Revising his life: Howard Fast

After leaving the Communist Party in 1957, writer Howard Fast went on to even greater professional success. The 1960 film version of his novel Spartacus was a huge hit and remains a classic. He wrote a series of highly popular historical novels. Even after he left the Party, his work continued to be shot through with heavy-handed politics. He wrote a draft screenplay for Spartacus, but Kirk Douglas, the star and producer, rejected it, calling it “a disaster, unusable” because “[i]t was just characters spouting ideas.”

Fast also published not one but two accounts of his involvement with Communism. What is striking are the differences between the two books. In his 1957 Saturday Review piece he had written that while the U.S. was not perfect, “it is a land where the individual, in his work and in his rights, is recognized and defended”; the Communist Party however, was “a prison for man’s best and boldest dreams.”

In his book The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party, published the same year, Fast continued to take this line, describing Communism as being rooted in “naked terror, awful brutality, and frightening ignorance” and saying that Communists had sold their souls when they joined the Party. Thirty-three years later, however, he wrote another book, Being Red, in which – to quote a review by Gerald Meyer – he covered “much of the same material, but from a very different perspective and for a very different purpose.”

That’s putting it mildly. As Meyer himself put it, “Being Red describes Fast’s membership in the Party as the best years of his life.” Dropping The Naked God down the memory hole, Fast “insisted that the Party was not dominated by the Soviet Union,” praised the USSR for having vanquished Hitler and saved “three million Polish and Ukrainian Jews,” maintained that the Daily Worker “never compromised with the truth as it saw the truth,” and resumed saying, as he had during his Party days, that he and his fellow Reds were “priests in the brotherhood of man” and members of “the company of the good.” Meyer summed it up this way: “Without ever mentioning The Naked God, in Being Red Fast refuted the damning criticisms of the Party he made in the earlier memoir.” He even made up at least one story out of whole cloth. (This was far from the only lie he told about his career in later years. At one point he even claimed that Ronald Reagan had applied to join the CPUSA in 1938 but had been rejected as “too stupid” – a tale that was sheer invention.) Significantly, the list of “Books by Howard Fast” in the front of Being Red omitted The Naked God. “Clearly,” wrote Meyer, “The Naked God is something Fast wanted to forget, and amazingly the reviewers of Being Red have allowed it to be forgotten.”

Why did Fast revise the story of his life? Meyer got it right: he was 85 (he would die three years later) and “wanted to be remembered as a man of the Left.” While The Naked God had been a good career move in 1957, enabling him to resuscitate his career as a mainstream novelist, Being Red was an equally good career move in 1990, when the most honorable items a writer could have on his CV, in the eyes of the literary establishment, were a stint in the CPUSA and a period on the Hollywood blacklist. Historian Ron Capshaw’s summation seems fair enough: “Howard Fast, among the writers attracted to communism, emerges as the worst example for the CPUSA: simultaneously dupe and careerist, a propaganda merchant and a groupie.”

Posted on November 18, 2016October 14, 2016 by usefulstooges 1

Embodying orthodoxy: Howard Fast and the Party

The 1957 Saturday Review article in which novelist Howard Fast recounted his history in the Communist Party – and declared his resignation therefrom – provided an illuminating look behind the scenes of an ugly system that thrived on useful stoogery.

For example, Fast recalled a New York conference at which the American author Mary McCarthy asked a high-profile Soviet author, Alexander Fadayev, “what had happened to a number of Soviet writers whom they carefully named,” in reply to which Fadayev

Mary McCarthy

not only gave his solemn word as a Soviet citizen that all of the named writers were alive and well, but…brilliantly ticked off the titles and description of the work that each particular writer was engaged upon. He told where they lived, when he had seen them, and even repeated details of their merry reaction to the “capitalist slander” that they were being persecuted. So smooth and ready was his rejoinder, so rich was the substance of his quickly supplied background, that one might well credit him with more creative imagination than he had ever shown in his own books. As chairman of the panel, I was quite naturally provoked that Miss McCarthy and her friends should so embarrass this fine and distinguished guest. His conviction and meticulous sincerity were above suspicion, and I think, if I remember correctly, that not only myself but Miss McCarthy and her friends were at least in some measure convinced that he spoke the truth. Like myself, how could they possibly have believed that a man would create such a monstrous and detailed lie and expect it to hold water?

