‘Not Even the Dead Are Safe’: ‘Reds’ and Communism’s Eradication of History

    “Haven’t you heard? There’s a new world coming.”

    This is a line of dialogue delivered by the actress Dorothy McGuire in the 1955 film Trial. McGuire is playing Abbe Nyle, a colleague and the love interest of an attorney named David Blake, who is played by Glenn Ford.

    Trial is one of the films we hope to show, or at least discuss, at the upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival. The line that McGuire delivers in it, about a “new world coming,” is one of my favorites, because it is said not with optimism and joy, but bitterness, sarcasm, and sorrow. Because Abbe Nyle is a former American communist who’s seen the evil of that belief system. She’s mocking communism while showing desperation at the persistent stupidity of its believers.

    One of the reasons we are holding an Anti-Communist Film Festival is to remind people what an evil system communism is -to remind them that great movies like Trial exist and should be watched and honored. Because communists in 2026 are working hard to make us forget. 

    In his forthcoming book Reds: A Global History of Communism, journalist Paul Mason explores how modern communists want us to forget the past:

I do not want to “take control” of the memory of Marx, any more than the memory of the Russian Revolution or the Spanish Civil War. But I do want to prevent the Communist Party of China taking control of them. Because, as [philosopher Walter] Benjamin reminds us: “not even the dead are safe from the enemy.” Just as postwar fascism fought to expunge the facts about the Holocaust, we are now seeing—in Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and political movements aligned to them in the global south—systematic distortions of the events described here. And it will get worse. In occupied Ukraine, new statues of Lenin are being erected. In Russia plaques commemorating victims of the Great Purge are being torn down and the last museum of the Gulag has been closed. In China, all critical writing about Mao is dismissed as “historical nihilism.”

    Mason then notes how his own book may be censored:

As you read each chapter, I want you to imagine how it might be written in a future dominated by the brain-frozen clichés of Chinese communism. The Beijing propaganda machine has been busy eradicating the truth about the Tiananmen Square Massacre for nearly forty years. What might it achieve if given the unchallenged right to curate the facts about 1848, 1917, or indeed 1789? Far from being yesterday’s problem, the struggle for the truth about the history of communism may have only just begun. If so, Benjamin’s words on the eve of its darkest and finest hours bear repeating: Every line we succeed in publishing today—no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it—is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness.

    One of the reasons a person like Hasan Piker is such a tragic and comedic figure is that the nonsense he is selling is not new and exciting, but at least one-hundred years old. It was preached by Lenin, by Stalin, by Mao, by the East German Stasi, by the American communists in the 1950s, and by the canapés radicals of the 1960s. The language is the same, the posturing is the same, it’s all the same – including the deadly results.

    In her 1994 novel The Memory Police (published in English in 2019), Japanese novelist Yoko Ogawa creates a world in which memories are forbidden. When a group of people begins to lose their memories and attachment to objects and concepts, a military force called the Memory Police enforces the loss of memories. The Memory Police beat those who claim that yes, yesterday a book was in fact on the kitchen table.

    Liberals have always assigned themselves the role of the Memory Police. They told us that there wasn’t any repression or famine in the old Soviet Union. They insisted that there were no communist spies in the American government after World War II. They told us our soldiers in Vietnam were evil. They’ve forced us to forget the history of left-wing violence in America.

    They will have no problem coming for our history books – and our movies. The Anti-Communist Film Festival is going to be a lot of fun. It’s also a very serious act of defiance against those who would tell us that communism never caused any problems, and in fact is an altruistic system that should be tried again.