Are you with us?
If you realize that the world is moving toward disaster, but see no effective force to avert it-
If you are eager to join in a great cause and accept a great faith, but find no such cause or faith offered to you anywhere today—
If you are not one of those doomed jellyfish to whom the word “Freedom” means nothing—
If you cannot conceive of yourself living in a society without personal freedom, a society in which you will be told what to do, what to
think,
what to feel, in which your very life will be only a gift from the Collective, to be revoked at its pleasure at any time—
If you cannot conceive of yourself surrendering your freedom for any collective good whatsoever, and do not believe that any such good can ever be accomplished by such a surrender—
If you believe in your own dignity and your own value, and hold that such a belief is not “selfish,” but is instead your greatest virtue, without which you are worthless both to your fellow-men and to yourself—
If you believe that it is vicious to demand that you should exist solely for the sake of your fellow-men and grant them all and any right over you—
If you believe that it is vicious to demand everyone’s sacrifice for everyone else’s sake, and that such a demand creates nothing but mutual victims, without profiting anyone, neither society nor the individual—
If you believe that men can tell you what you must
not
do to them, but can
never
assume the arrogance of telling you what you
must
do, no matter what their number—
If you believe in majority rule
only
with protection for minority rights, both being limited by
inalienable
individual rights—
If you believe that the mere mention of “the good of the majority” is not sufficient ground to justify any possible kind of horror, and that those yelling loudest of “majority good” are not necessarily the friends of mankind—
If you are sick of professional “liberals,” “humanitarians,” “uplifters” and “idealists” who would do you good as
they
see it, even if it kills you, whose idea of world benevolence is world slavery—
If you are sick, disgusted, disheartened, without faith, without direction, and have lost everything but your courage-
—
come and join us.
There is so much at stake—and so little time left.
Let us have an organization as strong, as sure, as enthusiastic as any the Totalitarians could hope to achieve. Let us follow
our
faith as consistently as they follow theirs. Let us offer the world
our
philosophy of life. Let us expose all Totalitarian propaganda in any medium and in any form. Let us answer every argument, every promise, every “Party Line” of the Totalitarians. Let us drop all compromise, all cooperation or collaboration with those preaching any brand of Totalitarianism in letter or in spirit, in name or in fact. Let us have nothing to do with “Front” organizations, “Front” agents or “Front” ideas. We do not have to proscribe them by law. We can put them out of existence by social boycott. But this means—no compromise. There is no compromise between life and death. You do not make deals with the black plague. Let us touch nothing tainted with Totalitarianism. Let us tear down the masks, bring them out into the open and—leave them alone. Very strictly alone. No “pro-Soviet” or “pro-Nazi” members of the board in our organization. No “benevolent” Trojan horses. Let us stick together as they do. They silence us, they force us out of public life, they fill key positions with their own men. Let us stick together—and they will be helpless to continue. They have millions of foreign money on their side. We have the truth.
As a first step and a first declaration of what we stand for, we offer you the following principles:
We believe in the value, the dignity and the freedom of Man.
We believe:
• That each man has inalienable rights which cannot be taken from him for any cause whatsoever. These rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• That the right of life means that man cannot be deprived of his life for the convenience of any number of other men.
• That the right of liberty means freedom of individual decision, individual choice, individual judgment and individual initiative; it means also the right to disagree with others.
• That the right to the pursuit of happiness means man’s freedom to choose what constitutes his own private, personal happiness and to work for its achievement; that such a pursuit is neither evil nor reprehensible, but honorable and good; and that a man’s happiness is not to be prescribed to him by any other man nor by any number of other men.
• That these rights have no meaning unless they are the unconditional, personal, private possession of each man, granted to him by the fact of his birth, held by him independently of all other men, and limited only by the exercise of the same rights by other men.
• That the only just, moral and beneficent form of society is a society based upon the recognition of these inalienable individual rights.
• That the State exists for Man, and not Man for the State.
• That the greatest good for all men can be achieved only through the voluntary cooperation of free individuals for mutual benefit, and not through a compulsory sacrifice of all for all.
• That “voluntary” presupposes an alternative and a choice of opportunities; and thus even a universal agreement of all men on one course of action is neither free nor voluntary if no other course of action is open to them.
• That each man’s independence of spirit and other men’s respect for it have created all civilization, all culture, all human progress and have benefited all mankind.
• That the greatest threat to civilization is the spread of Collectivism, which demands the sacrifice of all individual rights to collective rights and the supremacy of the State over the individual.
• That the general good which such Collectivism professes as its objective can never be achieved at the sacrifice of man’s freedom, and such sacrifice can lead only to general suffering, stagnation and degeneration.
• That such conception of Collectivism is the greatest possible evil—under any name, in any form, for any professed purpose whatsoever.
Such is our definition of Americanism and the American way of life.
The American way of life has always been based upon the Rights of Man, upon individual freedom and upon respect for each individual human personality. Through all its history, this has been the source of America’s greatness. This is the spirit of America which we dedicate ourselves to defend and preserve.
In practical policy we shall be guided by one basic formula: of every law and of every conception we shall demand the maximum freedom for the individual and the minimum power for the government necessary to achieve any given social objective.
If you believe this, join us. If you don‘t—fight us. Either is your privilege, but the only truly immoral act you can commit is to agree with us, to realize that we are right—and then to forget it and do nothing.
There is some excuse, little as it may be, for an open, honest Fifth Columnist. There is none for an innocent, passive, subconscious one. Of all the things we have said here to you, we wish to be wrong on only one—our first sentence. Prove us wrong on that. Join us.
The world is a beautiful place and worth fighting for. But not without Freedom.
1947
[AR wrote the following article for the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. It was published in the November 1947 issue of Plain Talk, a conservative political magazine.]
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. Some dangerous Red propaganda has been put over in 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 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 non-political movies
—by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories—and to make 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 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 do 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 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 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 that 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.