Yet Fast later learned that every last one of the writers McCarthy had asked about had, in fact, at the time of that New York conference, been “either dead from the torture chambers of the secret police or by firing squads, or lying in prison being tortured and beaten.” Fast had imagined that a respected writer like Fadayev was constitutionally incapable of telling such a massive lie, especially about such a serious matter as the well-being (or not) of his own literary colleagues; but in reality Fadayev had been a bald-faced liar, a thoroughly obedient tool of the Kremlin – ready, willing, and able to serve up utter fabrications in the service of a monstrous tyranny.

Fast admitted that he himself had been capable of doing this sort of thing:

Albert Maltz

When Albert Maltz, in 1946, sent to the New Masses an article that contained a rather mild criticism of the narrow and sectarian Communist attitude toward literature, he was treated as if he had committed a major crime. I include myself among those who blew up his criticism all out of proportion to its intent – a matter for which I have never forgiven myself, even though Maltz found it so easy to forgive and forget. Meetings were held. Mike Gold denounced Maltz with passion and language that a civilized person would reserve for pathological criminals. The fact that Albert Maltz was a writer of talent and unshakable integrity meant absolutely nothing.

Recalling this episode, historian Ron Capshaw wrote that Fast wasn’t just one of several people who criticized Maltz – he was, on the contrary, a brutal ringleader, an ideological enforcer out of Central Casting, “the embodiment of orthodoxy” who was “one of the most vicious of [John Howard] Lawson’s minions” (Lawson being the screenwriter who ran the Party’s Hollywood branch). To quote Capshaw, Fast “pounced” on Maltz.

More tomorrow.

Posted on November 17, 2016October 14, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

Leaving the Party: Howard Fast

Portrait of American author Howard Fast (1914 - 2003), 1962. (Photo by Fred Stein Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images) — Howard Fast

We’ve seen how novelist Howard Fast was supposedly disillusioned by Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” about the evil deeds of Fast’s longtime hero, Josef Stalin. In a 1957 essay for Saturday Review, Fast publicly declared that he’d left the Communist Party. (He wasn’t alone: a large majority of American Communists quit in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, also in 1956.)

That essay is a curious piece of work. On the one hand, he professed to be stunned by the reality of Stalin’s terror. On the other hand, he goes on to describe, with a novelist’s flair, the reality of life inside the Party, of which he had been a member for thirteen years. It is not a pretty picture. It is a grim portrait of a life made up of meetings with shifty, slimy, barely human characters – men and women who spouted dogma like robots, who feared original thinking “as the devil himself,” who bowed and scraped to their superiors, who systematically intimidate their inferiors, and who routinely listened for the slightest possible deviation from Party orthodoxy by their fellow members so that they could then set about denouncing them, humiliating them, and driving them from the fold.

The Party described by Fast was also populated by people utterly lacking in artistic taste or cultural sophistication – which was all to the good, from a Communist perspective, for art and culture, unless entirely devoted to promoting the Party, are anathema. It was also a fount of hypocrisy: Fast remembered a lunch meeting with the Romanian ambassador to the U.S., who was appalled when Fast and his colleagues from a Communist magazine, Mainstream, suggested that, in line with Communist doctrines of equality, the ambassador’s chauffeur be invited to join them at table. Moreover, the Party was a hive of envy: while Stalin and his henchmen in the Kremlin celebrated Fast, the local CPUSA hacks in New York saw him as an underling who was too big for his britches.

worker — A 1945 front page of the Daily Worker, edited at the time by Howard Fast

Fast maintained that he had never in his life experienced outside of the Party the kind of consistently repulsive behavior he had experienced and observed inside it. “Not even the warden of the Federal prison where I served a sentence as a political prisoner years later,” he wrote, “ever treated me or anyone else with such inhuman disdain and contempt.”

