[Marxism] Indiana Jones makes communists see red

[Pat Costello <pt_costello@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080523/od_nm/indianajones_dc;_ylt=Av2aaWvaR4Do7.yLKbpgrr6s0NUE

Indiana Jones makes communists see red

By Denis Pinchuk Fri May 23, 11:09 AM ET

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Russian Communist
party members condemned the new
Indiana Jones' film on Friday as crude anti-Soviet
propaganda that distorted history and called
for it to be banned from Russian screens.


"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"
stars Harrison Ford as an archeologist in
1957 competing with an evil KGB agent, played by Cate
Blanchett, to find a skull
 endowed with mystic powers.

"What galls is how together with America we defeated
Hitler, and how we sympathized
when Bin Laden hit them. But they go ahead and scare
kids with Communists. These people
 have no shame," said Viktor Perov, a Communist Party
member in Russia's second city of St Petersburg.

The comments were made at a local Communist party
meeting and posted on its
 Internet site www.kplo.ru.

The film, the fourth in the hugely successful Indiana
Jones series, went on release in
Russian cinemas on Thursday. Russian media said it was
being shown on 808 screens,
 the widest ever release for a Hollywood movie.

In past episodes Indiana Jones has escaped from Nazi
soldiers, an Egyptian snake pit,
a Bedouin swordsman and a child-enslaving Indian
demigod.

RUNNING DOGS

"Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett (are) second-rate
actors, serving as the running dogs
 of the CIA. We need to deprive these people of the
right of entering the country," said
another party member, Andrei Gindos.

Though the ranks of the once all-powerful Communist
Party have dwindled since
Soviet times, its members see themselves as the
defenders of the achievements of
 the old Soviet Union.

Other communists said the generation born after the
1991 collapse of the Soviet Union
 were being fed revisionist, Hollywood history. They
advocated banning the
Indiana Jones outright to prevent "ideological
sabotage."

"Our movie-goers are teenagers who are completely
unaware of what happened in 1957,"
St Peterburg Communist Party chief Sergei Malinkovich
told Reuters.

"They will go to the cinema and will be sure that in
1957 we made trouble for the
United States and almost started a nuclear war."

"It's rubbish ... In 1957 the communists did not run
with crystal skulls throughout
the U.S. Why should we agree to that sort of lie and
let the West trick our youth?"

Vladimir Mukhin, another member of the local Communist
Party, said in comments
posted on the Internet site that he would ask Russia's
Culture Ministry to ban the
film for its "anti-Soviet propaganda."

The Indiana Jones film is not the first Hollywood
production to offend Russian sensibilities.

In 1998 the Russian parliament demanded the government
explain why the Hollywood film
 "Armageddon" - which depicted a dilapidated Russian
space station that blows apart
 because of a leaky pipe - was allowed onto Russian
cinema screens.

A government official at the time said the film,
starring Bruce Willis as the leader
of a team of astronauts sent to deflect an asteroid on
a collision course with Earth,
 "mocked the achievements of Soviet and Russian
technology."

(Writing by Chris Baldwin, editing by Richard
Balmforth)



      

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