A few weeks ago I decried TCM’s glaring blind spot for Communism in connection with its broadcast of Saul Turrell’s Oscar-winning 1979 documentary Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist. Introducing the film, host Dave Karger referred to difficulties in Robeson’s career as a result of his devotion to “civil rights.”
The documentary is posted here. I haven’t double checked to confirm that it covers Robeson’s trips to the Soviet Union. However, it shows Robseson going to Spain to sing for the Republican forces. Toward the end it shows him singing a Chinese Red Army marching song that became the regime’s first national anthem.
An awake viewer might begin to get the idea that Robeson was an ardent believer in the Communist cause whether or not he ever formally joined the CPUSA. The documentary — like Karger — never expressly addresses the matter of Robeson’s long devotion to Stalin’s cause.
When I wrote last month I omitted Ronald Radosh’s definitive treatment of Robeson’s Stalinism in the 2019 American Interest essay “The price of self-delusion.” In the perennial war of memory against forgetting, I forgot!
In my comments I cited Harvey Klehr’s review of Martin Duberman’s biography of Robeson. The Radosh essay constitutes an invaluable contribution to the recurring issue of which Robeson’s story is symbolic, if not representative, and that is the suppression of historical truth in the service of liberal mythology.
