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The hypocrisy of Sean Penn
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I missed the Oscars and yes, I know the Academy Awards are well behind us, but I just happened to come across Sean Penn’s acceptance speech and I was stunned at the hypocrisy of it.
First, let me say that I think Sean Penn is one of the best actors I’ve ever seen. When it comes to plying his trade, he is one of cinema’s finest craftsmen. I thought his performance in Mystic River was brilliant, and as a child of the 80s I’ll never forget his turn as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
However, when Penn steps off the silver screen and into politics, he’s an unbelievable hack. Here is what he said accepting the award for Best Actor.
“You commie, homo loving sons a guns…I think it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grand children’s eyes if they continue that way…I’m very proud to live in a country that is willing to elect an elegant man president and country for all its toughness creates courageous artists…”
Forget for a moment Penn’s praise for “elegant” Barack Obama even though Obama opposes gay marriage, the very position Penn considers shameful. There is a ton of historical irony in Penn’s call for Proposition 8 supporters to reflect on their great shame and his lionization of “courageous artists”.
First some background.
Sean Penn is the son of one Leo Penn. Leo Penn was a Hollywood actor and communist during the CPUSA’s heyday in the film colony. Leo refused to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and was blacklisted with many other Hollywood communists. However, Penn was also an ardent Stalinist, denounced Franklin Roosevelt as a war monger, advocated for American neutrality toward Europe, and supported the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939—which eviscerated Poland and set the stage for the Katyn Forest Massacre. It should be noted as well that Josef Stalin is responsible for the murder of over 20 million people, whether it be from the Ukrainian Terror Famine, the Gulag, or the Great Terror.
Of course, when Hitler abrogated the treaty by invading the Soviet Union in June 1941 Penn, the Hollywood Reds and the rest of the CPUSA became full-throated supporters of FDR and American intervention into World War II.
The quick 180 degree turn by the CPUSA was due to the fact that Penn and his party comrades took their marching orders directly from Moscow and the Communist International (COMINTERN), which Josef Stalin personally controlled.
This is the shameful past the younger Penn would rather you not bring up. It is hard to ignore the irony though as Sean is a shill for thugs like Saddam Hussein and Mahmoud Ahmedijindad and Hugo Chavez. Like father, like son.
To be fair Leo Penn like the other Hollywood communists did not deserve to be blacklisted. However, their defenders use that point to obscure the larger truth about Hollywood communists and American communists in general. In the conventional telling of the story the Hollywood Ten were innocent liberals, martyrs caught up in the dark night of fascism, which descended upon the nation after World War II. In this telling, thinly veiled propaganda movies like Mission to Moscow and The North Star were not straight party line advocacy rather they were art. To put a spin on Barbra Streisand’s vapid film about the blacklist this version of events could be called The Way We Weren’t.
Hollywood Reds were not “courageous artists” they were Stalinist bootlicks, who were called on the carpet for toeing the line for a murderous, megalomaniacal dictator and his brutal regime. In short, they were part and parcel of an organization controlled by a less than friendly foreign government, an in many cases whose members committed treason against their own country on behalf of that government.
I doubt Penn feels any shame for Leo’s useful idiocy, or his own for that matter. However, his call for Prop 8 supporters to “…reflect and anticipate their great shame…” is its own interesting historical irony.
Hollywood communists were masters at shaming those who disagreed with them, even their own. The prime example is the case of Hollywood Ten screenwriter Albert Maltz. Maltz earned the wrath of his fellow travelers because he had the temerity to publish an article in the communist journal New Masses (once edited by Whittaker Chambers), in which he praised the work of non-Stalinist writer James T. Farrell, even though Farrell was at one time a Trotskyite. His fellow party members summoned Maltz to a meeting where they subjected him to the most foul form of degradation. Humiliated, Maltz recanted his argument and penned a retraction to his own article in New Masses in order to stave off expulsion from the party. To be sure Leo Penn was not part of this particular incident, but it is typical of how American communists emulated the ways of their Soviet masters. They didn’t take slights lightly and grudges carried on through generations. Witness the reaction of some Hollywood leftists to the honorary Oscar bestowed upon director Elia Kazan in 1999.
Kazan, a brief member of the CPUSA, director of classics like A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, was one of the few who “named names” to HUAC. For his testimony Kazan was persona non grata in many Hollywood circles.
The award sparked protest by blacklist survivors, and Sean Penn was a signatory to a Daily Variety ad that said Kazan “'validated the blacklisting of thousands…his action did enormous damage to the motion picture industry.” As with Albert Maltz the signatories demanded an apology from Kazan for testifying.
This is telling since the central lesson of Kazan’s widely renowned masterpiece On the Waterfront is the value of testifying i.e., “naming names”. In the end, the film’s protagonist Terry Mallory, played by Marlon Brando, testifies against the mob instead of staying “deaf and dumb.” At the time of his testimony in 1952, Kazan rightly noted that communism was a “dangerous and alien conspiracy…and liberal must speak out against it.” He reiterated that sentiment 36 years later in his memoirs stating that he would do the same thing again.
Sean Penn has no qualms heaping mounds of shame on those who disagree with them. However, his self righteousness rings hollow given the fact that he is the ideological and literal heir to a group of Hollywood artists, who unflinchingly supported and apologized for one of history’s worst tyrants.
But keep quiet, Penn and his fellow travellers don't like it if you speak out about their shame.
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