January 24, 2021
"No one took the hearings seriously at first, but they soon would."
"Mr. Bernstein was considered untouchable both in Hollywood and in the fledgling television industry in New York once his name appeared in 'Red Channels,' an anti-Communist tract published in 1950 by the right-wing journal Counterattack. 'I was listed right after Lenny Bernstein,' Mr. Bernstein recalled. 'There were about eight listings for me, and they were all true.' He had indeed written for the leftist New Masses, been a member of the Communist Party and supported Soviet relief, the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and civil rights."
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Someone should make The New Front. Cancel-culture blacklisting makes for a great theme.
Except, unlike nice 1950s anticommunists, today's left doesn't fool around, so no go.
Maybe some foreign filmmaker will do it.
I think we have given the Statists far too much leeway given their rampant dishonesty and corruption and their attacks on our country.
So much Hollywood hypocrisy on this, for decades. Did anyone ask Roseanne Barr for comment?
Oh the irony.
Leonard Bernstein was blacklisted? He was made conductor of a major orchestra, had several hits running on Broadway at the same time,did TV lectures, sold millions of records. That was some effective blacklist.
The same fascists who work so hard to get us deplorables canceled are the ones who scream loudest about blacklists.
But aren't they the same thing?
John Henry
Btw:I am 150% in favor of Joseph mccarthy's treatment of the famed Hollywood blacklist.
He handled that exactly as he should have.
John Henry
I get so tired of this. It is so fucking dishonest.
I've heard about Joseph McCarthy all my life. And yet meanwhile for virtually the whole of my life, academia have been doing everything that Joe McCarthy was alleged to have done, and doing it on a truly massive scale, a scale that effects millions.
Not just the few hundred Nazi supporters that Joe McCarthy targeted.
John henry,
"The same fascists who work so hard to get us deplorables canceled are the ones who scream loudest about blacklists.
"But aren't they the same thing?"
As I know you know, it gets a lot simpler if you take their frame of reference: They are the good guys. We are the bad guys. What was done to leftists in the 50s was wrong not because of what was done, but because of who it was done to. Suggesting that some pesky political opponent is a Russian asset is horrifying if you're Joe McCarthy, and presumptively justified if you're Hillary Clinton.
Remember that fake but inspiring Voltaire quote? "I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to my death your right to say it"? Yeah - turns out there are a few leftists remaining in the U.S. who actually believe that. But it kind of gets their allies wondering whose side they're really on.
JPS: "Remember that fake but inspiring Voltaire quote? "I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to my death your right to say it"? Yeah - turns out there are a few leftists remaining in the U.S. who actually believe that."
Correction: there are approximately zero leftists and LLR-leftists who believe that and only a mere 5% of liberals that do, and they will be "dealt with" soon enough.
The truth is they never believed it. It was simply a tool they used until they gained power.
Fen's Law is ever on point: The left/LLR-left/liberals never believed a single thing they lectured the rest of us about.
Fail Safe - about President Henry Fonda, who committed the greatest crime against humanity and mass murderer, presented as a good man of honor.
Hmm
https://mobile.twitter.com/LevineJonathan/status/1353357615464640514
Walter Bernstein's problems with the government started before McCarthy and I don't think they involved McCarthy.
Leonard Bernstein had leftist sympathies and supported Henry Wallace's 1948 campaign. It might not be unfair to call him a fellow traveler.
I don't think he was fired from anything, but to become the conductor of the New York Philharmonic Lenny had to denounce Communism.
All this seemed very recent and relevant in the '60s and '70s. It might be relevant today, but it seems like ancient history.
JPS said...
John hen
Suggesting that some pesky political opponent is a Russian asset is horrifying if you're Joe McCarthy,
When di Joe McCarthy go after any political opponent?
Or any politician at all?
Can you or anyone else name any?
Maybe Eisenhower but I think that would be a stretch.
John Henry
He did point out how general marshall had been deleterious on various fronts, as well dean achesons attachment to alger hiss.
There was a brief instance when the left was made accountable for their poor judgement, they have returned the favor a hindred fold.
