We are on the eve of the announcement of the lineup at the first annual Anti-Communist Film Festival. Our headline film is The Lives of Others, and I’d like to wait to reveal the others – although I’m not above dropping a hint.
I’ve spent over a year talking to Hollywood studios about licensing, visiting movie theaters to make my case (as you might expect, some were not thrilled with the idea), and finally getting a sponsor with the great folks at the Victims of Communism Foundation.
There’s one more thing I’d like to do. I have a 20,000-word essay about my favorite anti-communist movies. I’m looking for a publisher. My book publisher says the length is too short for a book, and most of my magazine and website editors say it’s too long. Excerpts from the essay have been published on Hot Air, Chronicles, and on the Victims of Communism website. I’d like to publish the entire essay in paper format. Something that people can hold – a Samizdat, which during the Cold War was a book or pamphlet that was forbidden in communist countries and was passed around from hand to hand by dissidents.
Most importantly, what I am calling Freedom’s Fury: A Guide to Anti-Communist Movies would be something that cannot be digitally erased.
In his forthcoming book Reds: A Global History of Communism, journalist Paul Mason explores how 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.
Forty years ago, in 1986, my father Joe Judge announced that after a five-year investigation into the spot where Christopher Columbus had landed in the New World, he and National Geographic were able to announce where Columbus had landed in America. It was the cover story in the November 1986 issue of National Geographic magazine. The press conference announcing the discovery had been the biggest in the history of the organization, and that event, which took place in NatGeo’s headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C.—and which I attended as a college student—my father talked about Columbus, history – and George Orwell.
While people had thought that Columbus had landed in San Salvador, he had actually touched ground at a small island called Samana Cay. San Salvador and Samana Cay are just 65 miles apart. At the press conference, my father was asked why what might seem like a small geographical dispute had generated such media attention. Dad invoked Orwell: In the novel 1984, there is a man sitting in a room and a screen comes down. There is a face on the screen, and that face is lying to him. History matters. Getting it right matters. If you don’t care about your history, you wind up like Winston Smith in 1984, being lied to.
That copy of National Geographic is still obtainable in hard copy. No one can digitally alter it, censor it, or change what my father wrote.
American communists would like nothing more than to censor the Anti-Communist Film Festival and forget it ever existed – even before it begins.
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