Monday, May 22, 2006

A Horrific Waste

"What's going on here and now is not to be compared with the witch trials of that time" [said Molly, Elia Kazan's wife, in "A Life"]. "Those witches did not exist. Communists do. Here and everywhere in the world. It's a false parallel. Witch hunt! The phrase would indicate that there are no Communists in governement, none in the arts, none sending money from Hollywood to 12th Street."
Samuel Blumenfeld has another tear-jerker about the tragedies that befell Hollywood during the McCarthy era, calling it nothing less than a horrific waste. For a true horrific waste, one would do well to cross the Russian border — the very society that was being defended by the "victims" of the "witchhunt" as a paradise on Earth — where the maximum penalty, and the sufferings, went far beyond one year in (a relatively comfortable) jail. (More trivial details such as these are explained in La bannière étalée.)

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