I was extremely unhappy that Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. Eight years later, I was starting to come around, despite the media's incessant hammering on the guy. Now I see things differently.

I was intrigued by some of the reports I'd heard about a book of Reagan's letters being published, and, in particular, one where he explains his experiences with actual communists, in a letter to Hugh Heffner.

Is there something wrong or immoral about favoring your own democratic country over paid influence from a totalitarian foreign power, one who we now know murdered millions of its own people? Is there something wrong or awful about that?

Conversely, is there something noble about receiving money from a foreign power to act, through secrecy, stealth, and deception, to bring your fellow countrymen under the control of a guy like Joseph Stalin? Is that somehow, in and of itself, especially laudable? And if it were so, why not just confess it?

Reagan was a liberal. A patriotic, America-loving liberal, just as many on the left claim to be today. As many do today, Reagan feared "neo-fascism" within our own government, and thus served as a member of the board of directors of "Hollywood Independent Citizens Committe of the Arts, Sciences & Professions".

But he was in for a big suprise -- things were not as they seemed:

A small group of board members disturbed by the things being done in the organization's name introduced to their fellow board members a mild statement approving our Dem. system and free enterprise economy and repudiating communism as a desirable form of govt. for this country. The suggestion was that by adopting such a policy statement the board would reassure our membership we were liberal but not a "front." The small group who introduced this measure were such "witch hunters" as James Roosevelt, Dore Schary, Don Hartman, Olivia de Havilland, Johnny Green & myself.

Leaders of the opposition to our statement included Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson and a number of others who have since attained some fame for their refusal to answer questions. I remember one of their group reciting the Soviet Constitution to prove "Russia was more Democratic than the U.S." Another said if America continued her imperialist policy and as a result wound up in a war with Russia he would be on the side of Russia against the U.S. We suggested this "policy statement" was perhaps a matter for the whole organization to decide — not just the board. We were told the membership was "not politically sophisticated enough to make such a decision."

When we resigned the organization went out of existence only to reappear later (minus us) as "Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences & Prof." in support of Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party.

The "seven months" of meetings I mentioned in the first paragraph or two refers to the jurisdictional strike in the Motion Pic. business. There are volumes of documentary evidence, testimony of former communists etc. that this whole affair was under the leadership of Harry Bridges and was aimed at an ultimate organizing of everyone in the picture business within Mr. Bridges longshoreman's union.

Now none of what I've said answers your argument that "freedom of speech means freedom to disagree," does it? Here begins my difficulty. How can I put down in less than "book form" the countless hours of meetings, the honest attempts at compromise, the trying to meet dishonesty, lies and cheating with conduct bound by rules of fair play? How can I make you understand that my feeling now is not prejudice born of this struggle but is realization supported by incontrovertible evidence that the American Communist is in truth a member of a "Russian American Bund" owing his first allegiance to a foreign power?

You know, it's the old story: Our cause is so worthy, so noble, so right, that we operate in the dark, pretend to be something else, and use dishonesty, lies and subterfuge to forward it.

And let's not forget the elitism -- the membership was "not politically sophisticated enough" to decide what stance their organization should support. Us smart, them dumb. How do we know we're smart? We're leftists!

Speaking of elitism, let's see how much the modern left has changed:

Reagan was a true mid-westerner in that he really believed that spying on fellow actors for J. Edgar Hoover was patriotic. His testimony was in large part responsible for the Black Listing of peace activists following the second world war. As a member of the Screen Actors Guild he made contracts which were management friendly to the detriment of the Guild but his crowning achievement of the early years was when he testified for the government in the Congressional Hearings which resulted in the black listings. Many good and great people like Dalton Trumbo who wanted peace and social justice back in the 1950's were ruined thanks to the work of Ronnie. As he moved from snitch on the good guys...

Damn those mid-westerners! They defile everything good in society. Nuke 'em all.

So, if these folks were such "good guys", then why did they lurk around in the dark? Why did they need to keep their ultimate goal of organizing all actors in Hollywood under Harry Bridges a secret? Why weren't they able to stand up and proudly, publicly say how much better Russia was than America?

The Washington Post has a really interesting article about the forces who were really controlling that committee. I'll quote a few paragraphs here, but I (uncharacteristically) recommend you read the whole thing:

The strike had been called by a ruddy-faced ex-boxer named Herb Sorrell, head of the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), who was prepared to get rough. "There may be men hurt, there may be men killed before this is over, but we are in no mood to be pushed around anymore," he warned. For good measure, he had brought dozens of tough guys ("sluggers," he called them) in from San Francisco, just in case.

Herb Sorrell had come up the hard way, beginning work at the age of twelve, laboring in an Oakland sewer pipe factory for eleven hours a day. He had cut his teeth in the Bay Area labor movement under the leadership of Harry Bridges, the wiry leader of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union. Bridges, according to Soviet archives, was also a secret member of the Communist Party and a regular contact for Soviet intelligence.

Sorrell had joined the party in the 1930s, and under Bridges's guidance he had led two violent strikes in the Bay Area. Both strikes, he later admitted, were secretly funded by the Communists, and this time he was secretly receiving money from the National Executive Council of the Communist Party. Sorrell was a member of more than twenty Communist Party front organizations and had pushed hard for the American Federation of Labor to affiliate with the Soviet-run World Federation of Trade Unions. (AFL leaders refused on the grounds that it was simply a front group.)

