PBS Slams America

I found myself watching a reprise of an American Masters program on PBS in the wee hours of the morning because our ancient Pekingese was acting out. The program chronicled the "ordeal" of Dalton Trumbo-one of the so-called blacklisted writers driven from working openly in Hollywood during the McCarthy era. I was struck by the palpable love the Douglas acting clan showed for the Communist Trumbo. The father and son acting dynasty must know that Communism is no mere political philosophy but the most murderous ideology ever conceived. The belief system Trumbo at least flirted with if not fully embraced, killed more than one hundred million people in the last century-first in Russia with the poison then seeping into Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, Angola, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe (not to mention the numerous Communist-inspired and supported insurgencies that did not succeed but killed thousands more) -and indiscriminately killing multitudes more than even Hitler could manage. Trumbo was lucky he was in America and not in the Communist sphere, where blacklisting or even a gulag would have been a preferred outcome to a bullet in the head in Lubyanka prison or in some unknown killing field in the Communist empire. Artists who demurred even a little from the party line faced Checka, NKVD, KGB, or GRU torture for supposed offenses against the state or the revolution. Some had show trials, some were simply disappeared as Communism spurred a vast apparatus of murder. Even if a bohemian was not subversive or counter-revolutionary, he might well face death because a SMERSH agent had not met his spy quota for the week. Trumbo was supremely fortunate that the authorities he offended were not Reds or he and his whole family would almost certainly have been executed. So watch the self-superior leftist arrogance that is PBS with the knowledge that whatever supposed injustice was visited on Mr. Trumbo, it pales in comparison to what the Communists he was infatuated with routinely did to his creative peers under their jackboots.