Archive for the ‘Communism’ Category

John Robson: Trudeau’s ‘wilful blindness’ to the evils of Chinese communism – National Post

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If you asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau whether Xi was a communist, he wouldnt admit it

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If youre wondering what it would take for the Trudeau administration to get over its crush on Chinese communism, I have no idea. Especially once we learned that despite everything, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) is doing its best to pour our industrial secrets into the Politburos pockets via wait for it Huawei. And by despite everything I mean massive evidence of the Chinese Communist Partys hostility to human rights and decency, including putting historys worst mass killer on their banknotes in case anyone was struggling with the concept of brutal communist dictatorship and loving it.

Periodically I get heckled for saying Trudeau administration not Trudeau government. But I cling to the quaint non-Xi Jinping concept of a separation of powers rather than a centrally directed, unified force for social change that can turn on a dime. And Im glad that some within our state apparatus agree.

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David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), recently warned against Beijings strategy for geopolitical advantage on all fronts economic, technological, political and military that uses all elements of state power to carry out activities that are a direct threat to our national security and sovereignty. Back in November the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) fingered China as a leading cyber-menace. And CSIS and the CSE are part of our government.

So too, unfortunately, is NSERC, which is currently trading our know-how for renminbi. Something major American and British universities now refuse to do, while Australians grow uneasy. Not us, apparently.

My colleague Kelly McParland, quoting Vigneault, asked in exasperation, You have to wonder how often knowledgeable people need to attest that Chinas is a dangerous, predatory and untrustworthy government before the fact of it begins to sink in and action is taken. Instead the Trudeau administration pussyfoots around genocide (whats an exterminated minority between trading partners, plus Uighur is hard to pronounce), plays Olympic dodgeball and flirts with Huawei.

As you may know, I dont believe in conspiracy theories. I think they poison public discourse and am forever trying to explain to people that when someone says stuff you dont agree with and does stuff you dont agree with its because they think stuff you dont agree with. But the Chinese Communist plan for world conquest isnt a plot. Its a plan.

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Chinese officials dont go out of their way to advertise it when trying to wheedle something out of you. But see Document No. 9, a.k.a., the Communiqu on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere, which was issued in 2012 with Chinese President Xi Jinpings backing.

It denounces seven things: constitutional democracy, including separation of powers, elections and an independent judiciary; universal values like Western human rights applying to China; civil society, as in anyone doing anything except through the Communist party; free markets; an independent press; historical nihilism, i.e., criticizing Mao Zedong for being an insane mass murderer; and questioning Chinese-style socialism, i.e., criticizing Xi for being one.

For opposing conspiracy theories I get called many names, including co-conspirator. But not useful idiot. They leave off the useful. Unlike Chinas leaders when it comes to Western politicians who give them a free pass, such as outgoing Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil, who recently echoed Document No. 9 Point 3 in a Canada China Business Council video.

Its not our role to go in and tell someone else theyre wrong, he said. Im proud to be a Canadian, but Chinese people are proud to be Chinese. And they have a way of doing things. Lets go learn. And let us grow economic ties. Never mind that they crush Hong Kong and commit mass slaughter. After all, Hitler and Stalin had a way they did things, too. And the Chinese way includes lucrative consultancies and senior advisor posts.

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The Politburo understands all too well that conceited people think arrangements that flatter and favour them represent the universe unfolding as it should. And its easy and comforting to ignore threats. Back in the Cold War, people were forever insisting Leonid Brezhnev or Stalin werent communists. Sure, they claimed to be, and imposed communism aggressively wherever possible. But deep down they wanted peace, power, security or any dang thing you could name except communism. Like our Chinese buds.

Unfortunately, Xi Jinping is as communist as Lenin or Mao. General secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Commanding its immense private army and flying a red flag with five yellow stars. Need I go on?

Apparently so. Because if you asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau whether Xi was a communist, he wouldnt admit it. He isnt given to answering even innocent questions, let alone awkward ones. And Im not saying they have something on him. Hes a fool on national security, as on economics, our constitutional order and practically anything else you can think of.

Even so, this wilful blindness and misconduct is amazing. If he wont stop it, we must.

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John Robson: Trudeau's 'wilful blindness' to the evils of Chinese communism - National Post

How TikTok communists are reclaiming the hammer and sickle – i-D

To prove to you why communism is so bad, were going to talk to my dad who grew up in communist Romania, TikToker @stinkysocialist says, in a video thats amassed 2.4m likes. Walking into their dads study, they ask: Dad, why was communist Romania so bad? The dad, serious, thoughtful and poignant, begins: I lived there until I was 21 years old, so I have a lot of horrible stories to tell you. I left communist Romania in 88, which was one year before the war went down. And if I were to tell you one main thing that I remember? I aint never seen two pretty best friends.

Scroll through TikTok and youll find a lot of videos like this that ostensibly touch upon the legacy of the Soviet Union, before flipping the script. The Daddy Karl trend back in October 2020 was a signal of how quickly TikToks communist community was growing. Four months on, #communism has reached over 563 million views and accumulated hours of videos dedicated to highlighting Gen Zs seemingly growing anti-capitalist beliefs, and their faith in opposing ideologies.

Youll find people flexing tattoos of the hammer and sickle symbol (originally created by Soviet artist Yevgeny Ivanovich Kamzolkin to represent unity between the working class and the peasantry) to the soundtrack Just Did a Good Thing. Another video sees the face of Joseph Stalin, the notorious leader of the USSR from 1922-1952, whose legacy is caught somewhere between mass murderer and World War Two hero, deepfaked to lipsync to Millie Bs M to the B. One TikTok is captioned communist leaders as chav anthems (Stalin is Sophie Aspins Mash Up, for those interested).

The influx of iconic Soviet symbols hanging on TikTokers bedroom walls or printed on their bikini tops, and videos claiming the USSR is best over a Soviet chorus soundtrack not to mention the numerous light-hearted tattoos and animations may seem like little more than another TikTok trend. For some, it does appear to be more of an aesthetic interest than a deeply political one. But for many others who place the hammer and sickle in their social media bio, or label themselves commies or comrades, its a belief; an important part of their identity.

20-year-old Ilyssa, from New York, sees communism as the only viable alternative, one that will improve the societal issues we currently face. From a young age, I was very aware of the stark class differences that existed, she says. I grew up with a single mother in a very poor family. We made it work but I was aware of our class status. On TikTok, she educates her 67k followers on the subject of anti-semitism and creates hammer and sickle-inspired makeup looks. For Ilyssa, the symbol means solidarity among the working class. [Communism] means being anti-capitalist. It means advocating for equality and dignity for all people and striving towards a basic level of humanity for every person that exists.

Yet it's hard to ignore the geographical and historical disconnect between young Americans with a new interest in this history, and those related, through experience or blood, to hardships under Soviet rule. Alina, an 18-year-old from Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine, wonders if TikToks communist boom is rooted in people who are fans of communism, but who understand little about its history.

In Russia and former Soviet satellite states, such as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, the Soviet symbol and images of the regimes leaders still carry the trauma of that time. For the children and grandchildren of those who suffered, the hammer and sickle represents much more than the solidarity initially intended. Stalins regime will be remembered by its descendants for decades to come, 18-year-old Anton from Omsk, Russia says. They will not forget the deaths of their repressed relatives.

The Red Armys arrival is rarely remembered as a pure liberation, historian Anne Applebaum wrote about the USSRs victory over the Nazis in her book Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe. Instead, it is remembered as the brutal beginning of a new occupation.

Many of the descendants of the regime know Soviet rule for its horrors. There was the looting and rape by Red Army soldiers, as documented by writers like Vasily Grossman; the Gulag system that led to the deaths of tens of millions of inmates; and the criminalisation of homosexuality in 1934 that targeted an unknown but substantial number of gay men and women -- a subject Dan Healey explores in his book Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi.

The flag of the Soviet Union may trigger memories of events like the Holodomor in Ukraine a famine widely considered to be a genocide that led to the deaths of up to 12 million Ukrainians. To some, its a symbol that represented the anti-Semitism that was characteristic of Stalins regime, such as the 1953 Doctors Plot, a witch-hunt that targeted predominantly Jewish doctors. For others, its a reminder of the 1921 invasion of Georgia, which aimed to rid the country of its independence and implement Bolshevik control, or the Great Terror/Purge of 1936-1938 that targeted everyone from ethnic minorities to those suspected of dissidence.

Its not just the ideologys dark history that Anton worries is being ignored, but its problematic present. The current situation in North Korea is an example, he says. The communists know what is going on there but either dont think its necessary to talk about, or they discuss it ambiguously.

There are a lot of TikTok videos under #communism that set out to show that true communism has never been properly implemented. One video says the Stalinism and Soviet communism legacy distorted so many peoples understanding of Marxism and socialism. They are different ideologies. For the communists of TikTok, oppressive regimes like that of Stalin, North Korea, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia have very little to do with what communism and the hammer and sickle mean today.

I dont necessarily agree that its offensive, says 18-year-old Zoe from Chicago, who has a tattoo of the symbol and uses her TikTok platform to educate others about communism. I dont think that we should equate communism with the Soviet Union. We associate the symbol with more radical, positive change. That desire for change was what pushed her into far left and anti-capitalist politics in the first place. It was mostly the events happening in the US, especially over the summer, that were the reason I decided that communism was the best fit for me, she says. And there are many others, both Gen Z and millennials, that are also starting to consider communism or socialism as a more suitable ideological fit.

A 2019 YouGov poll found that more than one third of millennials in the US approve of communism an 8% increase on the previous year. Elsewhere, predictions of the current presidential election in Ecuador are indicating a nation eager for a return to socialism after years of neoliberal rule under current leader Lenn Moreno. In Russia, only over the past few months has the seemingly progressive, socialist and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny (who has a history of racist and nationalist politics) overtaken Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, who has called for the Re-Stalinisation of Russian Society. Now, Navalny is seen as the substantial political opposition to Vladimir Putin.As such, he has recently been imprisoned for violating parole terms, during a period of time spent comatose in a Berlin hospital as he recovered from novichok poisoning.

The semantics of these debates are complicated, not least because while many advocating for communist ideals are based far from the former USSR, they arent necessarily disconnected from its history. Ilyssa recounts the hardships that her Jewish relatives felt when fleeing Russia from the pogroms in the early 20th century, and then from the Soviet Union a few decades later. My great grandparents were able to flee and come to the US, but a lot of their relatives were killed, and theres no documentation that exists of them outside of their memories, she explains. As a history major and descendant of victims of the Soviet Unions regime, Ilyssa wants to reclaim the hammer and sickle as a symbol of hope and a brighter future. But thats not to say that she doesnt recognise the dark nuances of the flag from which her great grandparents fled. Its realising that [Stalin] was not representative of communism or the hammer and sickle thats what makes it so easy to divorce the two. But its still worth learning from. We have to look at what parts of Marxism and communist theory left a space for totalitarianism and authoritarianism to take hold, and how we can prevent that from happening in the future.

Many young Russians also want to see the crimes of Stalin dissociated from the countrys proud heritage. The symbol isnt offensive," Roma, from Sarapul in Western Russia, says. It represents pride, a time when people strove for the best. Over 800 miles away in Saint Petersburg, 22-year-old Maria says she thinks its a good thing that Gen Z communists are breathing new life into the symbol: I personally dont associate it with anything bad. The hammer and sickle was there before Stalin and it was there after him. His crimes are a black stain on our history that still resonates to this day.

For many of Gen Zs TikTok communist community, rejuvenating the hammer and sickle is not about ignoring the weight that it carries. Its about returning the symbol to its original meaning: one of unity and solidarity. They want the symbol to represent everything they dream of seeing in the world. But, above all, they see it as an emblem of hope for a generation caught within a defective, splintering system; one they collectively want to topple on its head.

Follow i-D on Instagram and TikTok for more.

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How TikTok communists are reclaiming the hammer and sickle - i-D

When Television Was Anti-Communist and Jack Webb Was King – National Review

Jack Webb in Red Nightmare.(Screengrab via YouTube)TV from Dragnet to the Cold War and the PC war

Television is the enemy of the people. It broadcasts Fake News. It suppresses thought. We cant let it dominate us. These media lessons originated with Jack Webb, one of the pioneers of television drama. Webb is best known for the police series Dragnet, first a 1949 radio show, then two incarnations on TV, from 1957 to 1970, where he famously portrayed just the facts cop Joe Friday.The latter episodes that now broadcast on the ME-TV cable channel bring back TVs good old days but also prove Webbs uncanny vision. Dragnets spare production values and pithy realism compacted assorted societal complexities, from ordinary crime to various psychopathologies, into 30-minute blocks.

Compared with the straightforward dramaturgy of Webbs 1954 theatrical film Dragnet (just released on Blu-Ray from KINO), the Dragnet series doesnt look like Millennial TV but resembles the modernist style of cineastes Sam Fuller, Robert Bresson, and Jean-Marie Straub. And like Fuller, Webb was a military vet turned Hollywood professional who sustained his patriotism through pop-art aesthetics. Webb brought probing Americanism to television; the best example is his 1962 drama Red Nightmare, a prediction of 21st-century progressivism that exposes what we now take for granted in Fake News TV.

In Red Nightmare, originally titled Freedom and You, Webb focused on Communist encroachment. Its a Cold War parallel to todays PC war. Webb imagined a national takeover in which citizens are told, In America you have too many freedoms. One day it will be your mission to destroy those bourgeois capitalist freedoms. Webb himself steps in as narrator and sets the scene:

From the looks of it, it could be Iowa, California, Tennessee. You might call this a college town, Communist-style, as part of a long-range plan to destroy our free way of life.

Webbs intro pinpoints academias role in social revolution: The strangest of all schools: espionage as a science, propaganda as an art, sabotage as a business long-range Communist conspiracy.

First shown to schools and social groups, Red Nightmare arose out of the film branch of the now-defunct Office of Armed Forces Information and Education, established post-WWII by the Department of Defense; the program was committed to producing patriotic American stories (PBS and NPR, no longer sharing such a commitment, have taken over these roles and reversed their ideology.) Red Nightmare was eventually broadcast on Webbs GE True TV series, sponsored by the General Electric corporation. Todays television and mainstream media use commercial spots and series for idealized portrayals of race, gender, and already-settled discussions about social justice; they criticize America for not being sufficiently woke, sufficiently communistic.

Webb saw this coming. Red Nightmare proposes a fundamentally transformed America where average white American TV dad Jerry (Jack Kelly) awakens to find his suburban town looking like barbed-wired East Berlin. Webb describes Jerrys personal shock: When theres a job to be done, Jerry, like so many Americans, is apt to ask, Why Me? But when anarchy invades his home, Jerry finds it impossible to avoid his patriotic responsibility. Webbs Midtown, U.S.A., goes from a Rod Serling Twilight Zone fantasy to John Miliuss Red Dawn.

Media junkies who take The Twilight Zone with a grain of salt might scoff at Red Nightmare, but Webb, a true populist artist, targets their cynicism in ways that echo paranoia about the Deep State and the media. Jerry is warned:

When the moral fiber of the United States weakens and the economy collapses under the pressure of competitive coexistence, you will assume control. It will be your responsibility to purge the minds of reactionary Americans.

Jerry takes his precious freedoms for granted, unlike todays college youths who are not complacent; their pseudo-sophistication thwarts those freedoms, as prerequisites for high-paying jobs at Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, which they perversely see as protecting political correctness more important to them than freedom, especially when other peoples freedom triggers their privilege. Jerrys daughter succumbs: Its true, Daddy. The party convinced me that I should free myself of the lingering bourgeois influence of family life. She sounds exactly like shes reading from the Black Lives Matter manifesto.

Red Nightmare was directed by George Waggner, produced at Warner Bros. under the personal supervision of mogul Jack L. Warner. In 1962, Communism was an alarmists simple explanation for anti-Americanism. The only real difference today is that media executives program drama and information television to reshape traditional political consciousness into wokism. TV turns FDRs basic four freedoms into the anti-freedoms mentioned up top.

Jack Webb knew that TVs impact as social conditioning went deep, yet his narrative ingenuity was never humorless. Jerry drags his kids to church (Now youre really gonna find out what the truth is all about), but its been converted into the Peoples Museum: Soviet Inventions. Red Nightmares prescient parable is TVs most precise, exacting analogy for Millennial revolution.

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When Television Was Anti-Communist and Jack Webb Was King - National Review

‘Faith in the Masses’: Communist Party history gives something to believe in – People’s World

The new book 'Faith in the Masses' includes a range of topical and biographical essays from across the Communist Party USA's first century.

Faith in the Masses: Essays Celebrating 100 Years of the Communist Party, USA, edited by Tony Pecinovsky, is an ambitious undertakingalmost as ambitious as the work the book describes. These essays cast a wide net aiming to capture the breadth of the Partys efforts to change society over the last century. The celebration is heartfelt, reverent at times, hyper-romantic at others, and decidedly not uncritical.

The collection of short pieces is itself one manifestation of faith about which there is much to like. The very first contribution is Norman Markowitz and Tony Pecinovskys outline of Party history, providing a framework helping the reader to understand how the organization responded over the decades to the critical problems of American society and government. Their brush is detailed as well as encompassing. Real people respond in organized fashion to the issues of their time. Of particular interest is how the Party responded to various internal missteps along the way, to the almost ceaseless red-baiting attacks from outside, and to the winds of change involving race and gender questions.

Once set, the structure of this collection is embellished by a dozen topical chapters, a bit unevenly sewn together, but cohering by the force of their telling and the historical import of their subjects. C.J. Atkinss gracefully written, well organized recounting of the often overlooked life of Party founder Charles Emil Ruthenberg, who, alas, died all too young, at 44, in 1927, is a true gem that stands as a metaphor for the Party itself: hard, selfless work to make a difference in the world of its time.

Centerpieces of the Partys strugglethe labor movement, civil rights, and electoral politicsfollow the models of historical overview and origins tales. Joshua Morriss Playing by Our Own Rules: The Communist Partys Presidential Campaign in 1932 well lays out the promise and perils of participation in bourgeois electoral politics. Timothy V Johnsons The Communist Party and the African American Question traces the rocky path toward defining a politics of the Black nation in large part informed by widespread discussions within the international Communist movement in the 1920s and 1930s over colonialism.

In Has White Supremacy Ended Your Pain: Beulah Richardson and Art in the Struggle Against Racism by Denise Lynn, and The Cartoons of Ollie Harrington, the Black Left, and the African American Press During the Jim Crow Era by Rachel Rubin and James Smethurst, the authors explore the development of political line and actual struggle in the Communist Partys vital, central role at the intersection of class and race through powerful examples of cultural expression that were perilously on the precipice of being forgotten. It is made clear in these essays that though the current term intersectionality may be new, the CP had arrived at the exact same analysis decades before (the work of Claudia Jones among others comes to mind).

Again on the issue of race, Peoples World writer Al Neal, who covers the sports beat for the paper, contributes a fascinating piece, First to Start the Fight: Communism, the Daily Worker, and Baseball. Neal reminds us that the CP in its early days remained highly skeptical of sports as a topic even worth covering in its Party press, being an unhealthy diversion of workers attention from the class struggle. But he shows how gradually that attitude changed, and the Party, with writers such as Lester Rodney passionately following the unfolding story, became one of the leading lights, with the African-American press, in the national struggle to integrate baseball and other sports.

Labor issues suffuse the collection of essays. Robert Zeckers Faith in the Masses: The International Workers Order tells the story of that worker-run and Party-led mutual insurance and benefits society that fell victim to the axe of McCarthyism in the early 1950s. Long before the New Deal, the IWO, and the Workmens Circle before it, along with many other, mostly ethnic fraternal societies, created critical networks of social support addressing functions that in better organized welfare states the government addressed. This raises a glaring question to place before conservatives, even today. If they want to get government off our backs, why then do they attack people and their homegrown organizations for self-help?

Other references to workers issues run like rich veins begging to be mined. But among the core tenets of Party history and values, the labor movement itself is given short shrift, as noted in the Introduction for good reason. By now labors oft-told stories are otherwise accessible, through the work of scholars like Philip Foner et al and biographies of labor leaders, organizers, and workersmany of these also available from International Publishers. Still, it would have been of greater value for less familiar younger generations, and even those knowledgeable, to include more extensive coverage of working-class struggles alongside the kindred topics.

Read a preview chapter from the book: Gus Hall and the Communist campus tour of 1962

There are fascinating pieces on feminism (Elizabeth Armstrongs Gita, Betty, and the Womens International Democratic Federation: An Internationalist Love Story, which recalls activists Gita Bannerji of India and Betty Millard of the CPUSA); on literature (Joel Wendland-Lius enlightening A Culture of Human Liberation: U.S. Communist Writers in the 20th Century); and the environment (Marc Brodine and Tony Pecinovskys Virginia Brodine: Deciphering and Communicating the Science of Environmental Sustainability).

Topicality notwithstanding, one of the most forward-looking essays is Pecinovskys chapter Far from Marginal: The CPUSA in the 1960s and early 1970s, recounting the energetic bounce back from McCarthyite persecution. The Party had built new organizational outlets and conducted speaking tours, particularly on campuses, throughout these years, well engaging itself in the tumult of the times, including the Free Speech Movement, Civil Rights, and anti-war movements. One only hopes the space given to this chapter did not shut out another voice or topic, because much of this material was also covered in the authors 2019 book Let Them Tremble: Biographical Interventions Marking 100 Years of the Communist Party, USA.

Although this chapter only contracts to deal with Party activity into the 1970s, here would certainly seem to be a place to continue and expand Markowitz and Pecinovskys earlier outline of Party history. The fifty years that have elapsed since the seventies, particularly in the aftermath of organizational splits, demand more thorough updated explorationperhaps in a follow-up volume if its not too soon for historians to dredge up some uncomfortable incidents in the recent past involving persons very much still with us.

Yet as the question of marginality is raised, it is not unfair to shine a light on the more recent Party work, national and local, individual and organizational. Historic struggles in civil rights, peace, anti-apartheid, labor, environmental, and other movements have grown through direct action participation, from the fight to preserve public education to the Dakota Pipeline to the Black Lives Matter marches and anti-gentrification, housing, and anti-white supremacist demonstrations, not to mention some history-making electoral campaigns.

Faith in the Masses shows clear signs of having been rushed into print for the centennial of the Party. Too many are the typographical and grammatical errors, misspellings (both Nakita Khrushchev and Pete Seager on p. 39), incomplete bibliographical data, and repetition of common mistakes such as International [rather than Industrial] Workers of the World (p. 99 and again on p. 129), that needlessly distract the reader and unfortunately detract from the overall confidence in this book as a source. It deserved better. Hopefully, many of these can be cleaned up in a second printing.

Most laudable is the inclusion of a number of essayists whose names had been unfamiliar, at least to this reader. There seems to be a whole industry now of scholars committed to studying the history of the CPUSA and setting the record straight not only on its accomplishments but on its earnest grappling with problems the larger society was not paying heed to.

Lets continue this inspiring story in classrooms, on picket lines, and in the streets!

Faith in the Masses: Essays Celebrating 100 Years of the Communist Party, USAEd., Tony PecinovskyNew York: International Publishers, 2020425 pp. with illustrations, $19.99ISBN 10: 0-7178-0829-7

Order here: Faith in the Masses

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Firing Actors for Being Conservative Is Another Hollywood Blacklist – New York Magazine

In the late 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood studios under pressure from the right promised they would not knowingly employ a communist. This blacklist eventually became notorious, especially in Hollywood, which came to lionize its victims in several films. And yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the blacklist policy from the emerging current treatment of right-wingers.

Earlier this week, Gina Carano, an actor in The Mandalorian, was fired from her job after a controversy over an allegedly anti-Semitic social-media post. In short order, UTSA, her talent agency, dropped her as a client.

Many media accounts have taken the anti-Semitism charge at face value (USA Today: an anti-Semitic Instagram Story that she shared from another user.) The post in question, which triggered a social-media firestorm that quickly led to her firing and loss of representation, was not anti-Semitic by any reasonable definition. The post simply argued (uncontroversially) that the Holocaust grew out of a hate campaign against Jews, which it then likened (controversially) to hatred of fellow Americans for their political views:

Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors even by children. Because history is edited, most people today dont realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views

I dont find this post especially insightful. But overheated comparisons to Nazi Germany are quite common, and, more to the point, not anti-Semitic. There is no hint anywhere in this post of sympathy for Nazis or blame for their victims.

Many of the reports of Caranos termination string together the trumped-up offense of her post about Nazism with a series of controversial posts. The worst of them is a post insinuating elections are rife with voter fraud and should impose photo ID a claim that, while provably false, is also a standard-issue Republican belief. The second-most controversial post in her history is a very small joke, in which she added boop/bop/beep to her Twitter profile, before apologizing for the insensitivity of seeming to mock the practice of including pronouns in social-media biographies.

The remainder of her case history seems to consist of commonly held beliefs. Variety solemnly reports, Other posts, including a quote saying Expecting everyone you encounter to agree with every belief or view you hold is fucking wild and one saying Jeff Epstein didnt kill himself, remained. The suspicion that Epstein was murdered is hardly unusual. And Caranos belief that we should not expect everybody we encounter to share all our beliefs is not only widespread but utterly sensible. Indeed this seems to be the central point of disagreement between Carano and her former employer and client.

Whats most striking about the news coverage of Caranos defenestration is the utter absence of any scrutiny of her employer or her (now-former) agency. The tone of the reporting simply conveys her posts as though they were a series of petty crimes, the punishment of which is inevitable and self-evidently justified. The principle that an actor ought to be fired for expressing unsound political views has simply faded into the background.

If you think blacklisting is only bad if its targets have sensible views, I have some bad news for you about communism. While some victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist were liberals or progressives who refused to turn in the names of their colleagues, others were bona fide communists. Dalton Trumbo a Hollywood writer who was blacklisted, then wrote under front names, and whose story was told in a recent hagiographic movie starring Bryan Cranston followed the Communist Party line in the Stalin era. When many fellow communists dropped out of the movement after Stalin formed an alliance with Hitler, Trumbo followed the new party line.

Trumbo gained some martyrdom when he was hauled to Washington to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. This is the beginning of the American concentration camp, he warned. (Fortunately for Trumbo, his antagonists, unlike Caranos, were not witless enough to confuse hyperbolic Nazi comparisons with anti-Semitism.)

Of course the point with Trumbo and other blacklist victims was never the soundness of their thinking. Technically, the studios had the legal right to refuse to associate themselves with people who had abhorrent beliefs. But a fairer and more liberal society is able to create some space between an individuals political views and the position of their employer. A Dalton Trumbo ought to have been able to hold onto his screenwriting job even though he supported a murderous dictator like Stalin. And actors ought to be able to work even if they support an authoritarian bigot like Donald Trump.

Analysis and commentary on the latest political news from New York columnist Jonathan Chait.

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