Monday, November 26, 2012

Is There a Hollywood Blacklist Against Conservatives in Hollywood? Yes and No. (John Milius and Red Dawn).




John Milius, the famed and even beloved screenwriter of films such as APOCALYPSE NOW and GERONIMO and the director of movies such as DILLINGER and CONAN THE BARBARIAN(starring Arnold Schwarzenegger), says in the interview above that conservatives are blacklisted in Hollywood. He also says the he didn't get to direct many more movies because of his anti-communist film RED DAWN. The documentary, made by some dorky liberal, predictably dredges up the so-called 'McCarthy Era' and dishes out the standard narrative of what an evil period it had been. And then it features a phony sell-out 'conservative'--working as a casting consultant--who refers to anti-communism of the 1950s as 'disgusting' and says there is no blacklisting of conservatives happening in Hollywood.  So, who is right? Milius or the so-called 'conservative' casting consultant?

I'm no expert of Hollywood but I've known a couple of individuals--liberal leaning Zionists--from college who've worked as screenwriters, and they've confirmed the overwhelmingly liberal and 'progressive' climate of the movie community, both Hollywood and independent filmmaking. So, a disgruntled conservative will be tempted to jump to conclusions and blame the state of affairs on liberal 'blacklisting' of conservatives. But, reality is rarely that simple.

For starters, there is no McCarthyite style of blacklisting in Hollywood, i.e. there is no official or overt political pressure on Hollywood to be root out or purge individuals for their political or ideological leanings. Indeed, that was precisely the problem of anti-communist pressures on Hollywood. It came from the government. The issue of blacklisting would have been much less controversial had Hollywood made its own decision to fire writers and directors known for their pro-communist sympathies. Leftists and progressives still would have fumed over the policy, but it would have seemed less ominous than a policy dictated by political pressure. Just as most Americans uphold the notion of separation of Church and State, they don't like the idea of the state prying into the cultural affairs of private industries. It's one thing for an artist or movie company to decide what to do or not, but the state should have no say in the matter. The problem with the 1950s blacklisting was that the pressure originated from politicians. (A variance of the McCarthyite pressure in the 50s was the 'family values' crusade in the 90s where conservatives attacked Hollywood for corrupting American values with degrading movies, music, and TV shows, but conservatives in the 90s had nothing like the power the'd once wielded in the 1950s, not least because the moral values of the nation had changed so drasticaly since then. In the 50s, conservatives could rely on knee-jerk reaction against 'cultural pollution' from many Americans--even Democrats and liberals--, but following the social revolution of the 60s, even conservatives didn't want to come across as 'square' and 'lame', which is why Murphy Brown beat Dan Quayle in the national debate.)

But the historical issue of blacklisting cannot be understood simply as a matter of politics vs private industry . After all, if liberals and 'progressives' really believe in freedom of speech and protection of civil liberties from government intrusion, why are they so eager to push for government-mandated-and-enforced 'hate speech' laws that will give the government the power to determine what we can and can't say?  And if liberals really believe in the complete separation of Church and State, why do argue for banning the death penalty, welfare, amnesty for illegal aliens, and even 'gay marriage' on the basis of "What would Jesus do?"--according to silly liberals, if Jesus were alive today, He would be for 'socialized medicine', 'illegal immigration', and 'gay marriage'!  And why have liberals elevated mortals like MLK and Obama to god-like status? And why do liberals call for the public shaming and even firing of anyone who dares to criticize the MLK, the man and the legacy?

Now, consider the following scenario. Suppose Nazi Germany had defeated the USSR and the ensuing Cold War had been between US and Nazi Germany. Furthermore, suppose Hollywood moguls had been mostly right-wing German Americans. Suppose during WWII, the American president was a hardline right-winger who'd allied America with the Nazis against the Soviets. Suppose many pro-Nazi German-American agents had infiltrated the American government. Suppose most of the men who worked on the American atomic weapon project were right-wing German-Americans. Suppose a network of German-Americans slipped atomic secrets to Hitler.
Suppose following the end of WWII, the alliance between US and Nazi Germany falls apart. They now see each other as enemies. Suppose Democrats call for investigation of Nazi espionage in the US. Suppose it just so happens that much of American culture is controlled by German-Americans with a degree of sympathy for Nazi Germany. Suppose HUAC is a liberal or leftist committee whose agenda is to root out anti-American pro-Nazi activities in the corridors of American power. Suppose pro-Nazi forces in China comes to power in 1949, and there is a grand fascist alliance from Europe across Russia to China. Suppose Hollywood has many Nazi-sympathizing writers who devote their talents to spreading racialist and 'antisemitic' ideas, images, and views.
Suppose a Democratic liberal Senator comes along and declares that American government and life to be infiltrated with pro-German and pro-fascist elements. Suppose he uses his weight to spread 'hysteria' and pressures Hollywood, universities, and other institutions to purge the pro-Nazi, 'racist', and fascist elements. As a result, suppose many people with Nazi sympathies--or associated with people who harbor them--are blacklisted from many positions in arts, culture, government, media, and etc.
Would liberals and progressives have been outraged or disgusted by this hypothetical liberal McCarthy as a 'paranoid demagogue' or would they have hailed him as a hero and savior of freedom, liberty, democracy, and the American way?
Now, liberals may argue that Nazism was worse than communism--and given Hitler's insane invasion of Russia, I would have to agree--and therefore a blacklist against Nazi sympathizers and fascists would have been far more justifiable had the Cold War been between US and Nazi Germany, but that is matter of opinion. Based on the mountain of corpses it piled up, communism was, at the very least, the other great evil of the 20th century.

Though there is no way of determining how liberals--especially liberal Jews--would have reacted had the Cold War been between US and Nazi Germany and had McCarthy been a liberal anti-Nazi Democrat(as opposed to a conservative anti-communist Republican that he was), but given the preponderance of liberal hypocrisy in just about everything over the years, I'm almost certain that most liberals(and especially liberal Jews) would today hail the hypothetical liberal anti-Nazi McCarthy as a great man who led a noble crusade against Nazi sympathizers and fascists who, had they not been stopped in their tracks, would almost certainly have turned America into a tyranny.
Not long ago, Philip Roth wrote a novel called PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, a sort of what-if history where the Nazi-sympathizing Charles Lindbergh becomes president and persecutes the Jewish-American community in the 1930s/1940s. As far as Roth is concerned, freedom survived in America because a man like FDR held power during those tough times. Had it not been for FDR and Democrats, who knows what would have happened to civil liberties in America? Yet, Roth's view is Judeo-centric for he seems to be utterly blind to the fact that it was FDR who racially targeted over 100,000 Japanese-Americans, stripped them of their property, and herded them into 'internment camps'. Wasn't that a massive violation of civil liberties? Wasn't that a form of 'fascism'--as long as we are using 'fascist' to mean 'arbitrary use of power to oppress people, especially minorities'?
Yes, but it happened to the 'Japs' in the war against 'evil fascism', and so, that seemed to have been okay as far as the likes of Roth is concerned. Roth is more alarmed by a 'what if' that might have happened to Jews had Lindbergh won the presidency than by 'what was' that actually did happen under a liberal Democratic president who had great support from the Jewish community.
FDR is simply to be praised as a great hero and forgiven whatever his trespasses because he fought the biggest foe of the Jews: the Nazis. So, Roth's view--like those of most other Jews--has almost nothing to do with principles. It's really about tribal interests.
This is what most people don't understand about the Jewish hysteria about the 'dark days' of anti-communism in the 1950s. The real reason for the gripe among Jews is not that there was a blacklist but their own kind got blacklisted. Never mind that leftist Jews were blacklisted for their leftism and never for the fact of their Jewishness--unlike Japanese-Americans whose entire community was collectively condemned and punished regardless of the ideological leanings of individual Japanese-Americans. The only thing that matters to Jews is that "People who happen to be Jewish were hounded by McCarthy." Never mind that many of these Jews were aiding and abetting--through espionage, media, Hollywood movies, and etc--the agenda of Stalin the mass-killer of millions of people, mostly Slavic Christians. The only thing Jews obsess about is 'The anti-communists came after us Jews'.
Never mind that HUAC and McCarthy, though deeply suspicious of the Jewish community, were always careful to target only pro-communist Jews and spare patriotic Jews. If anything, they were eager to recruit patriotic Jews to the side of anti-communism. But, a people as tribal and ethnocentric as the Jews simply could only see it in simple terms of 'us versus them'.  Jews, an immensely egotistical and arrogant people, could never admit their side did anything to provoke suspicion and distrust in the goy community.
While it's true that many American conservatives in the 40s and 50s did suspect the Jewish community of being anti-American and pro-communist, this was the result of widespread radicalism and the politics of subversion in the Jewish community. American conservatives didn't just wake up one day and decide to go after Jews for the hell of it. Whatever prejudices they may have harbored toward Jews, most American conservatives wanted Jews to be good Americans and on their side. It was the Jewish community itself that doggedly clung to radical views and to the agenda of subverting American politics and culture.
American conservatives didn't initiate the cultural and political war on the overwhelmingly left-leaning Jewish community but only responded to the subversion of the Jews. But, most Jews are too arrogant to admit that they could ever have done anything wrong; they are too ethnocentric and egocentric to come to grips with the fact that Jews have often done hostile things and provoked the ire of the gentile community. As far as most Jews are concerned, Jews are always right, even when they do wrong, and so, it's always the fault of those who dare to 'target' Jews--even if they are only responding to the nasty targeting against them by Jews. So, if a Jew spits in your face and kicks you in the leg and if you spit and kick him back, YOU are entirely at fault. As Jews control the narrative, all we are likely to hear is "innocent Jew was spat on and kicked by an evil 'anti-Semite'." There will be no mention of the fact that the 'anti-Semite' was spat on and kicked first by the Jews.

