Remember how outraged celebrities were believing that Putin and Trump were working together? Where is the outrage when Hollywood does the collusion?
“Donald
Trump is committing Treason against The United States of America,”
tweeted director Rob Reiner a few months back. “He has turned the
world’s oldest Democracy into a wholly owned subsidiary of Vladimir
Putin.” A beneficiary of Hollywood’s chronic nepotism, Reiner was one of scores of celebrities accusing Trump of colluding with Russia. Bill
Maher sometimes knows better. Not this time. In a burst of faux
patriotism, he tweeted, “Trump can’t demand that everyone stand for the
flag if he colluded with a foreign gov’t to subvert the very democracy
that flag represents.”
It has not always been like
this. Not too long ago Tinseltown celebrated Hollywood’s fellow
travelers, the ones who defiantly colluded with the Russia of Josef
Stalin. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities
Committee held its first round of Hollywood hearings. The committee
selected 45 industry people to query, most of whom were friendly, but 19
of whom were not. Of those 19, eleven did testify
but refused to answer questions, and Congress cited them for contempt.
When playwright Bertolt Brecht fled to East Germany – who flees to East
Germany? – the group passed into legend as the “Hollywood Ten.”
After
two of the group, John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, were convicted,
the others waived jury trials and were sentenced to up to a year in
prison.
The
“innocents” of Hollywood – Humphrey Bogart in the lead – were formed
into a new “club.” This club, the Committee for the First Amendment,
seemed fully unaware of who was doing the forming.
The
Committee rallied to the cause of the Hollywood Ten, thinking the Ten
mindless liberals like themselves. Bogart even argued at a meeting of
the Hollywood 10 and their lawyers that they should be aggressive and
everyone say they were party members, so what that wasn’t illegal and
the lawyers told him it would help expose the legal system if they
didn’t fight back and took the fifth. Bogart began to realize he was
being used.
When Bogart realized what was actually
happening, the sacrificing of the 10 to make the U.S. look bad, he was
appalled by his own activism on their behalf, calling it “ill-advised,
impetuous and foolish.”.......To Read More.... Much More
No comments:
Post a Comment