Planting for the Future

By Judy Baehr
The Annual Harvest Fair

I see another stockade of slurs has been launched against the likes of famed Hollywood sceenwriter Bud Schulberg and the world-class director Elia Kazan. Even in death these immensely talented individuals are allowed no peace from demeaning and denigrating insults.

Schulberg and Kazan confessed to being former members of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and were called to testify before the House on Un-American Activities and “named names” of fellow Communists. For this noble act of patriotism they are forever painted as pariahs in the pantheon of Hollywood.

But let’s face the truth for once. The avowed aim of CPUSA was the overthrow of the democratically elected government of the U.S.A. “by violent means if necessary.” Here we are talking about the governments of Democrats Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

Back at the home of world communism, the Soviet Union, to which CPUSA was committed, dictator Josef Stalin in the 1930s purposely starved to death an estimated 10 million Ukrainian men, women and children, and right up to the start of the Second World War, it was estimated between 20% and 30% of Soviet residents were in slave labor camps.

The American Left and the Hollywood elite ignored these abominations. Virtually on the eve of the Second World War in Summer 1939, German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and Stalin engineered the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact that handed over to Moscow the independent nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, gave Moscow a slice of Poland and a slab of Romania, and a free hand to invade tiny Finland. Again, the American Left and the Hollywood elite ignored these betrayals of innocent peoples.

In 1944, the Soviet Union’s forces raced across Eastern Europe and added to its enslaved nations such countries as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany. Tens of millions of innocent citizens were shipped to the gulags. Yet again, the American Left and the Hollywood elite were quiet.

Then, in 1945, cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko fled from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, and revealed that far from being a trusted ally of the Western democracies, Moscow had established a worldwide net of espionage cells  in the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and other countries in order to subvert and sabotage these nations and bring them under Communist rule.

Treachery, from Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to Alger Hiss, and from Kim Philby to Sir Anthony Blunt, was revealed. Once again, the American Left and Hollywood’s elite turned a blind eye.

OK, not all were devious, some were just duped, and not all were nefarious. Some were just naive. But not so the likes of Schulberg and Kazan. They decided to tell America—and the world—the truth. For this, the American Left and the Hollywood elite refuse to forgive them.

Personally, I stand with the likes of Schulberg and Kazan on the side of democracy and decency, rather than dictatorship and deceit. I hope you do, too.