The biggest anti-communist I ever knew was my father. A journalist for National Geographic, Dad had been to most of the countries in the world. This included Cuba and the Soviet Union. On the day he deplaned after returning from Russia, he literally got down and kissed the crowd.
Dad was also a political liberal. This did not mean what it does today, a Marxist with blue hair screaming about trans rights and Palestine. There was once a time when liberals loved America and freedom, celebrated the difference between men and women, used the arts to push for free expression, and hated communism. Before working for National Geographic, my father worked for the John F. Kennedy administration. JFK was so anti-communist it irritated the far left. Dad voted for Kennedy - and then for Richard Nixon in 1972. He saw the racial left turn the Democrats were taking.
I’m welcoming liberals to attend the upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival. As naive as it might be, I still hold out hope that liberalism can disentangle itself from the far left that has taken it over and return to the common sense of my father and his generation. I hope they can rediscover the ethos that once made liberals the good guys, standing up against censorship and totalitarianism and promoting free expression and art.
I admit that I’m probably wrong. As Christopher Lasch explored in his seminal 1979 work The Culture of Narcissism, the human personality itself has changed in the last fifty years. Americans have transformed from strong and well-adjusted people to personalities that are weak and dependent on government, corporations, radical politics, sex, and bureaucracies for a sense of meaning. “The personal crisis…now represents a political issue in its own right,” Lasch wrote, “and a thoroughgoing analysis of modern society and politics has to explain among other things why personal growth and development have become so hard to accomplish; why the fear of growing up and aging haunts our society; why personal relations have become so brittle and precarious; and why the ‘inner life’ no longer offers any refuge from the danger around us.” Been on a college campus lately? It’s a mental house. It’s hard to fight a psychological disorder.
And yet we must. One film we would like to screen at the festival is Night People, a movie that always reminds me of my father. Released in 1954, it was described by the Hollywood Reporter as “a gripping, hard-hitting melodrama of the Cold War as it is raging in Berlin” that “may well be rated the best CinemaScope film yet produced.” Night People stars Gregory Peck as Colonel Steve Van Dyke, a U.S. Army intelligence officer navigating a Cold War crisis in divided Berlin. Peck has to try to rescue an American soldier who has been kidnapped by the Soviets and taken to East Berlin. When the soldier’s rich father arrives from America, naively announcing that he can buy the Soviets off or find some other way to get his son back, Van Dyke blasts him. The father has no idea what they are dealing with. “These are wolves!” Van Dyke cries.
My father was a passionate Irish Catholic and contemplative Catholic, but I’ll never forget seeing his anger rise in a social situation when some idiot would start celebrating Cuba or the Soviet Union. At one dinner, a young radical said that Ronald Regan was bringing “darkness to America.” Dad shot back: “If you’re going to talk about darkness, read Darkness at Noon.”
Gregory Peck was a lifelong liberal who fought racism and anti-semitism. For his philanthropy and humanitarianism, Peck was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Johnson in 1969 and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1967.
Critic Milton Luban said that Night People, “is the sort of film that should be seen by the American people for the sake of a fuller understanding of the nightmarish world that exists in zoned Berlin, with the Russians, working hand-in-hand with the Nazis, creating a reign of horror that will seem unbelievable to those of us who get only the surface news through impersonally casual headlines.” In his original review of Night People, The Hollywood Reporter’s Milton Luban offered high praise: “The best tribute to this scathing blast at commie tactics is that one so gratefully breathes the free air upon leaving the projection room.”
Amen.
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