One of the signal intellectual events of the early Cold War period was the 1950 publication of The God That Failed, in which six prominent figures explained why they broke from Communism. The book was a sensation because it came from leading figures on the left, rather than from longtime anti-Communists whose arguments and commitments were discounted. Most of the six distinguished and diverse figures, including the Hungarian Arthur Koestler, Italian novelist Ignazio Silone, and American Richard Wright, did not abandon their leftward dispositions, support for egalitarianism, or even socialist planning, but they did recognize the Soviet Union to be a malignant regime and the Communist parties in the West to be willing dupes of this massive ideological fraud. The stature of these writers as prominent figures of the left legitimized anti-Communism for other left-leaning people.
It was telling—and accurate—that Communism at that time was understood as a literal religious faith, with enforced orthodoxy and severe penalties for doctrinal heresy, complete with inquisitionary show trials to compel recantations or confessions of guilt, as well as public shunning of apostates. Which brings us to the new Michael Moore–produced documentary Planet of the Humans. It could almost (but not quite) have been called The Green God That Failed.
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