Wonder how long any prodemocracy writers would have survived the prisons, camps, and bullets those Hollywood commies' workers paradise would have meted out to any writer who defied the regime. Dalton Trumbo was a Communist and a Traitor and don't forget that!
What are they doing? Why do they come here?
Some kind of instinct, memory, what they used to do.
"Dalton Trumbo was a Communist..."
And?
"... and a Traitor [!]"
Well, he was a Communist when Stalin and Mao were the gods of communism. Never said he committed any overt criminal acts of treason but anyone who wants to foist those hideous death camp governments on us is scum by my me. Just for laughs, do you think Dalton Trumble would live for ten days if he was trying to foist American democracy to the people in his workers' paradises? He would have disappeared in the night and if later someone saw him alive he would have been so broken by the camps and secret police no one would recognize him. What did he suffer here, loss of a job and fame yet lived in comfort the whole time. He still wrote scripts and made money. Then he was rehabiliated while he never recanted one iota of his fascist beliefs.
shareWow! he was a fascist and a communist, quite a trick.
share
What was the difference? The communists were more ruthless and totalitarian than the fascists, it was only a matter of degrees. All arts and writing was rigidly controlled in Trumbo's workers paradise and were there to serve the revolution. Yet he had the gall to whine about his artistic freedom here, to advocate a system where there was none!
Hey Jake,
I understand your animosity, but I don't think you understand the socialist idealism that swept up many Americans during the 40's.
It's not that they wanted to promote oppressive communist regimes, they sought to create a socialist utopia, however misguided their philosophies were.
JR
It's not like they shot him either. Socialism is one thing, but when you support prison camp regimes like the USSR that is different. As an intellectual, he had an obligation to research and be honest.
shareThis is a classic fallacy: ad hominem tu quoque. Learn it once and for all: two wrongs don't make a right. True, Stalin's repression was much worse. That is no excuse for repression in the land of the free.
Dalton Trumbo was a man who stood for FREEDOM. His political ideas may have been wrong, but he had the right to have those ideas under the US Constitution. And he defended that right. And that is why he should be admired.
He wasn't even jailed, yet the regimes he stood for would have killed or permanently broken and exiled a man who stood up to them like he stood up agains the US, that is the irony. He was never starved, beaten, tortured, coerced into making incriminating statements, sent to dreary deadly workcamps to die or simply shot by the government, nor did his family get dispossessed and exiled either. He stood with the sworn enemies of the US yet got off with barely a lick. I just want people to acknowledge that. The Communists are very unpleasant people in spite of their high sounding rheoteric.
share[deleted]
He was financially ruined, ostracized, persecuted by fanatics. His daughter suffered terribly. This is not "barely a lick". I bet you would not bear a hundredth of what he went through, and all because of his ideas. He and his family did get dispossessed and exiled, and upon return, treated as lepers.
Persecuting people because of their ideas is what fascism is all about. If you wish to call yourself a fascist, be my guest. But don't pretend your values are those of the American Constitution or the American people. America has only one enemy: tyranny. As in Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. I want YOU to acknowledge that.
McCarthy had nothing to do with Trumbo
All over Russia and other communist states there are the ghosts and graves of murdered and totally beaten and broken dissidents, artists and intellectuals. So excuse me if his fate didn't move me to tears. The defenders of all these American communists never seem to acknowledge that the Communist virtually murdered mosts of their dissidents. I'm sure Alger Hiss still upsets you too.
Trumbo was never tortured or exiled and made a living, though not as good as before. He was credited with a lot of screenplays after his blacklisting and then that was eventually lifted. So where's the tragedy?
[deleted]
Since I am neither a fan or McCarthy, who had nothing to do with Hollywood blacklists or that fat loudmouth on the radio, what is your point? Trumbo was a confirmed Communist, this in the time of Stalin and the height of the cold war. I am glad you support my right to free speech by suggesting that I should be blown up by some indiscriminate weapon.
Sure people have all sorts of rights. but when Communist take over, the right of free speech and political association always seem to vanish. Reminds me of when Alexander Kerensky failed to act against the enemies of the February Revolution by having Lenin shot. Instead the fool freed him.