It’s all very interesting. But also deeply puzzling. For by the time the Times published Khrushchev’s speech, Fast had been a member of the Party for a full thirteen years. He had long since noticed all the unpleasant things about the Party that he would detail in his Saturday Review piece. How, then, could he have been surprised, as he claimed to be, by the revelations contained in Khrushchev’s speech? Since he already knew how far short the Party fell of what it professed to be, why did it take Khrushchev’s speech to make him leave? Wouldn’t it have made more sense, on the contrary, if Fast, aware as he was of the corruption and cynicism of the Party, had welcomed Khrushchev’s speech as a breath of fresh air and as a reason to hope that, with Nikita rather than Uncle Joe at the helm, the whole operation might actually reform itself into something that actually was dedicated to brotherhood and all that? And in that case, why didn’t the Khrushchev speech cause him to rededicate himself to the Party rather than to leave it?

Posted on November 16, 2016October 14, 2016 by usefulstooges 1

A master propagandist

As we saw yesterday, joining the Communist Party was a great career move for the novelist Howard Fast. He became a superstar behind the Iron Curtain and acquired influential comrades in the highest cultural and intellectual circles in the West. He hobnobbed with other members of the Red elite – French Communist author Louis Aragon, Chilean Communist Pablo Neruda. When Soviet writers came to the U.S., he played host to them; when he visited Paris, he was granted an audience with fellow Party superstar Pablo Picasso, who “kissed him on the mouth and offered him any painting he chose.”

Meanwhile, Fast lent his talents to the cause. He wrote pamphlets at the Party’s direction. He edited the American Communist Party’s house organ, the Daily Worker, from 1952 to 1954. He ran for Congress in 1952 on the American Labor ticket.

But his main contribution to Communism was this. He was a historical novelist whose novels revised history – especially American history – by consistently viewing it through a red-tinted lens. To quote Gerald Mayer, he “refitted the genre of the historical novel to the requirements of Popular Front culture.” Which is another way of saying that he was a master propagandist, distorting events of the past to make it look as if they were all about class struggle. As historian Ron Capshaw has put it, Fast “inserted the class struggle into U.S. history by filtering Tom Paine, slavery, Reconstruction, and Indian reservations through a radical lens. He did the same for figures in Western history including Moses and, most famously, Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator and slave of the Romans.”

In all these writings, according to Capshaw, Fast eagerly complied “with the directives of the Party to blue-pencil any ideologically incorrect sentiments (such as suggesting that a capitalist character could have any humane qualities).” Even Dashiell Hammett, whom Capshaw calls “one of the most obedient of Marxists,” despised Fast’s fiction, accusing him of “oversimplifying to death” his themes, more in the manner of a propagandist than of a literary artist. But the bottom line is that Fast’s fiction represented an invaluable service to the CPUSA, whose General Secretary, Earl Browder, believed that such efforts on the cultural front were vital if Communism hoped to win the hearts and minds of middle America.

Fast hit a bump after the war. Summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee to talk about his Communist activities, he was imprisoned for three months for refusing to provide HUAC with the records of a Party front called the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. But according to Capshaw, Fast “ruined, with his self-serving egoism, any chance for fellow communists to admire his fortitude. His depiction of his time in prison was so Christ-like that Dashiell Hammett (who also went to prison for refusing to betray his comrades) accused him of trying to wear a ‘crown of thorns.’” In any event Fast’s prison term was only a blip in his success within the Party, which was capped by his winning of the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954.

khrushchev_remembers — Nikita Khrushchev

Two years later, however, everything changed. Stalin had died in 1953, and on June 5, 1956, the New York Times published the text of the so-called “secret speech” by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev. In the speech, Khrushchev acknowledged Stalin’s reign of terror, described it in horrific detail, and condemned it utterly. A year later, in an article for the Saturday Review, Fast would recount what supposedly happened the next morning at the offices of the Daily Worker, where the question of the day was whether to print the speech or not. Fast and his colleagues, he maintained, were all shell-shocked. They had sacrificed “brilliant careers” to fight for “brotherhood and justice.” And yet now they knew they had hitched their wagons to an evil monster who, if given the opportunity, would likely have executed all of them.

