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It seems as though you can't turn around at the moment without bumping into yet another piece of anti-communist propaganda. Certainly not on TV, at any rate.
Red Storm - China's Cultural Revolution is coming to a close but The Wall, about "the Iron Curtain" as "a brutal reality - the Berlin Wall", is just beginning.
Secrets Of War, having given us a perverted view of the Berlin Airlift as democracy versus Red Terror, in its latest episode is shocked to discover that the USSR did not just stand back and let North Korea get plastered by the USA but actually supplied pilots as well as planes, military experts as well as materiel.
The Welsh-made series Red Chapters is explicitly devoted to "the rise and fall of communism". Its first episode, on October 26, examined what somebody named Gerard Noonan in the Sydney Morning Herald's TV guide called "that nasty, manipulative fellow Lenin".
The following week's episode dealt with Lenin's stroke and the "opportunity" it supposedly gave Stalin to "manipulate" his way into the top job.
The third episode was to have been about the start of China's Cultural Revolution (according to this nonsense it was all because Mao thought some play was making veiled references to him).
However, presumably to capitalise on the fact that the episode was due to screen within two days of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has been swapped with episode four - yet another attack on Stalin, this time over the assassination of Kirov.
This farrago claims Kirov's murder was "clearly a crime of passion" and not political at all (!) but that it provided evil old Stalin with the pretext he needed to wipe out countless political foes.
Do they seriously believe politics works like that? Or do they just want viewers to believe it works like that under communism?
Apart from the gross rewriting of history that is represented by all of these programs, there is a noticeable return to the extremes of Cold War crudity in much of the accompanying propaganda.
Consider the descriptive notes for the German anti-communist program about East European musicals of the '50s and '60s:
"As a whole, the Iron Curtain [sic!] countries were not known for their gaiety or joie de vivre, but between the cracks of stark socialist realism, there somehow appeared a few films that offered their audiences escape, hope and hit songs."
There is considerably more in the same vein, all of it typical of the new Cold War propaganda line: socialist countries were (and by implication are inevitably) grim, serious, grey places where nobody ever smiles. It's not actually new, of course, but it's getting a renewed - and intense - exposure.
In reality, the films of the socialist countries, especially the GDR, were replete with joyful, inventive and fanciful movies. Yes they made films about the Nazi experience, the War, the concentration camps - who wouldn't given their immediate past history?
But they also made children's films that beat into a cocked hat anything done in the West. For adults they also made comedies, costume adventures, romances, detective films, even westerns. Lemonade Joe, a spoof musical western from Czechoslovakia was a huge hit at the Sydney Film Festival in 1965.
Episode two of The Wall, which screened on October 31, inadvertently admitted the extent of the all-pervasive propaganda war that was waged from West Germany against the GDR.
All the socialist countries were nations under siege, but none more so than the GDR. In addition to the usual propaganda weapons - Voice of America, BBC, Vatican Radio, Radio Free Europe, and innumerable others - the GDR had to contend with West German TV, which most of the GDR could pick up.
The Wall gives this a positive spin: "The Socialist Unity Party (SED) propaganda did not make much of an impression on the East Germans. They relied on West German television as their most important and credible source of information." No wonder they became confused!
Television is a potent propaganda tool. And capitalism is all too well aware of its potential. It is one reason the screens of the public broadcasters are splattered with anti-communist and anti-soviet propaganda.
But why now? Why, ten years after "the death of communism" is it necessary to flood our TVs with a new bout of Cold War propaganda?
I remember speaking to a right-wing acquaintance of mine just after Gorbachev had "dissolved" the Communist Party of the Soviet Union without reference to its members (thereby showing not only his contempt for Marxism but also for democratic processes). "The Cold War's over", my friend crowed, "and we won it."
For a short time such triumphalism was rampant everywhere. It's the end of history, they claimed, there is no higher form of society than capitalism after all.
But if that is so, why are they fighting the Cold War with renewed vigour? Why has their triumphalism become so shrill and defensive?
Perhaps it's because history, far from ending, is moving inexorably towards the next stage, while capitalism is getting deeper and deeper into crisis.