[deleted]
I'd rather work in some miserable 19th century mill than be a slave in some Maoist commune or a Soviet collective. At least I could always quit and move oo. The Communist were supposed to be so much better than the capitalists yet your ilk rejected such basic notions of charity, mercy, humanity and the freedom of the individual in your quest to regiment all people in your warped utopian schemes.
PS, it wasn't just Stalin, it was all of them: Mao, Pol Pot, Ho, Fidel, and even Lenin.
[deleted]
Wow, such an elevated response.
What about the humanity of the mass murdering Communist tyrants he supported? Did Mao or Joe have more humanity in their farts than my total?
Answer me this question, what would happen to a writer in his blessed Communist country who supported a liberal democratic capitalist society? Death by bullet after show trial or a slower death by cruel neglect, starvation and overwork in a prison camp?
There is some truth in what you are saying. Under Stalin (and Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot) liberals, capitalists, anarchists, freethinkers, devout Christians, etc., were all subject to persecution, jail and death - fates far worse than the blacklisted writers.
But what you fail to appreciate is the First Amendment gives Americans the right to believe in communism, socialism, fascism. The blacklist violated the Constitution. And the communists operated many "front groups" - they would have names like "coalition against racism", "Group against fascism", etc. Many joined these front groups not knowing the CP was behind them. Many were naive and joined the CP. The American media was NOT reporting on the death camps run by Stalin - Stalin was our war time ally. As the truth about Stalin emerged, many left the CP.
Parnell, HUAC, McCarthy, Hoover's FBI - all made both true and false accusation against people. People were wrongly accused on the basis of little or no evidence.
You seem to have no understanding of the First Amendment.
Well, yes we do have the First Amendment, everyone's best friend unless you disagree with what is being said.
But Trumbo did more than just join a front group, he was a committed Communist. While I appreciate the movies he wrote, I can better understand why he was blacklisted. If you lived through those times when we were facing Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung,etc almost alone, you might appreciate not wanting to have a Communist write movies for mass public showings. If he wrote obscure novels, they prolly would have ignored him.
you miss the point, jakealope. as was pointed out in the film blacklisting wasn't a punishment for being a communist it was a punishment for not naming names. elia kazan was briefly a member of the communist party but continued to make movies because he named names. perhaps if you were to watch the film a second time the deeper issues might sink in. personally i came away from the movie convinced that the term "new world" is only a geographic concept. at the height of the "red scare" "communist paranoia" "blacklisting" or whatever you want to call it, america turned itself into "old europe". constitutional rights counted for nothing. it happened then and it could happen again so watch your back.
shareCertainly there is some hypocrisy involved using less than constitutional methods to shut out writers. But compared to what was happening in Trumbo's workers' paradises at the same time, it was quite ironic that he or anyone else would have any problem since no one put a bullet in his head or worked him to death in an arctic labor camp.
shareAre your posts on this topic actually a joke? If so, then I admire your commitment to the bit.
Trumbo had been a member of the Communist party. He was no longer a card-carrying Communist at the time of his investigation by the House Unamerican Activities Committee, although he was still committed to his socialist ideals.
Trumbo's right to hold whatever ideals he wished were guaranteed by the constitution. He was entitled to the right to privacy, as were those whom he was asked to rat out.
Contrary to one of your earlier posts, Trumbo was jailed. He spent a year inside for failing to co-operate with HUAC's witch hunt.
No shred of evidence has ever been used to prove that Trumbo engaged in any act of treason, or acted against the interests of his country in any regard. Evidence does not seem to have been necessary as justification for either Trumbo's investigation or blacklisting.
You make a giant leap, free from all logic, when seeming to assert that Trumbo approved of Soviet suppression: Trumbo supported socialism, the USSR was a socialist state, the USSR was a repressive state, therefore Trumbo supported repression.
Any ignorance of the logical fallacy you are making here would have to be willful. It would have been hypocritical for Trumbo to support Soviet repression whilst railing against the milder repression he experienced in the United States. However, the fact is that Trumbo was a life long believer in freedom. This is in no way clouded by the fact that he shared some political views with practioners of oppression.
