Ayn Rand
SCREEN GUIDE FOR AMERICANS
The influence of Communists in Hollywood is due, not to their own power, but to the unthinking carelessness of those who profess to oppose them. Red propaganda has been put over in some films produced by innocent men, often by loyal Americans who deplore the spread of Communism throughout the world and wonder why it is spreading.
If you wish to protect your pictures from being used for Communistic purposes, the first thing to do is to drop the delusion that political propaganda consists only of political slogans.
Politics is not a separate field in itself. Political ideas do not come out of thin air. They are the result of the moral premises which men have accepted. Whatever people believe to be the good, right and proper human actions — that will determine their political opinions. If men believe that every independent action is vicious, they will vote for every measure to control human beings and to suppress human freedom. If men believe that the American system is unjust, they will support those who wish to destroy it.
The purpose of the Communists in Hollywood is not the production of political movies openly advocating Communism. Their purpose is to corrupt our moral premises by corrupting non-political movies — by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda info innocent stories — thus making people absorb the basic premises of Collectivism by indirection and implication.
Few people would take Communism straight. But a constant stream of hints, lines, touches and suggestions battering the public from the screen will act like the drops of water that split a rock if continued long enough. The rock, they are trying to split is Americanism.
We present below a list of the more common devices used to turn non-political pictures into carriers of political propaganda. It is a guide list for all those who do not wish to help advance the cause of Communism.
It is intended as a guide and not as a forced restriction upon anyone. We are unalterably opposed to any political “industry code”, to any group agreement or any manner of forbidding any political opinion to anyone by any form of collective force or pressure. There can be no “group insurance” in the field of ideas. Each man has to do his own thinking. We merely offer this list to the independent judgment and for the voluntary action of every honest man in the motion picture industry.
1. DON’T TAKE POLITICS LIGHTLY.
Don’t fool yourself by saying, “I’m not interested in politics,” and then pretending that politics does not exist.
We are living in an age when politics is the most burning question in everybody’s mind. The whole world is torn by a great political issue — Freedom or Slavery, which means Americanism or Totalitarianism. Half the world is in ruins after a war fought over political ideas. To pretend at such a time that political ideas are not important and that people pay no attention to them, is worse than irresponsible.
It is the avowed purpose of the Communists to insert propaganda into movies. Therefore, there are only two possible courses of action open to you, if you want to keep your pictures clean of subversive propaganda:
1. If you have no time or inclination to study political ideas — then do not hire Reds to work on your pictures.
2. If you wish to employ Reds, but intend to keep their politics out of your movies — then study political ideas and learn how to recognize propaganda when you see it.
But to hire Communists on the theory that “they won’t put over any politics on me” and then remain ignorant and indifferent to the subject of politics, while the Reds are trained propaganda experts — is an attitude for which there can be no excuse.
2. DON’T SMEAR THE FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM.
Don’t pretend that Americanism and the Free Enterprise System are two different things. They are inseparable, like body and soul. The basic principle of inalienable individual rights, which is Americanism, can be translated into practical reality only in the form of the economic system of Free Enterprise. That was the system established by the American Constitution, the system which made America the best and greatest country on earth. You may preach any other form of economics, if you wish. But if you do so, don’t pretend that you are preaching Americanism.
Don’t pretend that you are upholding the Free Enterprise System in some vague, general, undefined way, while preaching the specific ideas that oppose it and destroy it.
Don’t attack individual rights, individual freedom, private action, private initiative, and private property. These things are essential parts of the Free Enterprise System, without which it cannot exist.
Don’t preach the superiority of public ownership as such over private ownership. Don’t preach or imply that all publicly-owned projects are noble, humanitarian undertakings by grace of the mere fact that they are publicly-owned — while preaching, at the same time, that private property or the defense of private property rights is the expression of some sort of vicious greed, of anti-social selfishness or evil.
3. DON’T SMEAR INDUSTRIALISTS.
Don’t spit into your own face or, worse, pay miserable little rats to do it.
You, as a motion picture producer, are an industrialist. All of us are employees of an industry which gives us a good living. There is an old fable about a pig who filled his belly with acorns, then started digging to undermine the roots of the oak from which the acorns came. Don’t let’s allow that pig to become our symbol.
Throughout American history, the best of American industrialists were men who embodied the highest virtues: productive genius, energy, initiative, independence, courage. Socially (if “social significance” interests you) they were among the greatest of all benefactors, because it is they who created the opportunities for achieving the unprecedented material wealth of the industrial age.
In our own day, all around us, there are countless examples of self-made men who rose from the ranks and achieved great industrial success through their energy, ability and honest productive effort.
Yet all too often industrialists, bankers, and businessmen are presented on the screen as villains, crooks, chiselers or exploiters. One such picture may be taken as non-political or accidental. A constant stream of such pictures becomes pernicious political propaganda: It creates hatred for all businessmen in the mind of the audience, and makes people receptive to the cause of Communism.
While motion pictures have a strict code that forbids us to offend or insult any group or nation — while we dare not present in an unfavorable light the tiniest Balkan kingdom—we permit ourselves to smear and slander American businessmen in the most irresponsibly dishonest manner.
It is true that there are vicious businessmen — just as there are vicious men in any other class or profession. But we have been practising an outrageous kind of double standard: we do not attack individual representatives of any other group, class or nation, in order not to imply an attack on the whole group; yet when we present individual businessmen as monsters, we claim that no reflection on the whole class of business men was intended.
It’s got to be one or the other. This sort of double standard can deceive nobody and can serve nobody’s purpose except that of the Communists.
It is the moral — (no, not just political, but moral) — duty of every decent man in the motion picture industry to throw into the ashcan, where it belongs, every story that smears industrialists as such.