Sunday Book Thread

Leftist ideology has been part-and-parcel of Hollywood for a long, long time. Ronald and Allias Radosh have written a book that sheds some light on how this came to be. Red Star Over Hollywood isn't the last word on the issue, but it provides some valuable background on how Hollywood became such a bastion of leftist politics. The end of the studio system essentially let the inmates run the asylum -- the notion that Hollywood is driven by money rather than ideology is a lie. (Which has been obvious for years and years, really, and explains movies like Warren Beatty's Reds and Robert DeNiro's Guilty By Suspicion, not to mention George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck.)

A good companion volume, if you're interested in the history of socialist/communist apologia in the United States, is In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. This book provides a lot of insight into why leftists have never really adjusted to the fall of the USSR and the discrediting of the Communist ideology -- the fall of Communist ideology left a hole in the center of the leftist worldview that's never really been refilled. (Leftists attacked Robert Conquest's The Great Terror as baseless Western propaganda for years until the Venona archives and other Soviet-era files proved it to be mostly correct.)

What has everyone else been reading?

posted by Monty at 09:17 AM

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