I am an atheist. There are atheist murderers. This does not mean I support murder. To prove that Trumbo was hypocritical in standing up to his oppression you must prove that he supported oppression elsewhere. He did not so you cannot.
Or else you could be saying that the blacklist was okay because worse suppression was being carried out elsewhere. This is clearly absurd. My crime is not less serious because others commit worse crimes. I can't excuse myself if I rape an adult by saying that I could, as others do, have raped a child instead.
You are in serious danger of taking your freedoms for granted.
We can be pretty sure he was in sympathy with the USSR under Stalin as well as Maoist China. Atheism is not a league, belief system or a party. It is the opposite of all that. So being an atheist means you just have a lack of beliefs, in contrast to a committed Communist like Trumbo who purposely joined the Communist Party. So your analogy between stereotyping people whose only similiarity is that they only don't believe in the supernatural and stereotyping people who purposely joined a party devoted to serving tyrants like Mao, Sung, Stalin etc and a totalitarian way of life is a false analogy. Do I agree that he deserved all he got?, no. I was trying to point out the irony in people who support states and ideals that believe in killing and jailing dissidents, especially artists, as a matter of correct policy don't have much of a moral claim to freedom of conscience from a state - society they seek to subvert.
It's sorry to see how completey you missed my point. In the analogy, I would only agree with the murderers insofar as they were atheists, not in the sense that they were murderers. Trumbo only agreed with the USSR insofar as they agreed on socialist ideals. He was vehemently opposed attacks on freedom be they killing, jailing or blacklisting.
I think that your ignorance largely stems from your ridiculous notions of communist ideology. Communism is neither "devoted to serving tyrants" nor do its ideals "believe in killing and jailing dissidents, especially artists, as a matter of correct policy". It is true that many communist states were vicious and totalitarian, but there is nothing inherent in communism which supports totalitarianism.
Trumbo believed in the ideals of communism. If you believe that this statement is the same as saying that he believed in state repression, you clearly have no clue what you're talking about.
Trumbo also believed inwhat he saw as the inherent value of the society around him, freedom of expression. He clearly believed in it much more than his opponents, whose actions denegrated the personal freedoms of their victims.
If there ever was a group of people who literally will kill you out of good intentions, it was the Communists. Trouoble with them is, for all their lofty, mostly good goals, they abandoned all ethical and moral considerations in pursuit of them, so their heaven became the people's hell. I still stand behind my analogy, atheists are not the same as Reds, one is a lack of belief while the other is a totalitarian belief system.
Many otherwise decent, well intentioned peole in the west became Reds especially in the 1930's, But after all the truth came out about the purges, gulags, Nazi Non Aggression Pact, behavior during WW ll et al, any decent, alert person should have had moral qualms about not only Stalin but that the whole underlying system which was rotten to the core. Remember nothing Stalin did was inconsistent with the earlier goals and he was hardly unique in his mass murdering tyrannical behavior.
This sort of reminds me, and is a valid analogy to the problems we face today. Many people on the left are upset about right wing Christian fundamentalists, and I am no friend of those types either, They go on about Propostion 8 or no gay marriage as if it was the Gulag redux. Yet so many of those same people seem okay with Islamic Fundamentalists who would throw gays off of skyscrapers and stone adultresses to death. The Muslims kill and riot over a cartoon yet somehow the same bunch of freedom lovers make excuses for them and permit the UN to pass censorship laws to protect their hateful faith from criticism, something they would never permit their own Christians to do. Just last month a Muslim extremist with ties to known jihadists went on a murder rampage on an Army base yelling Allahu Ahkbar and dressed in a traditional Muslim garb. Yet the same crowd condemned anyone who made the obvious Muslim terrorist connection and claimed that a non-combat doctor who had never been over seas was experiencing battle fatigue or harrassment instead. Then they went on to berate my types about non-existent retaliations against Muslims that still are fictional and made it seem that the Muslim community was the victim instead.