All of Jewish history is remembered and told this way by Jews. We are to believe that Jews were always innocent and never did any wrong but gentiles of all cultures--going back to the Egyptians--just decided to be irrationally nasty and oppressive toward angelic Jews. (It is indeed an odd phenomenon where a totally innocent, angelic, and faultless people go from one gentile community to another and become the object of hostility over and over for thousands of years. The oft-repeated pattern would suggest that Jews must be doing something wrong to keep drawing the ire of so many different kinds of peoples over thousands of years and across thousands of miles, but that would be 'irrational antisemitic' thinking. According to Jewish moral logic, if a Jewish a**hole went from nation to nation and spat on people and got beat up over and over by angry gentiles, the problem was never with the Jew's hostile attitude toward gentiles but the gentiles' angry response to the Jew. Perhaps, Jewish moral narcissism served as a kind of over-compensation for their lack of physical narcissism. Unable to show off or feel pride in their looks, Jewish pride came to rest on out-witting and out-moralizing everyone else. It never occurred to Jews that outwitting people--often by cheating them in business--would naturally make gentiles hate Jews. And even in cases where Jews did not blatantly cheat the gentiles, the Jewish ability to outwit the gentiles in business and power was bound to lead to resentment, and this should come as no surprise to Jews since poor Jewish immigrants had been filled with resentment against the richer American wasps--even in the nation that American wasps founded--and since Jewish elites today fan the flames of black and Hispanic hatred against whites simply on the basis that whites have more, even if whites have more due to higher qualifications and better work ethic. If black and brown resentment toward whites is justified--liberal Jews certainly seem to think so--, then gentile resentment toward richer Jews over the centuries--even if Jewish wealth was earned legally and fairly--should also be understandable. But of course, sneaky Jews say feeling envious about rich/successful Jews is just nasty resentment, but feeling envious about white gentile wealth--on the part of blacks and browns--is only about 'social justice'. So, if blacks and browns said, 'whitey has too much, and we want a slice of the pie', Jews encourage them. But if blacks and browns were to say, 'Jews have too much, and we want a slice of the pie', that is unpardonable 'antisemitism'. Though Jews are richer than whites, Jews forbid any discussion of Jewish power & wealth and instead direct the resentment of blacks and browns at 'whites who have too much'. When blacks and browns think of 'whites', they image that pops into their head is some white conservative Republican, not a liberal Jew who is richer than white conservative Republicans. Thus, rich liberal Jews, by posing as champions of equality, keep their own power and wealth while directing the resentment of blacks and browns at white gentiles. All white gentiles, conservative and liberal, should wake up to the dirty trick being played by the Jew, but white conservatives are too pro-Zionist to realize the true nature of Jewish power and white liberals are too brainwashed with culturally divisive trivial moral issues like 'gay marriage'--pushed by the Jewish-controlled media--to wake up to the fact that Jews are messing with their minds to maximize Jewish power and undermine white power. Anyway, when we survey the history of Jewish-gentile relations, on the occasion that violence erupted against Jews,  Jews were generally too wrapped up with moral narcissism--stemming from the Torah that declared them to be God's 'Chosen People'--to realize that their immoral actions may have instigated the goy hatred against them. Since Jews felt morally superior by the virtue of being the 'Chosen', they had this attitude that they were 'more equal than others'. If Jews had been purely tribalist and believed that their God favored them while other gods favored other peoples, they might not have been so morally neurotic and hypocritical. As it happened, Jews adopted two attitudes that were morally incompatible; Jews believed that their God was the only God and the God of all peoples--and therefore all peoples, Jews and gentiles, were the children of God--, but they also believed that there was a special Covenant between God and the Jews, and this made Jews better than other peoples. Thus, Jews developed a dual personality when it came to dealing with gentiles, an attitude that rested on both equal/universal values and supremacist/tribal arrogance. So, Jews would travel all over the world and deal with all sorts of people--as all were the children of God--, but they would seek to gain power over gentiles through all sorts of devious means. Though most peoples/cultures, just like the Jews, sought greater power and wealth for themselves at the expense of other groups all throughout history, they tended to be more nakedly honest in their aggression and ambition. They made little or no pretense as to what they sought and were doing. It was a simple affair of might-is-right and our side versus your side. In contrast, Jews made great moral claims about themselves, telling other peoples that there was only one God and that all people were the children of God, and so Jews simply wanted to live in peace with the rest of humanity. But the notion of Jews as the Chosen People served as a license to lie, cheat, and steal. Therefore, what especially angered gentiles over thousands of years was not so much Jewish greed or aggression but Jewish deception and hypocrisy, and the worst kind of hypocrisy is moral hypocrisy. Even today, if Jews were at least nakedly honest about their greed and power-lust, they would be hated less by people who know the truth of Jewish power. What really pisses us off is how Jews use disingenuous moral arguments to justify every single one of their foul and cretinous deeds. In a way, the story of Jesus can be seen as an attempt to resolve this conflict in Judaism. Jesus was born a Jew and had a very Jewishy personality and outlook. He was a supremely arrogant individual. Indeed He went one better by claiming that He was not only of the Chosen People but the very Chosen One--the Messiah--Himself. He was The Chosen Person among the Chosen People--and you can't get any more Chosen than that. At any rate, one thing that Jesus noticed was the discrepancy between Jewish conceits/attitudes/assumptions and Jewish behavior/actions/deeds. Jews claimed to be the Chosen People of the true God, a people more blessed than any other, yet so many Jews were craven money changers in the Temple, liars and cheats, and/or two-faced snakes. Jesus would have noticed that Jews bitched and whined about their tragedy as the holy and innocent perfect people always set upon by nasty goyim but, in fact, many Jews were vile and greedy and, more often than not, provoked anti-Jewish hostility among the goyim. Goyim were hardly innocent but neither were the Jews. Though Christians like to believe that Jesus's exemplary life and message were for all mankind, His actual goal may have been to set an example for Jews. After all, it was the Jews who claimed there was only one God and that they were the Chosen People. It was the Jews who claimed that whenever they got into conflict with another people, the gentiles were usually to blame while Jews themselves were innocent. But Jesus looked all around and would have noticed that many Jews are simply no good and, in some cases, even worse than the goyim. Jews make a huge moral/spiritual claim for themselves but too often act like pigs. So, it could have been that Jesus decided to live the kind of life that could indeed be called 'perfect' to show how a real Jew should live. He would abstain from worldly power, greed, lust, trickery, and deviousness. He would always be the good Man and die as a good Man. Indeed, the one time He got really angry was against Jews who were changing money in the Temple. Though Jesus saw plenty of non-Jews acting terribly, He understood that non-Jews didn't make the claim of being members of the Chosen People of the one and only God. Jews made that claim, and so it was their responsibility to live up to the claim, but the fact was that Jews rarely did. And this is what angered Jesus and drove Him to such rage against money-changing Jews inside the Temple. Since most Jews failed to live up the standards of the Chosen People, Jesus decided to take it upon Himself to be the perfect Jew and serve as an example for other Jews to follow, and indeed the original Disciples mostly tried to 'convert' fellow Jews to the Jesusian Way. Proto-Christianity was initially meant to inspire the Chosen People to live up to their moral and spiritual claims of being the Chosen People. The message was for Jews to be better Jews than for non-Jews to accept Jesus as the Son of God. Though Jesus did feel love for all of mankind, He believed the Jews to be a special people, indeed the Chosen People. And as His moral and spiritual message was highly demanding, He almost certainly thought only a great people could take it to heart, and that great people would have been the Jews since Jews were the Chosen People. It would have been unlikely for Jesus to have believed that goyim could rise to great spiritual heights as the goyim were not Chosen, and so, Jesus mostly preached to fellow Jews and hung His hopes on them. He saw the Jews as the Elect, but the problem was too many Jews were abusing their Chosenness for personal greed and self-gain than to serve as moral exemplars for the rest of humanity. It's like some liberals have this idea that Ivy League universities, as elite institutions, must train superior people who will then use their talents and skills for the good of all humanity. Genuinely idealistic liberals are upset by the fact that so many graduates of top universities talk the talk but don't walk the walk. Idealistic liberals don't preach to the masses since they see the masses as too dumb to understand much of anything. And so, they preach to the most intelligent members of society, the special Elect, who are admitted to elite universities. The hope is for the best and the brightest to go out into the world and lead the flock of dummies to greener pastures. Similarly, though Jesus did care for all humanity, He thought only the special people, the Chosen Jews, could properly lead mankind toward spiritual salvation, but it just so happened that too many Jews were using their cunning and skills to enrich themselves. It was only by the accident of history that Jesus's message that had originally been meant for the Jews came to serve as the basis for a Faith for all mankind. Jesus's intention had been to redeem humanity indirectly, i.e. He would redeem the Chosen People, and then the new-and-improved Chosen People would redeem humanity. Just as Karl Marx didn't want to deal directly with the Proletariat but train a new class of intellectuals who would eventually lead the working class, Jesus didn't want to spent too much time with goyim. He wanted to train the Jews to be better Jews so that Jews would serve as better leaders of humanity. What really upset Jesus was that Jews had so much talent and spirituality but used them more for greed and power-lust than for good and justice. There is a kind of replay of this dynamic in the modern world in the figure of Norman Finkelstein.  I suspect that the historical Jesus may have had a personality like that of Finkelstein, a Jew highly critical of the Jewish community. Since the end of WWII, Jews have fashioned a new kind of 'chosen-ness' for themselves. Holocaust is the new religion of the Jews, and it says that History has chosen the Jews to be the holy and perfect victim-people. While all peoples have their history of victim-hood, Jews were especially 'chosen' to suffer and know the depths of suffering. Thus, Jews are especially wise, deep, and moral. I suspect when Sotomayor called herself a 'wise Latina', she was channeling Jewish sensibility as she spent a lot of time with them at Yale. According to traditional Judaism, all peoples are the children of God, but Jews are the special Chosen people of God. According to the new Jewishism of the Holo-Cult, all peoples have been victimized by history but Jews have been especially 'chosen' and singled out for suffering, and so, Jews are filled with infinite understanding of human suffering. Nobody knows the trouble they seen, nobody knows like Jews. So, Jews are very very wise, indeed nearly perfect, and it's very very wrong for anyone, especially white gentiles, to ever question the power or agenda of the very wise, noble, and perfect Jews. Then Finkelstein came along, and just as Jesus noticed the huge discrepancy between Jewish claims and Jewish deeds, Finkelstein noticed the huge divide between modern Jewish claims and Jewish actions. Just as ancient Jews used God as cover for all their foul deeds, modern Jews invoke the holy Holocaust at every turn to make themselves blameless, noble, wise, and perfect at every turn. So, venal Jews like Abe Foxman use the Holocaust to enrich himself and his friends. Jews invoke the Holocaust to use American foreign policy to drop bombs on the Middle East. Jews make themselves out to be so noble but using all sorts of nefarious means to get richer and richer while the rest of don't do so well. And Jews exploit the Holocaust to carry out ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. Most Jews are blind--or willfully blind--to their hypocrisy as they're filled to their gills with arrogance and high self-regard, but Finkelstein won't have any of it. It's not that Finkelstein is a humble and gentle man who wants Jews to be like everyone else. If anything, he's one of the morally arrogant man that ever lived. The difference is that while most Jews are blissfully oblivious to their own moral hypocrisy and two-faced deviousness, Finkelstein tries to force the Jewish community to live up to all of its claims. And it is in this regard that Finkelstein is like Jesus. Jesus too was a supremely morally and spiritually arrogant man, but He felt a need to validate the lofty moral image of Himself by committing Himself to a truly moral life. Thus, even though both Jesus and Finkelstein have angered the Jewish community, they are not self-loathing Jews but Jews who abhor the hypocrisy of the Jewish community. In a way, one could say Finkelstein is more proudly Jewish than most Jews for he takes his Jewishness seriously. For him, Jewish morality--especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust--is not just something to exploit to gain more money and power but something for all Jews to live by. Ironically, just as Jesus who'd sought to redeem the Jews became the instrument of those who hated Jews, Finkelstein has been adopted by some anti-Jewish elements. Paradoxically, Finkelstein is harder on the Jewish community precisely because he believes in the superiority of the Jews. It's like a teacher is harder on the smart kid in class than on the dumb kid. The teacher will be content with a dumb kid getting a C but will be angry with a very smart student who got a B when he should have gotten an A. It's like the episode in FACTS OF LIFE where a teacher is a lot tougher on Jo than on Blair precisely because he sees so much potential in the former.)


