The Left Has Murdered Art

The crimes of leftism are vast and haunting and infiltrate every aspect of modern life – but no crime, perhaps, has been more heinous than the left's murder of art. Every medium we possess to communicate purpose, humor, reflection, beauty, love, belief, hope, sentiment, and wisdom has been crushed, puréed, and blended into the dull, dead mush of rigid leftist dogma. Consider the topic that has spiced literature and painting and song since those media were born: the natural and healthy tension between men and women. God and nature have made man and woman so that both sexes have unique insights and strengths as well as particular blindsides and weaknesses.

Literature has captured this brilliantly in the plays works of Sophocles and Aristophanes, the instructive stories of Republican Rome, the wry humor of the Canterbury Tales, the moral agony in Macbeth and Othello, the great novels of Tsarist Russia, and so much more. The surreal myth invented by leftists that all the social differences between men and women are the product of a mysterious masculine plot is so stupid and ignorant that only people whose minds have stopped thinking – that is to say leftists – could ever believe it. Art that must conform to notion that men and women are interchangeable parts, except when men "oppress" women, is artless glop, which connects to nothing real in life and marches to the dull drumbeat of totalitarian order. Leftism also demands that certain subject be taboo, even though many of these taboo subjects are the most poignant and instructive. Communism is at the top of the list. The great evil of Communism was grasped early by many Americans first entranced and repelled by this misology. Many of these – Max Eastman, Eugene Lyons, Whitaker Chambers, Howard Fast, Arthur Koestler, and Richard Wright – were creative geniuses who left brilliant literary studies into the horrors of Communism. Yet the left has never made a film about the Holodomor, perhaps the greatest act of genocide in human history, or the Gulag, which absorbed during its ghastly reign as many as 100 million human souls, or about how the treason that the Venona decryptions and the Soviet security files showed was much greater (not lesser) than Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee feared. Indeed, we have learned that people we never suspected were Soviet agents were, in fact, slavish toadies of the vilest regime in history. Has Hollywood ever explored the horror of North Korea in film? Mao in China was the greatest mass murderer in history, yet no art or film or song or other expression of human pain and horror has been made by the giant leftist-controlled media corporations in America, nor has any such work ever been produced by government grants, which are intended to support neglected areas of expression. If the nightmare of Communism is not the proper subject of "serious" film and plays and music and poetry and sculpture, then what is? Yet what we see instead are endless renditions of the long gone and utterly defeated Nazi Germany's well known crimes. We ought never to forget the crimes of Nazi Germany, but when that is the only totalitarian nightmare art is able to find, even when worse nightmares have come since and stalk the world still, then art is dead or dying. The leftist murder of art also requires the elimination of every honest perspective; every different school of thought; and, indeed, every variation of any sort from the party line. "All art is propaganda," Orwell wisely noted almost eight decades ago, but when there is a healthy garden of opinions and ideas, then art must compete and persuade. The left hates and fears competition of every sort, especially honest competition based upon merit and talent. So the healthy propaganda battles that armies of artists of every type ought to be waging on behalf of what they believe is right is never waged at all. Instead, we must endure the stultifying and endless repetition of the same stale and forced pseudo-art. Indeed, all the great virtues of art in all its forms have been lost to us by the left, which most of all feels it must control every single aspect of our lives. What that means as well, of course, is that the "creators" hired by the left are simply hacks with no talent, and those true artists who have another story to tell are consigned to the outer darkness by the organs of leftism. The left has murdered art, and we live in a gray and dim world because of that foul deed.