There is a scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino's revisionist take on the Manson murders, in which the fictional members of the family blame movies for their crimes. The real answer is less cinematic and more political. The Manson family’s crimes were part of a culture of leftist violence.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of the many ways that American leftists evade that reckoning.
After the murders, one of the Manson family wrote “pig” in Sharon Tate’s blood on the door. The radical act carried out in California thrilled fellow Weathermen radicals halfway around the country.
"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" Bernardine Dohrn gloated at a Weathermen war council.
Dohrn and other members of the leftist group understood the horrifying murders as a radical act that normalized violence. And Dohrn, a Weatherman terrorist, saw violence as an inspirational tool for shattering the norms of society. That was why the Weathermen adopted the ‘fork salute’.
The horrifying reality of the sorts of people that would do that is at odds with the media’s normalization of leftist radicals as principled activists reacting to racism and the Vietnam War. The radicals are routinely humanized and their victims are forgotten. History is entombed with the dead.
And so The Tablet decided to give Jonah Raskin, who had participated in the Weathermen, and later promoted the hateful works of the violent Communist terror group, a forum for his fond memories.
"I could wallow in nostalgia about my days with the Weather Underground in the early 1970s: at Coney Island with Bernardine Dohrn, eating Bill Ayers’ soufflés and Jeff Jones’ homemade breads," he begins.
Dohrn’s fork celebration of the murder of a pregnant woman had taken place in 1969.
 |
| Parody Poster Of "Once Upon A Time In Hollywood" To Point Out The Sexual Proclivities Of Hollywood Elites. |
But surely old Nazis also have fond memories of eating soufflés and homemade breads. Himmler’s wife probably made a mean ham sandwich. And the Manson family no doubt had some great chili. But outside of Neo-Nazi publications, they don’t get the space to share fond food and murder memories.
"I was in love with the romance of the underground but hated the bombings," Raskin writes.
And some of Manson’s followers liked the pot, but hated stabbing pregnant women.
A better title would have been I Was a Stooge for a Communist Terror Group That Murdered Americans. But instead, ‘Prairie Fire’ Memories is titled as a book review. Raskin, a professor emeritus, describes himself as a "reviewer of books, movies and restaurants", but the book, Prairie Fire, is the manifesto of the Weathermen, a Communist terror group, and its reviewer admits to...
