Too taboo a subject, perhaps?

Kathy Phuc Nguyen, a demonstration organizer and spokeswoman for the human rights group Thanh Nien Co Vang, drew cheers when, speaking through a bullhorn, she said, "Surely, one would not display a photograph of a young Jewish person wearing a Nazi symbol and standing next to a bust of Hitler in a heavily populated community of Holocaust survivors."

So it goes up in Orange County where large protests from the Vietnamese community and a defacement with red paint of one of the works, forced the shut-down of an exhibit sponsored by the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Assn. which they claim was intended to launch a discussion about freedom of expression in the Vietnamese community.

Now, here is where you get our obligatory preachiness about respecting others’ property and opinions and and where we also denounce vandalism……….

…. There. Glad we could get that off our chest.

Now despite the unfortunate actions of a few knuckleheads, we couldn’t help but feel some pride over the words and actions of many of these protesters. These people lived through the horrors of communism (or the coercion to live through the horrors of communism) – they should know.

There are a slew of Nazi/Holocaust movies out right now and that’s all to the good. Evil is evil and it should be forever documented, dramatized and memorialized as such. We’ve always wondered, however, why it is that “communism” has never received the same treatment from Hollywood or the arts and letters as its step-brother, National Socialism.

The reasons are many - we know this - but at the end of the day it boils down to practicality.

Making a two hour movie that focuses on a corrupt ideology and which is essentially contained to one geographic region, a dozen or so years and one central figure is difficult enough for Steven Spielberg.

Now try a movie that focuses on a corrupt ideology but has literally spanned the globe over the course of centuries now and which has been perpetrated by scores of influential regional and global figures alike and which has, ultimately, claimed the lives of 50, 60, 70(?) million people.

Yep. No wonder Hollywood has never attempted to crack that nut. Completely out of their league… and mood.