As Variety reports, Universal has canceled the release of The Hunt, previously set for September 27. The cancelation comes after three mass shootings and Universal said in a statement that “now is not the right time to release this film.” On the other hand, “We stand by our filmmakers,” associated with “this satirical social thriller.” Potential audiences might find “satirical” a bit odd, given the content.
“There’s some on-the-nose dialogue in the film itself making its political allegory even more clear,” explains James Hibberd at Entertainment Weekly. For example, one character asks “Did anyone see what our ratf—-er-in-chief just did?” Fortunately, “at least the hunt’s coming up. Nothing better than going out to the manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables,” as Hibberd notes, “referring to Hillary Clinton’s term for some of Trump’s supporters.”
In the CNN report on the cancelation, “every year ‘elites’ hunt average Americans from states like Wyoming and Mississippi for sport.” Americans in all states have good cause to wonder if the movie was more like cinéma vérité, as studios like to say, based in part on actual events.
Once at the controls of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Josef Stalin set out to collectivize agriculture, putting it under complete control of state planners. Small independent farmers, dubbed kulaks, resisted the plan. So in 1932-33, Stalin set out to abolish the kulaks as a class by starving them to death, a method of mass execution Stalin pioneered.
Millions perished, but for Anna Louise Strong, the American editor of Moscow News, “Stalin had merely analyzed and authorized what farmhands were instinctively doing.” According to Walter Duranty of the New York Times, there was no forced famine at all and the collectivization of agriculture was a great success. Jump ahead to contemporary America.
In the progressive vision, the United States is inexorably moving toward a society planned by an elite vanguard that has somehow escaped the conditioning that traps everybody else in false consciousness. Several Democrats running for president proclaim themselves democratic socialists, a theme F.A. Hayek unraveled in The Road to Serfdom, in the chapter “The Totalitarians in Our Midst.”
As the future Nobel laureate explained, “democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who now wish for it would be prepared to accept the consequences.”
In his chapter “Why the Worst Get on Top,” Hayek writes:
Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator will soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society trending towards totalitarianism.
Hayek understood that “ruthlessness is required for the task” and in such a system, “it is easier for people to agree on a negative program – on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off – than on any positive task.”
Under a democratic socialist president in America, the imposition of the Green New Deal, government monopoly health care, and other “progressive” goals, would require social disruptions on a massive scale. Like the kulaks, many Americans would resist, and that would call for action against the hated deplorables. The ruthlessness required for the task would be easier with a film like The Hunted in theaters, and the nation has already seen a preview.
In 2017, Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson shot up Republicans at a baseball game, nearly killing Rep. Steve Scalise. This attempted mass murder evoked little protest or outrage from the establishment media. A larger scale assault on the deplorables would be accompanied by politicians’ cries of “racist,” “white supremacist,” “Islamophobe,” etc., faithfully echoed by the establishment media.
The hunt for red America would be easier to pull off if the democratic socialist regime trending toward totalitarianism took away or diminished the people’s right to keep and bear arms. For reference see Stephen P. Halbrook’s Gun Control In the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State.” In similar style, the Ottoman Turks also disarmed the Armenians, as Peter Balakian documented in The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.
As Variety noted about The Hunt, “studio leadership ultimately determined that the film could wait.” Perhaps it will hit theatres sometime after November, 2020.
In 1991, meanwhile, President Ronald Reagan awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Friedrich Hayek, one year before he passed away. Back in the day, in The Road to Serfdom, Hayek left some thoughts on how to avoid deadly outcomes from the totalitarians in our midst.
“If the democracies themselves abandon the supreme ideal of the freedom and happiness of individual,” they in effect admit “that their civilization is not worth preserving.” Therefore, says Hayek, “we must retain the belief in the traditional values for which we have stood in the past and must have the moral courage stoutly to defend the ideals which our enemies attack.”
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