Sanitising the past

This is the sub-title which explains more closely than the actual title what the article is about: How and why Hollywood distorts history by filming it with a leftist lens. History in a post-modern world is what you want it to be, not an actual account of what happened. The featured distortion of the article is the film Bridge of Spies of which we find:

Bridge of Spies is typical Hollywood myth-making in that it is false on two levels. The lesser level is that of incident, of juicing the details to make a more riveting tale and to create a role more attractive for Hanks, who is so wary of playing any characteristic other than likeable, principled, and trustworthy that he is gradually becoming a sort of Madame Tussaud’s wax figure of himself. So: Donovan’s house wasn’t attacked by gunfire, he didn’t witness East Germans getting gunned down at the Berlin Wall, didn’t get mugged for his overcoat by a gang of East German youths, wasn’t harassed by the East German police, and didn’t have to overcome the hostility of the CIA up to and including the moments at the Glienicke Bridge where Donovan secured the release of both the downed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and a young American economics graduate student named Frederic Pryor, who was being held by East Berlin police. In the film, the CIA is so uninterested in Pryor’s release that the agency effectively works at cross-purposes to Donovan, who insists that both men must be freed. “That was the biggest error,” Pryor said this fall. “It didn’t happen like it did in the movie at all.”

Nor did Pryor dramatically get caught in East Berlin while momentarily venturing from West to East to help a woman at the exact moment when the cement and barbed wire of the Wall were hastily being thrown across that section of Berlin. Pryor didn’t even know until last summer that a movie that dramatized events in his life was in the works (Bridge of Spies had already been filmed by then). He hadn’t been allowed to see, much less comment on, the script.

The higher level of its distortion is to create some kind of moral equivalence between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. What caught my eye particularly was this, which reminded me of our Malcolm.

The Constitution is “what makes us Americans. It’s all that makes us Americans,” Donovan declares. A nice thought, but that still doesn’t obligate Donovan to work for a Soviet agent any more than it obligates any individual lawyer to defend, say, Dylann Roof. If anything, the question of which clients to accept is an issue for ethicists of the Bar, but “I’m defending a spy because the Bar Association asked me to” isn’t quite so resonant a declaration as one that invokes the Constitution.

Among the strongest evidence that Turnbull is a man of the left in everything he stands for is his role in defending Peter Wright, the MI5 agent who wrote his book Spycatcher outlining everything he could find to discredit and reveal the counter-espionage efforts of the West. Both Wright and Turnbull are heroes of the left because they found against Margaret Thatcher who tried to prevent the book from being published. People tell me that this is what barristers do, they defend their clients whatever their personal views may be. You believe that and you can believe anything. No one who has ever briefed counsel in an important case briefs someone who is not absolutely onside. That is Malcolm’s side. It remains an unmitigated disgrace that he now leads the party of the right in Australia. No one should trust a thing he does.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.