Jews remember the history of communism the way they remember the rest of human history: they were entirely innocent of all its crime and were its main victims.  Though many Jews played a key role in the establishment of totalitarian communism in the USSR and in the mass-killing of countless gentiles, the only thing Jews care to remember about communism was how 'evil antisemitic goy Stalin especially purged Jews'--though, in fact, Jews were among the least victimized groups by Stalin and among those who worked most closely with Stalin to victimize other groups. Jews only see and remember their own victim-hood while being callously blind to the suffering they caused to others. In this, they are rather like the ghosts in SIXTH SENSE: they see only what they want to see. Also, even though only a moral pervert would make excuses for Hitler and the Holocaust, antisemitism of the post-WWI period wasn't always 'irrational' and 'paranoid'. Many European Jews were indeed involved in murderous radical movements on the Left, moral & cultural subversion and decadence(especially as a weapon to soften and weaken gentile defenses against Jewish transgression and power), and/or involved with parasitic financial capitalism(which wasn't much different from what Jews today with Wall Street and the global economy for their own tribal interests). When it comes to the history of Israel-Palestine relations, most Jews only see themselves as victims, and even some liberal Jews who (mildly)criticize the ongoing occupation of West Bank believe the massive ethnic cleansing of Palestinians back in 1948 was totally justified. Though European Jews used brutality and violence--with the full backing of two superpowers--to drive Palestinians from their ancestral land, Jews only see Palestinian hatred for Jews but conveniently ignore Jewish contempt for Palestinians that made Palestinians hate Jews in the first place. Jewish-controlled media focus on Palestinian violence against Jews but ignore the fact that Palestinian violence is a reaction to Jewish oppression. According to the Jewish-controlled US media, Palestinian violence is terrorism pure and simple, but Zionist violence is always a 'justified' as a defensive/preventive measure against Palestinian violence. So, Jewish violence is always politically, historically, and morally contextualized but Palestinian violence is just seen as having come out of the blue, animated by nothing more than the evil of 'antisemitism' that supposedly went from the soul of Europe to the soul of the Muslims--like the Devil in THE EXORCIST goes from one part of the world to another. (And though Big Israel is crushing small Palestinian territory, the Jewish-controlled media have created this false bogeyman called the 'Muslim World', and so, we are to assume that Palestinians are merely the vanguard of the vast Muslim World's war against Israel when, in fact, most Muslim/Arab nations don't care about Palestinians and have done nothing to help them. So, even though the Big Jew beats upon the little palestinian, Americans have been given this mental image of the Big Muslim World--with Palestinians as its shock troops--waging a non-stop war on tiny wittle Israel.)
 So, why should Jewish remembrance of the post-WWII period be any different. Jews simply ignore their role in communism, radicalism, subversion, and espionage, and instead, ONLY focus on the 'paranoid' and 'hysterical' way American conservatives reacted to Jewish actions. We are all constantly told that all those communist and communist-sympathizing Jews were 'innocent' in the 40s and 50s but innocent of what? Many since have been exposed as having had genuine communist ties and sympathies. But, according to the Jewish narrative, they were 'innocent' for the simple fact that they refused to comply with HUAC.  If the main Jewish narrative had been "McCarthyism falsely accused innocent people and destroyed their lives"--for the longest time, many Jews even denied Rosenberg's role in atomic espionage--, this narrative became less and less tenable as the facts began to come out in the 90s with the opening of the Soviet archives. It turned out that communist espionage in the US in the 40s, especially under FDR, had been far more extensive than anyone had imagined before. And it turned out that so many Jews who insisted that they'd been railroaded were in fact members and/or agents of radical organizations. So, was there finally a mea culpa from the Jewish community? Fat chance. Anyone who knows anything about Jews know that they are incapable of ever admitting wrong, especially to goyim that they hold in contempt. No, the new narrative was simply that, "yes, many Jews in the 40s and 50s did have communist sympathies and even served as Soviet agents, BUT they were really well-meaning individuals and just happened to be misguided in their naive enthusiasm of saving the world."  So, there you have it. Even the most unrepentant communist Jew was only trying to do a great favor for all of mankind, albeit in a 'misguided' way. You see, they were so full of love of mankind that they got a bit carried away... like making apologies of a man who only killed around 20 million people.
Though Martin Peretz is never to be trusted, he's been one of the Jews to come clean about the liberal mendacity about communism. (He isn't to be trusted because his hatred of communism probably has less to do with all its victims than the fact that communist nations eventually became hostile to Jews.) And when it no longer became possible to defend the communist record of totalitarianism, mass killing, system of gulag, and aggression, many liberals and 'progressives' sought to redeem the legacy of communism by associating communists with noble causes in the West. For example, communists have been praised for supporting the Civil Rights Movement--of course, it escapes the minds of silly liberals that communists supported all such movements to destabilize America and pave the way for communist revolution than out of any genuine love for the Negroes--, but this is really virtue-by-association. Everything that blacks demanded for themselves in a free America would not have been granted to them in a communist society where blacks would have had about as much freedom as Tibetans under Mao or Ukrainians under Stalin. For American communists, the Civil Rights movement was just a ramrod to attack American capitalism with. If we use the logic of virtue-by-association, the world should be hailing Jesse Helms as a freedom lover since he was one of the biggest champions of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and refuseniks in the USSR. Using the logic of virtue-by-association, Helms' Segregationism must be have noble because of his political record of having stood for greater liberty in the USSR. And since Americans love Israel so dearly, they should all have hailed South Africa under apartheid since South Africa, indeed even more than the US, was the closest and best ally Israel ever had. (Conservatives who think they are going to win favor from powerful Jews just by supporting Israel and Zionism should take a close look at the fate of whites in South Africa. They went all the way in praising and supporting Israel, but Jewish America--the center of Jewish power in the world--still targeted South Africa under white rule for destruction. If whites in South Africa treat blacks like Jews treat Palestinians, they are evil and to be condemned. But if Jews in the Middle East treat Palestinians like white South Africans once treated blacks, they are to be rewarded with billions in aid every year, visits by American presidents who promise yet more support, and be permitted to build and store 300 illegal nuclear weapons. Again, it's the same pattern. Jews can never do wrong, and even when they do wrong, they are right. Whatever happens between Jews and non-Jews, Jews are right and non-Jews are wrong. Jews today have the God complex. They are a perfect people, and no matter what happens, they are never to be blamed. Even when they do wrong to us, they are innocent, and if we get angry at them, WE are guilty of harboring 'antisemitic' feelings. Kneel before all-perfect Jew-hovah. For a good illustration of this, consider Jews and Sarah Palin. Most Jews have expressed their rabid and virulent hostility, contempt, and hatred for Palin, and yet, Palin is one of the biggest ass-kissers of the Jews and is willing to bomb the Arab world back to the stone age for the security of Israel despite the fact that Israel is by far The superpower in the region and the biggest bully in the Middle East.) Saying that communists were good people because they backed the Civil Rights movement is like saying American neo-Nazis are a bunch of wonderful pacifists because they opposed the Iraq Invasion. What usually passes under the rubric of virtue-by-association is nothing but pure political calculation. When it suited their purposes, communists often sided with 'reactionaries' and 'fascists'.  Stalin cut a deal with Hitler. When the Soviet Union and Red China split apart, the Soviets even favored right-wing Asian nations against communist China, and Mao even met with arch-communist Nixon to forge an alliance against communist Russia. American communists didn't want blacks to be more free. They wanted blacks to shake the foundations of the American capitalist-democratic system so that America will one day be amenable to communist takeover, whereupon everyone would have to like prisoners in a vast prison system. Indeed, what is the most equal place in the world? Inside a prison where everyone, whether rich or poor, must wear the same clothes, do the same kind of work, and eat the same food. While equality of basic freedom is essential to democracy, equality of means and outcome is the radical tyranny of mediocrity. Naturally, everyone wants to be the best at what he does--whether it's sports, scholarship, criticism, science, art, and etc--, and competition creates divisions between the best, the middling, and the worst. Muhammad Ali wanted to be 'the greatest', not the mediocrest. It's all the more bemusing when so many liberals who claim to be for equality tend to be the competitive in the world, most committed to bettering and outdoing everyone else. Who are the most competitive people in the world? Jews. Even a pop critic like Gene Siskel was said to be competing with everyone else to make more money, get more scoops, have the last word, and etc. Jews would loathe the idea of being like 'everyone else'. Would Woody Allen or Alan Dershowitz be content to be nice mediocre 'dim-witted' middle Americans? Of course not. So, why do so many Jews officially uphold the ideal of equality while they themselves grow richer and more powerful?  I suspect it is a means to 'hide' their power and wealth. Jews practice Ayn Randism but preach Marxism. If Jews admitted their power lust, we would focus on their power and be critical of it. But if Jews make such fuss about equality, many people will equate Jewishness with equality for all. In a way, Jews are the best students of Christianity, through the history of which the rich and powerful grew richer and more powerful while preaching the ideals of love and equality for all. It was a nice cover for one's power and wealth. This is also obvious in today's China where the Communist Party elite rakes in great fortune and maintain unequal power over the populace but justifies and 'hides' their power by claiming to be working for the greater good of the Chinese people. By cynically invoking Marxist theory, Communist Party elites maintain the fiction that China today is merely going through the capitalist phase in order to create the proper conditions for real communism in the future. Yeah, nice try. "We at the top are getting richer and richer because we are working so hard to bring about the equality of mankind... sometime in the future."

As it stands today, there is no government-mandated-or-sponsored blacklisting in Hollywood. But then, there is government-enforced blacklisting and censoring of certain peoples, groups, and voices through means direct or indirect. And this happens on both the national and local level, both inside and outside government--though a person with far-leftist or anti-white affiliation cannot be denied jobs in government, a person with white 'racist' views can be fired and blacklisted from government. So, even an ideological Maoist can hold jobs in government and government-funded institutions, but a neo-Nazi wouldn't be allowed to get anywhere near a government job or receive government funding. (As the Martin Peretz wrote in the above-linked article: "Do Catholic universities still employ professors who believe that Galileo was in error? I doubt it. Navasky is the George T. Delacorte Professor of Journalism at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Isn't it time for him to start worrying about when dogma becomes lie? The innocence of the Rosenbergs is now exposed as false. Will the Delacorte Professor still say it isn't so?" 
The leftist Jew Navasky has been a lifelong apologist for communist tyranny all over the world, but he is allowed to hold a prestigious position in one of the top universities in the nation. Imagine a professor  who spent his entire life apologizing for Hitler being allowed to teach even at the Community College level. Liberals believe in blacklisting the 'far right'--and even the moderate right--, but it acts hysterical if anyone even mentions that fact that the elite institutions of this country are dominated by radical Jews. One may argue that Columbia University is a private institution, but the same policy of blacklisting exist in private universities as in public ones. (Bolshocaust denier can speak freely and teach, but imagine a Holocaust denier being in a college setting.)


And, it's a growing problem even in the sphere of private enterprise.
A good illustration of this is the Chick-Fil-A controversy that erupted in 2012 when the Jew mayor of Chicago declared that no business--at least no business owned and operated by white Christian conservatives--would be allowed to open stores in the city if opposed 'gay marriage'. Whether one agrees or disagrees with 'gay marriage', the Chicago decree was definitely a form of blacklisting of  businesses and groups on the basis of CREED.
And in all sorts of organizations, government or private, people are often hired or fired on the basis of their political beliefs, ideological convictions, and cultural preferences REGARDLESS of their competence and professionalism on the job. Then, why is there so little outrage? Because most of the blacklisting is done against 'racists', white conservatives, Christian groups, and 'anti-Semites'; and because the media and government are controlled by liberals and 'progressives'. The liberal community was up in arms in the 50s and 60s because their own had come under social and political pressures. They invoked Constitutional rights and protections to shield their own kind. After all, if leftists really love freedom and liberty, why would they have been so chummy with communists whose end goal is totalitarianism? The Left was always more about power and control than about freedom and individual liberty. Since then, liberals and 'progressives'--especially the Jewish kind--have taken control of just about every elite institution. So, why would the liberal-controlled media give a hoot about 'racists', 'reactionaries', white conservatives, and Christian rightists being fired and blacklisted from jobs and positions?
Over the years, American Renaissance, a white nationalist organization, couldn't even make a reservation to hold a conference. 'Progressives' may argue that it was practice of freedom of speech to alert and pressure Hotel chains--private business--not to rent space to certain 'hateful' groups, but imagine if right-wing or Muslim-American groups in America had pressured hotels not to rent out space to 'hateful' Zionists who are hellbent on oppressing Palestinians. Suppose white nationalist groups pressured a conventional hall to ban AIPAC from holding a conference on the basis that International Jews hate white people and are only trying to exploit Americans into supporting the 'genocidal' state of Israel. There would have been a storm of outrage led by the Jewish-controlled media, and a million lawyers would have come out of the woodwork to denounce the white nationalist group, and thousands of articles would have been published invoking the 'bad old days of McCarthyism' and the need for free speech in America.
To be sure, the Right isn't innocent on the issue of free speech. Jared Taylor, the head of the American Renaissance, had remarked repeatedly that in his ideal society, individual freedom would be curbed for the sake of white interests and white power. And conservatives have a long history of invoking 'community values' and 'patriotism' to, in effect, force businesses and local governments to uphold certain 'ideals' while suppressing certain expressions. More often than not, both the Right and the Left have tended to cry foul on free speech ONLY WHEN the rights of their own side were violated.
For much of the 20th century, Catholic organizations used its muscle to enforce certain standards on Hollywood. It even pressured local governments to ban certain books, movies, and music on the basis of the danger they posed to communal morality. Catholics and their allies may have had their reasons for fearing morally corrupting influences, but they often resorted to extra-legal means to silence voices they didn't like--and this was part of the reason why the Left, deviants, eccentrics, and others got so creative and clever at the science of subversion; since they couldn't say or show a lot of things outright, they had to find all sorts of sneaky ways to get them across.
Conservatives themselves don't have a very good record on freedom of speech. And even American libertarianism often served as a ruse for white-power-by-any-means. Libertarians invoking the Constitution pointed to the rights of states to do as they chose, a convenient loophole for defending racial segregation and denial of equal rights to blacks in the 50s and 60s. Ron Paul has remade himself as the defender of individual liberty, but his political origins go back to the segregationist positions of the Old South. As racial discrimination couldn't be defended morally, so-called 'libertarians' stuck to the letter of the Constitution that said the federal government has no right to dictate policies to the states. It was only when the segregationist battle was lost for good that libertarianism molded itself along the lines of gun rights, casino rights, and pot-smoking rights.
So, it would be naive to say conservatives--even libertarians--are naturally more freedom-loving and principled than liberals or leftists. It's really a matter of power and of which side is cleverer, more ruthless, more cunning, and more intelligent. In the struggle for power, the liberal side has decisively won over the conservative side, and much of this had to do with the fact that most Jews--the most intelligent people in America--have been liberal. If 80% of Jews were conservative and sided with white conservatives, US would today be a very different nation. Some conservatives might argue that the GOP should have done more to woo over the Jews in the past, but Jews would likely have stuck with the  Democratic party just the same. Jews have their own history, own perspectives, and own interests, and most Jews didn't want to be junior partners to white conservatives in the GOP. They were gunning for total control, and they had a better chance of attaining it by undermining white power in America--the main threat to Jewish power--and increasing 'diversity' and decadence(which would sap the white race of its survivalist and nationalist instincts). Jews would rather be the commanders leading the army of 'diversity' against Evil Whites than be the mini-me of White America, and Jews, to this day, associate the GOP with Wasp privilege and power. (This is rather ironic since the former Wasp elite--concentrated in the Northeast--have mostly become liberal and Democratic. What goes by the name of 'wasp power' today has very little to do with wasp power of the yesterday. Wasp elite used to consist mostly of Yankees whereas today's GOP ist dominated by Southern and Southwestern whites who, though substantially white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant, have historically resented the power of the Yankee elite, which is why most Southern whites used to be Democratic in their opposition to Wasp Yankee rule. As years went by, the Yankee Wasp elite left the GOP and joined the liberal Democrats while Southern whites inherited the Party of Lincoln and wrapped it with the Neo-Confederate Flag. Thus, the Democratic Party has the best minds of the both the Jews and liberal Wasps while the GOP has increasingly become the party of Bubba manipulated by Zionists. GOP is the party of neocons messing with the minds of neoconfederates.)

Today, liberals control most of everything in most states that matter. The red states are mostly in the Deep South that are culturally, intellectually, and economically less developed AND in the sparsely populated states of the desert-and-mountain west, like Utah and Montana. The states that really matter--New York, California, Illinois, Washington(largely due to Seattle), Florida, and etc are controlled by liberal Democrats. And even if the economic elites of Texas may remain Anglo-conservative for many years to come, the rapidly rising Mexican-American population will likely tip it to the Democratic column. Since 2000, some 'red states' have gone 'blue' but hardly vice versa. If non-whites are turned off by the GOP as the 'white party', many educated whites are turned off by the GOP as the dumb party of Neo-Confederate Creationists. Texas is still the main prize for the GOP, but look at the caliber of politicians that has come out of that state? The Bushes and Rick Perry. Most Democratic politicians are nothing special, but GOP seems to go out on a limb to find idiots like Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum.  GOP has failed as both a party of principles and party of power. The GOP caved into globalism, 'affirmative action', 'disparate impact', and foreign interventionism at the behest of Zionists, and so, it doesn't even have respect among genuine conservatives. If the GOP had at least gained power by selling out its principles, there might have been some kind of consolation--like when Clinton stabbed Big Labor in the back to win the support of globalist Big Business. But the GOP has lost support of the both the superrich and the white working class--formerly know as 'Reagan Democrats'--while having failed to attract minorities, even Asians.

