There is no excuse for the despicable behavior of "The Hollywood Ten." They should be denounced, not celebrated.
When they were called before Congress in 1947 to testify about communist infiltration of the film industry, they refused to do so, invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Now, 50 years later, liberals in L.A. want to lionize the "Hollywood Ten," but Allan Ryskind won't stand for it.
Ryskind is the son of playwright Morrie Ryskind, who willingly testified in 1947 against communist infiltration of the Screen Writers Guild. The younger Ryskind summarizes the mendacious mythology manufactured for these celluloid subversives: "Ten members of the movie colony -- men bursting with innocence and idealism -- were suddenly hauled before the wicked House Committee on Un-American Activities, where they were pilloried for their 'progressive' views by publicity-hungry, bigoted, venal politicians. With much bravado and belligerence, they refused to respond to questions, insisting they were protected from an invasion of their political beliefs by the First Amendment."
In a six-page article in a recent issue of the weekly newspaper Human Events, Ryskind reveals that the truth "is much different from Hollywood's oft-told tale. Far from being just good-hearted innocents . . . each of the Ten had been an active Communist." Ryskind reports that every single member of the Hollywood Ten "had been issued a Communist Party (CP) card. Each had paid dues to the party, met in secret CP gatherings, embraced CP projects, adorned various CP fronts, gave money and/or time to party causes, and invariably followed the CP line. And the American Communist Party, it was known at the time, was wholly controlled from Moscow. Nothing the CP ever did was without direction from the Kremlin. Nothing. The Hollywood Ten," he concludes, "had long been operating as stooges for one of history's most notorious mass murderers."
In short, the members of the Hollywood Ten were not heroes but villains. "When the 1947 hearings rolled around, the Soviet Union, communism, and the American Communist Party were fundamentally known quantities," Ryskind observes. "Any student of the USSR knew -- or certainly should have known -- about the Soviet-manufactured famine, the slave labor camps, the trumped-up purge trials, the mass execu-tions, and the cloak of terror that Stalin had imposed on his own countrymen."
The Hollywood Ten excused or endorsed these atrocities, and even managed to stifle their vehement anti-Nazism when Hitler and Stalin signed their infamous nonaggression pact. Ryskind argues that support for the Hitler-Stalin pact reveals the "true character" of the Hollywood Ten and other members of the American Communist Party. "They were Hitler's enemies and 'foes of fascism' only when Soviet Russia appeared to be threatened. They didn't care a fig about fascism or Hitler's murderous ways when the Nazi legions were directed against Western democracies." The Ten and their comrades, Ryskind declares, "were Stalin's stooges, and, when Stalin asked them, they became Hitler's stooges as well."
