The Bush Internationale

The old Internationale, the anthem of international communism and socialism, began thus (at least in the US version):

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!
For justice thunders condemnation:
A better world's in birth!

Now that George Bush is doing more for socialism than anyone since Chairman Mao, I offer the following:

Arise ye fearful of deflation,

Arise ye victims of the crunch!

Your paper suffers condemnation,

You don't have time to go to lunch!

No more the market's tides shall drown us,

Arise ye bankers, one and all;

Our bonds shall rest on new foundations--

The government will pay them all!

'Tis a right fine bailout,

Line up now for your pie,

The international rentier class

Has George Bush as its ally!

Hollywood's Red Decade

One of my hobbyhorses has been the deification of the Hollywood Ten, Hollywood writers who were prosecuted for refusing to testify before a Congressional committee investigating communist influence in filmland.

The business of interrogating people about their political views is, to be sure, unsavory. But these guys really were supporters of Stalin, a mass murderer. Why they should be given a bye when any hint of Nazi sympathies makes one a pariah has never been clear to me.

In this post, J.K.Dunn regales us with snippets about some of the pro-Russian propaganda films of the WWII era, encouraged by FDR, who feared that suspicion of the alliance with Stalin would harm his 1944 campaign. Dunn writes:

There are good reasons why the left doesn't claim these films. Instead, they try to take credit for other, unrelated films: film noir, which is supposed to represent a "Marxist critique of American society". (This is nonsense - almost none of the noir film-makers were leftists of any sort. Like all film buffs, I have my own theory concerning noir, which we don't have the space for here.), and the "social problem" films of the late 40s through the 50s, such as Gentleman's Agreement, No Way Out, and On the Waterfront. But the Hollywood Reds were either blacklisted or doing time during the heyday of these pictures. With few exceptions (Laurents wrote one, Home of the Brave), social problem films were liberal propositions.

No better example of the intellectual and artistic bankruptcy of the left exists than these films. They should have been allowed to make as many as they wanted. No blacklist, no Congressional hearings, no interference whatsoever. A couple dozen more like these and Hollywood communism would have been relegated to comic relief. Left alone, they'd have knocked themselves out.

Quaker Picnic Talk From an Unrepentant Marxist

Of course, some of us who have quaint ideas about right and wrong and international law might quibble over the right of the U.S. Marines to invade and occupy such countries, an act that Marine General Smedley Butler once described as a “racket”."

-- Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect, of course, self-defines as "The Unrepentant Marxist."

It's quaint that a Marxist revolutionary cites "right and wrong" and "international law" to support his criticism of U.S. policy.

If I remember right, in most varieties of the Marxist glass bead game, "right and wrong" is merely the expression of class interest, and "international law" the operating rules of the tyrants' cartel.

In this calculus, blaming a bourgeois government for violating international law is like blaming a rattlesnake for being venomous.

There's a whole tradition in this country, of course, of leftists trying to wrap themselves in the flag. "Communism," said Earl Browder, "is 20th Century Americanism," and when Stalin sent American Communists to die for the Spanish Republic, their expeditionary force was styled the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade." And who can forget the "Ballad for Americans?"

In 1935 the Comintern proclaimed a Popular Front policy that downplayed revolution and emphasized alliances with reformers and other leftists against the common menace of fascism. Embracing this stance with the slogan "Communism is twentieth-century Americanism," the CPUSA shifted to support of Roosevelt and sought a cooperative role on the left of the broad New Deal coalition. Communists achieved a limited but nonetheless significant presence in main stream politics through their participation in New York's American Labor Party, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, the End Poverty in California movement, the Wisconsin Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation, and the Washington [state] Commonwealth Federation. Two members of Congress, Representatives John Bernard (1937–1938) of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party and Hugh De Lacy (1945–1946), a Washington State Democrat, became secret members. Two open communists won election to the New York City Council.

Communists also took leading although usually secret roles in numerous liberal-left advocacy groups such as the American League for Peace and Democracy, National Negro Congress, American Writers Union, and American Youth Congress. Communists had no role in founding the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), but in 1936, after secret negotiations, CIO leaders hired more than fifty communist organizers and brought into the CIO several small communist-led unions.

Source: here.

Years ago, a friend of mine, a "red diaper baby," told me of going to a Youth Congress in Russia. The slogan of the day was "Mir e Druzhba!" or "Peace and Friendship." They went around Mir-and-druzhbing. This, of course, was the language of a Quaker picnic, not class struggle.