So one is 'right-wing' and one is 'leftist.'
Interesting.
The goal of communism was the overthrow of the government.
He should have been thrown in jail.
I won't read the NYT link because paywall and/or liberal garbage so maybe he was or wasn't.
But I love how they throw in 'civil rights' as a softener. Gee, civil rights can't be bad!
Walter Bernstein also supported Stalin. He was a card-carrying Communist Party member and therefore he pledged to work subversively to overthrow the American government. And as a foreign correspondent during the war, he could not even slightly claim innocence of Stalin’s purges, as too many others have been permitted to do.
And red channels was a private concern, never forget that. So he wasnt misidentified as many are today.
He was "untouchable", "blacklisted", and "cancelled" in 1950, yet:
Paris Blues made into a movie in 1961 starring Paul Newman
Fail Safe made into a movie in 1964 starring Henry Fonda and Walter Matthau
The Front made into a movie in 1976 starring Woody Allen and nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing
He had a 5 decade career, after he was cancelled. Poor guy.
People on the right should trouble themselves to learn the difference between 1950s anticommunism and McCarthyism.
McCarthy was a bullshit artist who discovered no communists whatsoever in the US government--not because there were none, but because he was a lazy alcoholic blowhard. He was stupid enough to attack the Army just because it denied special treatment to an enlisted man who Roy Cohn had the hots for, which finally pissed off Eisenhower enough to tell him to fuck off.
He publicized those names that were listed in various agencies
https://mobile.twitter.com/JunkScience/status/1353405687917809664
Was this admission before or after the media pennsylvania admissions
Revelations, now venona was cut short because weisband ond of the noncoms at asa revealed
The Front, or what's old is new. And it's not coming back merely as farce.
Venona to the soviets.
So after making a splash in his twenties, he was blacklisted for the decade of his thirties, but then able to get fine screenplays he wrote in his forties and fifties picked up. Lucky guy.
I never watched the Front because Allen only in it as an actor and I never thought him a good actor. But now that it's history like the period it covers I guess I will give it a try. Can't go wrong with Zero Mostel, who i saw on stage at that time in a revival of "A Funny Thing ...."
Someone should have asked if he supports the current blacklisting. Maybe they did and they didn';t report it because they didn't get the answer they wanted.
I wonder what "current" means to someone 101.
Commie should have been helicoptered 70 years ago.
When did Joe McCarthy go after any political opponent?
He did have an "Alger—I mean Adlai" moment, but that wasn't any more serious than most political jests or jabs.
William bundy yes one of those was on hiss's defense fund he was at the company at the time.
Fail Safe - about President Henry Fonda, who committed the greatest crime against humanity and mass murderer, presented as a good man of honor.
Wasn't he dreamy..../s
Those WWIII movies drove me over the edge when I was a kid. They did to me what they're doing to kids now re climate change: convince them there is no future.
I could have used a little faith, hope and charity.
Bost failsafe and strangelove were based on accidental incidents day after testament threads more deliberate escalation.
Communism 100,000,000 of their own people dead.
McCarthyism Some actors and directors lost their jobs for a while, and Pete Seeger couldn't go on TV
I'd say that's about even.
But we cant trip your shoe without a seeger replay on tbs.
Assistant Village Idiot said...
Communism 100,000,000 of their own people dead.
McCarthyism Some actors and directors lost their jobs for a while, and Pete Seeger couldn't go on TV
Name one actor, director, or singer or other in entertainment who lost a job because of mccarthy.
Name one who mccarthy investigated.
Tell us who made American govt employees sign loyalty oaths. Was that mccarthy?
Tell us who is responsible for the McCarren act which made certain political beliefs illegal.
John Henry
Name one
Pete seeger died an unrepentant Stalinist a few years ago.
A lot of his music is political and antithetical to everything I believe. A lot of if was completely non political.
I still like his music and have a dozen or so of his albums. Including some 10" colleagues from the 50s.
