This is a supplement to the piece I posted yesterday that needs clarification. It is all too easy to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer as two sides of the same coin - Barbie as the ultimate “woke” movie and Oppenheimer as a movie that attempts to vindicate or sympathize with Communism.
But that would be a mistake. Barbie reflects our society now, a society not unlike what the Communist hunters most feared: ideological capture of our major institutions, our culture, our schools, and our government.
I enjoyed Barbie because laughing at a silly movie was fun, but it is important to put it in context of what we’re living through now.
As Critical Drinker explains:
Barbie is light-hearted and not intended as propaganda, but it makes assumptions about our shared reality that really only has meaning for those on the Left who go along with it. Men are bad, women are good, but gender is not a binary, etc.
Oppenheimer is about the America before the war and the America after the war. Everything changed dramatically in the wake of Hitler, Stalin, and the bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which would eventually take us to the Cold War.
Oppenheimer was never a Communist. The film Oppenheimer is not about Communism. It isn’t even really a Left vs. Right film. There isn’t much politics involved at all. Some might react to the movie without seeing it, falsely believing it’s Communist propaganda — understandably, because of Hollywood’s reputation of late. But that would be unfair and a misread of what Oppenheimer is about.
In the 1930s, amid the Great Depression, Hooverville, and the New Deal, it was a “Great Awokoning” of a kind. Those on the Left who cared about social justice started organizations to help those left behind. FDR’s New Deal, for instance, left behind Black Americans.
In the book about Oppenheimer, he was so well-read, compassionate, and worldly that he understood it was an unequal society, just like Orwell or any decent person who lived back then would. That is what drew him, and Orwell, at one point, to Communism. And both would eventually abandon it once they saw where it led.
Oppenheimer and Orwell were free thinkers. They valued freedom of the mind more than anything, just as I do. That is why Orwell wrote 1984, and it’s why Oppenheimer’s quote about science is such a good one:
Does anyone think today’s Left still believes that? They do not. They don’t believe in freedom of the mind at all. They believe in forced conformity and ideological compliance in art, science, education, and even relationships between people, language, comedy, and everything else they control, which is almost everything.
Oppenheimer’s first girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Many of Oppenheimer’s friends were also Communists. They continued to try to recruit him, but he always refused to join — he was a singular thinker and did not want to belong to any group or have any allegiances.
He also, and I want to be clear here, BUILT THE ATOM BOMB THAT ENDED THE WAR. Anyone who wants to dump on Oppenheimer has to understand his place in history, and if you are applying his suspected ties to Communism as being more important than BUILDING THE ATOM BOMB THAT ENDED THE WAR, then you are no different from the screeching fanatics on the Left.
Whether you think he should have built the bomb is beside the point. He helped end World War II, full stop. He was hailed as a hero for doing so. Our government wanted to build what President Ike warned against in his farewell address, the Military Industrial Complex:
Oppenheimer did everything he could to prevent the arms race, which put him at odds with the government and the military.
Oppenheimer was Jewish, which meant he was already an outsider and felt like one his entire life. But playing such an important part in history — with the caveat that they dropped the bomb on Japan and killed hundreds of thousands of people, of course — mattered to him. He believed he was building the bomb for Hitler, not Japan.
The paranoia in our country was understandable. Communist spies were working in our government. There was a united effort to indoctrinate our citizens to their ideology. There was Communist ideology injected into Hollywood screenplays. There was a Communist movement here. Their fear was not unfounded.
Many of those involved in the Communist movement in the 1930s would ultimately abandon it once they saw Stalin’s murder of millions and his extreme totalitarian ideology. Most people on the Left did not know the extent of it because then, like now, only useful information filtered through.
I grew up thinking Communism was “good,” and would only later understand how that ideology had manifested in the former Soviet Union, in China, in North Korea. Has it ever worked out without becoming a dystopian nightmare? No.
That’s why Winston Churchill concluded this about Democracy:
Yet, with the mass hysteria after the Rosenbergs were caught and executed, and the shooting in the Capitol, our government wanted to purge not just actual Communists but anyone who ever knew Communists or read a book that might be thought of as having Communist leanings.
This is why Arthur Miller wrote the play The Crucible to bring back the Salem Witch trials to illustrate another era when mass hysteria caused us all to look at one another suspiciously, and terrible things followed in its wake. And why Rod Serling wrote such profound dissenting viewpoints in so many of the Twilight Zones epsiodes, like the Monsters are Due on Maple Street:
Now, we’re seeing our country overtaken by something similar to Communist ideology AND the persecution of those trying to fight back. It’s a hard pretzel to wrap one’s mind around. It’s easy if you separate the mass hysteria from the ideology.
Now, the hysteria is (and I’m writing a longer piece about this for next time in Part Three of America at the Hands of a Cult) rooted in the idea that it’s the “Communist” ideology that must be preserved and anyone trying to dismantle it is a racist, sexist, bigot, transphobe, etc.
The two sides have completely reversed themselves. The Left is now where the Right was then. But if you stand on the side of freedom, you will always be on the right side, no matter your ideology. America is founded on freedom, and it’s freedom we must always reach for.
What will frustrate me the most about the Left’s reaction to Oppenheimer is that they will see themselves as still on the right side of history because the Republicans were persecuting him and ultimately removed his security clearance. Maybe that means they still see themselves as the good guys still fighting the good fight. But they would be wrong.
Even those who are against “cancel culture” and understand fanaticism and dogma have captured all of our major institutions, from culture to education to science to government, will never be able to take one step further to understand that the source of the hysteria is the person that disrupted the utopia: Donald Trump.
It’s a little like saying witchcraft is real and there are real witches, just not those you accused of witchcraft. To understand the source of the hysteria — Donald Trump is a racist and a rapist — is to understand the purges and persecutions.
This is why I no longer draw that line, why I write so much about Trump and MAGA even at the cost of my own reputation, and why I live my life publicly defying that direct order to divide myself from half the country. I do not buy into it, and that, I think, is our only way out.
Until they can do that and humanize Trump and his supporters, they will never fully grasp the moment we’re living through and will still kick the can down the road for years before it all comes home to roost. And it will. It always does.
All one has to do is look at their behavior, and our behavior, since Trump was elected to understand what they’re doing now, to Trump, to anyone who isn’t fully on board with their “Woketupia” is still mass hysteria. It’s still a mass delusion. It will still be regarded with the same disdain we now regard the witch hunts in the 1950s.
At least in the 1950s, they had the excuse of WWII — Hitler and Stalin. Now, all we have is Trump, MAGA, and the Tea Party as their greatest threat. They believe it’s the “white male patriarchy” and the “white supremacists” trying to remove the “Black and Brown and the LGBTQIA people from power.” And this is because Obama did remake this country into a “woke utopia.”
The film Barbie is a great example of just how accepted this ideology is - that regardless of its dramatic changes over the past few years - they can still point to “The Patriarchy” as the ultimate evil.
We’ve now become almost numb to watching our fellow Americans, millions of them, treated as enemies of the state, not to mention the unprecedented persecution of Trump — Jack Smith’s indictment as the most recent example, but the raid on mar-a-logo, Russiagate, the two impeachments, and a propaganda media that refuses to report the truth, the casual dehumanization we see against them on social media when the Left holds all of the power is a terrifying moment in history to be living through.
It isn’t hard to stand on the right side of history. You just have to recognize what fear and delusion can do to people when they don’t have strong leaders like Eisenhower to guide them through the storm.
I hope that clarifies my intent with the piece.
Of Communism and Oppenheimer