Results 1 to 9 of 9

Thread: This Land Is Our Land

  1. #1

    This Land Is Our Land

    Some people have questioned the connection between the recent NFL player protests and communism. They have referred to comments about cultural Marxism as nothing more than a "modern right-populist bogeyman", thus inferring there is no connection at all.

    To reach this conclusion, one would have to view the NFL protest in a vacuum, intentionally ignoring statements and positions that have been taken by some individuals involved in these NFL protests, and further, to ignore manifestos and demands that have recently arisen from those who claim to speak for the Black Lives Matter movement.

    In a larger sense, one would have to ignore history itself, and forget about the record of communism in America, and it's use of racial identity issues and sports in an attempt to gain support.

    A popular television show recently had an episode titled "This Land is Your Land", and while this was most likely a wink and a nod to the communist history that the song represents, in the context of today's politics, it reveals much more via an essay inspired by the same song at the government funded National Endowment for the Humanities.

    While the politics of the television show might be apparent by the fact that the current season has been dedicated to demonizing "preppers" as racists and murderers, the essay at the NEH makes it clear that communism, Hollywood and manipulation of sports have a long history.

    Below are excerpts from the essay, which enlighten us about the history of connections between Marxist individuals and organizations, and racial politics and sports (and more broadly about propaganda via entertainment, of which sports is simply a subset). What we see today is nothing more than a replay, an extension and modern remake of well-used leftist political tactics. Are the current NFL protests related to cultural Marxism? In the light of history, it's hard not to see the tangled web of connections.

    -------

    This Land Is Our Land
    By Michael Kazin

    Consider the words and images of the Great Depression that, alongside speeches by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, remain icons more than eighty years after the long slump began. “Once I built a railroad, / Made it run / Made it race against time / Once I built a railroad / Now it’s done / Brother, can you spare a dime?” In Yip Harburg’s lyrics, set to a Russian-Jewish lullaby, a beggar talks back to the system that stole his job. The man seeking a handout is everyman—once a farmer and a combat veteran as well as a construction worker.
    ...
    All these works were created by individuals active in the culture of the Popular Front, a vigorously democratic and multiracial movement in the arts and daily life that was sponsored but not controlled by the Communist party. Harburg was a leading member of pro-Soviet groups in Hollywood and penned dozens of songs that satirized racist lawmakers and Cold Warriors, which helped earn him a blacklisting in 1950. But he kept the Oscar he had won a decade earlier for writing “Over the Rainbow” for The Wizard of Oz.
    ...
    To understand the fortunes of American communism during its heyday in the 1930s and forties requires a healthy taste for irony. On the one hand, the apostles of Lenin and Stalin yoked themselves to one of the bloodiest, most repressive regimes in history and the first one whose dictatorial nature mocked its own vision of a world run by working people. Yet the Communist party had a striking influence on American culture, although seldom in its own name. The influence of Popular Front culture endured long after the party had been banished to the crumbling margins of American politics. The number of renowned writers, filmmakers, entertainers, and artists who had traveled with the Communists during its heyday was quite remarkable, given the party’s modest size and electoral inconsequence. Party members wrote “Ballad for Americans,” “Strange Fruit,” “This Land Is Your Land,” Native Son, The Little Foxes, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Artists who, while not members, had spent many evenings in the party’s milieu, created Citizen Kane, Death of a Salesman, “Fanfare for the Common Man,” For Whom the Bell Tolls, Yertle the Turtle, Invisible Man, and wrote the screenplay for Casablanca. Novelists in or close to the party had nine books at or near the top of the best-seller list from 1929 to 1945.
    ...
    The very creation of a marketable genre known as “folk music” was due almost entirely to the Popular Front. From his office at the Works Progress Administration, Charles Seeger (father of Pete) wrote, “The folk music of America [has] embodied . . . the tonal and rhythmic expression of untold millions of rural and even urban Americans . . . the American people at large has had plenty to say and ability to say it.”
    ...
    No white-led radical movement since the Civil War had staked as much as the Communists on a commitment to racial equality. The party never attracted many non-white members and had trouble holding on to those it did. But its constant assaults on racist laws and politicians earned the respect of black Americans who had no intention of joining. In 1945, two black sociologists observed, “The Reds won the admiration of the Negro masses by default. They were the only white people who seemed to really care about what happened to the Negro.”