Given the power of liberals, blacklisting today targets the White Right and certain Christian groups. In contrast, one can be far leftist, radical, subversive, decadent, and/or hostile--especially if one happens to be Jewish, gay, black, feminist, cultural Marxist, and etc.--and gain access to the highest positions in government and business. So, someone like David Irving would never be given a position in the Western academia, but even a diehard Stalinist or Maoist could get tenure at the most prestigious university. If you're on the 'Left'--in quotes because today's leftism is utterly different from what used to go by that name--, you can have any kind of association, ideology, or whatever and be welcomed into polite-and-powerful society. So, it didn't matter that Obama was associated with deranged Wright for 20 yrs and was chummy with arch-Marxist and anti-American Bill Ayers. He was still promoted as the second coming of the messiah, Kennedy, MLK, and etc. He was made president and handed the keys to the American military, which thanks to Obama, is now a free zone for brazen homosexuals. Someone like Elena Kagan who publicly declared that she's for censorship and doesn't believe in the First Amendment can be nominated to be a Supreme Court justice--and even a good number of Republican senators voted for her out of their deference to Jewish power. Sotomayor can declare herself ' wise' because she's a Latina and openly call for increased discrimination against whites to serve her tribal interests. Even people with close ties to communist organizations have no problem getting positions in colleges, government, military, CIA, and FBI.

But, if you're a conservative who opposes 'gay marriage', you may be targeted for dismissal in government, schools, and even private employment. Even the so-called freedom loving ACLU will not come to the defense of people who lost their jobs for their political incorrectness. Jewish organizations like ADL and SPLC, along with Jewish-controlled media, pile on anyone associated with this thing called 'hate' and undermine their opportunity to make a decent living. So yes, there is a blacklist at work, but it goes unnoticed because liberals and 'progressives' control government and the media. Most people get their news from the mass media, and so, if the mass media refuse to cover stories of conservatives and rightists blacklisted and fired form their jobs for having the 'incorrect' creeds, then most people won't know what's happening. Just like most Russians in big cities weren't aware of the mass deaths of Ukrainians in the 1930s because the Communists controlled all the networks of information in the USSR--and most Germans knew little about the Holocaust because the Nazi-media enforced a blackout on what was really happening to the Jews--, the current climate of blacklisting doesn't register because of the media blackout on people who've been fired or blacklisted for their 'hateful' creed.
If anything, the liberal media seem to endorse the idea that people should lose their jobs for having wrong personal or political views. So, most Americans have come to think that it's perfectly acceptable to deny people jobs or have them fired for having 'extreme rightist' views but it would not be okay for if someone were to lose to his or her job for having 'far leftist' views; that would be 'McCarthyism'. Imagine if Bill Ayers was fired for his hateful anti-American views. Imagine if a journalist was fired for his radical pro-gay views. Imagine if a teacher was fired for being a member of the local communist party. The media would condemn it as the return of 'McCarthyite fascism', but if a teacher is fired for his 'racist' views, the Jewish-controlled liberal media will only join in the tarring-and-feathering of the man's character. According to liberals, Linda Tripp, the woman who violated Monica Lewsinsky's friendship and spilled the beans to the world, acted like an evil McCarthyite witch. But the woman who violated Mark Fuhrman's trust and spilled the beans on what he said about blacks is a true hero. Liberals have long condemned Elia Kazan for having been a rat, but liberals and Jews just love and praise people who rat on 'racists' and 'haters'. It's all a matter of 'who, whom'. If you blacklist or rat on leftists or Jews, you are a terrible person. But if you blacklist or rat on rightists or white conservatives, you are a heroic truth-teller.
So, it's terrible to violate someone's trust if it aids conservatives, but it's great to do so if it smokes out a 'racist'. It's all about power, not principles. Liberals who've attacked J. Edgar Hoover and McCarthy for the sordidly personal way they went after their enemies praise Anita Hill and the feminists for their personal attacks on Clarence Thomas. So, it was terrible of Hoover to dig out the secrets of King's sex life and it was low-down for McCarthy to mix personal attacks with political ones, but Anita Hill was a great heroine for telling the world all the sordid details about Thomas's jokes about 'long dong silver', porn videos, and pubic hair on Coke can. And the very feminists who've been hysterically condemning everything as 'sexual harassment' and ruining peoples' careers with all sorts of exaggerated accusations--at one time, they even called for prohibiting consensual relationship between men and women in the work place--came to the defense of Clinton and accused Republicans of 'sexual McCarthyism'. Though feminists have created the very climate where a man's reputation could be destroyed for having 'used his patriarchal power over female employees', they tried to tag all the blame on the conservatives. Indeed if any group played the politics of 'sexual McCarthyism' in American life, it was the feminists with their shrill man-hatred and paranoia of every white college male student being a 'date rapist' and every male executive being a potential 'sexual harasser'. But when it turned out that their guy Clinton, the 'most powerful man in the world', was using his power and reputation to get sexual favors from a White House intern, the feminists accused conservatives of 'sexual hysteria'. Some things never change. It was the Democrats, leftists, and liberals who created the climate of hysteria during WWII by having Americans believe that the slanty-eyed buck-toothed 'Japs' were coming to bomb every small town in America and that thick-skulled-and-necked Teutonic Nazis had the entire US coastline surrounded with submarines and infiltrated every American city and town with spies and saboteurs. But when WWII ended and the new enemy were the communists and their agents in US government and institutions, liberals began to bitch about the 'paranoid' style of the American Right. Indeed, this narrative has become enshrined in American historiography ever since. So, just about every educated person thinks: FDR and liberals = freedom-loving victors over fascist tyranny; McCarthy and conservatives = paranoid demagogues of the anti-communist 'witch hunt'. In fact, there were many more communist and far-leftist agents in American life, government, and culture than there were Nazi sympathizers and agents of Imperial Japan(!), and the whole climate of political paranoia and wholesale purging of those suspected of 'treason' began under the FDR regime with the full support of Jewish liberals and leftists.
But your average liberal thinks FDR's suppression of the America First movement and violation of the rights of Japanese-Americans were either justifiable or, at worst, regrettable--like it was an accidental spilling of milk.  We have such a lopsided and ridiculous remembrance of history because Jewish liberals control the media and academia. As Charles Foster Kane said, "(people will) think what I tell them to think!" Today, the people with such power are the Jews and their liberal gentile puppets in the academia and media. And if you don't go along with such a narrative, it will be difficult for you to rise up the ranks of power.

So, yes, there is a lot of blacklisting happening in America, but Jews and liberals get to decide who is or isn't blacklisted. And since Jews and liberals control most of the media and law firms, they can do as they please and give their own spin of the events.
Also, what with the national religion being Holocaustianity and MLK worship, conservatives are loathe to defend free speech and right of equal opportunity for the 'extremists' who might offend Jews or blacks. If a person were fired for his or her communist, Marxist, radical feminist, or radical gay ideology, even moderate liberals will cry foul and scream 'Neo-McCarthyism'. The ACLU will spring to action and sue the institution for having fired an 'innocent' person. But if someone associated with 'racism' or 'gay bashing' is outed and fired, most conservatives will not come to his rescue. When American Renaissance was hounded from place to place and not even allowed to reserve a conference hall at a hotel, not a single mainstream conservative or conservative group came forward to champion its right of free assembly and free speech. When John Derbyshire wrote a column about black racial reality, National Review's Rich Lowry, a pissant coward, was among the first to condemn Derbyshire as an intolerable bigot. The way the political game is played, when conservatives attack a far leftist, moderate liberals will defend the leftist and attack conservatives for 'McCarthyism'. But when liberals attack a far rightist, conservatives will side with liberals and pile on the 'hater'. Conservatives are in a morally defensive position since America's two great national religions are now premised on the sacredness of Jews and holiness of blacks. The Nazi mass-killing of millions of Jews is remembered as the 'greatest evil of all time', but who cares about the tens of millions killed by communism? We are constantly reminded of the KKK's lynching of blacks, but what about the non-stop barrage of black violence against whites?  If you mention that fact, you are a 'fear-mongering racist hater'. So, Jewish Hollywood makes movies like MACHETE and Tim Wise laughs at old white people in their deathbeds, but the Willie Horton ad was the most 'racist' and 'evil' thing in American politics.

To prove that blacklisting goes on all over America, we need only consider the following scenarios. Suppose a Hollywood writer happens to be outed as a member of the KKK. Suppose a high school chemistry teacher is outed of belonging to a Neo-Nazi organization or even just a 'white nationalist' organization. Suppose someone serving in local government is found to be a Holocaust denier. Suppose an aspiring actor in Hollywood is a loud opponent of Zionism and condemns Israel's occupation of West Bank as 'genocide'. Suppose a school principal made a comment on facebook about 'gay sex' being unnatural and dirty. Suppose a police chief in a city was overheard saying that he thinks MLK was a fraud and a thug. Suppose a TV sports journalist said such-and-such team is more likely to win because it has more blacks, i.e. blacks can naturally jump higher and run faster. Suppose a leading financial analyst on TV was recorded as saying that Jews control American society because they are more intelligent and use tribal networking. Suppose a movie director said we should end foreign wars because most recent wars tend to be instigated by Zionist Jews while most of the dying is done by gentiles. And so on and on.
Now, what is likely to happen to all these people? Will they go on working or will they be fired--or at the very least censured, suspended, demoted, and/or denied further promotion?
One may agree that such people should be denied jobs and publicly humiliated for harboring 'false' or 'evil' creeds, but who can deny that such people would indeed have been blacklisted.
One may think that the KKK is so evil that no KKK member, no matter how talented or skilled, should be allowed to work in Hollywood. Even so, there is no denying that having the creed of the KKK means you will be blacklisted from Hollywood. One might argue that Hollywood stands for certain lofty values--though one would be hard-pressed to find them given most Hollywood movies--, but there is no denying that holding certain views, values, and/or creeds will get one banned from Hollywood.
Hollywood also blacklists and censors the kind of movies that gets made. If a famous and popular screenwriter submitted a script about how Zionists ethnically cleansed Palestinians or how Soviet Jews worked closely with Stalin to kill millions of Ukrianian Jews, what is the chance of it being made into a movie? Or imagine if someone submitted a script about white slavery in Israel. Most likely, not only will the screenplay be rejected but word will spread throughout the Hollywood community to never hire that writer again. Since the ban on the writer won't have been declared officially, it won't be a technical blacklist but still a virtual one. Indeed, blacklisting doesn't have to be official, public, or overtly political. As long as there are the Jew-Boys-Network, Gay-Boys-Network, and liberal-boys-network in Hollywood--and there are--, the virtual policy of blacklisting can take place behind closed doors or under the radar. It's like sororities don't have an official policy that says 'NO UGLY AND FAT GIRLS', but there are ways to favor the lookers over the uglers.
Every organization, depending on the leadership and composition of its members, would like favor certain people while excluding others. In America, we ideally like to believe a person should be hired or fired on the basis of skills and merit than for his race, color, or CREED.
The difference is that when conservative-dominated organizations fire or blacklist radicals, decadents, and subversives of the 'left', the liberal community will invoke 'freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of creed' to champion the 'bullied' victim and even use its muscle to sue the organization and bring it down. As far as liberals are concerned, the Catholic Church should be pressured to include more homosexuals and feminists into its ranks. If it fails to do so, it's an oppressive 'blacklisting' organization. But if liberal-dominated organizations fire, ban, censure, censor, and blacklist people they don't like--'the rightwing haters'--, that is wonderful, that is progress. As far as liberals are concerned, they rationally ban and blacklist only 'haters' and 'bigots' whereas conservatives suppress wonderful 'progressives' who are trying to spread more freedom, equality, and diversity. Since liberals are correct and justified in all that they do and believe, their hate is not hate but love; their blacklisting isn't blacklisting but 'fight against hate', and etc.

Now, I'm not going to defend neo-Nazis and the KKK. But, there is no denying that such people are indeed blacklisted in many places in America simply for their views, beliefs, convictions, or creeds. And if it's justifiable to blacklist such people for their personal ideologies, one could argue that it had been justifiable for Hollywood to have blacklisted communists and the like; after communists hate free enterprise, and what would Hollywood have been without capitalism?
It certainly would have been preferable had conservatives in government employed subtler means to pressure Hollywood to root out possible Soviet-sympathizers. Because the anti-communist right overplayed its hand, the impression people got was that of government telling private industry what it could and couldn't do. Even so, if liberals believe that certain people should be removed, shamed, shunned, and/or blacklisted for having certain foul and rotten views, then one can make a case for the blacklisting of communists and their sympathizers, especially in government. And since public education is funded by the government, why shouldn't the government root out all communist or communist-sympathizing teachers IF INDEED powerful institutions should ensure that evil people don't gain a foothold in society? One can defend communists as 'champions for social justice', but one can also defend 'racists' as 'courageous speakers of truth on the issue of race'.

