Tillie Majczek. That’s a name to remember on Mother’s Day. She scrubbed floors for 11 years to raise the money to free her son from a false murder conviction — and succeeded. Her story, and that of the reporter who took up her cause, is told in the 1948 film Call Northside 777. It’s a sweet story and a tribute to a free press.
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Friedrich Hayek: Happy Angel Birthday!
Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (aka F. A. Hayek) was born on May 8th, 1899. He was a formidable defender of human liberty and warned early of the dangers of centralized power associated with socialism. Here are six short films to celebrate his birthday.
May 1: Victims of Communism Day | Ten Films to Honor the Dead
Perhaps as many as a hundred million people were victims of communism in the last century, deliberately rounded up, shot, starved, or simply forced to march into snowy wasteland until dead, exterminated by communist regimes.
The most comprehensive statistical source for democide statistics, Death By Government, puts the toll at 106 million. Necrometrics estimates that Stalin and Mao alone killed 60 million. Wikipedia, defining democide more narrowly, puts the toll between 21 million and 70 million. The Museum of iCommunism estimates 100 million murdered. The Black Book of iCommunism estimates 80 to 100 million.
But these are just statistics. As psychologists have pointed out, it’s impossible for the human mind to grasp the magnitude of that level of horror through sheer numbers. Just as Schindler’s List was instrumental in getting the public to come to finally terms with the Holocaust, it is perhaps through film that death toll of communism can best be understood.
Every May 1st for the last several years, Ilya Somin has written an editorial for the Washington Post declaring the “May Day” so beloved by the Left to be renamed “Victims of Communism Day.” I concur, and so, while socialists blissfully celebrate their worker’s paradise this May Day, indifferent to the human cost of their political philosophy, I propose that well-meaning people consider watching a film on the subject, both out of respect for those lost and to be intellectually armed against the ignorance of those still in denial. Here are some recommendations.
Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism
If you don’t know much about the origins and history of socialism, start here — you could hardly do better than this eye-opening and comprehensive documentary. It chronicles socialism’s rise and fall, and tells much of the untold story of how it all began. By the way, did you know that socialism was first tried in Indiana, long before Marx even wrote a word on the subject? You’ll learn about that, and more, in this engaging film. Full review.
China | Mao’s Great Famine
Could 45 million people be murdered — the single greatest man-made holocaust in human history — and yet the event pass nearly unrecorded? Up until this point, yes. But a handful of historians are at last ripping the lid off of both the crime and the cover-up of the Great Leap Forward, the deadliest stage of Mao’s socialist inferno, in five recently-published books (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)…and in the groundbreaking documentary Mao’s Great Famine, the subject of this review. This persuasive film provides a rare glimpse through the razor-wired gates of a “workers’ paradise” in its purest state. Full review.
“Not many survived the famine, and of those who did, few have spoken out. Mao’s Great Famine compiles never before seen footage from the famine with testimonies of [survivors].”
–Patheos
China | Hard to Believe
Forced organ harvesting of political prisoners in China was first exposed in 2006 in a short undercover investigative clip by the BBC (among others), but it wasn’t until recently that this horrifying practice started to get the full attention of filmmakers. In 2014, director Leon Lee released Human Harvest, in which he filmed two Nobel Prize winners soberly and carefully investigating the question of Chinese organ harvesting. Their unhappy conclusion — that China is indeed harvesting live prisoners on a “just in time” basis — gave intellectual gravitas to the human rights campaign to stop this practice. A second documentary, Hard to Believe, was made in 2015 backing them up. It aired on PBS and won numerous awards.
“This documentary is extremely important for those involved in organ donation and transplantation, human rights, healthcare, ethics, and the law…The credentials of the interviewed experts are impeccable.”
–Journal of Bioethical Inquiry
USSR | The Soviet Story
The untold story of Soviet mass murder of an estimated 7 million Ukranians is documented through rare archival photographic footage and interviews with survivors. This holocaust is one of the biggest under-reported crimes of the twentieth century, under-reported because left-leaning intellectuals were uncomfortable with the parallels such genocide obviously implied between the Soviet communism and Nazism. Those parallels get laid out cold here.
“…gripping, audacious and uncompromising.”
–The Economist
USSR | In the Crosswind
“In the Crosswind chronicles a sinister and oft-forgotten chapter in the history of communism: in June, 1941, Soviet forces purged the populations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, executing the men and transporting the women and children to Siberian labor camps.”
–Filmatique
“No topic continues to haunt the Estonian national psyche more than the Soviet deportations. Every family of today was affected, in one way or another, by what Helde calls the ‘Soviet Holocaust.'”
–East European Film Bulletin
USSR | Stalin: Inside the Terror
“This is a BBC2 documentary from 2003 and probably one of the best on Stalin and communism. The archive footage is very good and it draws upon some excellent evidence from close witnesses, including Stalin’s own family.”
