The controversy surrounding the awarding of an Oscar for lifetime achievement to Elia Kazan this spring has passed. Yet the political mindset that produced this preposterous and sometimes vicious controversy remains, it seems, a permanent feature of our mainstream liberal culture. It is a mindset that still looks upon lying about Communism as a permissible moral choice. By the same token, telling the truth about Communism remains for minds of this persuasion the one unforgivable sin, punishable by public defamation and professional ostracism. The headline for Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s article in The Wall Street Journal of March 19 gave us a perfect summary of this malign mindset: “He told the truth; They lied for Communism; And he’s the bad guy?”
It was to be expected, of course, that such remnants of the paleolithic Left as The Nation and The Village Voice would indulge in yet another orgy of anti-anti-Communist subterfuge, denial, and mendacity on this occasion, for it is in the nature of the anti-anti-Communist mind to deny even the most horrific facts of history in the name of some allegedly higher political loyalty. As Anne Applebaum observed in these pages in October 1996, in our series on “The Future of the European Past,”
The fact of the matter was that the founding philosophers of the Western Left were the same as those of the Soviet Union. Some of the language was shared as well: Marx and Engels, the masses, the struggle, the proletariat, the exploiters and exploited, the ownership of the means of production, and more. To condemn the Soviet Union too thoroughly would be to condemn a part of what the Western Left held dear.
What was once an attitude confined to the hard-core Stalinist Left, however, has now passed, unchanged, into the culture of post-Cold War liberalism as an article of faith. If, some fifty years ago, there was a sharply drawn difference to be observed in the ways that Time magazine, for example, and The Nation responded to revelations of Communist criminality, those differences have now been effectively eradicated. In 1999, Time has become indistinguishable from the rest of the Left-liberal media in regarding anti-Communist candor as the one unforgivable sin.
Nowhere has this liberal mindset remained more adamant in its refusal to deal with the harsh realities of the Communist past than in Hollywood. As Anne Applebaum also observed in her contribution to “The Future of the European Past” series,
Steven Spielberg, probably Hollywood’s leading director (like it or not) has chosen to make films about Japanese concentration camps (Empire of the Sun) and Nazi concentration camps, but not about Stalinist camps.
Hollywood has never given us a Soviet version of Schindler’s List or Sophie’s Choice, and never will, for to do so would be to vindicate, by implication, those who had the courage to tell the truth about Communism when it mattered most—when Stalin and his terrorist empire were continuing their slaughter of the innocents.
It was the critic George Steiner who once condemned Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for committing a “moral indecency” in comparing Lenin to Hitler in The Gulag Archipelago, even though the invention of the twentieth-century concentration camp remains a conspicuous feature of Lenin’s contribution to modern politics. But it was, of course, Mr. Steiner who committed a moral indecency in his slander of Solzhenitsyn, and it was this same moral indecency that was restaged in the Elia Kazan uproar.