We can play all kinds of semantic games, but blacklisting is blacklisting. It's disingenuous to say something is not blacklisting because the purged elements happen to be agents of 'hate' or 'intolerance'. That's like saying it's murder when a communist is killed in cold blood but not when a fascist is. (But then, NY Times follows such a logic as when the black thug Omar Thorton murdered white employees at work. The liberal Jewish narrative was not 'black thug murdered whites', but 'Did Thorton kill a bunch of white racists who had it coming?' Similarly, it's a 'hate crime' if a white person says something that mildly offends a black person, but it's not a 'hate crime' if a gang of blacks run around targeting and beating up white people.
But then, this sort of logic informs much of political history. After all, Jewish-controlled media and academia have made us far more sensitive to the murdered victims of Nazism than of communism. So, we are constantly reminded of all those MURDERED Jews but we are to assume that millions of Ukrainians were only KILLED by Stalin--and we are not supposed to mention that many Jews lent their hands to the mass-murder, I mean 'killing', of Ukrainians. Jews can be murdered but they can never murder; when Jews commit murder, it's just 'killing', and our job is to rationalize why Jews needed to kill to either defend themselves against 'antisemitic' murderers or to make the world a better place. So, Hitler committed murder, but Trotsky only killed(and only for the good of mankind).
According to liberal/leftist logic, it is far worse for the Right to kill a few thousand leftists than for the Left to kill millions of rightists--or even innocent people of no particular ideological affiliation. Most victims of Stalin and Mao were not members of the bourgeoisie but poor peasants, but Jews and liberals never cared much about them. And most of the victims of the Khmer Rouge were also peasants who starved to death on collective farms. But, there is almost no discussion of those evils whereas 'progressives' still fume about a couple of thousand leftists killed by Pinochet. Of course, had Allende been a fascist general and Pinochet a leftist military commander--like Hugo Chavez--and had leftist Pinochet overthrew the rightist Allende--and killed thousands of supporters of the hypothetically fascist Allende--, most 'progressives' would have sided with Pinochet. (The very progressives who'd long condemned America's role in the overthrow of Allende had no problem with Obama and European leaders' engineering of the overthrow and lynching of Gaddafi. As long as you carry the 'progressive' card, you can do just about anything and get away with it. What happened to Gaddafi was not 'murder' or 'lynching' because he wasn't a darling of the international 'progressive' community and because he was taken out be the Zionist Sarkozy and 'progressive' Jewish puppet Obama. But we are told Allende was murdered though he committed suicide. If you are a leftist, you are a victim of a 'murder' even if you take your own life as Hitler did.)  Suppose leftists in the German military in the 1930s had pulled off a coup against Hitler and toppled the regime and killed 20,000 Nazis. Do you think any 'progressive' would have bewailed the overthrow of a government that came to power through the democratic process, which the Nazis did? Boris Yeltsin used tanks against the democratically elected Duma in the 90s, but most of the Jewish-controlled American media not only refused to condemn the action but made excuses for it for the simple reason that Yeltsin was happy to be the tool of globalist Jews who were then forming a network that would link NY with Moscow that was soon to come under the influence of Jewish oligarchs. So, Jews don't mind violence, murder, mayhem, and blacklisting as long it's beneficial for their side. It has nothing to do with principles and everything to do with power. Indeed, consider all the fulsome praise liberals and leftists in the West have piled on the Castro regime that denies freedom to Cubans to this day. Since many liberal and leftist Jews sympathized with Castro--indeed NY TIMES played a crucial role in helping Castro to power--, Castro has been spared the kind of vitriol that's been visited on Pinochet. As you can see, Jews, leftists, and liberals really prefer control over freedom. They want freedom for their side but no freedom for the other side. Freedom is good as long as it means more power to their side; freedom is bad if it provides the other side with chance at power.

The liberal media have always used terminology cleverly. We've all heard of 'right-wing death squads', but have you ever heard of 'left-wing death squards'? We've all heard of Muslims referred to as 'terrorists', but have the Jewish-controlled media ever referred to men like Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, and Ariel Sharon as terrorists even though they had been involved in terrorist acts in their youth--and even later as much of the violence against Palestinians and Lebanese can only be called acts of terrorism?
Or consider how the liberal media will use 'conservative' and 'right-wing' as synonymous with evil. So, if a bunch of skinhead thugs in Germany commit acts of violence, they are members of the 'radical right'. But then, hardline communists in post-Soviet Russia were referred to as 'conservative'.  Liberal media argued that hardline communists were trying to restore the Soviet system and as such were 'conservatives'. But using this logic, shouldn't neo-Nazi skinheads in Germany be called 'leftists' since they are trying to undermine the established system?  When it comes to skinheads, the liberal media use the ideological definition of the 'right', but when it comes to communists in Russia, the liberal media use the contextual definition of 'conservative'. Yes, this is how clever Jews--and their goy running dogs--play the game of politics and power.

Even if a liberal or 'progressive' is in agreement with Hollywood's policy of banning of 'racists', neo-Nazis, white nationalists, KKK elements, 'anti-Semites', anti-Zionists, and such people, he should at the very least admit that it is a form of blacklisting. Just because people you don't like are blacklisted doesn't mean that blacklisting doesn't take place. Similarly, just because US tortured its enemies in the War on Terror doesn't mean that it wasn't torture. Waterboarding is torture. (If you say it isn't, would you argue American POWs wouldn't be victims of torture if enemy captors used waterboarding on them?) One  may defend waterboarding or not,  but no honest person should deny the fact that it's torture. Just because torture is used against terrorist scum doesn't make it 'not torture'. Torture was used extensively against German POWs by Americans and the British in WWII and the immediate aftermath. One may justify the practice as having been necessary against an especially evil foe, but torture is torture, and only a liar would use semantics to argue otherwise. But, so many people are blind because semantics rules the day. 'Affirmative action' is essentially discrimination against middle class, working class, and poor whites(and Asians) in favor of blacks, Hispanics, and rich Jews/whites. Though Jews and rich whites are not specifically favored by 'affirmative action', the fact  that the main burden falls on less privileged whites has a defacto effect of favoring certain whites/Jews--especially the affluent urban 'creative' class--over other whites. So-called 'tax credits' are just another form of welfare, but many people don't know this because of the terminology. In today's America, if MSM calls blue 'brown', it becomes the new brown. Words have such power over us, and liberals understand this, which is why they've taken over English Departments and turned classes into mind control laboratories. Should it then be surprising that so many educated people are incapable of understanding the world except through the mental prism/prison of 'racism', 'homophobia', 'antisemitism', 'xenophobia', 'misogyny', 'sexism', and whatever else the academia cooks up next?

Just as killing a Jew or leftist is murder but killing a rightist is not, the sheer fanaticism of the 'progressives' and their allies can never be said to be 'hysterical' or 'extreme', but even the slightest deviation from moderation for those on the Right is routinely and hysterically denounced as 'hysterical', 'paranoid', and 'extreme' according to the Jewish-controlled academia and media. (Feminists can act hysterical, but
if you point out their hysteria, you are attacked as a 'sexist' for stereotyping women as 'hysterical'. Blacks can be loud and crazy, but if you point out their boorish behavior, you are attacked as a 'racist' for stereotyping blacks as 'loud and crazy'. Jews can act pushy, subversive, and nasty, but if point out their character, you are attacked as an 'antisemitic' for stereotyping Jews as 'pushy, subversive, and nasty.)
So, the Pussy Riot is not crazy and hysterical. So, it's perfectly okay for Jews to rabidly holler 'Nazi' and 'antisemitic' at the drop of a hat. It's okay for blacks to scream 'racism' and even to pull one hate hoax after another--for which they are not punished but only offered 'counseling' as if they hadn't acted out of malice but were driven to desperate behavior--like the black guy in SHOCK CORRIDOR--by an all-too-'racist' society. It's perfectly okay for the Democrats to say that the GOP is waging a 'war on women' simply because conservatives think affluent women should be able to afford their own birth control pills.

Perhaps, it would be wrong to say liberals are inherently worse than conservatives when it comes to hypocrisy. If conservatives like Pat Buchanan had the kind of control over the academia and media that liberal Jews do, things could very well be no better... or even worse. But there is no denying that too many liberals and 'progressives'--especially the clever and dominant Jews among them--play fast and loose with the rules, and surely some Jews and liberals are well aware of this hypocrisy. (It could be that many liberal Jews want government to ban 'hate speech' so that they themselves can wash their hands clean of the charge of censorship and blacklisting.  As long as there is freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, liberals and Jews can be charged of hypocrisy for firing, banning, and/or blacklisting certain individuals and groups--and out of their own volition, as the government didn't legally require them to do it. They would be responsible for acts of censorship since they themselves chose to silence certain voices without pressure from the government. But if there are 'hate speech' laws, liberals and Jews can simply say that they are complying with the laws passed by the government and don't really have any choice in the matter. Indeed, notice how Google plays the game. It pretends to be for 'free speech' but it also supports Obama and Democrats who are working to end free speech with 'hate speech' legislation. Since Google wants to promote itself as a beacon of free speech, it would be foolish to overtly call for banning certain kinds of speech. However, if the Democrats gain control over all branches of government and institute 'hate speech' laws, Google can just shrug its shoulders and say, "We may not agree with the law, but it's the law, and so we have to obey it." Thus, Jews pretend to champion free speech while, at the same time, supporting politicians--who are mostly puppets of Jewish power and money--who are working to restrict free speech, especially speech that is critical of Jewish power. This is why no rational person should ever trust Jews.)

Anyway, returning to what Milius said about the Hollywood blacklisting of conservatives, is it true? I think yes and no. Yes, in the sense that organizations dominated by one particular group tends to favor its own kind while controlling the numbers of other groups. Thus, a kind of tokenism operates in Hollywood where a certain number of conservatives are admitted but never enough to tip the balance and undermine the dominance of liberals. But the liberal bias may not always be conscious or intended. If arts and entertainment generally attract those who happen to be Jewish, liberal, and/or gay, and if liberals, Jews, and gays favor their own kind--even without an overt goal of excluding conservatives--, then there will be many more liberals, Jews, and gays than other kinds of people by the simple logic of social dynamics. But, the same can be said for Nashville or Evangelical organizations. Even if they don't have a specific policy banning liberals or 'progressives', they will tend to attract and favor people who share their values and outlooks.
Also, what does it mean to be a 'conservative'? While Hollywood certainly blacklists white 'racists' and overt 'anti-Semites', there is no blatant policy for excluding conservatives. But then, Hollywood's definition of an 'acceptable' conservative may be spineless and bloodless moderate, decadent, and/or hedonistic Republicans like Kelsey Grammer, Clint Eastwood, John Malkovich, Tim Allen, Gary Sinise, and others of that ilk. Suppose Hollywood were run by Rightists and the only kind of 'acceptable liberals'  allowed in were the likes of Ron Howard and Robert Zemeckis. It would be a pretty bloodless bunch. Not that Hollywood is a hotbed of far-leftist filmmaking, but the fact is one can be affiliated with far-leftist ideology, anti-white groups, anti-American organizations, or radical Zionist groups and still be allowed to work in Hollywood. But if you're outed as a 'racist'--even if you keep your views to yourself on the job--, you will be fired and blacklisted forever.