North Korea | Yodok Stories: North Korea
“Yodok Stories is a documentary film directed by Polish documentary screenwriter and director Andrzej Fidyk and produced by Torstein Grude. Today, more than 200,000 men, women and children face torture, starvation and murder in North Korea’s concentration camps.”
–Wikipedia
Cuba | Improper Conduct
Cuban refugees detail Castro’s persecution of “undesirables,” particularly gay men. The stories that survivors relate of the labor camps to which they were sent are consistent, shocking, and very credible. This documentary was awarded the Grand Prix at the Twelfth International Human Rights Festival and is one of the very few on this site to earn the highest score in both libertarian content and production quality. Full review.
“The movie’s tone is civilized, but the testimony is as savage as it’s convincing.”
–New York Times
Cambodia | Enemies of the People
“This is patient, persistent, probing and fearless journalism of the highest order and it shocks to the core. ”
–Time Out
“Enemies of the People is another disquieting testament to the fact that ordinary individuals under extreme pressure will carry out the most monstrous crimes.”
–New York Times
East Germany: Youth Shot at Berlin Wall
He was only one person, one 18-year-old who was killed trying to escape communism, but the moment he was killed the Berlin Wall became real because everyone near the wall saw him die. In a poignant record of the tragedy, British Pathe provided this unnarrated, silent 3-minute clip.
“Peter Fechter (14 January 1944 – 17 August 1962) was a German bricklayer from Berlin in what became East Germany in 1945. He was 18 when he became one of the first victims of the Berlin Wall’s East German border guards while trying to cross over to what was then West Berlin.”
–Wikipedia
Oscar Schindler: Happy Angel Birthday!
Oscar Schindler, memorialized in the 1993 film Schindler’s List, was born on April 28th, 1908. His powerful story, extraordinarily well-told by Steven Spielberg, so impressed critics that it won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Happy Earth Day! /Sarc
Earth Day is an annual celebration to support “environmental protection” — no, not primarily to promote good things like clean air and clean water, but to fight global warming, excuse me, climate change, via massive government regulation, control, and spend on a world scale. All this is justified by claims that doom is nearly upon us and can only be averted by radical change coordinated at gunpoint. Should you believe these predictions?
Well, look back at the predictions made on the original Earth Day in 1970. Not one of them came true. Some of these were highlighted in the news segment below — note the caliber of the people making these predictions — they are among the best and the brightest and yet they are still completely wrong.
Even Spock believed in 1979 that the Earth was doomed unless immediate action was taken, doomed not by Global Warming but by Global Freezing.
But haven’t predictions gotten better since then? No, no they haven’t. Here’s a nice list of failed climate change predictions made over the last 25 years. Note they have one thing in common: the dates for demise are soon, but not so soon that anyone will remember the prediction and come back to say hey, this never happened. It’s always doom awaits us in the near future, not immediately, not in the far future, but in that comfortable mid-zone.
By the way, now that we live in an age where we judge the merits of everything by the foibles of those who authored our current institutions, remember that the guy who invented Earth Day, a leftist named Ira Einhorn, murdered his girlfriend and mummified her body, which was found in his apartment 18 months later. He died in prison recently. More on his colorful history here. So when someone mentions Earth Day, be sure to say “But wasn’t that founded by a murderer?”
John Stossel, whose trademark is a balanced look at things, did a great segment on Earth Day and climate change generally. It’s worth watching.
Years ago, Penn & Teller invited Earth Day enthusiasts to sign a petition banning H2O, yes, water. Many signed, inadvertently revealing the scientific naivete of environmental activists. Since then, this has become a repeatable experiment, used in high schools to show why it’s important to be skeptical of politicized scientific claims.
One of the better documentaries on climate change, made by the talented director Martin Durkin, is The Great Global Warming Swindle. It is generally available free on youtube.
Lastly, if you want to know how climate change got started as a cause, check out this short film about the cherry-picking of data to support the cause. It’s not science, it’s politics.
Waco Anniversary Recalls Film That Exposed Cover-Up
Thirty-one years ago today, a religious commune in Waco, Texas was raided by FBI and BATF, resulting in the holocaust of 76 people including children, burnt alive. The official story was initially that the tragedy was a mass suicide, that authorities never fired a shot and never set fire to their compound. That became — through constant repetition — the narrative that everyone believed.
Then, out of nowhere, a little-known independent documentary entitled Waco: Rules of Engagement hit the theaters. The film ripped the lid off of the government’s case and took it apart piece by piece, indeed so effectively that it was nominated for an Academy Award. As Roger Ebert put it at the time, “Whatever happened at Waco, these facts remain: It is not against the law to hold irregular religious beliefs. It is not illegal to hold and trade firearms. It is legal to defend your own home against armed assault, if that assault is illegal. It is impossible to see this film without reflecting that the federal government, from the top down, treated the Branch Davidians as if those rights did not apply.”
