Great news! Hollywood is full of genuine, true blue heritage Americans defending traditional American ideals again! The Atlantic helpfully alerts us to Hollywood’s Great Leap Backward:
The fate of the Hong Kong booksellers has caused an outcry around the world, with independent news outlets and free-speech advocates warning of a return to totalitarianism. “It’s an attack on the publishing industry from all aspects,” declared Yaqiu Wang of Human Rights Watch in a recent New York Times article.
This outcry is wholly justified. But as a longtime observer of a different medium that has also been losing ground to China’s censors, I have to wonder: Why isn’t there a similar outcry about China’s mounting attack on the film industry, not just in Hong Kong but also in the United States?
Over the years, the U.S. government has often praised and defended Hollywood films as a key component of American soft power—that is, as a storytelling medium that can, without engaging in blatant propaganda, convey American ideals, including free expression itself, to foreign populations around the world. But Hollywood has long since abandoned that role. Indeed, not since the end of World War II have the studios cooperated with Washington in furthering the nation’s ideals. Instead, the relationship today is purely commercial—on both sides. For example, Hollywood frequently enlists Washington’s help in fighting piracy and gaining access to foreign markets. But even while providing that help, Washington refrains from asking Hollywood to temper its more negative portrayals of American life, politics, and global intentions. (The exception is the Department of Defense, which insists on approving the script of every film produced with its assistance.)
Things are different in China. In that country, which is fast becoming the world’s largest and most important movie market, the ruling Communist Party exercises no such restraint. On the contrary, Beijing has a very clear idea of how a film industry should operate—namely, as an essential part of the effort to bring public opinion in alignment with the party’s ideological worldview.
And here we were worried about those (((Hollywood values))) relentlessly attacking America, Christianity and Western civilization. It’s reassuring to be informed that, contrary to our spurious concerns, Hollywood is actually, and has always been, full of real White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans standing up for traditional American ideals.
So, naturally, we must rise to defend these great champions of America and the West against the Chinese incursion, because these terrible Chinese interlopers just don’t respect those ideals, right? Or, you know, Americans could always just sit by and watch Hollywood burn as the People’s Liberation Army marches right over it and holocausts the global propaganda machine. Whatever shall we do?
Looks like it’s time to toast some marshmallows. And the jump to China is definitely off, as it looks like we’re about to be informed that Xi is the New Hitler.
Washington Free Beacon senior editor Bill Gertz said on Friday that under Chinese president Xi Jinping, the communist state has become a “communist nightmare.”
Gertz appeared on The Mark Levin Show to promote his new book, Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy, in which he describes how the “China threat” has transformed radically since the 1980s.
“It really took a turn for the worse under the regime of Xi Jinping, the current Chinese leader, who has advanced what he calls the China Dream, which is really a communist nightmare,” Gertz said. “He has his eyes set on global hegemony, he wants China to be the dominant superpower in the world, and in order to do that, he has to diminish the power of the United States. Xi Jinping has become the new Mao, the new emperor.”
I wonder what went on behind the scenes over the last few years? Regardless, it’s evident that China has made it abundantly clear to the relevant parties that they are not at all interested in having their olam tikkened.