    The party’s rhetoric on race was not always a guide to its actions. Communists fought for civil rights the same way they fought for industrial unions and intellectual freedom: with one eye fixed steadily on the needs of the USSR. What did remain consistent was the party’s vision of a society that would encourage both racial equality and expressions of racial pride. A mass, sustainable civil rights movement did not emerge until the 1950s, when the party had all but vanished from political life. But the Popular Front helped put forth a new way of understanding race in America, and it was on such an understanding that the marriage of pluralism and equality depends.

    Communists sponsored broad ad hoc coalitions on a variety of racial issues—from a federal antilynching law to voting rights to battling against fascism as a system of explicit race hatred. These efforts attracted a prestigious group of African Americans from the arts and entertainment.
    ...
    The advocacy of militant antiracism had its prophetic moments—particularly in the area of mass culture. In 1939, in New York and other big cities, the party launched a boycott of the movie Gone With the Wind, whose rosy depiction of the Confederacy clashed with histories of the Civil War era by DuBois and other radicals. A pro-Communist writer declared he “should like to take” the film’s producer David O. Selznick “out of his chartered skysleeper and rub his nose in the South of pellagra, of Jim Crow, of illiteracy, . . . of sharecroppers, of the modern Ku Klux Klan riding down unionists.” Although the boycott’s effect on the box office was minimal, it was the first major salvo in a debate over media images of black people and other ethnic minorities that continues today.

    Communists had more success when they protested against the Jim Crow barrier in a form of entertainment older than film: Major League Baseball. Due to an unofficial agreement among team owners, no black player had taken the field with white ones since the mid-1880s. When he became sports editor of the Daily Worker in 1936, Lester Rodney resolved to abolish that tradition.

    Cleverly, the young editor framed the campaign in the language of muckraking as well as principle: “The Sunday Worker will rip the veil from the ‘Crime of the Big Leagues’—mentioning names, giving facts, sparing none of the most sacred figures in baseball officialdom.” The strategy gained new readers as well as lavish praise from the black press. In return, Rodney reprinted similar features from such black weeklies as the Pittsburgh Courier—which further enhanced the credibility of his stand.

    Over the next decade, the party pressed its case in a variety of venues. May Day paraders carried banners demanding integration of the sport; young Communists even picketed Yankee Stadium before a game. In interviews with Rodney, various Major League managers stated their support for abolishing the color bar. Paul Robeson, a former football All American, lectured baseball owners at one of their meetings: “The time has come that you must change your attitude toward Negroes.” Finally, in the fall of 1945, the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, a college graduate and army veteran, to a contract.
    ...
    Popular Front artists may have had their greatest impact creating features on the big screen. During the years of Depression and world war, at least 40 percent of Americans took in a movie every week. Much of what they saw had an earnestness and sentimental vigor that dovetailed with the ethos of the Popular Front. Of course, to know that certain American radicals had a big hand in shaping such profitable and now iconic movies as The Public Enemy, Frankenstein, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Woman of the Year, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington does not mean that audiences were consuming a left-wing sensibility along with their sodas and popcorn.

    But in Hollywood as elsewhere, cultural Communists had a talent for making themselves useful and tilting the opinions of others their way. Communist party members and their close allies took the lead in forming the first independent unions of writers, actors, and craftsmen—and sponsored such groups as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, whose events drew thousands of participants and widespread media attention. Appearing under the aegis of Popular Front groups, such liberals as Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, and James Cagney spoke out for Republican Spain and industrial unions. The presence of such a broad alliance gave the political culture of the film world an unmistakable tinge of pink. No one in Hollywood objected when Howard Koch, the principal screenwriter of Casablanca, described Rick, the hero played by Bogart, as someone who “ran guns to Ethiopia” (which Mussolini’s armies invaded in 1935) and fought for the Spanish Republic or when Ginger Rogers, in a script for Tender Comrade, written by party member Dalton Trumbo, asserted, “Share and share alike, that’s democracy.” Later, the House Unamerican Activities Committee would blast that line as unpatriotic.
    ...
    Capra was fortunate his critics didn’t know that Sidney Buchman, the film’s main scriptwriter, was a member of the Communist party. Buchman already had several popular comedies to his credit. But Mr. Smith was his first serious film, and he had to persuade the director to accept its strong Popular Front message.
    ...
    But he altered few of Buchman’s lines, and the film made Capra one of the most popular directors in the country. The left-wing Americanism expressed by Mr. Smith—sentimental, combative, and implicitly interracial—was little different from that sung about by Woody Guthrie and Josh White. But the film’s huge audience and numerous Oscar nominations helped make its species of patriotism one of the most ubiquitous legacies of Popular Front culture.
    ...
    Historians continue to battle over how to define the essential nature of the Communist party and the Popular Front. One camp argues that the party and its allies were, in FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s famous phrase, “masters of deceit.” Nothing they did mattered as much as their allegiance to a foreign power, and when that allegiance became a serious handicap during the Cold War, the party was finished.
    ...
    More: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/.../land-our-land
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.