While Hollywood certainly favors liberals, gays, and Jews over others, the paucity of conservatives--even mild conservatives--cannot be blamed on liberals alone. Think back to high school, and what kind of people were most likely to enter into creative fields?  In high school, I worked with the backstage crew in Theater for a couple of semesters, and just about every kid was a Jew, a liberal, or gay. Most young people who gravitate toward the arts tend to be liberal-leaning or wanna see themselves as 'rebels' and 'mavericks',. and they are more likely to feel at home among liberals than among conservatives. (While there is a substantial
number of conservatives with an interest in culture, they tend to be receptive than participatory. As conservatives generally tend to mind their own business than possess exhibitionist tendencies, people with the conservative personality--even those interested in the arts--tend not to join in the process of creation.  To be creative, one has to be somewhat reckless; one has to be willing to risk making an ass out of oneself to achieve that rare moment of glory. As the conservative personality tends to be more sensitive to criticism and ridicule--more conformist--, it is less likely to drive one toward creativity. Terry Teachout is your typically intelligent conservative observer of arts and culture. He partakes of what is created but doesn't participate in the creation.)
Liberals, even with their political correctness, tend to be more cutting-edge than conservatives who tend to meat-and-potatoesy. Most liberals may actually think alike, but they go through the grand motions of being 'different' and 'liberated'--and creativity is often more about putting on a show than telling the truth. So, liberals got more freaks, weirdos, degenerates, and mental cases on their side, the kind of people who are obsessive enough to risk everything to make it in arts, culture, or entertainment; and even though most such people have no talent, they are still engaged in 'making a difference' in the cultural scene, and some of them do create something of worth. Even if only 5% of what liberals do turns out to be any good, it's still a hell of a lot more than what conservatives achieve if most conservatives refuse to venture out of their comfort zone at all. Suppose 10,000 liberals go into the arts, and only 5% of them do anything notable. That's still 500 people. But suppose only 100 conservatives go into the arts, and 5% of them are good. That's only 5 people. 500 vs 5. Just think back on your high schools days and try to remember the kind of kids who were into ideas, arts, culture, and etc. Rarely do conservative kids show interest in that stuff, and even if they do, they tend to be receptive--like Teachout--than pro-active. While your average conservative kid may be emotionally, socially, and morally more stable than your average liberal kid, moderation generally doesn't do much for creativity.
Actually, it's not the liberals who are the most creative either as most liberals tend to be rather bland just like conservatives. This explains why so many notable artists of the 20th century have been leftists or loonies. Leftists may have crazy ideas, but they have passion, and its passion that drives people to take chances. In a way, the obsessive 'antisemitism' of men like Wagner and Celine shouldn't be really surprising, any more than the radical leftism of men like Eisenstein and Brecht. If the essence of creativity and originality is to push the envelope beyond all known boundaries, then personalities prone to extremes will tend to achieve most in art. Thus, Wagner was not only obsessive about his music but in his view of humanity. This goes for politics too. If Hitler had been a bland and modest person, he wouldn't have embarked on the 'mad artist' dream of seizing power in Germany. The same could be said of men like Napoleon, Lenin, and Mao. As extreme personalities, they were not only crazy about politics but lots of other things. Power wasn't enough for Hitler. He had to pursue his mad vision of racial purity as the basis for creating an 'Aryan' utopia.  Power wasn't enough for Napoleon. He had to spread the French Revolution to all of Europe and be emperor. Power wasn't enough for Mao. He had to keep pushing the boundaries of the Revolution in economics and culture.  Just like Orson Welles's appetite for food and women couldn't be separated from his obsession with creativity, the extreme passions/prejudices of great artists couldn't be separated from their extreme passion for creativity/originality. A person with an extreme personality is likely to get carried away with whatever he puts his mind to. Since your average liberal is rather bland and clean-cut, it's generally not liberals who succeed in the arts. It's those with extreme personalities, and such types tend to be more prevalent among Jews, gays, and blacks(especially in musical expression). So, why do extreme personalities gravitate toward liberalism when mainstream liberalism is, in many ways, just as bland and dweeby as mainstream conservatism? Because liberals are more likely to show interest in and dole out cash for the works of extreme creative personalities whereas most conservatives have no use for that stuff. So, extreme creative personalities, even if they aren't intrinsically or initially liberal, will gravitate more toward liberalism since they find more acceptance, support, and success among liberals than among conservatives. Even a conservative artist with an extreme personality will discover that he or she has a better chance of success among liberals than among conservatives who don't give a crap about culture outside the mainstream.
Furthermore, what liberals seem to understand that conservatives don't is that even much of mainstream culture is created by extreme personalities. Take George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. They are hardly 'radical artists', but they both grew up with obsessive hobbies and developed passionate love for movies. They drew inspiration from films from all over the world, and even as they made movies like JAWS and STAR WARS that appealed to the mainstream masses, they were obsessively committed to going the extra mile and being ahead of the curve. Even when they worked on cliched genre movies, they were obsessed with pushing the envelope and shocking the public--even if in a fun happy way--with new thrills no one had previously thought possible. There had been monster movies before but nothing quite like JAWS. There had been space movies before, but STAR WARS blew people away in the summer of 1977. THE GRADUATE and THE GODFATHER were also mainstream movies but created by men of extreme personalities. The novel of THE GRADUATE was written by a real eccentric, and its director Mike Nichols was something of an oddball Jew with background in edgy satire and avant-garde theater. And the music was scored by Simon and Garfunkel of the counterculture folk rock community. Mario Puzo was something of an obsessive 'loser' who'd doggedly committed himself to writing despite the lack of success that only finally came with THE GODFATHER, a novel written in the spirit of vendetta against the literary world and the public that had neglected his previous output. He was no average Italian-American. And Francis Ford Coppola was raised in an artistic family and spent much of his sickly childhood in obsessive love with movies, and he was a big fan of foreign cinema. Though Beatles and the Stones were mainstream rock groups, John Lennon and Mick Jagger were serious weirdos. If anything, Paul McCartney was the anomaly as a rather stable and moderate figure with tremendous gift for music, but then, this explains why he's been loathed by so many who see him as just a talented fake, i.e. he was good but not authentic; he was a professional stylist but not a personal artist. And heaven knows Brian Wilson was a serious neurotic though he wrote beach music for every boy and girl. So, even much of the best of mainstream culture has been created by mavericks, freaks, weirdos, and etc. Paradoxically, many weirdos and freaks prefer to make it in mainstream culture because they want the validation, adulation, and approval that were denied them in their youth. If you were a nobody in highschool, you might wanna finally be acknowledged as a somebody by creating something that everyone loves. Thus, many of the most famous filmmakers were actually loser-dorks in highschool. All the kids who'd ignored Lucas and Spielberg in high school were later watching their movies and being blown away.

Regarding the specific charge by Milius that he fell out of favor with Hollywood because of his anti-communist movie RED DAWN, I somehow doubt it. After all, RED DAWN was hardly the only anti-communist movie of the 80s. Stallone's star rose higher and higher with RAMBO and ROCKY IV, both maniacally anti-communist movies. And there were made-for-TV movies like WORLD WAR III with Rock Hudson, which I think had Russians invading the US.

And in 1987, there was a TV movie called AMERIKA, the plot of which is summed up as "America has been bloodlessly taken over by the Soviet Union, leading to slave-labor camps for some, collaboration for others and rebellion for yet others" in IMDB.
And there was WHITE NIGHTS with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines.


And there was Clint Eastwood's FIREFOX, described by Wiki as: "A joint Anglo-American plot is devised to steal a highly advanced Soviet fighter aircraft (MiG-31, NATO code name 'Firefox') which is capable of Mach 6, is invisible to radar, and carries weapons controlled by thought. Former United States Air Force Major Mitchell Gant, a Vietnam veteran-and former POW-infiltrates the Soviet Union, aided by his ability to speak Russian (due to his having had a Russian mother) and a network of Jewish dissidents and sympathizers, three of whom are key scientists working on the fighter itself. His goal is to steal the Firefox and fly it back to friendly territory for analysis."

While there were a good number of anti-conservative/Reagan movies like THE DAY AFTER(and all those Save-the-Farm movies), Hollywood of the 80s found anti-communism very marketable, and many liberal Jews played along as they'd grown very angry about Soviet 'antisemitism'. And most American Jews by the late 70s figured it was better to direct white American patriotic anger at the evil Russkies--another white gentile people--because otherwise, Americans might direct their anger at Jews. Also, Jews were very much aware of the fact that the Soviet Union was the main backer of many Arab nations hostile to Israel.

The real reason for Milius's eventual failure as a director was his movies made little money. He had one big hit with CONAN THE BARBARIAN, but most of his directorial efforts had been bombs, indeed very big bombs. DILLINGER, THE WIND AND THE LION, BIG WEDNESDAY, and FAREWELL TO THE KING--Milius's directorial effort following RED DAWN--were all major failures. RED DAWN was a considerable hit but only because it was low-budget. Milius was far more successful as a writer--and some of the movies he wrote or contributed to in the 70s were among the decade's biggest hits--, but even his works as a writer failed to make a dent at the box office beginning in the late 80s. EXTREME PREJUDICE was a box office failure and GERONIMO even a bigger one. This isn't to say they were bad movies--indeed they were better than most--, but Hollywood is a business, and Milius simply wasn't cranking out the hits as a writer or director. He was less the victim of 'anti-conservative blacklisting' than free market dynamics, and he wasn't the only one. Many iconic film auteurs of the 60s and 70s had a difficult time getting financing in the 80s and 90s. Just ask William Friedkin, Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Monte Hellman, and many others--and they were all liberals. With the rise of the blockbusters and the Wall-Street-ization of  Hollywood, the industry was looking for formulas. Formulas for box office hits and formulas for safe/respectable 'art films' for the autumn season. Even so-called 'art films' over the years have grown increasingly more staid and predictable. Does anyone really remember or care who directed NEVER LET ME GO, REVOLUTIONARY TOAD, CAPOTE, etc?
There was a revival of independent filmmaking in the 90s, and its biggest star was Mr. Outrageous Quentin Tarantino. The problem that most young moviegoers have with Milius is not so much his political conservatism as his old fashioned sensibilities. Even most young liberals don't want to see liberal movies from the past. They are too 'slow' and 'square'. Milius has been one of the least technologically-oriented directors in Hollywood. He likes the idea of ruggedness, of hardy individuals against the elements. He likes the theme of struggle. Problem is most young moviegoers prefer their heroes to be augmented or boosted with special powers that allow them to fly all over and blast away at bad guys with major weaponry or fight really fast. This is the age of the comicbook superhero movies. Kids wanna see stuff like AVATAR, IRON MAN, MATRIX, and other such movies where characters are imbued with nearly techno-fascist-mythological powers. Darth Vader won. Milius's brand of 'zen fascism' is not spectacular enough for today's moviegoers. Why watch a man struggle against nature or villains with muscle and gun/knife when you can watch superheroes with godlike powers flying over mountains in a nanosecond and blowing up entire cities with the press of a button or flicker of the wrist? Why go hiking and mountain-climbing and sweat when you can go to an amusement park and get on the roller-coaster and feel the speed and breeze?  Milius offers the fascism of toil and struggle; new Hollywood offers the fascism of easy power and easy glamour. It's no wonder that 007 is still a successful franchise. Everything comes to easily to Bond. Everything--technology, luck, women, etc--is always on his side, and this also explains the mega-success of FORREST GUMP, a kind of dummy 007 movie. Notice Gump always lands on his feet, and everything goes right for him.
Milius has hardly been a realist, but within his particular brand of fantasism, nothing comes easy for the hero who just strain and struggle against 'real' obstacles; he must labor. Even in CONAN THE BARBARIAN, the great mythical muscled hero must sweat and toil to finally overcome  his enemies; no pain, no gain. And RED DAWN is nothing like RAMBO, AVATAR, or most recent action movies. Though the premise of Milius's film is in many respects even more fantastical than Stallone's idiot movie, its violence is closer to reality, closer to the kind of 'old-fashioned' violence in John Ford movies. It's not real-real but realist-enough in the sense that heroism is a real pain in the freezing ass. In contrast, bullets seem to bounce off Rambo's chest. RED DAWN grossed 40 million(respectable return on a movie that cost only 4.2 million), but Rambo grossed 150 million in America and 300 million worldwide. Though the filmmaking of RAMBO has none of the brilliance and flair of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, both were big hits because the action was loud, fun, and easy--as in 007 movies.

