Rightly Understanding the Past

For John, BLUF:  Let us dispense with the false equivelency of American Democracy and Soviet Communism.  And let us not go overboard by branding our friends on the left as Communists.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

The InstaPundit provides an important point for us.

J.P. FREIRE:  The “Hollywood Holocaust” and Other Cold War Myths.  Leaving aside the obscenity of comparing out-of-work screenwriters with gassed Auschwitz inmates, there’s this:  Communists are no better than Nazis.  Refusing to hire Communists is on the same moral plane as refusing to hire Nazis.  Which is to say:  It’s a good and admirable thing, not a sin.  Go broke and starve, commies.  It’s what you deserve for being eager, willing servants of totalitarianism.

Yes, we were allied with the Communist Soviet Union during WW II, but that Great American, Prime Minster Winston Churchill, points the way to rightly understanding the relationship:

If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

To his personal secretary John Colville the evening before Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union.  As quoted by Andrew Nagorski in The Greatest Battle (2007), Simon & Schuster, pp. 150-151 ISBN 0743281101

Let us draw a distinction between the Socialists of Europe and elsewhere and the Communists of the Soviet Union, particularly under Joseph Stalin.  The second lot were cruel and evil, killing millions of their fellow countrymen and women in the pursuit of a dream to reduce individuality and independence.  The fellow travelers of Hollywood were misguided at best and knowing supports of an evil up there with the Nazi regime at worst.  It is not that we couldn't forgive them.  We forgave the Germans  It is that their support of evil should not have been swept under the rug, where it would rest, waiting to infect others.

Where scores settled and wrongs done?  Absolutely, but there were reasons Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman "Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the."

Regards  —  Cliff