  2. Remove this section of ads by registering.
  3. #2
    The advocacy of militant antiracism had its prophetic moments—particularly in the area of mass culture. In 1939, in New York and other big cities, the party launched a boycott of the movie Gone With the Wind, whose rosy depiction of the Confederacy clashed with histories of the Civil War era by DuBois and other radicals. A pro-Communist writer declared he “should like to take” the film’s producer David O. Selznick “out of his chartered skysleeper and rub his nose in the South of pellagra, of Jim Crow, of illiteracy, . . . of sharecroppers, of the modern Ku Klux Klan riding down unionists.” Although the boycott’s effect on the box office was minimal, it was the first major salvo in a debate over media images of black people and other ethnic minorities that continues today.
    That is another tidbit contained in this essay that applies to today's contrived controversies.

    Bannning Confederate era flags and tearing down statues? Just another remake and re-imaging of communist tactics from long ago.
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.

  4. #3
    It's true that there's a long history of communists promoting racial politics, but the meaning of that history is often misunderstood (or deliberately misrepresented) by people involved in white identity politics. It's not that the particular racial policies the communists were promoting had an affinity with the communist program. The goal in promoting racial politics was simply to create exploitable conflict. If the big cultural divide in the US happened to be religious (for instance) rather than racial, they might have promoted religious politics (and conflict) instead. The substance of what they were saying wasn't important; it was the destabilizing effect on society which was important. The upshot? If you want to counter the communist agenda with regard to race, you do it by not getting drawn into the conflict in the first place. They want you to go to the barricades for the "other side."
    Last edited by r3volution 3.0; 10-03-2017 at 10:30 AM.

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by r3volution 3.0 View Post
    It's true that there's a long history of communists promoting racial politics, but the meaning of that history is often misunderstood (or deliberately misrepresented) by people involved in white identity politics. It's not that the particular racial policies the communists were promoting had an affinity with the communist program. The goal in promoting racial politics was simply to create exploitable conflict.
    ...
    Agree that it is about exploitation, and especially by the leadership, it was not about any concern for black folks. As far as misrepresentation, today as it was then, it's about exploitation, and the left is no stranger to misreprenting their true motives. Crony socialists like Hillary, Schumer, Pelosi and Feinstein are prime examples. It's about their power and insider corruption, with a nice frosting of "oh, we care about you peons, and all other people hate you." Divide and conquer.
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.

  6. #5
    Mr Smith Goes to Washington is an incredible film. The script writer was dragged to Congress during the communist blacklisting BS and admitted to being involved with the communist party for a couple of years. He was blacklisted, his careered ruined, and left the country.

    Let us NOT go back to Hoover-ism.
    There is no spoon.

  7. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Ender View Post
    Mr Smith Goes to Washington is an incredible film. The script writer was dragged to Congress during the communist blacklisting BS and admitted to being involved with the communist party for a couple of years. He was blacklisted, his careered ruined, and left the country.

    Let us NOT go back to Hoover-ism.
    That movie wasn't terribly relevant to the point of the OP and the NFL, but it is interesting nonetheless. The essay goes into more detail about the movie than quoted above.

    The difference between Marxism then, and Marxism The Re-imagining, is that at that time, it was covert. It was necessary for them to be very subtle and secretive, because after all, they were and are revolutionaries seeking the overthrow of the US as we know it.

