The other day Lynn Redgrave (67 years old) succumbed to breast cancer. Unlike her notorious older sister Vanessa and her recently deceased Trotskyite brother Corin, she never showed Marxist tendencies and by all accounts was a classy lady who loved both her adopted home America and her native Britain. Vanessa’s daughter Natasha Richardson who tragically died in a skiing accident last year also seemed to be a decent normal person. As this article shows, the less said about the rest of the bizarre Redgrave family, the better. Talent does not necessarily mean brains.
Note – as a commenter writes – “Corin and Vanessa Redgrave were not born in squalid poverty. They are another harsh reminder that the truly poor and dispossessed rarely engage in radical politics. Nope, that dubious honor usually goes to the sons and daughters of fairly affluent parents.”
by Ron Radosh
There is no better précis of how the Left thinks about the world, and acts on it, than the British journalist Nick Cohen’s article appearing in the new issue of Standpoint. Cohen writes a candid appraisal of what left-wing politics did to the mind and life of the late actor Corin Redgrave, brother of the more famous Vanessa, who like her brother, is a lifetime member of a small fanatic Trotskyist sect, the Workers Revolutionary Party, led by a man named Gerry Healy. The group was so fanatic that it accused Trotsky’s American followers of having been responsible for his murder in Mexico, ignoring all the evidence that it was an NKVD operation orchestrated by Joseph Stalin.
As Cohen notes, all the Redgraves are good actors. Vanessa could, while she denounced Israel and praised Palestinian terrorists, at the same time appear on American television as a Jewish concentration camp victim in a Holocaust drama. I used to say, when people asked for my position on the blacklist of the 1950s, that I despise Vanessa Redgrave’s politics, but would go at a minute’s notice to see her perform in a Broadway play. I praised her acting ability, and her prowess as an actor did not make me pay an ounce of attention to her political harangues.
This, of course, is not how the British media (so similar to the American media in this regard) dealt with her brother’s politics after his recent death. All the usual sources praised Redgrave as a man who fought “injustice and oppression,” and who tried “to make a better world.” That is certainly the case, if by a better world one means the regimented police states so favored by Marxist-Leninist regimes, to which Redgrave devoted his life.
As Cohen reveals, the truth is that both Vanessa and Corin “spent their adult lives serving a repellent totalitarian party led by a rapist and a friend not of ‘human rights’ and ‘justice’, as Radio 4 pretended, but of dictatorship and terror.” Cohen paints a picture of the paranoia that surrounded the Trotskyist party’s headquarters in Clapham, and the leader’s admonition that all members “had to cut off all ties with everyone except the chosen few.”
Read the rest here: The Truth about the Redgraves and the ’60s Left: Kudos to journalist Nick Cohen
Tags: Ron Radosh
