THEY ARE AFRAID.
That was one of the comments left on Facebook in response to a story in the Washington Times about the upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival. The comment was in response to the flood of other comments expressing sarcasm, outrage, and animosity towards the idea that, in the first week of October, a bunch of us are getting together to hold an Anti-Communist Film Festival. I’ve been promoting the festival for over a year and working hard to make it happen, and am taking a brief break in the beginning of August now that we have dates and a great sponsor in the Victims of Communism Foundation.
Before the break, however, it’s worth addressing the anger from the Left about the festival - to talk about why, as the comment above puts it, THEY ARE AFRAID. The vituperation comes from the fact that American socialists are afraid of the Anti-Communist Film Festival. Film is a sexy and glamorous art form that decades ago came under the control of the left, and they don’t like the idea of anyone challenging them. It’s like when a conservative tries to sell a book in the publishing world or a TV show in Hollywood. This is their playground. We’re the punk rockers arriving to shake up the establishment.
Here are some of the comments left on Facebook in response to the Washington Times article:
We got a new Red Scare
Is the alternate title of the festival the strawman festival?
Absolute hysteria. Remember, anticommunism was, is, and shall always be: fascism. One cannot be anticommunist without being - even if latently - pro-fascist. Why is antifascism a bad thing?? Unless of course, one is a fascist…
Maybe an anti-fascist film festival would be more suited.
Have a Comedy Night with "I Was a Communist for the FBI"...
One can reasonably oppose state communism for any number of reasons; I don't think it's the right path myself. But I've never met any self-identified "anticommunist" who didn't have at least a little goose in their step. Something about that word that straightens out the arm
Why note make it a double feature, with Refer Madness?
So a literal propaganda festival?
Communism will win
Ah yes, I am sure that propaganda that was too hamfisted to work even in the 50'es will have a profound impact in 2026. First time as tragedy, second time as farce, and all that…
That's MCCARTHYIST PROPAGANDA lol gonna be a big empty theatre
Will they show Triumph Of The Will? There’s no growing Marxist movement in the USA.
That’s a lot of rage aimed at a few people who want to watch some movies. Also, anyone who thinks a film like The Lives of Others, our headliner, is a cheap piece of McCarthyite propaganda needs to stop sniffing glue.
THEY ARE AFRAID. Yes, they are. The arts have always been a supremely effective way to urge people towards beauty, faith, and rational thought. What we are doing with the festival is similar to what the United States did during the Cold War. We are simply encouraging Americans to act like free people and read the books and watch the movies that we want to. In his great book Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War, Duncan White describes how freedom-loving people sent books into the Eastern Bloc using balloons:
BETWEEN FEBRUARY AND May 1955, a group secretly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency launched a secret weapon into Communist territory. Gathering at launch sites in West Germany, operatives inflated ten-foot balloons, armed them with their payload, waited for favorable winds, and launched them into Poland. They then watched as the balloons were carried deep behind the Iron Curtain, where they would eventually disgorge their contents. These, though, were not explosive or incendiary weapons: they were books. At the height of the Cold War, the CIA made copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm rain down from the Communist sky.
He goes on:
The scheme was part of a larger effort to penetrate the wall of censorship the Soviet Union had erected around its Warsaw Pact allies. Western radio broadcasts were jammed, letters were censored, and only state-run newspapers were published. The CIA disguised its role in the campaign to get banned materials into these countries by secretly channeling funds through front organizations that produced the tens of millions of books, leaflets, pamphlets, posters, and the hundreds of thousands of balloons needed to fly them into enemy territory. In response, the authorities in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland warned its citizens that possession of this material was illegal and even sought to shoot down the balloons with fighter planes and antiaircraft guns.
The left is basically trying to shoot down our balloons. It won’t work. As Johnny Ramone once put it, “I don’t like communist games.”
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