    Back then, Capra terribly "mistrusted" the communist writer, insisting that the there be no stealth propaganda "theme" in his movie. Today, the writer, the director, the actors, and everyone involved would be pushing for blatant Marxist themes. They feel they now have the power to take control. Thus, the turn from the phony facade of looking out for the little guy, to today's revealing of the true "stamp out all opposition" totalitarianism. This is nothing new. The road to Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot is well-trodden and clear to anyone who can read a map.

    More from the essay:

    There is no better example of that than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, directed by Frank Capra in 1939. The story adapted the traditional genre of a virtuous innocent who comes into conflict with a corrupt urban elite. Jefferson Smith, played by James Stewart, is a new appointee to the U.S. Senate from a rural Western state. When he learns he is only a “stooge” in an influence-peddling scheme run by a party boss, his venal colleague, played by Claude Rains, pressures him to resign. Instead, Smith mounts a solitary, twenty-three-hour filibuster to salvage his reputation and ends up exposing the plot to drive him from office.

    Capra made other films with a populist flavor. But Mr. Smith is the only one that challenged the probity of a hallowed government institution. And it certainly incensed the keepers of the institutional flame. “The thing was outrageous,” declared James Byrnes, a powerful Democrat from South Carolina who attended the Washington premiere, “exactly the kind of picture that totalitarian governments would like to have their subjects believe exists in a democracy.” Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley called the film “as grotesque as anything I have ever seen.” Lawmakers from both parties united in disgust, as did newspapers, which echoed the charge that Mr. Smith fit the propaganda about America spewed out by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. Joseph P. Kennedy, then U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, offered to purchase all negatives of the film from Columbia Pictures for $2 million, in order to destroy them.

    Capra was fortunate his critics didn’t know that Sidney Buchman, the film’s main scriptwriter, was a member of the Communist party. Buchman already had several popular comedies to his credit. But Mr. Smith was his first serious film, and he had to persuade the director to accept its strong Popular Front message. Capra knew Buchman had joined the party and, as a result, “mistrusted me terribly.” The scriptwriter argued that, with fascism on the march, they needed to emphasize “the spirit of vigilance which is necessary if one believes in democracy, the refusal to surrender even before small things.” Capra responded, “Go f— yourself with your theme.”

    But he altered few of Buchman’s lines, and the film made Capra one of the most popular directors in the country. The left-wing Americanism expressed by Mr. Smith—sentimental, combative, and implicitly interracial—was little different from that sung about by Woody Guthrie and Josh White. But the film’s huge audience and numerous Oscar nominations helped make its species of patriotism one of the most ubiquitous legacies of Popular Front culture.
    ...
    More: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/.../land-our-land
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    That movie wasn't terribly relevant to the point of the OP and the NFL, but it is interesting nonetheless. The essay goes into more detail about the movie than quoted above.

    The difference between Marxism then, and Marxism The Re-imagining, is that at that time, it was covert. It was necessary for them to be very subtle and secretive, because after all, they were and are revolutionaries seeking the overthrow of the US as we know it.

    Back then, Capra terribly "mistrusted" the communist writer, insisting that the there be no stealth propaganda "theme" in his movie. Today, the writer, the director, the actors, and everyone involved would be pushing for blatant Marxist themes. They feel they now have the power to take control. Thus, the turn from the phony facade of looking out for the little guy, to today's revealing of the true "stamp out all opposition" totalitarianism. This is nothing new. The road to Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot is well-trodden and clear to anyone who can read a map.

    More from the essay:
    This author obviously has some issues.

    The movie is about fighting the deep state and is NOT left-wing Americanism. Rand Paul could easily play Mr. Smith in today's world.

    I suggest you read Frank Capra's autobiography: Frank Capra: The Name Above the Title. It is a beautiful story about trying to do one's best for others.

    And watch the movie- then we can really talk about this.
    There is no spoon.

  9. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by Ender View Post
    This author obviously has some issues.

    The movie is about fighting the deep state and is NOT left-wing Americanism. Rand Paul could easily play Mr. Smith in today's world.

    I suggest you read Frank Capra's autobiography: Frank Capra: The Name Above the Title. It is a beautiful story about trying to do one's best for others.

