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Maybe David Boaz Needs A Netflix Account

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 […]

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. ~David Boaz

Well, having just mentioned The Killing Fields, it seems odd that he seems to list “Pol Pot’s mass slaughter” as one of the things that hasn’t been treated in a film.  The Katyn massacre was part of the story of the codecracker movie nobody went to see, Enigma, and The Lost City showed briefly but effectively the beginnings of communist terror under Castro and Guevara.  The horrors and chaos of the Cultural Revolution have been depicted, albeit not in a systematic way, in the fine Chinese movie To Live and, again, One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich portrays Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Gulag.  The Last Emperor at least obliquely refers to the police state under Mao (and this otherwise movie actually exaggerates the mistreatment accorded to Pu Yi after his deposition).  Tom Hulce starred as the projectionist in an outstanding portrait of Stalin, The Inner Circle, that was as quickly forgotten as it was brilliant in depicting the dictator and his willing lackey (it was more of a portrait of the cult of personality, but very powerful all the same).  Robert Duvall played the man himself in a miniseries about Stalin.  Those are just the ones that I have happened to see or know about myself.  

Now, it is absolutely true that there are still not enough movies being made to tell the stories of the more vast, systematic crimes of the Soviet Union and Maoist China against its subject peoples, including the genocide of the Ukrainians or the famines induced by collectivisation in China, and there are obvious political reasons why telling the stories about the evils of communism does not inspire a lot of folks out in Hollywood. 

Yet if screenwriters and producers are not banging down the door to make these movies, to listen to contemporaries of all political persuasions compare current threats to the Greatest Evil Ever you would be hard-pressed to find very many who talk about how such-and-such a foreign leader is the “new Khruschev” or the “new Stalin.”  No, every pundit knows that to get people to pay attention to a foreign crisis he has to invoke Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust.  Chauvinists and jingoes call it Islamofascism for a reason (they are ignorant), but they have another reason: fascism causes a visceral, negative reaction in virtually all who hear it, while communism may well deeply offend many but somehow lacks the emotional power that sixty years of continuous conditioning about Nazis have created.  There is a more immediate hunger for anti-Nazi stories in America, because Americans were directly involved in fighting Nazi Germany in a way that we simply weren’t with the Soviets.  Even telling stories from the Korean War are probably less appealing, because the war was enormously unpopular and ended in stalemate.    

Even so, there are a few more films depicting the crimes of communism than Mr. Boaz allows.  If they are less well known, that may be because they have smaller audiences, perhaps because the Cold War ended with a whimper rather than a bunker.  All of this may in turn explain why there are fewer movies made about the evils of communism: the stories are very dramatic and powerful, but the collapse of communism came about in large part because the system simply broke down and the many peoples who laboured under that yoke finally threw off the yoke themselves.  Sad to say, but great stories about foreigners successfully struggling against their repressive governments are not the source of big box-office results.  What kind of anticommunist movies sell over here?  Rambo.  Now you can probably see why there aren’t more of them being made.

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