Saturday, May 19, 2007

Where Are the Anti-Communist Movies?

The title of this post duplicates the title of an article I stumbled upon:



By David Boaz:


...Anti-Nazi movies keep coming out, from Confessions of a Nazi Spy and Hitler, Beast of Berlin in 1939 and on through The Great Dictator, The Mortal Storm, The Diary of Anne Frank, Sophie's Choice, Schindler's List, right up to the current Black Book. And many of these have included searing depictions of Nazi brutality, both physical and psychological.


But where are the anti-communist movies? Oh, sure, there have been some, from early Cold War propaganda films to such artistic achievements as The Red Danube, Ninotchka, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Killing Fields, East-West, and Before Night Falls. But considering that National Socialism lasted only 12 years in one country (and those it occupied), and Communism spanned half the globe for 75 years, you'd think there'd be lots more stories to tell about Communist rule.


No atrocities, maybe? Nazis and Brits were vicious, but Communists were just intellectually misguided? Well, that seems implausible. They murdered several times as many people. If screenwriters don't know the stories, they could start with the Black Book of Communism. It could introduce them to such episodes as Stalin's terror-famine in Ukraine, the Gulag, the deportation of the Kulaks, the Katyn Forest massacre, Mao's Cultural Revolution, the Hungarian revolution, Che Guevara's executions in Havana, the flight of the boat people from Vietnam, Pol Pot's mass slaughter—material enough for dozens of movies.



Do read it all.  I agree, we do need anti-communist movies in order to explain to young people that it really was (and is) a bad idea.  But, besides the leftist bias of many Hollywood filmmakers, I think I can guess another reason why there are very few movies about the struggle against another totalitarian ideology of the 20th Century.  You see, at least in the former Soviet Union Communism lasted so long, it is very hard to produce a movie with a happy ending.  On the other hand, if you take a time frame that encompasses the fall of Communism, the happy end is possible.  I hope there will be people that take it up.


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