Page 45 - American Conservative September/October 2015

her death and, along the way, gaining plaudits for her supposedly noble resis- tance to false charges. Entertainment professionals joined cells so secret that each could operate quite separately from the others. These men and wom- en put into their movies Marxist mes- sages ranging from the subtle to the overt. MGM’s 1944 film “Song of Rus- sia” stars Robert Taylor as an American conductor who visits the USSR in 1941. His love affair with a beautiful pianist in a surprisingly prosperous socialist republic is ruined by Operation Bar- barossa. Ayn Rand, testifying before HUAC, described the Nazi invasion as depicted in “Song of Russia.” Border
guards are shown listening peacefully to a Tchaikovsky concert:
Suddenly there is a Nazi attack on them. The poor, sweet Russians are unprepared. Now realize—and that was a great shock to me— that the border that was being shown was the border of [Soviet- occupied] Poland. That was the border of an occupied, destroyed, enslaved county which Hitler and Stalin destroyed together. That was the border being shown to us—just a happy place with people listening to music.
Ryskind’s second success is to re- mind us of the moral ghastliness of the Nazi-Soviet pact. One of the fre- quent excuses made for Communist sympathy in the 1930s is that it was a form of opposition to fascism. Yet be- tween 1939 and 1941, Stalin carved up Eastern Europe with Hitler, allow- ing the German dictator to wage war uninterrupted in the West. Ryskind shows how faithful Soviet agents fell in line, switching overnight from ad- vocating an anti-fascist front to urg- ing America to stay out of the war. It is upsetting to see included on the list of guilty people the names of some the century’s greatest writers: “Lillian
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 45
Michael Hogue