The Communist Holocaust

This move Reds glorifies those who created a Holocaust even larger than Hitler's. The Soviet Union was a terror/nightmare state that murdered tens of millions of people.

To be fair Reds did address the treatment of those deemed counter-revolutionaries as being murdered without question.

"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not".

Hmm... I believe most educated persons know the Soviet Union (technically founded in 1922, after John Reed's death) executed millions upon millions of individuals, as well as systematically exterminated several ethnic minorities. I think many viewers understand the USSR was a brutal, corrupt, authoritarian state that ultimately became a living nightmare and a hell on earth. Few intelligent people would deny that.

However Warren Beatty might (weakly) argue that his peculiar film focuses on international socialism as a broader, pre-1917 revolutionary movement versus socialism manifested as an iron-booted regime. Many of the characters in Beatty's film were later executed by the Soviet regime in show trials (i.e. Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek, etc). Also, some like Emma Goldman became disenchanted with Russia. Goldman published "My Disillusionment in Russia" (1923) and loudly denounced the new regime for betraying its professed goals. Of course, John Reed died in 1920, and Louise Bryant died 1936. Who knows what their later views might have been circa the 1950s regarding the Soviet gulags. Perhaps, like Goldman, Reed and Bryant might have become disillusioned. We'll never know.

That being said, I agree there is a cognitive dissonance in most Hollywood films when it comes to politics, and I agree that Beatty's film glosses over bloody, indefensible events that were unfolding in Russia even when Reed and Bryant were there circa 1919–1920. His film exists in a bubble of naivete. However, his film is nowhere near as bizarre, appalling, and cockeyed as Lewis Milestone's infamous "North Star" (1943).

I wouldn't say the movie "glorifies" the soviets at all. It shows us how the Bolsheviks took advantage of Reed's (Beatty) idealism when they changed his speech to appeal to Muslims. It was pretty even handed in telling Reed's story, and we also see the disillusionment of Keaton and Maureen Stapleton.

Just love when someone damns a film they obviously haven't seen. If the OP had seen Reds, he would've known that the Bolshevik revolution is shown as creating the mess that it did - perhaps most obviously underscored in the scene where Emma Goldman enumerates the failures of the Red government, and sums it all up by saying, "It doesn't work!" Far from being glorified, the Bolshevik government is shown as tyrannical and inept, and the American communists as naive idealists.

Could you imagine if a movie in modern America had been made like this glorifying the Nazi takeover of Germany?

You could say the same aboyt a film of the French Revution. Great hopes and exhilaration at the start, then a degeneration to terror and dictatorship.

This movie does just the opposite. Watch all of it.

Could you imagine if a movie in modern America had been made like this glorifying the Nazi takeover of Germany? Could you also imagine the response if people made benign comments on imdb.com about aspects of that film while ignoring the elephant elephant in the living room; that they're glorifying the ultimate evil? What's happening here is even worse. This move Reds glorifies those who created a Holocaust even larger than Hitler's. The Soviet Union was a terror/nightmare state that murdered tens of millions of people. Let me repeat that important point, the Soviet Holocaust was worse than the Nazi Holocaust. Beatty and Keaton were despicable for contributing to this movie the way they did. They are morally worse than neo-Nazi skinheads. Our popular culture and public education system do a terrible job of informing us of the Communist holocaust that murdered around 100 million people. If it did that job properly no one would tolerate this horrible movie.

Dear me. Where a lack of information is abundant, competitive outrage fills the void. I would suggest that you give the people here credit for being at least a little bit aware of the downside when they watched the film and maybe even crediting them with the ability to watch it with an open mind.

This is not a recruiting film for the Communist party, nor is it a glorification of any one person or thing. It is a film about one of the most momentous events in history (whether it was right or wrong is largely irrelevant).

I would also suggest you take a chill pill and read a few books about what is for the West, a poorly understood series of events in a country we have little understanding of. The film doesn't really change this. Pointing to a few stereotypes and links to later events do nothing for your argument. There is no disputing the evils that happened (though the numbers are both notoriously rubbery and useless or misleading on their own). Start here:

"The Russian Revolution - A People's Tragedy" by Orlando Figes.

If that is too big, try his other book "Revolutionary Russia - 1891-1991"

If you are interested in things military, "The Eastern Front, 1914-1917" by Norman Stone will give you a great head start before launching into Figes' tomes.

That just deals with the Revolution. There are lots of other books worth reading on other aspects of the Soviet Union. But delving into this, you will soon realise that it was incredibly complex and can barely be summed up in Figes' original 800+ pages, much less a few posts on the internet. In fact he hardly scratches the surface. Issues of aggressive nationalism, ethnic diversity, religious conviction and even the sheer size of the place make it abundantly clear that we are not dealing with a homogenous society in the way we might with say the United States (which, for all its differences, still functions essentially in unison).

The subject is incredibly complex and the more you read, the more complex it gets. How anyone could run that part of the world defies my imagination.