Wrote movie director Milos Forman, for The New York Times:
Milos Forman, PBS image, American Masters
When I was asked to direct One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, my friends warned me not to go anywhere near it. The story is so American, they argued, that I, an immigrant fresh off the boat, could not do it justice. They were surprised when I explained why I wanted to make the film. To me it was not just literature but real life, the life I lived in Czechoslovakia from my birth in 1932 until 1968. The Communist Party was my Nurse Ratched, telling me what I could and could not do; what I was or was not allowed to say; where I was and was not allowed to go; even who I was and was not.
Now, years later, I hear the word “socialist” being tossed around by the likes of Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others. President Obama, they warn, is a socialist. The critics cry, “Obamacare is socialism!” They falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. It offends me, and cheapens the experience of millions who lived, and continue to live, under brutal forms of socialism.
. . . Whatever his faults, I don’t see much of a socialist in Mr. Obama or, thankfully, signs of that system in this great nation.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Fred Clark writing at Slacktivist.
More information:
- Actual Socialism (washingtonmonthly.com)
- Socialist: I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means (carpebootium.com)
- Milos Forman: Obama’s No Iron-Curtain Socialist and Socialism Has No Human Face (txwclp.org)
- Is Obama a Socialist? An Answer to Milos Forman (realclearpolitics.com)
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 