History According to Glenn Beck

Viewers tuning into MSNBC at 5 p.m. on Friday would have seen Chris Matthews riffing on President Barack Obama's speech in Ohio, while CNN's "The Situation Room" led with the earthquake in Haiti.

But Fox News wasn't focusing on the day's news. Instead, host Glenn Beck ran through the atrocities of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara — "the true unseen history of Marxism, progressivism and communism" as Beck described it — with some implied lessons for today.

Over the past year, Beck has used images from Nazi rallies or the Soviet Union when stoking fears of creeping socialism in the United States. And he's often placed historical figures into the far-out theories he diagrams on his chalkboard. But in Friday's hourlong documentary, titled "The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free ... or Die," Beck doubled down on the use of imagery pulled from the 20th century's totalitarian past to make a point about citizens needing to be wary of government overreach in the present.



Beck, in teasing the documentary Thursday, claimed that "progressives" don't want the public to know about this history and that it's "not being taught in classrooms in America."

Not everyone who watched his history lesson was convinced — especially some professional historians.

Clemson University professor Steven Marks, author of "How Russia Shaped the Modern World," said that while Beck doesn't explicitly tie the left-wing totalitarian regimes of the past to contemporary liberals, that's what "he's hinting at here."

"No one in their right mind is going to defend Stalin or Mao or Che Guevara," Marks said. "The implication is that this is what's going to happen if Democrats get their way. This is just a complete lie."

Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Life at Boston College, said that the film not only isn't accurate, but that Beck "lives in a complete alternative universe."

As an example, he said, Beck mentions how the Nazis supported programs like universal health care as evidence that their ideology may have more to do with the left than the totalitarian right.

Nazi Germany was "not evil because of their economic program," said Wolfe, which he noted included a few programs designed to promote public health.

"It was evil,” he said, “ because it aimed at the extermination of European Jewry."

Syracuse professor Robert Thompson, who runs the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, said that from a structural standpoint, Beck's special "wasn't anything terribly new." He pointed out that hosts like Edward R. Murrow did single-issue documentaries, occasionally "with a very distinct point of view."

Still, he said it was unusual for Beck to switch formats, but perhaps, "the temptation to use the considerable rhetorical tools made possible by the documentary form was probably irresistible."

Indeed, like typical documentaries, there were the talking heads in front of a black background, including a number of prominent conservatives and libertarians — Jonah Goldberg, National Review writer and author of "Liberal Fascism"; Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of Reason.tv and Reason.com; Lee Edwards, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation — and even outgoing Ukranian president Viktor Yushchenko.

Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown, described Beck's special as "a classic piece of anti-Communist propaganda" which he said doesn't mean most of the facts are wrong, but that the host's selectively using some, while ignoring others.

For instance, Kazin said, Beck doesn't mention that "the first anti-Communists were democratic socialists and anarchists like Emma Goldman" or that "socialists in Europe after 1945 were allies of the U.S. against the USSR."

"Totalitarianism has been around as a concept since the late 1930's, but Beck seems to have discovered it this week," Kazin said.
“State inhumanity — under different economic systems — is a terrible fact of history,” Kazin said. “And, yes, Communist regimes were among the worst of them. But Beck is only interested in ‘exposing’ inhumanity on the left. And that's why his film is propaganda.”
But Edwards said he was impressed by Beck's "solid research" and willingness to take on "still-prevailing myths about Che Guevara and Mao." In Edwards opinion, it was "one of the best documentaries [he's] seen on communism," and rare in today's media world.

"I think this suggests the line on Beck that he is some kind of wild man is just not true," Edwards said. "This guy is thoughtful and interested in history. How many journalists in cable, print or whatever have this kind of interest in giving you a historical context. I think he should be commended for that."

Gillespie, who covered the Hollywood-ization and marketing of Guevara as a fashion icon for Reason, agreed that Beck is doing something no one else is doing in cable news — which even critics would probably agree with, although for different reasons.

"Beck may be a strange mix of comedy and pathos, but he's also bringing substantive discussion to cable news and creating arguments that can be engaged, refuted or amended," Gillespie said after the film aired.

Goldberg, reached before the show aired, described what he'd seen of it as "very hard-hitting."

But that doesn't mean he believes the historical arguments are meant to infer that the current Democratic regime could commit atrocities on the level of Hitler or Stalin. "If they're trying to make the case that Obama's going to lead to anything like the 65 million killed or the concentration camps, I'd be the first to condemn it," Goldberg said.

A Fox News spokesperson did not return a request to speak with a network executive about this program.

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