Hear , hear
My own opinions about the bizarre demonizing of Senator McCarthy in particular, and anti-Communists in general, canbe summed up in a word: suicidal. Since the time of Sparta-adoring Plato, the intellectuals habitually worship brutal thugs, who would, once in power, immediately kill all the intellectuals.
Let me re-post, without further comment, what reader Carolyn over at Dirty Harry‘s website says about Dalton Trumbo and the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.
“Whenever I see pictures of the blacklist era, I see only pictures of those ’stalwart brave’ leftists who defended communism – but NO pictures of what it was they were defending.
“Instead, all we see are pictures of the blacklisted people – their ‘noble’ faces, their ’suffering’ families, their ‘anguish’, etc. Even if it isn’t accurate, you still can’t help associating with those pictures because they’re the only ones you have. But what if you actually saw the pictures of what it was those ‘noble’, ’stalwart brave’ leftists were defending?”
“NO person could see the mass graves of those millions of Ukrainians which Stalin starved to death and be unmoved. If you could have seen just one picture of a village, even a family decimated into gaunt hellish death by Stalin’s famine, seen those emaciated bodies who ate grass and (in some grisly cases) each other to try desperately to stay alive, if you saw the ditches, the streets, the cemetaries piled high up, up to the heavens with the mounds of earth covering the corpses of men, women, of children reduced to the size of rodents from starvation, hundreds upon thousands upon millions of corpses making you cough from the sour stench that emaciated corpses always emit, earth covering bones that were once humans who laughed, picked up their child, hugged their wives, sang songs – but now are only stinking smelly bones covered in mottled paper-thin skin and hairless heads, the child in their arms reduced to the size of a rat, these mounds of dirt stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see, nothing living, silence, no laughter, no movement, everything dead, and only the stench of decaying bodies everywhere – than a picture of smug, well-fed Trumbo’s ’suffering’ as he’s denied his servants and his Cuban cigars sure as hell doesn’t look as f**king noble as he and all of Hollywood insist it is. Even less noble when you realize that smug well-fed Trumbo knew those pictures. He KNEW the hell of Stalin’s deeds. And yet Trumbo ignored them and didn’t lose a moment’s sleep.”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