The studio strike Sorrell organized in 1946 was no ordinary labor action. It was ostensibly called because of worker concerns, but Sorrell saw it as an opportunity to gain control over all the major unions in Hollywood. As he bragged in the early days of the action, "When it ends up, there'll be only one man running labor in Hollywood, and that man will be me!"

The stakes were high. If Sorrell succeeded, the Communists believed, they could run Hollywood. As the party newspaper the People's Daily World put it candidly, "Hollywood is often called the land of Make-Believe, but there is nothing make believe about the Battle of Hollywood being waged today. In the front lines of this battle, at the studio gates, stand the thousands of locked out film workers; behind the studio gates sit the overlords of Hollywood, who refuse even to negotiate with the workers. . . . The prize will be the complete control of the greatest medium of communication in history." To underscore the value of this victory, the paper quoted Lenin: "Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important."

The Communist Party had been active in Hollywood since 1935, when a secret directive was issued by CPUSA (Communist Party of the U.S.A.) headquarters in New York calling for the capture of Hollywood's labor unions. The party believed that by doing so they could influence the type of pictures being produced. The directive also instructed party members to take leadership positions in the so-called intellectual groups in Hollywood, which were composed of directors, writers, and performers.

To carry out the plan, CPUSA sent party activist Stanley Lawrence, a tall, bespectacled ex-cabdriver. Quietly and methodically he began developing secret cells that included Hollywood performers, writers, and technicians. His actions were handled with great sensitivity. Lawrence reported directly to party headquarters in New York, which in turn reported its activities to officials in Moscow. There, Comintern boss Willie Muenzenberg declared, "One of the most pressing tasks confronting the Communist Party in the field of propaganda is the conquest of this supremely important propaganda unit, until now the monopoly of the ruling class. We must wrest it from them and turn it against them." ....

Again, I beg you, please read the whole thing.

Reagan was motivated to give support to the totalitarian extreme left because he was being driven by a fear of creeping "neo-fascism" of his own government. Has anything changed today? Not if the blogger I quoted above is an indicator:

The Bush Coup of 2000 HAS to continue in the face of its growing problems because if they fail to prevail they will go to jail. They are just running from the law now and expanding the military because they fully expect to have to use it against the US population in order to keep from being overtaken and apprehended and brought to trial for capital crimes of sedition, tyranny, espionage, and murder. It is highly unlikely that we will see Bush very often now except in the company of the military. Expect a marked increase of his use of military habadashery and military symbology as the current credibility crises on every front pushes him to true desperation.

Oh, yes, Diktator Bushitler. Yes, let's look for the "military habadashery", a la Daniel Ortega, shall we? Oh my!

But the fun doesn't stop here:

Kathryn Harris is still keeping blacks in Florida off the voting rolls...Jewish grandmothers will still be voting for Pat Buchanan. Even with the completely legitimate complaints in Florida it was ultimately impossible to recount due to the tremendous media presence which was afforded James Baker. Lawrence Tribe and David Boies were enormously ineffective in 2000 in the face of the well orchestrated lies which were posted every where in the media. Clinton was cowed and Gore appeared silent and entirely docile. Gore said last week he basically gave the country over to them because he respected the rule of law. I don't buy that for a minute. I think that he was scared to death.

Ah, those weren't lawyers that the Republicans sent down to Florida to defend against a host lawsuits filed by Democratic lawyers. They were assassins!

And even now, Katherine Harris is doing her evil deeds, keeping blacks from voting. Too bad there was scant evidence of such last time around. "They" must has pressured the press into faking their reports or be killed.

Our history here in America is somewhere near where Russia was in 1920. Big black cars coming in the middle of the night and carting the citizens them off to tortures as the boot steps on each face for another 50 years. If you think that this is far-affetched consider what they have already gotten away with. We have a lot of inbred trailer trash who love to follow orders so they don't have to be troubled with learning to think.

Note again the preening elitism, and hatred of his everyday countrymen. Again, we have the seeds of totalitarianism -- if not, why would he have to engage in revisionism of this sort:

As our genuine fear mounts, we are becoming increasingly docile as a people just as the Russians and the Germans and the Italians did in the face of their fascist class aggressors.

Errr, you mean those Russican "facists" like the people Dalton Trumbo reported to? Wait -- wasn't he just a 'good and decent' guy a minute ago? Little did we know that Lenin and Stalin were facists! They are in this guy's world: we must disown our own history, lest we learn from it.

And, to complete the profile, let's not forget the obligatory hatred of traditional Christianity:

So stand up, stand up for Judas and the cause that Judas served
It was Jesus who betrayed the poor with his word [...]

By sword and gun and crucifix Christ's gospel has been spread
And 2.000 cruel years have shown the way that Jesus led
The heretics burned and tortured, and the butchering, bloody crusaders
The bombs and rockets sanctified that rain down death from heaven
They followed Jesus, they knew the answer
All non-believers must be believers or else be broken
So put no trust in Saviours, Judas said, For everyone
Must be to his or her own self - a sun

True, 50,000 witches burned is bad. (Or was that number exaggerated?) But let's then also consider 100,000,000+ killed by leftist regimes during the the last century in the same light.

Things don't change, do they?