Posted on November 15, 2016October 14, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

A jewel in the Kremlin’s crown

Some American intellectuals joined the Communist Party after the stock market crash of 1929, when many people, convinced that democracy was dying and that they faced a choice between the rising powers of fascism and Communism, decided that the latter was the only hope for a better future. A number of these people, who saw the USSR as a principled bulwark against the Nazis, had their illusions crushed by the Kremlin-engineered famine in the Ukraine of 1932-3, or by the Moscow show trials of 1936-8, or by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939.

Howard Fast, the author of Spartacus and other bestsellers, was different. He joined the Party in 1943 – at the height of war, when the Soviet Union was America’s ally and, as the Guardian put it after his death in 2003, when the “wartime love affair with the Soviet Union and the Red army was at its peak.”

It was also the year in which Fast, who was born in 1914, had his first genuine success, with the biographical novel Citizen Tom Paine. He later claimed that although he joined the Party late, he had been drawn to it much earlier, rendered susceptible to its appeal by his “poverty and hunger and despair in the early 1930s,” when he a working-class boy in New York City; if he came to it at such a late date, it was “because I could no longer see any future as a writer unless I was able to wed my principles to action.” Joining the Party, claimed Fast, he “felt that I had now become part of an edifice dedicated singularly and irrevocably to the ending of all war, injustice, hunger, and human suffering – and to the goal of the brotherhood of man.” But it’s hard to believe that an intelligent, independent-minded author who’d followed the news about the Soviet Union since its founding in 1922 could be sucked in by wartime propaganda that dropped all of Stalin’s atrocities down the memory hole – hard to believe that in 1943, a man like Fast could sincerely think that the USSR was “dedicated…irrevocably” to “brotherhood.”

Why did he join the Party, then? “Even among sympathetic biographers such as anti-anti-communist Gerald Sorin,” historian Ron Capshaw has written,

John Howard Lawson testifying before HUAC, 1947

Fast’s joining the CPUSA is presented not as an authentic expression of Marxism, but as an act of careerism….Fast was quite an operator, seeking not only fame but the adulation of wealthy Marxists he admired. What clinched the case for signing up with the CPUSA was a trip to Hollywood, where he met Stalinist screenwriters who lived in enviable luxury. He saw that the leader of the Hollywood branch of the Party, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, owned a 50-acre ranch. Then, too, there was the opportunity to romance starlets.

One thing we do know is that by signing up with the Party, Fast became a jewel in the Kremlin’s crown. As Gerald Mayer has written, “the CPUSA and indeed the world Communist movement lionized Fast…the Party enshrined him, along with Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois, on the highest pedestal in its pantheon of intellectuals.” In the Soviet Union, where it was a crime to even own most contemporary Western books, his novels were issued in translated by government-owned publishers and were widely read. As a result, in a country whose citizens were denied access to the work of far better American writers, Howard Fast became a household name.

Posted on November 14, 2016October 14, 2016 by usefulstooges 1

No peacenik: Tom Hayden

As we saw yesterday, Sixties radical Tom Hayden, who died on October 23 and was remembered in one obituary after another as a champion of peace, was, in fact, the very opposite of a peacenik.

