Mythologizing Murder By Jack Cashill

A new and much heralded documentary by Peter Miller, simply titled Sacco and Vanzetti, purports to tell the true story of these two doomed Italian immigrants.

Like so much produced by the left, however, the film tells us more about the filmmaker and his enthusiastic reviewers than it does about history

A review by Phil Hall in Film Threat captures Miller’s intent and the typical progressive critical response. According to Hall, this “excellent documentary” shows how a “hideous prejudice against Italian immigrants” and a “fear of European rooted political movements” led to the railroading of two innocent men—men who “actually abhorred violence.”

This is utter nonsense. In reality, the reporting on the trial stands as a brilliant prototype of the Soviet ability to manipulate the world media to its own ends. As Miller and his reviewers have unwittingly proved, contemporary leftists are as eager to be duped as their literary predecessors, but they have far fewer excuses for being so.

In the way of background, the early Soviets absorbed not only Karl Marx’s economics but also his morality, such as it was. In their pursuit of the larger truth—pravda—they scorned any petty factual truth—istina—that stood in its way. The man who brought this new system of power, the so-called “lying for the truth,” to the West was an unlikely German Communist named Willi Munzenberg. A sort of roughneck publisher, Munzenberg had an instinctive feel for the power of the media and persuaded Lenin to let him apply it.

Full Article...

Sphere: Related Content