This fall, the Victims of Communism Foundation is hosting an Anti-Communist Film Festival. The idea for the festival came to me last year, and the Victims of Communism Foundation is the perfect sponsor for the event.
Over the past year, I’ve written on Hot Air and elsewhere the celebrities I’d like to invite to the festival – stars like James Woods, George Clooney, and Gary Oldman. There are two additional names I’d like to add to the list: Adam Driver and George Pelecanos.
Most people know Adam Driver as the A-List actor who has appeared in everything from Star Wars movies to Noah Baumbauch comedies and small independent dramas, but some might not know that Driver also joined the Marines when he was younger. I don’t know his politics, but he’s never come across as an annoying Hollywood liberal. He may be just the kind of artist who would get the Anti-Communist Film Festival.
Joining the Marine Corps “was one of the things I’m most proud of having done in my life,” Driver said during a 2015 “TED Talks” address. “I found I loved the Marine Corps the most for the thing I was looking for the least when I joined, which was the people — a weird motley crew of characters from a cross section of the United States that on the surface I had nothing in common with. Over time, all the political and personal bravado that led me to the military dissolved. And for me, the Marine Corps became synonymous with my friends.”
Driver was assigned to Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, California, as an 81mm mortar man. He served for two years and eight months before a biking accident led to a discharge with the rank of lance corporal.
According to the Department of War, Driver said he missed the “discipline, rigor, and camaraderie that comes with being a Marine.”
Driver also played me in a skit on Saturday Night Live, which you can read about here.
The other name on the list is George Pelecanos. Part of this is a hometown thing. Pelecanos and I are both native Washingtonians. Pelecanos writes crime fiction, and he’s one of the best at it. He is also a TV and film producer, often collaborating with David Simon, on Simon’s HBO series The Wire and co-creator (with Simon) of the HBO series The Deuce and We Own This City. Pelecanos was inspired by the works Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett and John le Carré.
Pelecanos is also a frequent host of films at the American Film Institute (AFI) in Silver Spring, Maryland. Earlier this year, he introduced one of my favorite movies, Out of the Past. It was in attending film festivals at the AFI, as well as some of the movies hosted by Pelecanos, that I got the idea for the Anti-Communist Film Festival. Hopefully, the AFI’s response to my pitch to host the Anti-Communist Film Festival won’t be held against me by Pelecanos.
Pelecanos is the author of Hard Revolution, a novel set in 1968 that revolves around the riots following the death of Martin Luther King. As Pelecanos notes in Hard Revolution, there was trouble brewing long before Martin Luther King was killed:
In August of ’67, arson and minor riots had broken out along 7th and 14th Streets, with rocks and bottles thrown at firemen attempting to extinguish the flames. Since then, unrest and disorder had become almost weekly occurrences. Stokely Carmichael, the high-profile former spokesman for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had moved to town. H. Rap Brown was being extradited from New Orleans to Richmond and ultimately to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he faced charges of arson and inciting a riot in the town of Cambridge. Black Panthers and other Black Nationalist factions had become active and entrenched around the city.
After Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, more than 1,200 buildings in Washington, D.C. were burned. The cost was almost $25 million. The mayhem was caused by Marxist radicals. Near the end of his book Ten Blocks From the White House, Washington Post reporter Ben Gilbert – a black man and no conservative – introduces a theme that has reverberated through urban riots for more than fifty years. That theme is Marxism.
Four months after the D.C. riot, in August 1968, Gilbert made contact with three men who claimed responsibility for the violence following King’s death. The men were all left-wing agitators. They claimed they had been planning violence for months before King’s death. They used King’s death to spread chaos, from setting fires to throwing rocks and bottles to dynamiting buildings. According to witnesses, they cared little or nothing about Martin Luther King. The men were hidden behind ski masks and introduced themselves to Gilbert as Marxist revolutionaries. One quoted Che Guevara — “In a revolution, you either win or die.” Another called white people “the Beast” and insisted King was killed because he fought “colonization.” Today, these men are probably tenured professors at America’s elite universities.
In his 1997 book The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities, Fred Siegel describes “riot ideology” as when“public officials are reluctant to confront public disorder and crime for fear of violent opposition.” Riot ideology was once a hallmark of Marxist groups like the Black Panthers and Weather Underground. It is now ignored by the mainstream media even as it has helped destroy America’s cities. The 2020 urban riots over the death of George Floyd cost an estimated $2 billion, a record.
In “Forever 1968,” a 2016 City Journal article, Siegel argued that “there is [a] continuity between the current moment and the never-ending sixties: the revival of Black Pantherism in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the new Eldridge Cleaver.” Siegel noted that “the sixties are sometimes associated with the idea of participatory democracy, but that concept was buried under the weight of Great Society bureaucracies.” Siegel pinpoints the main problem: “One feature of the sixties has endured: the glorification of violence…Violence incarnate was glamorized by the dashing, handsome, leather-clad Black Panthers and their gorgeous consorts. The Panthers colonized the minds of the New Left—particularly Students for a Democratic Society and its offshoot, the Weathermen—who longed to win their approval. Liberals were caught up in Panthermania, too.”
I should make clear that I do not know the politics of Adam Driver or George Pelecanos. We want the Anti-Communist Film Festival to cast a wide net, and these two men have indicated that they understand what it means to fight for freedom – and to resist totalitarianism.
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