Half-Truths and Social ConsciencenThe Nation has published an excerptnfrom a book by a certain Nora Sayrenentitled Cold-War Cinema. In it, thenauthoress derides the grotesque crudenness and vulgarity of the Hollywoodnanticommunist movies of the ’50s.nNow, everybody knows that most ofnthose movies were hopelessly simplisticnand trivial, often to the point of idiocy.nThe question is, however—taking intonaccount our present perspective—werenthey devoid of any truth.’* Or: Haventheir tawdry half-truths been verifiednby the unfolding of subsequent decades.”nMs. Sayre writes that in the notoriousnWarner Brothers picture / Was a Communistnfor the FBI:n”The Communists also force a strikenon the Pittsburgh steelworkers’nunion, and those who didn’t join thenpicket line are beaten with steel barsnwrapped in the Jewish Daily Forward,nso that Jews will be blamed for thenblood spilling.”nWell, there is countless evidence thatnin Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,netc., the communist secret servicesnworking to subjugate those countriesnhad commissioned Jewish officers tonperform the cruelest and bloodiest actsnof persecution and torture, at the samentime deliberately publicizing their Jewishnidentities through what came to benknown in those societies as the “whisperednpropaganda.” This tactic, or perversion,npaid off handsomely 25 yearsnlater, when Moscow and the respectivenEast European regimes decided to fannStreicher-style anti-Semitic campaignsnin order to divert the people’s wrathnfrom Soviet oppression and failures.nBut Ms. Sayre has more to say aboutnthe same picture:n”A [communist] leader says [in it),n’To bring about Communism innSOai^^M^a^nChronicles of CulturenLiberal CulturenAmerica, we must incite riots.’ Hencenthe Communists try to inspire blacksnto assault whites…”nIt takes guts for an American journalist,neven one so infatuated with hernown leftism, to sarcastically intimatenhow unbelievable such an utterancenmust have been at that time. But thentestimonies of black writers of thenstature of Richard Wright and RalphnEllison amply confirm that this kindnof rhetoric, perhaps not so simplistic,nwas a routine agitprop force. There isna larger dimension to the problem too,nnamely: Can such a thing as good, honest,nacceptable propaganda exist.” Thenanswer is not easy, but it can be deducednfrom some areas of thinking more refinednthan Ms. Sayre’s. The admittednprinciple of every marxist-leninist isnthe hoary, banal “the end justifies anynmeans” motto. What the primitive Hollywoodnmovie of the ’50s tried to do,nthe grossness of its language notwithstanding,nwas to somehow acknowledgenthis extremely dangerous cynicism ofnsociopolitical methods. Like all propaganda,nit had to resort to half-truths,nbut somehow over the years, the halftruthsnproved to be quite painful verities,nand today we know that, yes, thenState Department and the Americannintellectual community swarmed withnpeople ready to render services to thencommunists for various and often complexnreasons. And that this readinessnto serve a lethal totalitarian ideologynwas often motivated by noble sociomoralnconsideration, deeply grounded in thenethics of American liberty. And thatnthe communists never hesitated for anmoment to take advantage of these philosophicalnand political complexities innthe interplay between the Americannconscience and the American system,nand were, and are, ever ready to packagentheir steel bars in slogans whose onlyninstrumentality is to subvert. On thennnother hand, their propaganda never suffersnfrom their own torments and conflictsnbetween truth, half-truth and evennthe merest relation to fact. In theirnpropaganda, Trotsky, Slansky and Rajknwere agents of Hitler, or the CIA, hadnto be killed for “it,” and were. Whichnmakes us think that Hollywood’s simplismsnand platitudes of the ’50s werengood, honest and truthful, both by comparisonnand unrelatively.nHyperbole, Anyone?nA sample of the New York TimesnBook Review’s reviewing:n”Judged in terms of the power, range,nnovelty and influence of his thought,nNoam Chomsky is arguably the mostnimportant intellectual alive today.”nWe would argue. Noam Chomsky, tonour mind, is a semanticist and linguistnof some scholarly achievement. He isnalso a political half-wit, a procommunistnradical, was a Viet Cong enthusiast duringnthe Vietnam war, and can now watchnthe fruits of his exertions on TV, asnpeople die attempting to escape thenIndochina communist paradise henhelped to establish; In the Americanncultural universe he’s about as importantnas Muhammad Ali. This comparisonnmay wrong Ali a bit. We can’t help feelingnintrigued that the New York Timesnwould think otherwise.nSuper Self-RighteousnessnMr. Frank McConnell, identified asn”Associate Professor of English atnNorthwestern University,” reviews ThenLast Romantic: A Life of Max Eastmannin the Chronicle Review, a supplementnto the Chronicle of Higher Education.nWe can find there the following dialecticalntour deforce:n”Eastman, good American that henwas, was always—not just in his laternyears—a pragmatist as well as a humanitarian.nHis passion (and it wasnreal) for a better world to come wasnalways a passion grounded in hisn