In the days of Old Hollywood, details of violence were more muted but the action was more realistic at least in this sense:  few heroes had anything like superhuman powers, and the action was purposeful than grandiose and show-offy. John Wayne was a big action star, but when he got hit in the jaw, he fell down--even when the hitter was a gay boy like Montgomery Clift. Though much has been made of the war-mongering aspect of SANDS OF IWO JIMA, Wayne plays just another soldier doing his best for the good of the team. We don't see him baring his chest and leaping across oceans to crush the 'Japs'. And Wayne in THE SEARCHERS was extremely angry precisely because his powers were so limited. There's less reason for superhuman heroes to be angry since their power can destroy enemies with ease. This is why 300, for all its bared teeth and growls, isn't really an angry movie. Its Spartan warriors are so powerful that it's like lions gorging on rabbits. A lion gets angry in a fight against other lions, not against rabbits. If Wayne had such powers in THE SEARCHERS, he would have been having fun smashing 1000s of Indians than simmering with pent-up rage. So, the more powerful the hero becomes, less personal anger he is likely to feel.
This was one of the problems of LORD OF THE RINGS movies. The good guys had such an easy time smashing so many of the bad guys that it was difficult to feel any kind of emotion. In contrast, EXCALIBUR and THE 13TH WARRIOR are far more tension-filled because nothing comes easily for the heroes. Similarly, if a martial arts expert takes on 20 old ladies, there's hardly gonna be any kind of real conflict or tension. Old Hollywood generally gave us good guy or few good guys vs bad guy or few bad guys. So, there was an element of parity. Take a film like HIGH NOON. It's one against four, not one against 400, and its hero has no superhuman powers. (Though the Dollars Trilogy are great fun, they lack emotional tension since we know that the Man with No Name can easily out-shoot anyone. He has superhuman powers.)  Since the conflict unfolds on a more realistic plane in HIGH NOON, we become more involved in the nature of the characters and their hatred for one another. Since the action/violence is so tight, the focus is more on what drives these men to violence, and since they all lack superhuman powers, their wits count as much as their skills. While some people find this kind of storytelling more engrossing and involving, other people--it seems most young people today--find it a drag. When the focus of the story is the personal animosity between a handful of characters--as in Anthony Mann's WINCHESTER 73 or Nicholas Ray's JOHNNY GUITAR--, then the violence will be limited to the core characters. And if the core characters have no superhuman powers, they will have to bide their time to vanquish the foe. For generations weaned on video games, rock music and music videos, and Hollywood blockbusters, the style of story-telling in Old Hollywood action cinema isn't very appealing. Moviegoers today want more action, more bombast, more fireworks. So, not surprisingly, the heroes must be given superhuman powers and face off against swarms of bad guys in spectacular fashion. (In a way, the helicopter raid scene on a Vietcong village in APOCALYPSE NOW was a foreshadowing of things to come in future cinema. Kilgore decides to go all out on the village because he knows that Americans have far superior firepower against the Vietnamese. It's like gods vs ants. It's like war as amusement park. Though Kilgore is a tough guy, he's not a true hero-warrior since he has the power of American technology and might behind him, and what he looks for in war is not meaning but fun. Though an able leader of man, mentally he's a boy-soldier. The helicopter scene is the most exciting in the movie--and indeed one of the greatest battle scenes if cinema--, but it's more fun and thrills than tension-filled or suspenseful since we know Americans are gonna crush the primitively-armed Vietcongs; even so, it's an awesomely mounted artistic statement of an auteur--perhaps topped only by Spielberg's Normandy scene in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN--, one that was unfortunately later studied and turned into formula for mass entertainment by the likes of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay; if Coppla was making a statement that Americans saw Vietnam War like an amusement park, Bruckheimer and Bay had no use for irony when they disgraced a great American tragedy--the attack on Pearl Habor--into popcorn movie fun and thrills. The rest of APOCALYPSE NOW is less exciting and even boring, but the change of pace and scale is meaningful as the theme is about man's coming face-to-face with the true nature of war with nothing but his body and soul. As Milius said in interviews and expressed powerfully in FAREWELL TO THE KING, his lifelong fantasy has been to depart from civilization, contact a primitive tribe and defeat its top warriors on their own terms, and become the new lord of the jungle. For a white man to truly prove his worth, he mustn't rely on technology for even an old lady with a machine gun can mow down hundreds of tough tribal warriors. For the white man to know and show his true worth as a warrior, he must go native and triumph without the gun. Milius probably loved Westerns because gunmen have to face against other gunmen without special advantages. And even though the white man had a decisive edge against American Indians, there was still an element of parity between the cowboy and the Indian, whereas the rise of modern technology in the 20th century, especially with the rise of superpowers, destroyed any possibility of individual heroism.)
So, we get endless series of bad guys being destroyed in LOTR movies. AVATAR initially seems like a movie where the good guys are outclassed by the bad guys with better weaponry, but it's not long before Pandora turns into a kind of green-technological-power in its own right and blows away untold number of evil earthlings in spectacular fashion. Just like kids want volume at rock concerts, they want volume in movies. Not just in the size of image and loudness of the sound but in the size of blasts and number of people blown away. Why was LOTR and AVATAR among the biggest money-makers of all time while THE 13TH WARRIOR is one of the biggest money-losers? Because the scale of conflict in THE 13TH WARRIOR is smaller and tighter, as in SEVEN SAMURAI. One must become involved with the characters, engrossed in the story, and immersed in its world, which is not happyland where everything exists for the sake of funnery. In LOTR movies, in contrast, even moments of mega-violence/mayhem are amusement-park-like. It's non-stop fireworks, and the feeling one gets is not unlike the 'thrill' of a video gamers in shooting/blasting away endless minions of bad guys. Most moviegoers prefer blowout movies to close-contest movies. They like the movie equivalent of a superbowl game where one side defeats the other side by 50 points. Generally, a  game is between two well-matched teams tends to be low-scoring and less 'exciting'. In wrestling and judo, an evenly-matched competition tends to be less 'spectacular' as both men are experts at defense as well as offense. Therefore, in order to enjoy such sports, one mustn't expect fireworks or spectacular movements but know the psychology at work, whereupon the apparently 'less exciting' game could paradoxically become more exciting, i.e. 'not much is happening' on the outside precisely because so much is happening on the inside. Since the bodies and skills are evenly matched, the real competition is happening in their minds.
Similarly, chess games among grand masters are rarely spectacular. But for most people, it's more fun to watch superhuman Bruce Lee beat up a whole bunch of bad guys who are about as effective as old ladies. It's more mindlessly fun to watch Rambo re-fight the Vietnam War and destroy half of the Evil Empire in a single afternoon. To be sure, the superhuman good guy must eventually face off against the superhuman bad guy--and in that, there is finally some kind of parity--, but as the manner of combat is likely to be outlandish and ludicrous, more like professional wrestling than real sports. We don't really care about the moral issue or wits-behind-the-muscle but the sheer bombast of mega-forces clashing. It's like a monster movie, like KING KONG vs GODZILLA. ROCKY III and IV have limited number of characters, but the violence is all volume. If the first ROCKY movie at least gave us a 'real' character in the ring against a realistic boxer and, as such, made us care about the personal anxieties and psychology of Rocky, the sequels--especially III and IV--are really about boxers as comic book superheroes and villains bashing one another with superhuman powers. For anyone who knows anything about boxing, the fight in the first movie is hardly convincing but it still works on the emotional level because we've seen Rocky, a nobody and 'loser', grow into somebody as he trains and pushes his body to the limit for the big night. But in III and IV, we can just rest assured that the gods are smiling down on Rocky and will imbue him with the power necessary to eventually destroy the Monstrous Negro and the Awesome Russkie. It's like in KING KONG vs GODZILLA where an apparently defeated King Kong jolts back to life and kicks Godzilla's butt.


Anyway, Milius was hardly the only 'victim' of new Hollywood. After all, American cinema was more counter-cultural in the 70s than in the 80s, yet it was in the 70s that Milius really made his name. Of course, one could argue that American liberalism has paradoxically, over the years, become less leftist and more correct. Almost no 'progressive' today takes stuff like Marxism or radical feminism seriously. Almost no  'progressive' believes Maoism or Che-Guevara-ism had or has anything to offer.  Che Guevara cult still exists but mostly as a capitalist brand or an ass tattoo. Most 'progressives' are deeply into capitalist success, global free enterprise, being 'creative' to make the climb in the neo-haute elite societies in NY and San Francisco. And today's 'progressives' aren't into dropping out and touching American Indians but about 'Europeanizaing' American cities into 'whitopias' and hiring Asian-Indians. So, if the radical left and the real left is extinct as a cultural force or power, why is the 'new left' so invested political correctness? Since they are no longer committed to 'world revolution', shouldn't they be mellower and less coercive? But the very fact of their betrayal of leftism could be one of the main reasons for their insistence on political correctness. Since they are, in real/factual terms, just a bunch of hypocritical and overly privileged bunch of people obsessed with money, power, and status, they would prefer that people not notice and discuss the true nature of elite power and privilege in today's world. A similar dynamic took hold in the USSR during the Brezhnev years and in China since the 90s. As Stalinism thawed into a 'communism with a human face', one might have expected the Soviet authorities to be  more liberal, but the era of political reform in the late 50s and 60s proved to be short-lived and soon after the fall of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union reinforced the politics of orthodoxy. Though the Soviet Union became less Stalinist in practice, it became more hardline communist in its ideology. Similarly, China has become increasingly less communist and more capitalist since the 90s, but the official ideology of the Communist Party became more 'Maoist'--at least in reviving the cult of Mao as a 'great leader'. More economic freedom/growth was accompanied not by more political freedom but more official correctness. Paradoxically, increased correctness serves as a cover for increased betrayal of the revolution by the Communist Party. The Chinese Communist Party came to power and justified its rule on the basis of its commitment to creating a classless society, but once it adopted free market reforms, the Communist Party elite has become increasingly 'greedy' and 'selfish'. They've enriched themselves as 'hypocritical traitors of the Revolution'.  All the more reason then for the powers-that-be to tighten the screws on official ideology and orthodoxy in order to maintain the fiction that the Communist Party still has the right to rule because of its commitment to Revolutionary Ideals.

It could be that at least part of the reason for the rising tide of political correctness in American society just when 'progressives' have embraced success, wealth, power, and privilege has something to do with a similar paradox that characterized the Soviet Union in the 70s and China since the 90s. Liberal elite's use of political correctness isn't merely to suppress the 'evil reactionary right' but to hoodwink the less successful liberals, leftists, 'progressives', and 'people of color' without power and privilege. The liberal elites, by making a big stink about 'racism', 'sexism', and other 'evils' and by shrilling calling for more political correctness to clamp down on the 'evil right', can slyly fool the masses of loser liberals, leftists, 'progressives', and 'people of color' that they, the liberal elites, are ever so serious about working to bring about greater 'social justice' in the world. Loser liberals may be resentful of winner liberals, but as long as winner liberals use their institutional power to push for more political correctness in the struggle against the 'evil right', a lot of loser liberals will just go along and overlook the fact that winner liberals are getting richer while they, the loser liberals, are getting poorer--NY has a great divide between winner liberals and loser liberals who wait tables of the winner liberals.
Loser liberals are also unaware of the fact that the winner liberals have slyly reoriented 'progressivism' so that it will favor the powerful, privileged, and the rich over the unwashed mob. Liberal elites have pulled this off in three ways. One was to favor Identity Politics over class politics. If class politics were the main premise of ideological leftism today, then the liberal elite would be on shaky legs. After all, the liberal elites have been getting richer and richer for the past 30-40 yrs. If class were central to leftism, poor whites of both political parties and different religious affiliations would come together and attack the elites, many of whom are liberal, Jewish, SWPL, feminist, and gay. It wouldn't matter if the angry mob were culturally conservative, liberal, or whatever. They might unite as a class--and even join up with blacks and browns--against the elites, most of whom are liberal or 'progressive'. But with the rise of Identity Politics, the masses are less likely to unite as a class and more likely to break apart along racial, cultural, and ethnic lines. So, blacks prefer black identity and browns prefer brown identity. While conservatives might see Identity Politics as poor blacks and browns ganging up on better-off whites, it could also be seen as poor blacks siding with rich blacks and poor browns siding with rich browns. Thus, masses of blacks and browns are less likely to think in terms of class. A poor black would rather side with a rich black--like Obama--than side with a poor white.
Then, there is the ideology of feminism. As most 'feminists' happen to be privileged--many of them happen to be high IQ Jews and Wasps from good families--, modern feminism is less about women's war against 'patriarchy' and more about privileged women in academia, government, and upper professions demanding more privileges for themselves. Even so, a lot of unsuccessful women have been won over to feminist ideology, which further undermines the power of class consciousness. If feminism didn't exist, unsuccessful women would join up with unsuccessful men--sexually and politically--and form a united front against successful rich people. But too many unsuccessful women see the world in terms of women vs men, when, in fact, their 'oppressors' aren't so much unsuccessful men but elite 'feminist' women who increasingly hog a bigger share of the pie.
Thirdly, gays may be even more privileged than elite 'feminist' women. Thus, as long as 'progressivism' has turned into a game of fighting the 'war against women' and 'homophobia',  it basically serves the privileged class over the mass class. So, loser liberal whites, instead of siding with loser white conservatives, would rather expend most of their political energy on waving the gay flag or lionizing the likes of Sandra Fluke as a heroine when such things really favor privileged gays and pampered elite 'feminists'. It's all very pathetic.

But, this problem exists on the conservative side as well. A whole bunch of white conservatives refuse to side with white liberals against the elites because they care more about 'right to life' than economic issues. Powerful and privileged conservative elites have cynically exploited issues like abortion to keep the underclass masses of white conservatives to keep voting for the party of Wall Street instead to finding common ground with 'loser' white liberals who've also been left out of global game of power and privilege.

Of course, the biggest joke of all on the so-called Left is the cult of Holocaustianity and the fight against 'antisemitism'. If indeed American society was infested with neo-Nazis and skinheads--and if Jews were indeed a truly powerless group--, I can understand the need to stand up to antisemitism, but most of the hysteria about 'antisemitism' today isn't to protect powerless Jews from powerful 'anti-Semites' but to forbid criticism of Jewish power that only happens to be the most powerful power in America. If leftism is about standing up for the powerless against the powerful, how can it be leftist when one of the hallmarks of today's leftism is all the hysteria about 'antisemitism' that silences legitimate and necessary discussion and criticism of Jewish power, privilege, and influence?  Thus, what now goes by the name of 'leftism' is really calibrated to protect power/privilege than to challenge it. Since the elites are dominated by so-called 'progressives' and since these 'progressives' are hypocritical power-lusters(indeed hardly any different from the piggish elite class that formed in Kremlin in the 60s/70s and within the Chinese Communist Party since the 90s), they feel this need to maintain the charade of their commitment to 'progress' by increasing political correctness. In a nutshell, they hide their immense economic success as globalist capitalists by drowning the public sphere with the bullhorn of political correctness--and too many people are too stupid to figure this out.

