That all of this is a blip, an anomaly sprung from a bizarre confluence of unique and unpredictable but gravely life-threatening events- through no fault of our own.
That we have done nothing to cause any of it, and that pretty soon now, we'll shake it off, and get back to the great, gentle, humanistic, benevolent, peaceful, globally beloved REAL America whose memory we all cherish and adore.
As if we have not been a vicious and rapacious perpetrator of global aggression, murder, genocide, fascism, slavery, and pervasive oppression -- not only of the poor innocent indigenous victims we first found on this land that's our land, or brought here to do the dirty work for free -- but ceaselessly, mercilessly and with consistent national complicity committed on our own citizens.
The author of this review, himself a child victim, sees a lot of the evil, and much of the current expression of that evil. What he cannot bring himself to see is the true nature of America and Americans.
He cannot bring himself to see that THIS is who and what we are, and have always been, that there are concentration camps in the USA: the infamous and widely videotaped FEMA camps, the I.C.E. detention centers spread across the landscape, the thousands of privately-run-for-profit Prisons that enslave 3 million or so of our citizens. Like many such victims, he clings to the belief that Daddy was really a good man, and really truly loved him- but just made some bad mistakes.
Daddy did it to him, and is still doing to millions of us- right here in the USA (see below). You don't need to search in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib for serial abuse, torture, enslavement- and certainly not for oppression, censorship, vilification, nor the willful national complicity that makes it all possible.
Dalton Trumbo loved America too much, and sadly, so does this reviewer of a remarkable new film about Trumbo, his life, and the disgraceful but historically consistent persecution then called "Blacklisting" and now under the department of Homeland Security, but still sponsored by the good folks of the USA.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dalton Trumbo and American Evil
By Andrew O'Hehir
June 26, 2008, salon.com
"Convince people that their family's safety
is at stake, and they'll believe all kinds of outrageous lies
and turn against their neighbors who happen to look or act
different. "
"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."
"... No one, as Trumbo said, who lived through the
blacklist years emerged from them unscathed by evil, and now
that evil has been visited on later generations..."
No one has ever summed up the Hollywood blacklist of the
1950s -- and, by extension, the entire history of that
decade's anti-Communist witch hunt -- any better than this:
"The blacklist was a time of evil. No one on either side who
survived it came through untouched by evil. There was bad
faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and
cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and
stupidity, good and bad on both sides. It will do no good to
search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because
there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less
than others, some grew or were diminished, but in the final
tally we were all victims because almost without exception
each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to
say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and
receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why
none of us -- right, left, or center -- emerged from that
long nightmare without sin."
Those words were spoken by Dalton Trumbo in 1971, when he
received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild
of America -- as he noted at the time, an award bestowed by
those who had fought for him, those who had betrayed him and
those who had only the vaguest notion who he was. In
"Trumbo," the new film directed by Peter Askin and adapted
from Christopher Trumbo's off- Broadway play about his
father, the speech is given an electrifying reading by actor
David Strathairn. "Trumbo" is a terrific picture, a blend of
interviews and archival footage and readings of Trumbo's
letters and speeches (by Strathairn, Michael Douglas, Joan
Allen, Paul Giamatti, Brian Dennehy and others) that vividly
illustrates why the blacklist remains an urgent issue 60
years later. One could wish it were a bit more honest about
the sources of Trumbo's obvious mixed feelings about himself
and his fellow leftists. (Perhaps Christopher Trumbo's
forthcoming book will address this.)
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.
He continued to write scripts under assumed names and in
impoverished circumstances after his release from prison, and
spent several years with his wife and three kids in Mexico
working for little or nothing. He wrote at least 30 films and
doctored or rewrote countless others. He won two Academy
Awards decades after the fact, one of them posthumous. (They
were for "Roman Holiday" in 1953 and "The Brave One" in
1956.) His other screenplays included "Kitty Foyle"
(nominated for a 1940 Oscar), "Gun Crazy," "Lonely Are the
Brave," "The Sandpiper" and the antiwar classic "Johnny Got
His Gun," adapted from his own novel and his only directing
effort. Trumbo also became the first of the Hollywood 10 to
break the blacklist, when Otto Preminger hired him to write
"Exodus" and Kirk Douglas hired him to write "Spartacus,"
both made in 1960.
If the Hollywood blacklist and the entire Red Scare has
become a murky, antique-seeming affair in most people's
minds, there are reasons for that. Inevitably, the passage of
time and the death of nearly all the participants has turned
it into a remote artifact of black-and-white newsreel
footage. I think the fact that most of the Hollywood 10 and
other blacklistees continued to work, under various ruses,
and even formed an expatriate Red community of sorts in
Mexico, makes the whole thing seem like a romantic caper. In
fact, it was a cruel and deeply symbolic act of tyranny that
displays all too clearly one of the running themes of
American history: Convince people that their family's safety
is at stake, and they'll believe all kinds of outrageous lies
and turn against their neighbors who happen to look or act
different. I know, that's starting to seem unpleasantly
familiar, but let's not get ahead of the story.
Historians in recent years have legitimately attempted to
wrestle with the era's complexities and shine light into its
darker corners. It has long since become clear, for example,
that many American Communists, Trumbo included, succumbed to
the paranoia and authoritarianism that by Stalin's time were
ingrained doctrines of their faith. Ironically enough, during
World War II Trumbo apparently informed the FBI about his
contacts with people he suspected were Nazi sympathizers. He
later said this was a "foolish" decision, and that he quickly
understood that the agents were more interested in him than
in his letters from possible Hitler-lovers. None of this is
mentioned in the film.
Along with honest historical inquiry, however, has come a
smug, contrarian right-wing campaign to muddy the waters and
make the paranoid derangement of '50s America seem somehow
justified. If American Communists held a misguided faith in
the Stalinist Soviet state, the thinking goes, and if some
tiny percentage of them were Soviet agents or spies (and
let's stipulate that those things are true) then all 80,000
or so were, prima facie, seditious revolutionaries and
threats to democracy -- and the Hollywood 10 really were
trying to pervert healthy Americans with Red propaganda
concealed as entertainment. Not all versions of the neocon
rehabilitation of McCarthyism are quite so baldly ludicrous,
but all must make the imaginative leap that a tiny,
ineffective and consistently persecuted political movement,
which throughout its brief heyday attempted to reassure the
public that "Communism is 20th century Americanism," was in
fact an immensely powerful and sinister force.
All disputes about history are really arguments about the
present, and that goes double in this case. Contemporary
right-wingers don't care about the real story of Dalton
Trumbo, his nine original co-defendants or the dozens of
other blacklistees that followed. (A random assortment: John
Garfield, Dashiell Hammett, Judy Holliday, Langston Hughes,
Gypsy Rose Lee, Arthur Miller, Zero Mostel, Dorothy Parker,
Edward G. Robinson, Artie Shaw, Orson Welles, Josh White.) In
fact, as Askin's film makes clear, Trumbo was a witty,
irascible, mule-stubborn individualist who grew up on
Colorado rangeland and was a poor candidate for Marxist-
Leninist groupthink. He was a Communist Party member for, at
most, four or five years, and like most other American Reds
of the period -- like, say, my mother -- he was more
attracted to the excitement, the sense of action and heady
adventure, than to the core ideology. (No, I'm not a neutral
observer of this issue, if that's even possible.)
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.
In one devastating letter read in the film, Trumbo observes
that the liberal producer who doesn't believe in the
blacklist but apologetically tells him he can't hire a known
Communist because "that's the country these days" is more
oppressive than any congressional blowhard. His eloquent
anger toward the country that he believes betrayed freedom,
principle and basic human decency in its moment of postwar
crisis is matched by his confidence that if he could poll the
entire American population on one question -- "Would you like
a man who informs on his friend?" -- the universal answer
would be no.
But the lesson of "Trumbo" that clearly resonates in 2008 is
that even in an increasingly pluralistic society, public
tolerance can readily be turned against those who hold
troubling ideologies or alien beliefs, and in that situation
terrible things become acceptable. Some of those things are
small, like the cruelty and ostracism Trumbo's daughter
endured in elementary school, and some are larger. One of the
anti-Communist movement's darkest triumphs was the Emergency
Detention Act of 1950, which envisioned the suspension of
constitutional rights in a national emergency, and funded the
creation of six concentration camps for American civilians
who "probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with
others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage." It was
passed by Congress over Harry Truman's veto, but without much
public debate.
Not much about this act is easily available online, a
startling fact in this age of information overload. Congress
repealed it in 1971, and the six camps -- some of them
formerly used as Japanese-American internment camps during
World War II -- fell into disrepair. But it obviously struck
some people as a good idea, and so today our secret prisons
are in other countries and governed by no law, and so far
they have not housed any cantankerous Hollywood
screenwriters. No one, as Trumbo said, who lived through the
blacklist years emerged from them unscathed by evil, and now
that evil has been visited on later generations. His wife and
kids loved him, and he finally got his Oscars. Surely that
counts for something.
"Trumbo" opens June 27 in New York and Los Angeles, with
national release to follow.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Excerpts. Please access the following for complete info:
www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2005/05/location_of_con.html
Location of Concentration Camps in America
There are over 800 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational
and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even surrounded by
full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by
FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be
implemented in the United States, and all it would take is a presidential
signature on a proclamation and the attorney general's signature on a
warrant to which a list of names is attached.
The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a "mass exodus"
of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly
rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many
military bases to be closed down and to be turned into prisons. Operation
Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are the two sub programs which will be
implemented once the Rex 84 program is initiated for its proper purpose.
Garden Plot is the program to control the population. Cable Splicer is the
program for an orderly takeover of the state and local governments by the
federal government. FEMA is the executive arm of the coming police state and
thus will head up all operations. The Presidential Executive Orders already
listed on the Federal Register also are part of the legal framework for this
operation.
The camps all have railroad facilities as well as roads leading to and from
the detention facilities. Many also have an airport nearby. The majority of
the camps can house a population of 20,000 prisoners. Currently, the largest
of these facilities is just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaskan
facility is a massive mental health facility and can hold approximately 2
million people. Now let's review the justification for any actions taken...
Executive Orders associated with FEMA that would suspend the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights. These Executive Orders have been on record for
nearly 30 years and could be enacted by the stroke of a Presidential pen:...
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