    And watch the movie- then we can really talk about this.
    The essay isn't really attacking Capra, so it's no dig at him. Capra wasn't going to go along with any communist propaganda, so the movie supposedly didn't contain any of that. Exposing state corruption is not always about a revolution, thus the movie itself was not about that. At that time, fighting the deep state was considered "left-wing". In general, is questioning authority left or right? Hard to say when the meaning of words keep changing. Depends more upon what the people in power call themselves. If they are right, and you call them out, you are a leftist, the perspective at the time of the release of the movie. If the establishment is leftist and you attack them, then you are right.

    But once again, this brings us back to modern politics. Some in the government found the movie to be an attack upon them. They are the establishment. Look at today. Any criticism of the Hillary campaign must be an attack, by foreign agents, specifically, the Russians! The roles have been reversed. Hillary is the establishment now.

    Like Mr. Smith exposing corruption, exposing the corruption of Hillary does not necessarily need to be an enemy plot. Honest Americans and opposition Americans can have a concern about corruption, no matter who is involved. No need for Russians to give their opinion and stir the pot.

    Really, the only point the author is making with that example is that "Mr. Smith is the only one that challenged the probity of a hallowed government institution." It was not the focus of the OP, as it was a bit of a tangent, and not relevant to my points. It speaks more to the fact that the establishment finds any and all criticism to be an attempt at revolution against them, whether the critics are just average honest people, or secret revolutionaries.

    ----

    A note on the author:

    The essay is from a leftist perspective, and it is about taking credit for changing the nation. The Mr. Smith example is probably a case of the author attempting to take too much credit.
    Last edited by Brian4Liberty; 10-04-2017 at 11:15 AM.
    "Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
    "Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
    "Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
    "Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul

    Proponent of real science.
    The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.



  10. Remove this section of ads by registering.
  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    The essay isn't really attacking Capra, so it's no dig at him. Capra wasn't going to go along with any communist propaganda, so the movie supposedly didn't contain any of that. Exposing state corruption is not always about a revolution, thus the movie itself was not about that. At that time, fighting the deep state was considered "left-wing". In general, is questioning authority left or right? Hard to say when the meaning of words keep changing. Depends more upon what the people in power call themselves. If they are right, and you call them out, you are a leftist, the perspective at the time of the release of the movie. If the establishment is leftist and you attack them, then you are right.

    But once again, this brings us back to modern politics. Some in the government found the movie to be an attack upon them. They are the establishment. Look at today. Any criticism of the Hillary campaign must be an attack, by foreign agents, specifically, the Russians! The roles have been reversed. Hillary is the establishment now.

    Like Mr. Smith exposing corruption, exposing the corruption of Hillary does not necessarily need to be an enemy plot. Honest Americans and opposition Americans can have a concern about corruption, no matter who is involved. No need for Russians to give their opinion and stir the pot.

    Really, the only point the author is making with that example is that "Mr. Smith is the only one that challenged the probity of a hallowed government institution." It was not the focus of the OP, as it was a bit of a tangent, and not relevant to my points. It speaks more to the fact that the establishment finds any and all criticism to be an attempt at revolution against them, whether the critics are just average honest people, or secret revolutionaries.

    ----

    A note on the author:

    The essay is from a leftist perspective, and it is about taking credit for changing the nation. The Mr. Smith example is probably a case of the author attempting to take too much credit.
    True.

    Although, I do have a problem with including The Wizard of Oz in "leftist" propaganda.
    There is no spoon.



Similar Threads

  1. Mike Lee: Public Land vs. Government Land
    By TaftFan in forum U.S. Political News
    Replies: 42
    Last Post: 06-29-2017, 04:54 PM
  2. Bernie Sanders- This Land is Your Land
    By Origanalist in forum 2016 Presidential Election: GOP & Dem
    Replies: 4
    Last Post: 03-29-2016, 09:16 PM
  3. BLM Anthem? "This Land Is Their Land"
    By Occam's Banana in forum Open Discussion
    Replies: 2
    Last Post: 04-15-2014, 10:46 AM
  4. Land yacht? Try Land Ocean Liner!
    By tangent4ronpaul in forum U.S. Political News
    Replies: 3
    Last Post: 12-23-2010, 05:32 PM
  5. Land, when to buy???
    By Allen72289 in forum Economy & Markets
    Replies: 13
    Last Post: 01-14-2008, 04:25 PM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •