Trumbo.2007.Cold.War.txt
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Trumbo (2007)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0889671/
Director: Peter Askin
Dalton Trumbo was the most famous and probably the most talented of the Hollywood 10, the group of left-wing film industry professionals who went to prison after refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Along with many other actors, writers, directors and musicians, they were then banished from the business. Trumbo himself served 10 months in federal prison after his conviction for contempt of the 80th Congress; as he remarks in an archival interview seen in the film, he entirely agreed with the verdict, as he felt nothing but contempt for that Congress and several later ones.
What the more intelligent neocons see in the 1950s crackdown on Communism is both an underlying pattern and an instructive example, having to do with power and how to wield it. The real target of the Red Scare was not the handful of prominent lefties like Trumbo who had their livelihoods destroyed and their reputations ruined but rather the rest of society, which proved by and large to be craven, suggestible, and downright eager to hew to a new standard of patriotic conformity. Whether this was accidental or intentional, pursuing a highly unpopular minority provided authoritarian elements in this country with a test case: How far could constitutional rights and liberties be eroded by government-sponsored fear-mongering? The answer was pretty far, and would-be dictators from J. Edgar Hoover to Dick Cheney have been renovating and repeating the pattern ever since, with a different half-imaginary enemy in the gunsight.
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