As for RED DAWN the movie, I recall hating it with a passion when it came out for reasons ideological and personal. I used to have leftist sympathies back then, and RED DAWN just struck me as a crazy, stupid, and irresponsible movie pandering to the fears and prejudices of simple-minded gun-nuts. As for personal reasons, let's just say I have an allergy to anyone or anything that vilifies Russians and Eastern Europeans in general.
In some ways, a movie like RED DAWN has been poisonous in encouraging the militia mentality that reared its ugly head in the 90s. Not that I have anything against the idea of the militia, but having known some people in those circles, I can vouch that liberals are not entirely wrong about paranoid far-right lunatics.
Yes, the Cold War was for real, and USSR was in some ways an 'evil empire', but the very idea of the Soviets invading America seemed too preposterous, even for a political fantasy.
To be fair to Milius, RED DAWN has to be taken with a grain of salt. I doubt if Milius really thought US would be invaded by the Soviets, and the movie's scenario is willfully sci-fi-paranoid-futuristic. And I suppose why not? If it was okay for paranoid liberal filmmakers in the 60s to make movies like DR. STRANGELOVE--though Kubrick considerably subverted the subversive message itself--, FAIL SAFE, and SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, the scenarios of which had the US government infested with military psychopaths just itching to trigger a nuclear WWIII--and if it was okay for liberal directors of the early 70s to make stuff like PARALLAX VIEW and THREE DAYS OF CONDOR--, what was so wrong about Milius's own brand of right-wing fantasy? Besides, it wasn't long after RED DAWN that a Costa Gavras' BETRAYAL came out where a bunch of 'decent patriotic' white folks of a small town turn out to be a bunch of crazy militiamen(who even use a Negro for target practice). Even so, I must say the liberal paranoid movies tend to be a bit more thoughtful than right-wing ones like RED DAWN and RAMBO(which is especially stupid). Also, the scenario of liberal paranoid movies tend to be somewhat more plausible than right-wing ones. There were indeed some extreme right-wing elements in the US military in the 50s and 60s, and the Timothy McVeigh affair amply demonstrated the dark side of the militia mentality. When I accompanied a friend who went to see a gun-seller in a small town, the guy--a veteran of the Vietnam War--was talking crazy about how Americans must arm and get ready because Libyans--yes, Libyans!--and others were planning to invade America. He looked like a normal guy with a normal job, nice little house, and normal family, but he was talking nuts. Now, of course, most small town folks aren't crazy or think like the gun-seller, but such people do exist, and it doesn't take too many nuts to carry out stuff like the Oklahoma bombing.

But the most harmful effect of movies like RED DAWN is that they divert white American patriots from their real enemies and emphasize the primacy of guns over all else. This has created a culture of stupidity, ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and anti-intellectualism among many American conservatives. Whenever a lot of conservatives feel threatened by social change, they grab onto their guns like their teddy bears. It's as if guns have a talismanic power to save them from the looming danger. While guns are necessary as a last resort when all else fails, power is mostly fought and won intellectually, culturally, economically, creatively, and institutionally. The paranoid-gun culture on the Right has turned many white conservatives into turtles hiding in their shells than wolves fighting for turf, influence, and power. American conservatives have the mentality of the French on the eve of WWII. Fearful of Germans, French only hunkered down and focused on defense.

RED DAWN and RAMBO--and HEARTBREAK RIDGE--did harm to American conservative culture because they focused American patriotic rage against foreign enemies who didn't pose much threat to America. Vietnam War was over and forgotten by the 80s, and it made little sense for Stallone to dredge it up for cheap entertainment. One could certainly understand Cold War fears to some extent--through the 60s and 70s, even experts thought the Communist East was on the rise while the capitalist democratic West, especially after the social and political chaos of the 60s, was on the decline. And with Nicaragua falling to communism in the late 70s and Central America embroiled in civil wars pitting Marxist guerrillas against rightwing regimes, some feared that Latin American nations would fall like dominos to world communism. As Milius came of age in the 60s and 70s, it is understandable why he'd come up with a scenario like RED DAWN. But by the 80s, it was all just a silly fantasy and rather stupid one at that.  Anyway, by directing American conservative rage at all these foreign enemies--Vietnamese, Russians, Cubans, etc--, American conservatism failed to deal with the problem of their real enemies AT HOME.
Unlike conservatives, American liberals and Jews mainly targeted their domestic enemies. So, while liberal Jews, gays, blacks, and illegal aliens were gaining in power, American conservatives, in culture and politics, preferred to fix their bayonets against the Russkies, Vietnamese, and Cubans--and later the Muslims.
What happened to America in 2008 is many times worse than the scenario in RED DAWN.  A slick pimpish mulatto--promoted as a posterboy of interracism--was elevated to the presidency with the backing of the cabal of Jews, gays, and liberal Wasp traitors that controls nearly all the elite institutions of this nation. While stupid conservatives were watching the skies for communist and Muslim invaders from abroad, the real enemies of America have been growing in power IN America. Milius claims that RED DAWN was a ballsy movie, but it really wasn't. If anything, Hollywood Jews probably tolerated and even approved of it precisely because it was the sort of thing that diverted American conservative rage from the real enemy of American conservatism: Jews, gays, blacks, and illegals. Jews push a guy like Obama into the presidency while American conservatives fixate on supporting a foreign nation, Israel, against Palestinians, a dispossessed people whose situation is very much like the one whites are facing in America today. Jews on Wall Street steal trillions from the white middle class while the white middle class support politicians who promise even more aid to Israel. Jews are committed to destroying the white race, but the white race is committed to backing Israel no matter what it its oppression of Palestinians. Perhaps, deep down inside, Milius wanted it this way too. After all, despite all his 'zen fascist' antics, he too is Jewish(though, I must admit, I only found out this year).

That said, upon re-watching RED DAWN some years back, I found myself hating it a lot less. For one thing, the Cold War is now a distant memory, and the movie is something of a relic. There is also the nostalgia factor as I often find myself feeling a certain fondness for 80s movies I hated back then even though I still don't think too highly of them. I hated FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF, PRETTY IN PINK, SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL, COCKTAIL, OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE, LESS THAN ZERO, ALL THE RIGHT MOVES, TOP GUN, KARATE KID II, MANHUNTER, BREAKFAST CLUB, SMOOTH TALK, ABOUT LAST NIGHT, ST. ELMO'S FIRE, and many others, but I must admit I enjoyed re-watching them.

While I still think RED DAWN is pretty stupid, I don't think it's a bad movie at least within the premise it lays out. And it is interesting in reversing the roles of the occupier and occupied. For most Americans, the idea of foreign invasion is unthinkable.The only time Americans had problems with 'foreign invasion' was in the War of 1812 when the British even managed to burn down the American capital. Since then, Americans continued to gain power, wealth, and land against Indians and then Mexicans. In the 20th century, America even took to playing the role of world policeman and was on the winning side in WWI and WWII and, at the very least, stopped communist aggression in Korea. Technically, Americans fought to a stalemate in Vietnam, and it was South Vietnam that lost the war, but in truth, Americans quit the war as hopeless and left the South Vietnamese to the certain fate of being overrun by communists. Even so, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong never posed a danger to America itself. Even Japan that bombed Pearl Harbor had no agenda and no ability to invade any part of America, not even Hawaii. Thus, Americans got used to exerting their power abroad.
Milius reversed the scenario as playful fantasy and goofy paranoia but also out of moral envy. Generally, the underdog wins the moral sympathy, which is why we root for little Jerry the mouse against Tom. Americans were the underdogs in the Revolutionary War but the aggressors or overdogs in all subsequent wars. In the War of 1812, the Brits may have been the overdogs--and they certainly got the better of it though neither side won--, but Americans started the war. (One could argue the American South understands what it means to be an underdog and 'oppressed' group since it was attacked, defeated, and occupied by Yankees, and indeed, there is a tragic aspect of neo-Confederacy-ism  in every kind of white militia movement, even in the North.)  Americans have long been the overdogs, but there is a lingering cult of underdog-ism in the American psych-political-moral mind-set.   Americans still like to think of their nation having been founded by idealists who had the courage to challenge the greatest empire in the world. Though French played the  decisive role in defeating the British, Americans still like to believe that a ragtag bunch of patriots of a newly declared republic led by George Washington defeated the mightiest military in the world. I don't know what they teach in schools today, but in grammar school, we learned of how the Minutemen used guerrilla tactics against the British army.

So, the American mythology has long informed us that this nation was founded by underdogs who fought against all odds. Of course, as America grew rich and powerful, Americans became very proud of their nation as 'the greatest power in the world'.  Nevertheless, a kind of underdog-victim mentality remained in the American psyche, and so Americans tended to frame all wars in moral terms that harked back to the Revolutionary War. So, even though Japan was doomed and no match for the US after it attacked Pearl Harbor, Americans were led to believe that mighty Japan was on the verge of invading America. And though Americans were killing many more Vietnamese than vice versa, the war was framed in terms of decent Americans aiding helpless South Vietnam against an evil communist enemy. And even though the 9/11 attacks were a fluke, for a while many Americans convinced themselves that they were engaged in a great War on Terror against the Islamic Jihad that attacked us because it doesn't like our freedom. Oh my, if we fail in our crusade against this great enemy, we might be defeated in the Clash of Civilizations and lose our freedom to listen to Lady Gaga.

Thus, there is a kind of dualist-schizophrenia at the core of the American psyche. Americans proudly say "We are #1 and America is the greatest nation/power on Earth" but, at the same time, Americans believe that the very source of their great power derives from their underdogness. The Revolutionary War is remembered as one in which the underdog victim-side defeated the overdog victor-side, and so, the rest of American history has come to be seen through the prism of victims-as-new-rightful-victors, i.e. American power grew so powerful precisely because good decent Americans favored victims over victors.
But when victims defeat the victors and become victors themselves, are they proud as noble victims or notable victors? In the American political psyche, two things, moral righteousness and power-lust, cannot be separated, and this may been why it was so easy for Jews to gain elite power in America for Jews have an even more extreme version of noble-victim-gaining-power-over-the-victor complex.
Though Jews have become immensely powerful and privileged, they see their power as morally and historically justified for having grown out of Jewish victim-hood's eventual triumph against 'antisemitic' victorhood. Jewish victims vanquished the anti-Jewish victors, and Jews became the new victors, but Jewish victory is to be seen as justified since it's morally rooted in victim-hood. Losers have a right to win, and this is why it's so difficult to criticize Jewish power. Jews have premised Jewish power so much on Jewish powerlessness of the past that it sounds mean-spirited to question Jewish power.  Jews, like the Anglo-Americans of old, have defined their power as having been gained for power-for-power's-sake but for power-against-oppression-sake. Thus, Jewish power is seen as the empowerment of noble victims than power-mongering of oppressive victors. But then, this moral logic of power goes back to Christianity, which, even as the predominant force in Europe long after the fall of Rome, justified its power as having been earned by noble victims in their spiritual struggle against Satanic forces of heathenism.

Anyway, this kind of duality informs Milius's RED DAWN that puts Americans in the role of the Viet Cong in an America that is invaded and occupied by a foreign enemy. Though Milius detested communism, he had a certain respect for the patriotic-resistance mentality of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. They had the wrong ideology but the right virtues. They were, at least as tough warriors, committed to their ruthless war against the foreign invaders who, in this case, happened to be Americans. In APOCALYPSE NOW, Kurtz explains how he was shocked by the ruthless deeds of the Viet Cong but then came to realize how the communists had arrived at a kind of harmony between sanity and brutality. The communists had embraced war as the natural state of man, and so they could do brutal stuff in battle but then go back to being decent family men back home. Some people have asked how Germans could read Rilke in the morning and kill Jews in the afternoon, but that wouldn't have been much different from Viet Cong chopping people to death in the morning but then returning to their roles as farmers/fathers/husbands in the afternoon. The rise of advanced civilization has cocooned modern man in the conceit of peace as the social norm, but the true nature of man is as much hunter/warrior as farmer/settler. In APOCALYPSE NOW, Kurtz 'goes native' to learn and embody the true art of war. (Milius's right-wing comic book intellectualism probably has its counterpart in Romero's left-wing comic book intellectualism.)
But then, he's no longer fighting for Americans but for the honor of the warrior soul. He becomes both an enemy and friend to both Americans and Vietnamese. He's still an American fighting the Vietnamese communists, but he's also a primal warrior at war with the modern world. As a jungle warrior, he's no longer fighting for cookie-cutter ideals of anti-communism. He's fighting for something beyond ideology and morality, something beyond 'good and evil'.
And there is an element of that in RED DAWN. What matters above all for the Wolverines is their own turf and kin. Their fight is more tribal than national. They are not fighting to defend an abstract idea of America from foreign enemies but to defend their own turf where they grew up and have families and friends. It's like a high school football team playing for pride on its home turf; in a way, it's kinda like Coppola's ONE FROM THE HEART, which also starred Patrick Swayze.
Had RED DAWN focused on the US military taking on the Soviet military, it would have been a war against equally matched giants, and it would have missed out on the element of underdog-ism. For Americans to be like the Minutemen--or the Vietcong--, the courageous underdog fighting against all odds, RED DAWN had to focus on a bunch of proud young boys in an isolated community. Perhaps, this explains why the far-left NATION magazine ran a rather favorable review of the movie. Though it was staunchly anti-communist and paranoid-right-wing, it favored the idea of underdog guerrillas taking on a technological superpower. White Americans were now the Indians or the Viet Cong. They were the victims, and from a leftist viewpoint, RED DAWN was about white Americans getting a taste of their own medicine.



1 comment:

  1. Your posts are too long. Most people's attention span is short. For the internet, a blogging post should be small.

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