One of the most shameful things Western elites did at the end of Cold War was try and pretend it never really happened. At most, they concede its existence, but usually as a relic of the past or as a banal fight between two superpowers, both of whom did “bad things” of equal moral severity.
The recent attempt at a movie on the Hollywood blacklist is a wonderful case in point. Per the cultural elites in Hollywood, the Red Scares and McCarthy was a huge horror show. That many of those purged apologized for or defended the genuinely horrific Stalinist purges (in which those purged didn’t just lose their jobs, but were tortured, shot, or sent to concentration camps) or the Nazi-Soviet alliance is just one of those things that are somehow forgiven or excused. What matters is that they were “idealistic,” “meant well,” and “dreamed of a better world.”
Therein lies the rub. It was easy enough for the West to castigate Nazi Germany and present it to the world as the personification of evil. The selfish ideology, insane hatreds and contempt for the rest of humanity made it a simple matter to make the Third Reich into a totem for negative morality. Godwin’s Law notwithstanding, Nazi Germany very much remains — perhaps alongside ISIS — the anti-benchmark against which all moral activity is judged. When people are so obviously evil, it’s very easy to call foul.
It is quite another thing to stare evil in the face when it believes and argues it is doing good. For make no mistake: the communists who starved millions in Ukraine and China, shot untold numbers of “enemies of the people,” and imparted untold misery among much of humankind believed they were doing something momentously positive.
The communists believed that they were bringing about a new utopia, one without classes or human conflict, in which “social justice” would be the norm and suffering would be a thing of the past. They espoused many of the slogans now bandied about by the democratic left. Many, perhaps most, meant it. This was not “just” a totalitarian ideology, but a specific kind — a totalitarian ideology with the noblest of intentions.
Defending evil in the name of utopia
Which brings me to Walter Duranty and the Stalinist famines of 1932–3. The story itself is well-known. In an act aimed at “ending class differences” among the peasantry and breaking dissident nations such as the Ukrainians, Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin embarked on a project of forced collectivization of agriculture. The result — forced famine, wholesale massacre, genocide — would be repeated with the same horrific effect in Mao’s Great Leap Forward and elsewhere.
Walter Duranty, a journalist for The New York Times and a supporter of Joseph Stalin, did everything he could to hide the realities of the famine, blatantly lying about its effects in his dispatches. He also did what he could to discredit other journalists who told the truth about what was happening. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his work.
Duranty was not the only one to defend communist atrocities, just as Stalin was not the only one to slaughter millions in the name of utopia. But it is nevertheless a representative story, simple enough to be told in a way that the uninformed can understand.
Evil on screen
Like it or not, only the genuinely dedicated few will read the hefty tomes of Frank Dikkoter, Richard Pipes, and Robert Conquest on the horrors of communism. If we wish to break forever the West’s complacent attitude to that ideology’s consequences, then a representative story like Duranty’s needs a wide audience, either in the movie theaters or in a TV series. Not as an independent film, but a Hollywood-level affair with its attendant publicity.
A movie about Duranty would not just show the horrors of communism. It would break one of the West’s central myths: that good intentions are enough. To the contrary, it would show that noble ends and evil methods still amount to evil. In the case of communism, those “noble intentions” can even make that evil worse. If the deeds are evil, no amount of “meaning well” matters worth a damn.
The movie should jolt and horrify. It should be a cautionary tale, not just of something that happened in the past, but of something deep inside the human soul that exists even today. Fanaticism in the name of the secular progressive left is just as horrific and inexcusable as when it is done in the name of Christianity or Islam.
To be sure, a Duranty movie would probably not be enough on its own. But it would be an excellent start. To the average Westerner, communism is an abstract idea. To hundreds of millions in Europe, Asia, and Africa, it is a horrific nightmare and permanent scar on their history. It is past time the Hammer and Sickle became as repulsive as the Swastika as symbols of human evil. A Duranty movie could help start the process.
