Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 08:21:59 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: WWII and the Cold War (post #2)


Gary McClennan:

>David and Wheelwright and Maltz then all had much in common.  They were
>attempting to articulate a radical populist politics based on a fusion of
>communism and nationalism.  This is an old debate of course and as I come
>out of the Trotskyist tradition there aren't any prizes for guessing what my
>opinions are on this.  But I would like to be a little wicked and say about
>this left pragmatism:- "It didn't damn well work".  
>

Louis Proyect:

What a terrific post by Gary. I am familiar with another xenophobic
anti-Japanese film by another blacklisted CP screenwriter (but not one of
the Hollywood 10) named of Ben Barzman. This one starred John Wayne (!). I
will track down the title.

I knew Ben's son Jon when I was in the SWP. He was a Harvard student who was
deeply Staliniphobic. I certainly had the feeling that there was something
generational at work here. Jon was a workerist dissident in the party when
the Party Line was pro-social movements. When the SWP went workerist, Jon
dropped out and became a history professor. Go figure. Some people don't
like to be part of the mainstream.

This whole question of how liberals and radicals got sucked into identifying
with the war aims of US imperialism is a fascinating one. Frank Capra and
others made award-winning propaganda films for the War Department. Meanwhile
the CP made no distinction between the defensive of the USSR against fascism
and the imperialist dog-fight between Roosevelt and the Mikado. It was all
one big happy "progressive" war, hurrah.

What happened is that this identification between the working class and its
imperialist masters against the Axis was *easily* transferred to one in
which the "Commies" became the enemy. The visual style was almost identical.
Capra documentaries showed the Nazi Panzers sweeping across a map of Eastern
Europe through animated symbols such as the swastika. The same type of stock
footage began being used in the 1950s. Instead from that point on the
"enemy" was flooding westward across the Iron Curtain toward the "free"
nations of NATO.

The CPUSA endorsed the Smith Act being used against the Trotskyist SWP which
opposed WWII as an imperialist war. (It later admitted this was a mistake.)
When the Smith Act was then used against the CPUSA during the Korean War,
the same sort of justification was used against it. The CPUSA was aiding and
abetting a foreign adversary.






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