Racism In Cold War Film

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The Cold War FBI connected antiracism to communism in postwar US cinema by seeing it as a strategic measure taken by communist for marginalized people to create an uprising and to incentivise them to go against their country, which has rejected them and turn to communism. African Americans and other groups of marginalized people such as Jewish, Irish catholics, and women were some of the groups of people targeted by communist according to the Cold War FBI by using anti racist rhetoric and other tactics to recruit marginalized groups of people. Films made during the Cold War with underlying messages of inequality, American racism among many other truths, stirred up fear with the FBI and other agencies and led to trials and accusations of American …show more content…

The Red Menace (1949) promotes debunking the Communist Party's perceived goals by showing the true hypocrisy found in the party in terms of anti racism as well as by exposing Communist elitism. Robert Chester’s article, World War II in American Popular Culture, 1945-Present, describes the change in representation of fear and danger in the United States, going from anti fascism to anti communism and states, “In American culture, the Soviets replaced the Nazis and the Japanese as the most dangerous purveyors of global violence, a transition perhaps most evident in cinema” (Chester, 85). Connecting the Soviet Union and other Eastern Europeans with communism is present in many American films, where Russians and other foreigners become generic communist. The Red Menace supports this idea with two of the leading characters Yvonne Kraus and Nina Petrovka, members of the Communist party with foreign …show more content…

In The Red Menace, Mollie O’Flaherty, is an Irish-American communist member who embodies a prostitute, who helps bait and recruit men to the Communist party. She is an intellectual person but at the same time is seen as not fully understanding communism and what it stands for. Her position in society is very controversial for the movies period, and she embodies what a women should not do. Mollie denounces Catholicism and feels like she is working for a better cause for the party. Mollie states that she joined the Communist party after her father died from being exploited by her bosses, and this is meant to show a contradiction, as her body is being exploited to recruit

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