Congressman says NO is treason

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24. Actually, she was known in fascist circles, particularly among White Russians/Baltics like Rosenberg

Last edited Sun Mar 25, 2012, 09:45 AM - Edit history (3)

Both Rand and Rosenberg were anti-communist exiles from the Bolshevik revolution. Rosenberg was a leading member of Aufbau Vereinigung (AV), Reconstruction Organisation, a conspiratorial group of White Russian émigrés which had a critical influence on early Nazi policy. Rand was a disillusioned Kerensky Liberal who moved Right after she arrived in California. There were a couple extra degrees of separation between their White Russian circles, on account of the vicious anti-semitism of Rosenberg's Nazi associates.

The White Russians and fascist sympathizer networks intermixed in Hollywood, where Rand made a living as a costume designer at RKO and a writer for other studios; they were a disparate group that included some very powerful figures, including several studio heads. Columbia Pictures' Harry Coln, Nicholas Schenck, and Louis B. Mayer were all admirers of Mussolini. The fascist tinge and fascination with Mussolini was more of a Depression-era fear of Communism and a common aesthetic with the Italian Fascists than the sort of committed racialism that animated Rosenberg and some American antisemites, such as Henry Ford. The public face of Right-wing Hollywood was the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), formed in the early 1940s by rightists such as Adolph Monjou, John Wayne, and Ronald Reagan, at the time that Rand was emerging as a prominent figure in her own rightist circle.

Rand authored a pamphlet for the Alliance, entitled Screen Guide for Americans, where she wrote:

The purpose of the Communists in Hollywood is not the production of political movies openly advocating Communism. Their purpose is to corrupt our moral premises by corrupting non-political movies--by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories- thus making people absorb the basic principles of Collectivism by indirection and implication. The principle of free speech requires that we do not use police force to forbid the Communists the expression of their ideas--which means that we do not pass laws forbidding them to speak. But the principle of free speech does not require that we furnish the Communists with the means to preach their ideas, and does not imply that we owe them jobs and support to advocate our own destruction at our own expense. - Text form The Passion of Ayn Rand by Barbara Branden, p. 199