Hollywood Anti-War Left Fears It’s Racist to Oppose Obama’s Syrian War

-By Warner Todd Huston

Actor Ed Asner has explained why the anti-war Hollywood left is absent from the fight against Obama’s war in Syria. Hollywood is more afraid of looking like racists than interested in standing up for their supposed principles against killing people.

Asner made the accusation in a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter though he also fell back on Bush-was-worse claims.

Asner is opposed to any military intervention in Syria and said that it could be considered a “war crime” if Obama were to initiate any such action, but he also had an interesting explanation on why there is no organized anti-Syria war movement in Hollywood.

“A lot of people don’t want to feel anti-black by being opposed to Obama,” Asner said.

So, for Hollywood, fear of being called a racist trumps supposed principles against war and killing people.

Asner is, however, quite soured on President Obama.

“I voted for him, but I’m not proud. He hasn’t thrown himself on the funeral pyre. I wanted him to sacrifice himself. Instead, he has proved himself to be a corporatist, and as long as he’s a corporatist, he’s not my president,” Asner told Hollywood Reporter. “A lot of people have lost hope–with the betrayals, the NSA spying… People aren’t getting active because ‘Who gives a sh*t?’ is essentially the bottom line.”

In the same interview former M*A*S*H star Mike Farrell agreed that Obama has been disappointing, especially on drones and foreign policy.

Despite this general feeling of dissatisfaction, though, Hollywood and the entertainment industry has remained mostly silent on Obama’s beating of the war drums, not to mention his death-from-the-skies drone policy.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

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