1968-dnc-chicago-riots — 1968 Chicago riots

Here are a few more highlights. In a 1967 article in the New York Review of Books, he served up detailed prescriptions for organized urban bloodshed. That same year, contemporaneous observers blamed his incendiary rhetoric for “causing nearly a week of rioting” in Newark. During the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, he encouraged civil disruption in the form of “spreading nails on a highway” and firebombing police cars. At Berkeley in 1969, he led a “training center” where would-be revolutionaries were taught to use firearms and explosives. Also in 1969, he took part in a “war council” in Flint, Michigan, at which he and some of his comrades officially declared war against America and called for “violent, armed struggle.”

To be sure, after the madness of the 1960s dissipated, Hayden shifted gears. In the 1980s and 90s, he got himself elected to the California legislature, taught courses at Harvard, UCLA, and elsewhere (despite having no degree beyond a B.A.), and gave speeches at innumerable universities.

But he remained a radical rabble-rouser. In 1996, quick as ever to embrace a trendy left-wing cause, he wrote his own book on environmentalism, The Lost Gospel of the Earth, even though he had no expertise whatsoever in the field and absolutely nothing original to say about it. Echoing Kirkpatrick Sale’s vapid, ultra-PC Conquest of Paradise (1990) and other recent contributions to the genre, Hayden drew an embarrassingly crude contrast between the perfectly saintly American Indians and the unwaveringly evil Europeans. “His descriptions of Indian virtue and wisdom,” wrote Vincent Carroll in a review for the Weekly Standard, “are no less monochromatic than his most gullible exhortations on behalf of the Viet Cong – if anything, they are more so.”

wto_protests_in_seattle_november_30_1999 — Seattle riots, 1999

And so it went. In 1999, Hayden encouraged street riots to protest World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. In 2001, he blamed the 9/11 attacks on American imperialism. In 2005, ever eager to socialize with America’s enemies, he met in London with Iraqi terrorist leaders; afterwards, his naivete as intact as it had been decades earlier, he wrote an article painting these ruthless jihadists as gentle, peace-loving patriots. When Hugo Chávez died in 2013, Hayden wrote: “As time passes, I predict the name of Hugo Chávez will be revered among millions.” In 2014, he declared in an op-ed that the Cuban Revolution had “achieved its aim: recognition of the sovereign right of its people to revolt against the Yankee Goliath and survive as a state in a sea of global solidarity.”

How to sum up the life of a man who combined moral depravity with sheer doltishness? Carroll made a couple of good points in his review of The Lost Gospel. Citing Hayden’s “dreadful sanctimony and self-absorption” and air of “moral superiority,” Carroll wrote: “one continuously marvels that a man of Hayden’s superficiality has played such a prominent role in left-wing political thought for more than 30 years.” But we can’t say we’re too surprised: after all, Hayden was far from the only narcissistic, barricade-charging ideologue of the 1960s who was treated as a cultural hero in the decades that followed and whose fatuity, ferocity, and malice were transformed, in his obituaries, into wisdom, peacefulness, and love.

Posted on November 11, 2016November 11, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

Tom Hayden’s “social conscience”

When Tom Hayden died on October 23, the mainstream-media obituaries made him sound like a prince among men. The Associated Press called him “an enduring voice against war” and “a prolific writer and lecturer advocating for reform of America’s political institutions.” The Washington Post’s Elaine Woo described him as “one of the most articulate spokesmen of youthful angst” and as the “ideological lodestar of Students for a Democratic Society.” Hayden, Woo maintained, was a man of “deep social conscience.”

hayden4 — With his then wife and co-conspirator, Jane Fonda

Some people would argue with that. Take Hayden’s position on the Vietnam War. He has routinely been described as an antiwar activist. In truth, he wasn’t against the war – he was on the other side. So fervently did he support the enemy, in fact, that he made multiple trips to Paris and elsewhere to meet with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leaders, to whom he offered strategic and tactical advice – an unequivocal act of treason.

