Senator
Joe McCarthy covers the microphone as he listens to his
nearly-as-notorious
legal aide, Roy Cohen, in 1954
Rceczpospolita, Poland
Joseph McCarthy and the 'Martyrdom' of Hollywood
"Exposing communists in public office was not for the purpose of persecuting people for their political views, but a reasonable and all-out defense against the threat of a totalitarian state."
Edward R. Murrow: One of the most celebrated journalists in American history and CBSNews colleague of the recently deceased Don Hewitt and Walter Cronkite, Murrow helped bring down Senator Joseph McCarthy with a television news special in 1954.
In recent years, American
movie screens, and in consequence, Polish, too, have been showing movies that
glorify the victimization of America's creative world during the
"horrific" era of Joseph McCarthy. Such
well-known films as Good
Night and Good Luck [video below] tell the stories of progressive journalists and
filmmakers standing up to the nightmarish terror of the Wisconsin senator and show
how they were persecuted for their heroism.
Recently, Canal Plus has
been trying to terrify us with the biography of screenwriter and author Dalton Trumbo, who, due
to the notorious senator’s vigilance, was barred from writing under his own
name. This movie, dripping with sentimentality, in which the best known
American actors make the highest-pitched declarations about “persecution,”
“suffering” and even “blood” (yes, no mistake here), leads one to consider this
martyrdom in the "factory of dreams."
Let’s start with Joseph
McCarthy. The senator from Wisconsin was a political adventurer who in 1950,
decided to make use ofthe anti-Communist
wave, swimming to the top by purging U.S. public life of Kremlin agents. For
four years, McCarthy stalked American politics. By repeatedly throwing out completely
unjustified accusations and publicizing fabricated revelations, he greatly
contributed to the discrediting of the fight against communism. His Republican
Party colleagues kicked him out and a few years later, in 1957, McCarthy died as
a consequence of severe alcoholism. A statement attributed to then (Republican)
President Dwight Eisenhower, that the Kremlin’s main agent in America was
McCarthy himself, seems accurate.
The trouble, of course, was
the results of his activities, not any real communist affiliation on his part.
The McCarthy case could be considered fairly typical democratic overreach at a
time of emergency. It could also be seen as a symptom of the overall health of
the United States, which dealt with McCarthyism without much of a cost. This
isn't to say that there weren't unjust and unpleasant consequences for a number
of people. But the threat in those days was real. The three-year-long Korean War
had brought the Americans over 30,000 casualties and the danger of an attack from
the communist countries, particularly during the Stalinist period, was not far
fetched.
Communist infiltration of
Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration has been a repeatedly confirmed fact, as was
sympathy for communism within American creative circles. Until 1956, official communist
doctrine was to treat the Soviet Union as the only true homeland, and working
on its behalf was every communist’s duty. The difference between ordinary communist
activity and that of a Kremlin agent was quite fuzzy. It's no wonder, then,
that defenses had to be erected against the enemy; exposing communists in
public office was not for the purpose of persecuting people for their political
views, but a reasonable and all-out defense against the threat of a
totalitarian state.
The House
Committee on Un-American Activities had nothing to do with McCarthy. It was
created in 1938 and was dedicated, among other things, to identifying communists
and Nazi sympathizers in public office. It's difficult to imagine this kind of
proceeding without a temporary violation of civil rights and, consequently, a
number of connected excesses. Fighting these excesses was important, but making
a mirror image of the communist terror out of them, like Hollywood does today,
is absurd and disgusting. Keep in mind that many of those who, for instance,
lost the right to write movie screenplays (under their own names), praised a system
built upon crimes against humanity. It is in this context that we should see
Hollywood's martyrdom.
*Bronislaw Wildstein
is considered by many Poles to be a modern version of Joseph McCarthy, after in
2005, he smuggled a file of informers and victims of the former communist
secret police out of the Institute for National Remembrance and distributed it
to fellow journalists.