You have to understand there is a difference between a communist action and an action committed by a communist. There is also a difference between a communist action and an action committed in the name of communism. The same goes for Islam, Christianity, Buddism or any other creed that you care to name.
If you cannot provide clear evidence of tyranny in the doctrine of communism rather than in examples of its application, you cannot use belief in that doctrine as evidence of the support of tyranny.
I'm not going to respond to you on the Muslim doctor. As you will appreciate, it is a controvertial topic and bears no real relevance to a documentary on the life of Dalton Trumbo. Therefore, it has no place on these boards.
If you can provide an example of word or action by DT, or any of his fellow blacklisters, which shows support of repression I will gladly give you a hearing. Please bear in mind support of communist ideas does not count, as the theory is not inherently repressive, but has been applied in a repressive manner. Accuse those who committed these acts of repression, but do not lump together with them everyone who held or holds communist beliefs.
If you provide a argument of substance, I will respond. If you continue to blur the lines, then this is the last you will hear from me.
Pax
Okay, DT wasn't some Red Guard beating a scholar in the street or an Chekist shooting a bound prisoner in the back of the head. And quite possibly he either didn't know about such practices or was appalled by them. But if he failed to see the connection between Marxism and the absolutely brutal and freedom sucking means used to establish Communism then he is willfully blind or just plain stupid. When Marx talked about classes fighting then exterminating the bad old ruling class, there isn't much room for mercy, justice, the individual, love or all those other obsolete bourgeoisie values or concepts. The new man must be created by making the old man die out.
shareMan, you've obviously preconceived misconceptions about what communism is or isn't, or what it is or was.
1- The information you've available now is not the same there was back in the 30's and 40's, people didn't know what was happening in the Soviet Union or China, the same way no one knew that Hitler was murdering Jews 'til the second world war was already going on.
2- The Soviets were your allies during the Second World War and NEVER from 39 to 45 have you ever worried with the dangers of communism, that came later on.
3- Marxism never advocates extermination of old ruling classes, it talks about redistributing richness through production criteriums, and talks about the economic methods that society has to base itself, and about worker rights. Read as many original writings as you want from Marx, and you'll never find those kind of genocide affirmations, and I know you won't, I took the time to read them.
4- What is in question here is if you have or if you have not freedom of thought/expression, you don't have freedom of thought if you're only not troubled if you agree to what people say it's agreeable.
5- Only thing Trumbo was convicted for was for being a communist and not cooperating on your witch hunt, paint it as you wish, but I fail to see the democracy aspect of your constitution present there. People may be convicted by crimes, but for thoughts? That only means your country applied the same principles that used to exist on european monarchies, where one could be convicted for thoughts agains the King.
6- In case you don't appreciate Mr Marx, think that his ideas are of the utmost importance to the unionist revolution of the later 19th century, and they are the ideas that lead you to work a certain amount of work per week, and to have right to representation in front of your employers, and most of your rights as a worker come from him. Hate communism as you wish, but obviously you don't even realize it's influence...
7- If you agree with the conviction of someone for his/her belief in ideals you consider wrong then, for God sake realize you're fascist and intolerant, and with the difference of not having a weapon in your hand, you're not that different from the "devilish-communists" you acuse and hate.
author, part of your problem with understanding Jakeolope's point (in addition the fact that he hasn't done a very good job articulating it - and did he have to bring up Muslims?) can be seen in your use of small-c communism rather than big-C Communism. Trumbo was not merely an advocate of Marxism, by his own lights, he was a member of the Communist Party, a Soviet-funded and essentially Soviet-operated organization. Now I am NOT saying this is legally the same as swearing allegiance to a foreign government, nor that he was a traitor. Indeed, I think the blacklist and the congressional hearings were fundamentally unjust, particularly the latter (wrong as the blacklist was, people are denied employment all the time in Hollywood and elsewhere for unfair reasons; it is unfortunately not as exceptional as one would like to believe). But Jake has a point about the hypocrisy of Hollywood writers who were members of the CPUSA but proclaimed their fidelity to civil liberties, and about CPUSA membership implying support for the agenda of the Soviet Union.