There’s more. He wrote a letter to a North Vietnamese officer, Colonel Lao, that closed with the words: “Good fortune! Victory!” While in North Vietnam, he and his then wife, Jane Fonda, recorded radio broadcasts consisting of nothing but Communist propaganda, knowing that these broadcasts would be used to try to brainwash captive GIs. When American POWs returned home and claimed to have been tortured, Hayden branded them liars. Then there was his and Fonda’s ardently pro-Communist film, Introduction to the Enemy, in which they confidently asserted that a win by the North Vietnamese would usher in a veritable utopia.

The fact that the enemy’s victory led not to utopia but to genocide didn’t shake his Communist faith in the least. On the contrary: after the war, when antiwar songstress Joan Baez condemned the brutality of the victorious Communist regime, Hayden labeled her a CIA stooge. So trapped was he in his own ideological prison that when he returned to Vietnam decades after the war, Hayden was crushed to find that the Vietnamese people he met were drawn far more to American-style capitalism than to Marx.

When he wasn’t committing treason by promoting the cause of the enemy, Hayden was up to no good at home. His New York Times obit, by Robert D. McFadden, stated that Hayden “opposed violent protests.” This is sheer revisionism, betraying either ignorance or mendacity on McFadden’s part. In fact Hayden spent much of the 1960s fomenting armed revolt in American cities. He championed the savage, cop-killing Black Panthers. “Perhaps the only forms of action appropriate to the angry people are violent,” Hayden said in 1967. “Perhaps a small minority, by setting ablaze New York and Washington, could damage this country forever in the court of world opinion. Urban guerrillas are the only realistic alternative at this time to electoral politics or mass armed resistance.”

Posted on November 10, 2016November 11, 2016 by usefulstooges 1

Ed Asner, 9/11 Truther

HOLLYWOOD - MARCH 07: Actor Ed Asner arrives at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards held at Kodak Theatre on March 7, 2010 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images) *** Local Caption *** Ed Asner — Ed Asner

We’ve seen in the last couple of days that beloved actor Ed Asner is a hard-line socialist – if not an out-and-out Communist – and a champion of the Castro regime in Cuba.

Castro isn’t the only guy Asner has stood up for. As Mark Tapson noted in a 2012 article, Asner is one of those celebrities who seem drawn to murderers (especially cop-killers):

Asner testified as a character witness for accused cop killer Kenneth Gay and has spoken out publicly on numerous occasions protesting the death sentence of the celebrity set’s favorite cop-killer, Mumia Abu Jamal. Asner was also a member of the International Committee to Free Geronimo Pratt of the vile Black Panther Party, arrested in 1970 for murdering a Los Angeles schoolteacher.

Asner also embraces the crudest kind of socialist economics. In 2012, he narrated Tax the Rich, a brief propaganda video for children created by the California Federation of Teachers. “You have to see this outrageous and amateurishly animated video,” wrote Tapson,

to believe just how blatant and exaggerated is its class warfare propaganda. It’s shot through with the Occupy movement’s language about the decent 99 percent versus the insanely greedy 1 percent. It asserts that the heartless rich (all white men, of course, as opposed to the diverse commoners) became wealthy through tax loopholes, tax cuts and tax evasion; they are blamed for causing the decline of public services and crashing the economy, for buying politicians and suppressing votes, and for controlling the media which then hypnotizes the people into believing there is no alternative to capitalism.

The video, intended for the brainwashing of young minds in the classrooms of California and written by a staffer who, as of 2011, earned $139,800 a year, occasioned the following criticism by political commentator Tucker Carlson: “There’s really no overstating how dumb this is. The idea that there are any California teachers currently in classrooms in charge of children who agree with that, is horrifying.”

