Kanye West, onetime popular rapper and entertainer, recently made the news with his despicable praise of National Socialist dictator Adolf Hitler. Sadly, praising socialist dictators is nothing new in either the popular culture or the mainstream media.
Appearing on the Alex Jones show while wearing a black mask, Kanye West demonstrated why (in his own words) he has struggled with mental illness.
West told host Jones that “every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler. I like Hitler.”
Jones tried to rebuff West, saying, “The Nazis were thugs and did really bad things,” but West did not relent, telling Jones, “But they did good things, too. We gotta stop dissing the Nazis all the time … I love Nazis.” West offered their building of the autobahn as an example of the “good things” the Nazis did.
West insisted that Hitler “didn’t kill six million Jews. The Holocaust is not what happened.” Besides that, he added, Hitler “had a really cool outfit and he was a really good architect.”
Before he appeared on Alex Jones’ show, West had visited former President Donald Trump at his Florida home, bringing along a noted anti-Semite, Nick Fuentes. Trump later said that he met with West to persuade him not to run for president in 2024, and that not only did he not know Fuentes was coming, but he didn’t even know who Fuentes was beforehand.
This meeting took place before West’s rant, not after. But of course the national media has used the meeting to imply that Trump is himself anti-Semitic, and to associate the former president with West’s incendiary rhetoric, despite Trump’s pro-Israeli policies such as moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
As bizarre and reprehensible as West’s remarks are, they unfortunately are not unique among American entertainers and mainstream media. Foreign dictators have often been praised by both.
A prime example is the way the American entertainment industry, the American press, and even the American government heaped praise on Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, a man responsible for even more civilian deaths than Adolf Hitler.
Stalin engineered a famine in Ukraine, the Volga Basin, the Kuban and Don regions of the North Caucasus, and Kazakhstan in the winter of 1933-34. The Holodomor famine in Ukraine alone led to the loss of four million lives. Stalin expropriated all available grain and livestock in the country, using starvation as a weapon to break the resistance of the peasants to collectivization.
Walter Duranty of The New York Times even won a Pulitzer Prize for the lies he told in his reporting of the Stalin-engineered famine. Duranty later excused his praise for Stalin and his coverup of the mass murders of the Soviet dictator by saying, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” (It is thought that he borrowed the expression from Stalin and previous Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin.)
Another observer of the famine, Malcolm Muggeridge, wrote in The Guardian that “only the military and the G.P.U. [the secret police, forerunner of the KGB] are well-fed, the rest of the population obviously starving, obviously terrorized.” (It should be noted that “terrorism,” while often used to describe the tactics of non-government groups, originally was associated with governmental mass murders used to keep the populace in subjection.)
When others attempted to tell the truth about the crimes against humanity going on inside the Soviet Union, they were usually met in places like the United States and England with opposition and slander. Beatrice Webb, a British socialist, called Muggeridge’s reporting “a hysterical tirade.” George Bernard Shaw, another British socialist, dismissed it as right-wing slander of Stalin.
Opponents of Soviet communism were often derided as fascists and Nazi apologists (a tactic often used today), but Muggeridge was no defender of Hitler. He said the Nazis were basically “the same people, the same faces. It’s the same show.”
In other words, both the communists and the National Socialists (Nazis) were both socialist, totalitarian dictatorships.
In 1943, the movie Mission to Moscow came out, an adaptation of a 1941 book written by Joseph E. Davies, onetime U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. It was highly pro-Stalin and has been derided by those who do not favor Stalin’s murderous reign.
In the film, which is styled like a documentary, Davies tells the audience, “No leaders of a nation have been so misrepresented and misunderstood as those in the Soviet Union during those critical years between the two world wars.” President Franklin Roosevelt personally approved of the film’s creation, and so did Stalin — who was allowed to screen the movie.
New York Times film critic Bosley Crawther praised the film. Crawther would later be a fierce opponent of the anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy.
In the 1950s, The New York Times sent to Cuba a reporter who did a series of articles praising the bandit Fidel Castro as a devout Catholic and advocate of liberty. The articles boosted financial aid from Americans to Castro, and helped the communist revolutionary establish a Soviet-aligned communist dictatorship over the island. This led to the joke that Castro should appear in some of the paper’s promotional ads that it used at the time, with people saying, “I got my job through The New York Times.”
Over the years, entertainers like West who have uttered pro-Hitler remarks have been roundly and rightly castigated. But entertainers who praise communists have faced little problem. Jane Fonda, a Hollywood actress, went to Vietnam and posed for a photograph holding an anti-aircraft gun used to shoot down American pilots.
Then there was folk singer Woody Guthrie, who wrote for an official newspaper of the American Communist Party, using one of his many columns to praise Stalin for his invasion of Poland. Rather than being criticized for his adoration of a mass murderer, Guthrie is an object of admiration today in much of the popular culture. If someone ever brings up his support for Stalin, it is usually downplayed as being of no importance.
And despite the imprisonment in Communist China today of over one million political prisoners, NBA star Lebron James faces little condemnation for his overt support of the Chinese Communist Party.
Kanye West should be chastened for his support of Hitler, one of history’s worst monsters. But let us not forget how little — if any — condemnation is uttered today of the monster Joe Stalin. And note how criticism of the Chinese Communist Party is often considered somehow “racist” by many in the media and popular culture.