Also, apparently Trumbo himself "named names" something the film never mentions but he, to his own credit, acknowledged:
from Wikipedia, source listed as Victor Navasky's "Naming Names":
Shortly after the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, Trumbo and his publishers decided to suspend reprinting of Johnny Got His Gun until the end of the war. After receiving letters from individuals requesting copies of the book, Trumbo contacted the FBI and turned these letters over to them.[6] Thus did Trumbo, in effect, "name names", something that would come back to haunt him years later when others would name him before the House Un-American Committee. Trumbo regretted this decision, which he called "foolish", after two FBI agents showed up at his home and it became clear that "their interest lay not in the letters but in me."[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Trumbo#Involvement_with_communism
Incidentally, the film also presents an irritatingly ahistorical context for the period, by implying that there was little anti-communism before 1945 (the U.S. and USSR were allies during the war, but there had already been a massive Red Scare, far more repressive than the Cold War's Red Scare, after World War I; and incidentally Stalin was an ally of HITLER's from 1939 to 1941, the period in which many Communists and Communist sympathizers switched their stance from anti-fascism to all-out pacifism, switching back to anti-fascism again when the USSR was invaded). The film also allows several commentators to speak about McCarthy as if he was behind Trumbo's blacklisting (McCarthy was in the Senate, not the House, and did not begin his crusade until 1950, years after the Hollywood Ten were first called before HUAC.) The story and the person are compelling ones, and the issue of persecution is a just cause, but the film muddles this by making it all black-and-white, which is not only historically inaccurate, but, frankly, dramatically less interesting as well.
As for Trumbo and whether he himself was a hypocrite...he apparently was a Communist until 1948, but used the First Amendment by refusing to answer the committe's questions in 1947. Whether or not he did so self-servingly, or out of a conviction which later led him to abandon the CPUSA, or out of a kind of blindness by which he cared deeply about civil liberties in the context of America but did not examine how this contradicted a support for Soviet-style Communism - I don't know. I would like to think that it was the second case, but I would have to read a full-length biography or study of the man to find out more.
Also, there's a bit of irony in the film using Trumbo's quote about concern for free speech going out the window in favor of economic security. This is actually the Communist line, in which context it's considered understandable not lamentable. Does anyone have or know of the full interview in which Trumbo offered this observation? I'd be interested to know if the filmmakers used it as he originally intended.
shareHe was a communist but he wasn't a traitor, if you assume by traitor that he actually took acts against the U.S. government, or swore allegiance to a foreign government, which is treason.
Some may argue that being a CPUSA member was pledging allegiance to a foreign power, and indeed, the Cold War prosecutions against the CPUSA hinged not on that but that the CPUSA abstractly called for the overthrow of the US government, by teaching Marxism.
OK< traitor is a rather loaded term. But the CPUSA was not an independent organization, they acted in accordance to the wishes of the CPUSSR. So in essence he was an agent. True, traitor means he passed on vital secrets or sabotaged something, he was more of a propaganda mill.
shareokay, so he was a propaganda mill. in a free society what is wrong with that?
shareNothing, just be honest that Trumbo was a Communist mouthpiece, as well as a good writer I may add.
shareWow.
I wonder how many of the people who post on this board have actually seen the movie Trumbo.
The main point of the movie, as far I could understand it, was that Senator McCarthy (and most of the current government at the time) had heard of the communist situation abroad, and were afraid of its influences in America, and the people who might be part of the communist party.
Hence the committee on the House of UN American activities, questioning all those people, including Dalton Trumbo.
Some of these people refused to answer the committee's questions, on the basis that it went against the amendment against the invasion of privacy and others on the right not to be incriminated.
Some of these people might have been communist, or a member of the party, but the point is, its not right to deny people the right to work, because they cling on their rights.
Actually Joe McCarthy had nothing to do with HUAC, he was a Senator who came later, or with any of the Hollywood investigations, as well as Trumbo was a sympathizer of the USSR.
shareThere is a difference between been a sympathiser of the former United Soviet States Republic and been accused of being a member of the communist party.