Amusingly, however, in 2013, when asked by an interviewer for Russia Today whether he had any concerns about the discrepancy between the salaries of “top Hollywood actors” and those of, say, nurses and schoolteachers, Asner said: “Hollywood actors are at least putting out some semblance of beauty or style or acting. I think it’s unfair to list them as part of the one percent.” The rules, in short, apply to corporate executives and the like, but not to me and my fellow TV and movie stars.

septembermorn — A mock-up poster for the Truther movie that never was

As if all this weren’t enough, Asner is, in addition, an outspoken 9/11 Truther. In a video taped for a 2004 Truther conference in Toronto, he called into question the responsibility of Osama bin Laden and suggested that members of the U.S. government had been behind the atrocity. In the above-mentioned interview with Russia Today, he repeated his charge that the official story of 9/11 was a lie. In his opening remarks at a 2007 Truther “symposium,” he referred to the U.S. as a “so-called democracy” and to the atrocity itself as “so-called terrorism.” He narrated a Truther documentary, “Solving the Mystery of Building 7.” And in 2012, along with several other actors (among them Woody Harrelson and Martin Sheen), he called for a new investigation of 9/11 and announced his participation in a planned feature film entitled Confession of a 9/11 Conspirator (the title was later changed to September Morn), which, Asner promised, would show that “Al-Qaeda couldn’t have done it.” This project soon fell apart as a result of angry disputes, with participants telling different stories about what had happened.

Bottom line: terrific actor. And hopeless stooge.

Posted on November 9, 2016October 24, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

Asner’s Castro connection

Actors Ed Asner, John Newton, Alice Evan and Peter Jason, took a break from their Nov. 29, 2006 tour of the Pentagon to pose the Defense Department's podium in the briefing room. The group was in town to promote the movie and Hallmark's "Cards for Troops" program and had spent time visiting with wounded servicemembers at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesday and Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. — Ed Asner

Actor Ed Asner, who turns 87 today, has been a longtime fan of Fidel Castro, 90, and has been active in a number of organizations and campaigns designed to shore up the Castro dictatorship. Among them: the International Peace for Cuba Appeal and the Actors and Artists United for the Freedom of the Cuban Five. (The Cuban Five, whom we’ve discussed briefly on this site, were spies who were imprisoned in the U.S. for several years.) Routinely, Asner has blamed America for Cuban Communism, his argument being that the U.S. embargo forced Fidel into the arms of the Kremlin. (Don’t try to explain to him that he’s reversed cause and effect.)

Not that he seems particularly bothered by Castro’s Communism. In 1998, visiting Cuba with Muhammed Ali, the American TV star had a friendly meeting with the Caribbean dictator; there is no record of his having breathed a word in criticism of the system Fidel had imposed on his people.

On the contrary, Asner has more than once twisted himself into rhetorical knots in an effort to defend that system. Discussing the Cuban situation in 2003 on MSNBC, Asner was asked about Castro’s imprisonment of his critics. Asner didn’t hesitate to stand up for this practice, maintaining that Fidel had been compelled by (once again) the U.S. embargo of Cuba to resort to such “excesses.” When Pat Buchanan, his interlocutor, requested that Asner explain the connection, Asner asserted that Castro “feels the imminent threat of the Bush administration.”

030114-O-0000D-001 President George W. Bush. Photo by Eric Draper, White House. — Ever the villain

Did this mean, Buchanan inquired, that Asner seriously believed Bush intended to invade Cuba? Asner, while not replying with a direct and unequivocal yes, warned darkly that George W. Bush was “beginning to lower the crunch on Castro.” As evidence for this claim, Asner noted that the president had “just canceled student scholastic trips and museum trips to Cuba.” Buchanan proceeded to remind Asner that Fidel Castro had “persecuted his own people” and “denied them free elections for forty years” and that he was, in fact, “an unelected dictator who puts people in prison on his own.” Asner’s comeback, which demonstrated that the actor had long since accustomed himself to engaging in reflexive moral equivalence, was that America hadn’t had a free election in 2000, either.

In 2003, a group called Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-America Hollywood protested the casting of the pro-Castro Asner as Santa Claus in the movie Elf, then in production. “If he dislikes the country that has afforded him the lifestyle and luxury that his earnings as a celebrity have afforded him,” asserted the group’s leader, “then maybe he should see how wonderful Cuba really is. I doubt he would be able to enjoy the freedoms he has here were he under Castro’s rule.” The campaign failed, and Asner has in fact played Santa several times now.

