The 2027 Anti-Communist Film Festival is going to be lit. That is to say, it’s going to be lit in both meanings of the term — a fun time, as well as a literary time, with book recommendations that we can start to make this year.
The timing of the festival is great, coming after the successful first annual Anti-Communist Film Festival and after the blowout election that saw socialists and communists getting elected to major political positions in America.
The festival, which I dreamt up last year and launched in conjunction with the good folks at the Victims of Communism Museum, happens in October, and while we are putting next year’s roster together I wanted to recommend a book. This title came to my mind recently when I was out with a very liberal friend who was celebrating the Marxist blowout in the elections. I had some flyers from the Anti-Communist Film Festival in my backpack, and I produced one to hand to her — kind of a warning about what she had just voted for and what she could expect. She recoiled, afraid and unwilling to even touch the flyer. She literally stepped back to avoid touching it.
One thing I have always admired about conservatives is we will read anything or see any movie, even if it’s outright socialist propaganda. We aren’t afraid of books.
The book I want to recommend is Thomas Fleming’s 2009 The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War. In it Fleming coined a new term: Bibliophobia. Bibliophobia is the fear of touching a book because you might get contaminated by the contents. In The Anti-Communist Manifestos Fleming explores four anti-communist books: Darkness at Noon (1940), by Arthur Koestler; Out of the Night (1941), by Jan Valtinr; I Chose Freedom (1946), by Victor Kravchenko; and Witness (1952), by Whittaker Chambers.
Fleming explains that for many communists these books — and much other literature — was literally untouchable:
It is one thing to be afraid to read a book, and quite another to be afraid to touch it. The four books to which we are about to turn became for the Communist cause metaphorically untouchable; but the literature reveals a phenomenon yet more dramatic, literal untouchability. Walter Ciszek was an American Jesuit of Polish ancestry who spent a quarter century of persecuted religious ministry in various Soviet prisons, labor camps, and those remote provincial towns and cities with unfamiliar names that were the KGB’s favorite sites of exile for liberated prisoners. In every one of these places Ciszek found a hunger for his sacramental ministrations, and surprising opportunities to supply them. One day (this was in his post-Gulag period of exiled “freedom”) he decided to visit another priest of his acquaintance. With nearly supernaturally awful timing he arrived at his friend’s lodgings at a moment when the priest himself was out but the NKVD [Soviet police] was in. That is, the police were in the very act of conducting a search of the man’s quarters. “The agents were going through everything, examining things thoroughly, then replacing them carefully. The search dragged on until almost 1 a.m., with one very curious incident: among the bookshelves they found a missal and a prayer book; one of the young agents was afraid even to touch them.”
Fleming goes on:
That would have been about 1959, and suggests that the incidence of Soviet bibliophobia had not greatly decreased in two decades. For twenty years earlier, in Moscow, Markoosha Fischer was trying to take her mind off the purges by renewing her lapsed career as an expert translator of Western books into Russian. She went to the head of the State Publishing House with several possible works she had brought back from a recent trip abroad. These included Arthur Koestler’s account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War and I. J. Singer’s Brothers Ashkenazi, which had appeared to considerable applause in 1936. Speaking of the Singer book, Fischer mentioned in a matter-of-fact way that a part that was “anti-Soviet” would have to be edited out. “He was paging through the book while I talked. When I said ‘anti-Soviet,’ he literally dropped the book as if it burned him.” Fleming noted the irony “that book-burners should themselves be burned by books.”
It’s tempting to say leftists are like vampires and pro-Western books like a crucifix to them, but Fleming notes that some of the great anti-communists of the 20th century were not saints. “The moral relationship between an author’s life and work is a question with a troubled history going back at least to Plato,” Fleming writes. “All four of the authors dealt with in this book attract my full attention but only at best my partial admiration. The life experience of each, which included that special form of purgatorial fire Communism orchestrated for its apostates, would have been enough to test even the strongest character.”
Fleming explores the life of Arthur Koestler, the author of the classic Darkness at Noon, as “a modern genius” who could nonetheless be boorish towards women. Jan Valtin, author of the huge bestseller Out of the Night, “was by his own testimony a professional thug for half his adult life.” Fleming adds that Valtin “was probably a murderer, though his time spent in San Quentin was only for attempted murder.” Like many former Soviet citizens, Victor Kravchenko, author of I Chose Freedom, “never entirely succeeded in leaving behind him the evidences of dishonest servility and self-preserving self-centeredness that the experience of the 1930s required of so many Soviet bureaucrats. Even Whittaker Chambers, the author of the classic Witness, “has to have been among the most divisively controversial Americans of the twentieth century” and “lacked any kind of public graciousness that might counteract the fierce attacks and smears unleashed upon him. He combined, unpleasingly, an unconvincing Quaker meekness with the grumpiness of the prophet without honor in his own land.”
In his book Out of the Night, Jan Valtin writes this: “A man lives his life only when he is marching, I thought, when he keeps marching onwards at any price. When he stops marching onwards, he decays. The joy of life is the joy of the experience that comes from feeling one's own strength.” Valtin also calls his former communist comrades "the unflinching prisoners of a grandiose make-believe.”