Turner Classic Movies: Pro-Communist, Anti-American | The American Spectator

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) on cable tv is the film-lover’s dream come true. It possesses a huge library of films from Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 30s to the 50s, newer films, and silents. They are presented with no commercials in their full, unedited versions. TCM hosts worthy series co-hosted by specialists, on topics such as African Americans in film.

Tragically, TCM has been infested with a terrible leftist bias since it began 30 years ago. The main hosts introducing the films, usually in the evening, endlessly promote lies to dismiss the Communist threat and infiltration of Hollywood from the 30s to the 50s and at times patronize some of the films with an ugly anti-American bias. They always falsify the facts about the Blacklist of the ’40s and ’50s, grossly deceiving their unsuspecting viewers. And they present series promoting their leftist prejudices while whiting out legitimate topics.

TCM hit a new low last autumn with its series of “greatest political films,” only it included almost all liberal/left films. No surprise because it was based on an article in the now far left, rabidly anti-Trump New Republic. For example, it ignored the best film about the American Dream, King Vidor’s An American Romance (1944). Proving TCM’s blindness, during the series they showed this film, apart, one morning past 1 a.m.

The main sore point is the Blacklist. Growing from revelations in the ’40s and ’50s of Soviet Communist espionage and promotion of communist propaganda in movies, and hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the studios (which in those days held total centralized power) sought to root out communist influence. Secret party members were plotting to gain control of some craft unions, including the actors’ union. This was the period when Ronald Reagan, as president of the actors’ union, became a staunch anti-communist. His life was threatened, leading him to sleep with a gun under his pillow. He had to sneak into his studio to avoid threatening communist picketers.

One would never know this history watching TCM or reading its website. True, many innocent people were unfairly tagged as communists and their lives ruined. But the truth is the CPUSA was actively recruiting allies and seeking to subvert the movie industry, as they understood the enormous espionage and propaganda potential with control of the industry. The famous “Hollywood Ten,” innocent victims in liberal mythology to this day, were mostly screenwriters and all were secret CPUSA members. The evidence of their propaganda is, ironically, clear in some the films on TCM; films like Tender Comrade, Force of Evil, and Pride of the Marines.

With the brief opening of Moscow’s archives in the 1990s, we now have conclusive proof that Stalin was using the CPUSA as agents to subvert Hollywood and other parts of America. See John Haynes and Harvey Klehr, The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (with former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev); The Secret World of American Communism; Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, and their other books.

Dalton Trumbo, TCM and liberal hero, one of the Ten, loyally defended Russia’s alliance with Hitler from 1939-41, joining with isolationists protesting President Roosevelt’s policy to aid Churchill’s Britain, which was fighting alone on behalf of civilization. Then, the day Hitler invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, on Stalin’s order, he somersaulted to support FDR. Yet TCM ran two series glorifying Trumbo as an innocent victim; viewers never learned of his treason.

The two chief offenders were the late Robert Osborne, a failed actor and the first, longtime face of TCM, and the current chief host, Ben Mankiewicz. During President Trump’s first term, the latter called him a “buffoon.” This past July 4, introducing Yankee Doodle Dandy, with James Cagney playing George M. Cohan, he denounced the Cohan song “You’re A Grand Old Flag” as “jingoism.” (Cohan also composed “Over There.”) This arrogant leftie should have been fired the first time years ago, but TCM management (owned by Time Warner) has always tolerated this anti-American prejudice.

The holocaust denial didn’t concern Hitler and the Jews but rather Stalin and his own people. This was evident in Osborne’s dismissal of the 1949 film The Red Danube, a striking dramatization of the Soviet’s forced repatriation of 2.5 million Russians back to Stalin at the end of the war, all documented in Nikolai Tolstoy’s Victims of Yalta and Nicholas Bethell’s The Last Secret.

While this was part of the mutual repatriation agreement made with the Allies at Yalta, Stalin’s execution of it was brutal, and many thousands committed suicide rather than go back to execution and torture; some mothers drowned their children and themselves. Some Allied soldiers who forced back these poor souls witnessed immediate Soviet machine gun mass executions of men, women, and children. Yet Osborne heaved his shoulders, sarcastically crying the film was about “those bad old commies.” This was a heinous moral crime and, apparently, some Leftists are still running interference for Stalin.

I co-hosted with Osborne my own month-long series of conservative movies in 2000, likely the only time this point of view has ever been heard on TCM. I told the producer the facts about the Blacklist. Later, he told me he asked then Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel about the Blacklist and Schickel confirmed my point. Yet for 25 years since 2000, the lies and distortions have continued. Evidently Mankiewicz and the others never been educated on the subject, and lack the integrity to study the facts before dishing out their myths to their audience.

In fact Osborne never missed an opportunity to dismiss the danger of communism. His remarks were so consistently one-sided it is reasonable to conclude that, at the very least, he sympathized with the Communist cause. Ironically, his presence in Hollywood just a few years after the intense CPUSA push, probably justified the Blacklist!

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Spencer Warren was a member of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department in the Reagan Administration, and served as counsel to two members of the House and a US Senator.