Age hasn’t withered Asner’s devotion to his cigar-chomping pal in Havana. Three years ago, in a letter addressed to donors to a Cuba-friendly group, he invited them to join him on a delightful trip to Fidel’s tropical prison. “This is a great chance,” he wrote, “to experience for yourself the lively, inspiring and creative people-to-people exchange the right wing is trying to block.”

Oh, and let’s not forget this: Asner was also hugely supportive of Hugo Chávez’s regime in Venezuela, signing a 2004 letter calling chavista Venezuela “a model democracy.” Chávez’s policies have since destroyed the Venezuelan economy, of course, but if Asner has issued any expression of regret for having encouraged all this, we haven’t been able to find it.

But that’s not all. More tomorrow.

Posted on November 8, 2016November 8, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

Hollywood’s “resident Communist”

asner3 — Ed Asner (top middle), with other stars of The Mary Tyler Moore Show

If you’re an American of a certain age, you certainly know who Ed Asner is, and you’re probably very fond of him. And you should be: he’s a terribly likeable guy and a terrific actor. For seven years back in the 1970s, he played the gruff-but-lovable boss Lou Grant on the hit CBS comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show. There followed several more years in his own spinoff series, Lou Grant. He’s since starred in innumerable TV movies and made guest appearances on a number of sitcoms. Now pushing ninety (he turns 87 tomorrow), Asner continues to keep busy as an actor.

During all these years, however, he’s also found time to involve himself in politics. From 1981 to 1985, he served as president of the Screen Actors Guild. In addition, he’s been active in a great many left-wing groups, campaigns, and causes, the list of which is at least as long as his list of acting credits on IMdB.com. So important a player has he been in far-left activism that his name figures in a 2000-word history of the American left at the website of the Democratic Socialists of America – a group he’s belonged to for years.

lougrant_edasner — On his own series, Lou Grant

Just a few items from that list. In the 1980s he joined groups that provided aid and comfort to Communist guerrilas in Central America. In 1984 he sponsored the annual banquet of the Labor Research Association, a Communist Party front organization that compiled statistics for use by unions and activists. In 2002 he signed a statement formulated by a leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party that accused George W. Bush of repression and imperialism.

From time to time, Asner has managed to combine acting with activism. While playing Karl Marx in a 2010 Los Angeles stage production, he explained to a reporter that he’d been cast in the part because “I’m always thought of in Hollywood and surrounding environs as the resident communist.” (Imagine what it takes to be the “resident communist” in Hollywood!)

Years earlier, in 1983, Asner appeared in Sidney Lumet’s film Daniel, based on E. L. Doctorow’s novel about a young man whose parents – based on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – were executed many years earlier for being Soviet atom spies. The movie, which was scripted by Doctorow, was widely, and properly, panned as a piece of clumsy propaganda: while celebrating the purported nobility and idealism of the radical 1930s activist milieu that shaped the Rosenbergs’ values, it delicately skirting the evil reality of Stalinism and the issue of treason.

Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg_NYWTS — Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

Asner’s belief in the film and its Soviet-friendly message, however, was demonstrated three years ago by his sponsorship of a screening of it that was co-presented by the Communist Party and held at a Party-operated venue in Los Angeles. At the screening, which was dedicated to the memory of the Rosenbergs, Asner gave a speech in which he accused the Rosenbergs’ prosecutors of anti-Semitism, drew a moral equivalency between the Rosenbergs’ trial and Stalin’s show trials, and criticized the “antipathy in this country for people of differing opinions.” As we’ll see tomorrow, however, Asner has shown great understanding for the brutal treatment of “people of different opinions” in another country – namely, Cuba.

Posted on November 7, 2016November 7, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Useful Stooges