Apparently, simplemimes, you didn't pay much attention to anything I wrote in my post of 11/13/09, or anywhere else -- about Communists, espionage, or actors called before HUAC.
The "Hollywood Ten" hauled before HUAC in 1948 all were or had been CPUSA members. Some were hard-core Stalinists like John Howard Lawson and Ring Lardner, Jr., who remained Reds all their lives. Others, like Edward Dmytryk, later renounced Communism. I specifically noted that these ten, as well as most of those brought before the Committee in its much wider "investigation" of 1951-52, had been Communist Party members. But of that bunch, most had long since left the party and were no longer Communists. And the fact is, HUAC went after Hollywood for the publicity, not because it was a hotbed of treason. Contrast this with the Hiss case, in which actual traitors were unmasked, thanks largely to Richard Nixon's perserverence, much as I dislike crediting the man with doing anything good. But truth is truth.
Where you get the idea that all these movie people "went underground" after leaving the party -- implying, of course, that they were still Commies, and engaged in crimes against the United States -- baffles me. In any case, even the relatively few hard-core Hollywood Reds hardly went underground. No film person was ever implicated in espionage or other acts of treason (for example, stealing or conveying secrets). It was never a crime to be a Communist. The "Verona papers" confirmed the treason of people like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, and served to confirm the party membership of some others. None of this was news; it just asserted what everyone but blind left-wing ideologues had long known and accepted. But no one in the film industry that I know of was ever involved in treason or other related criminal activity.
In short, who on this thread was denying there were Communists in the film industry? If you are saying I was, you're either not very good at reading things, or deliberately misstating the truth.
The difference is that you want Communists blacklisted for what they believed, not what they did. In fact, it was the efforts to force Communists to register that drove the party underground. But just as it's an inconvenient fact for some liberals to admit that most of the accused had been Communist Party members, so is it inconvenient for some conservatives that not all Communists engaged in treason. For every Hiss or Rosenberg there were thousands of blind saps who thought they'd found a "cause" but commited no crime. Being stupid isn't against the law, and being a Communist in itself was and is not an act of treason.
As to the rest of your remarks....
I didn't mention the origins of HUAC because I wasn't writing a history of the Committee; it was irrelevant to the point I was making. For the record, no, I have no problem with its investigating treasonous pro-Nazi groups; why, do you?
Similarly, your bringing up the 1939 German-Soviet pact is simply bizarre and utterly irrelevant to the discussion at hand. And to say that I had "no problem" with the USSR or the division of Poland is as moronic as it is false: it's not only unfounded -- I challenge you to prove I said or believe any such things -- but goes to show your own political agenda, bias and rewriting of history. You would have made a good HUAC chairman, unencumbered by regard for the facts.
Finally, this "you guys" stuff. I take it you mean liberals, and that they somehow "lost" some imagined cause. This implies that all liberals defended Communists, were soft on Communism, and all the rest of that rot. In fact, it was the liberal President Truman who first stood up to the USSR, gave us the Marshall Plan, aid to Greece and Turkey, began NATO, defended South Korea, and under whom the first A- and H-bombs were exploded. It was the liberal President Kennedy who accelerated our military build-up, intensified military intervention overseas, oversaw both the Bay of Pigs (a messy loss) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (a victory), and other liberal presidents -- and liberal foreign affairs and defense people -- who nurtured the western ideals of freedom against Communism until its final collapse. Of course, conservative presidents and thinkers did the same, but they didn't do it alone, or first. Unfortunately, you appear to be one of those people who ignorantly tars anyone of a different political stripe with the Red brush and inaccurately insists it was demi-gods like Ronald Reagan who single-handedly won the Cold War...making conservatives the "winners" and liberals the "losers". How ridiculous, and pathetic. "Simple" is an apt portion of your IMDb moniker.
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