Now they want to rehabilitate the Soviet Union?

During my lifetime I have seen Hollywood first prefer Nazi villains to reds and then prefer American villains to both.

The CIA and American corporations are standard sources of evil in the entire world, according to the contemporary entertainment media, even if sometimes receiving little more than casual mention as some sort of threat.

But now this?

Now the PC commissars are gunning for ‘Stranger Things’

Even though the Soviet Union has been no more since 1991, some unthinking liberals writing for influential publications have been taking exception to negative depictions of the Soviet Union in popular culture lately.

My favorite example comes from Variety film critic Peter Debruge. He recently reviewed a movie about the Russian ballet star Rudolf Nureyev, who defected to the West in 1961: “The film remains maddeningly ambiguous about his motives for cutting ties with the Soviet Union. . . . 

"[Nureyev] developed an ego somewhere along the way of the sort better suited to Western countries, where self-interest (versus personal sacrifice for the greater good) is a way of life.”

. . . .

On July 4, Netflix released the third season of its hit teen-horror show “Stranger Things,” set in a small Indiana town in the 1980s. 

This inventive mash-up of 1980s pop-culture themes has previously featured a US government conspiracy involving the torture of children along with evil supernatural creatures from an alternate dimension. 

This season, however, there’s a new villain. 

It turns out the Soviet government has secretly funded the construction of a lavish shopping mall in the town to disguise its efforts to open a portal to the other dimension. 

Our heroes must fight unambiguously evil Russians to save the day and the world.

. . . .

Quoth Sophie Gilbert of The Atlantic: “The setup for the entire eight episodes of Season 3 seems at first to be based on a simplistic premise of good and evil, one that the show’s previous seasons resisted. . . . 

"All eight episodes are being released by Netflix on July 4, and the Uncle Sam-against-the-Russkies plot configuration leans heavily on red-blooded patriotism.”

She then claims the show is more nuanced than this because it shows how capitalism can destroy the commerce of small towns through things like the mall — when the best joke of the show is that the mall was only built there to serve the interests of the Russkies!

. . . .

And in The Week, Aaron Bady opines that “instead of reminding us of what we have lost — our youth, our innocence, our sense of play — the show gets caught up in the kind of patriotic fantasies that adults love so much, things like ­romance and defeating communism in a mall with fireworks on the Fourth of July.”