The Top 40

And then, when the war came, they helped the Soviets.

My comment above needs context, With the advent of war, Hollywood helped the American and allied war effort, and did so magnificently. My point above is that some in Hollywood didn't just paint our new "allies" under Stalin's yoke as heroic for the war effort's sake, but also because they were enamored with Soviet Communism.

Well to be fair, at first few had a clue how evil and horrific the Nazis were going to be or what they had in mind. And when big money shows up asking for your help in what you are good at, most people will tend to ignore things like dictatorships.

Especially since in the early 30s, fascism sounded so intellectual and scientific - blending the good parts of socialism and capitalism into a new third system working toward the betterment of all mankind and all that.

Now people try to rewrite history and pretend it was obvious what a demon Hitler was and how evil the Nazis were, but for a while they were the darlings of many in the academic set such as Margaret Sanger.

Didn't Warner Brothers have cartoons that made fun of Hitler? (and the Japanese)

Yep, things turned around pretty quickly. Labor unions, Hollywood, etc were pretty opposed to fighting Hitler until he attacked Russia, basically. The picket lines folded up shop overnight.

Christopher Taylor: "Well to be fair, at first few had a clue how evil and horrific the Nazis were going to be or what they had in mind."

"...fascism sounded so intellectual and scientific - blending the good parts of socialism and capitalism into a new third system working toward the betterment of all mankind and all that."

Kinda like with that 0bama guy and his "must have" book 'Dreams of my Father[land]: A Story of Race and Inheritance' which spelled out what he was all about, where he came from, and where he wanted to go...His struggle with racial identity and such.

What mystifies me is that anybody is shocked by this. Fascism, Communism, Nazi-ism-- they're all facets of Progressivism, the guiding ideology of a large segment of Hollywood for most of a century.

My two cents' worth.

Hale Adams
Pikesville, People's Democratic Republic of Maryland

Hitler had laid out his plan, the outlines of it anyway, in Mein Kampf. Unfortunately, too few people in America (or Britain or France) read his book, even in translation. Of those who did read it, and got past the turgid, inelegant prose, too few took it seriously enough to sound the alarm. Those who did--Churchill and a few others--were ignored until too late. Although many of us warned what 0bama would be like, we were also ignored by those who either wanted to believe, or who did not wish to have their slumber disturbed.

What happened during WWII was that the world became so horrified by the Nazis that even the CPUSA realized it had to back off on its anti-Americanism.

By the time Russia was canonized by FDR as an ally against Germany, the country was treated to the spectacle of even such New York Lefties as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie not only supporting the war effort but appearing in US uniform, which I would imagine causes Seeger to blush to this day.

Hollywood was right with 'em.

Yeah there's a bit of rewrite about history done regarding that time. It wasn't so much that Hollywood was particularly partriotic or that the left was suddenly all in because Hitler had to be defeated. It was still political, but we were allied with Communist Russia, against an enemy of the communists.

At that point, despite abundant evidence (such as Ayn Rand's first book) of the horrors of communism, most leftists still had a very romantic idea of what Russia was like. They thought it was just wonderful and we should be that way. All those actors and stuff who were accused of being communist members later... most of them really were, not because they were necessarily so communist, but because they were sold a bill of goods by the Russians and their useful idiots here.

most leftists still had a very romantic idea of what Russia was like....

If you substitute "Communism" for "Russia" in that phrase......nothing has changed, has it? And I certainly agree that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" was without doubt the operative principle behind Hollywood (and the New York folkies) suddenly getting behind the war effort.

Younger folks who haven't been movie buffs are generally shocked to watch '30s movies from a political perspective; it's certainly not difficult to spot the leftie screenwriters. High art, high culture, and an enormously un-subtle level of propaganda.

Dja ever see Dead End from 1937? It looks like Social Realist art, start to end.

Rob De Witt: "Gabriel over the White House" (1933) would be another good example of the genre.

What's interesting about this history is that for the period of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact (August 1939-June 22, 1941), Hitler and Stalin were officially BFFs, and Germany was off-limits for Soviet propaganda. Prior to the pact's adoption a week before Germany's invasion of Poland, CPUSA and like-minded groups kept up a drumbeat of NKVD-directed venom directed at the Nazi regime. After Stalin and Hitler made nice with each other, it stopped, immediately, and stayed stopped until Germany launched Operation Barbarossa. I've heard stories of CPUSA members almost getting whiplash from having to shift gears so suddenly. But shift they did, based on Moscow's commands. Independent thought has never been a strong point for the American far-left.

I watched a bunch of those old cowboy movies John Wayne knocked off in the 30s early in his career, like 10 a year. Every one of them had the same theme: a local community is helpless and cannot fight the bad guys, but a federal agent (John Wayne) comes in and saves the day. Turn to the government for your aid, don't handle things yourself!