John Henry
And there was nothing, nothing whatsoever, wrong with the way mccarthy treated him. (prove me wrong)
the left doesn't want any scrutiny whether it came from the amerasia case which led to the loyalty oaths, the huac or the senate government committee, how long did they deny that hiss was guilty, and hence nixon was apriori, as we see from the soviet treatment of ingush, chechens, kalmyks, the soviets weren't anymore sincerely interested in African Americans then when they pushed Ukrainian and Azeri independence against the czar, just a tactic,
Tina Trent,
Walter Bernstein also supported Stalin. He was a card-carrying Communist Party member and therefore he pledged to work subversively to overthrow the American government. And as a foreign correspondent during the war, he could not even slightly claim innocence of Stalin’s purges, as too many others have been permitted to do.
Was he in the CPUSA at the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact? That's the first question to ask of any "journalist" covering those years. If they were supportive of Hitler while the pact was in force, and then furiously backtracked the moment Hitler invaded the USSR, they were Communist stooges and literally nothing else.
When Orwell wrote, in 1984, that Oceania was and always had been at war with Eurasia, and at peace with Eastasia, this is obviously what he meant. Hitler was a goodie, until he was a baddie, and then he had always been a baddie, whatever you yourself might have said on the subject a week ago.
Even "Stalin's purges" sanitizes the atmosphere: It wasn't just the top names who suffered, though Heaven knows that towards the end, staying in the upper echelons was a matter that could be spoiled instantly and irrevocably by a single misstep, and not staying there generally meant summary execution. The thing about "cancel culture" now isn't that it's new, but that it's being applied to populations who assumed, over-optimistically, that they'd escaped it. It's not a misfiring of the "cancel culture" phenomenon that a lot of the Left are being "cancelled" right alongside their "right-wing" brethren. That's the whole point.
narciso,
That's what I say about Paul Robeson, basically: "Terrific voice, bummer about the Stalinism." Robeson lived in an America deeply unfair to Blacks (which has improved immeasurably since, though you really couldn't guess that from the press), and went and accepted a Stalin Prize from an entity which thought nothing of starving to death and "disappearing" actual millions of citizens, because at least they weren't doing it to Blacks (not unreasonable; they literally had none). The situation in the US was frightful, but the one in the USSR was orders of magnitude worse. Colleagues -- at least, they imagined they were colleagues -- of Robeson pleaded with him to put the word out as to what was actually happening in the USSR. He just wouldn't do it.
My uncle tells me that when my grandfather heard the claim there were 200 communist sympathisers in the State Department said "Is that all?"
there were 200 communist sympathisers in the State Department said "Is that all
Exactly. The secular lure of hopes and dreams of consolidating capital and control drives "ethical" (i.e. relativistic religion) people left. It's the original sin, the wicked solution, a dark diversity (i.e. denial of individual dignity, individual conscience, intrinsic value).
Joe Biden said “I don’t know what I’m signing” on camera as he proceeded to sign an unknown executive order. In the video posted to BitChute, an unidentified person told him to “sign it anyways.”
But don't you dare call him a puppet for fascists or his election illegitimate.
I just noticed that you have this tagged 1950s, Ann.
Why?
The Hollywood Blacklist happened in the 40s.
John Henry
Ann mentioned having Netflix recently. Here's a movie recommendation. I just rewatched it for the 3rd or 4th time and it just gets better.
The movie is a black comedy with Steve Buscemi, Michael Palin, Jeffrey Tambor and a bunch of other great actors whose names I don't recognize.
The movie is The Death of Stalin and is about the 3-4 days from just before Stalin's death to Beria's "Trial", finding of guilt, sentencing and execution.
Reasonably accurate historically, at least on the major points.
Terrific movie.
John Henry
Watched The Front for the first time several weeks ago. I know Woody Allen didn’t write it, but I was struck by how similar its cinematography and characters were to his movies.
I second John Henry on Death of Stalin. And it is pretty historically accurate too.
Speaking of Beria. Whenever I see someone wearing a Che Guevara shirt I ask them if they have the full matching set of Beria and Himmler shirts. They never laugh.
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