The long arc of history

It's not knowledge to which I am even particularly attached, but it is surprisingly hard to revise what you first learned as a child.

Growing up, the received wisdom was that the House Un-American Activities Committee was not much more than organized mob violence; that there were Communists in Hollywood but they were well intentioned intellectuals honestly believing in the perfectibility of man via the science of Marxism; that the Hollywood Blacklist blighted the lives of numerous innocent Americans, that the Rosenbergs were innocent of the accusations made against them and that their conviction was a failure in the judicial system and a travesty; that Alger Hiss was likely completely innocent of the charges, that the Soviet spying efforts on the Manhattan Project were justified by wartime exigency; that Soviet spying in the US in the 1930s through the 1950s was wildly exaggerated; Whittaker Chambers (Alger Hiss's accuser) was a self-serving buffoon; Richard Nixon was a ruthless politician on the make, fully willing to exploit the Red Scare and national paranoia to make a name for himself; and finally, that the hysteria surrounding Soviet activities in the US was a result of small-mindedness, naivete, anti-intellectualism and anti-semitism.

I wonder what is being taught in schools today and how that era is being presented. I have a sense that perhaps not too much has changed.

And yet it has. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the brief window of openness surrounding perestroika and the opening of the Soviet archives, much of what I was taught has been refuted and many of the concerns about Soviet spying and activism have been revealed to have been justified. The Rosenbergs and Hiss were indeed guilty as charged. Soviet spying was indeed extensive and effective. Soviet spying on the Manhattan Project accelerated the Soviet nuclear program in their post-war Cold War with the US. While ham fisted, the HUAC was indeed dealing with a real issue which represented a real danger to the US. And on and on.

Now there is a new book out that, if true, upends the story of communism in Hollywood. Flipping Hollywood’s Blacklist Narrative
by Ron Capshaw is a review of Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters, Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler by Allan H. Ryskind. It is a rather chaotic review, jumping all over the place and presuming a level of detailed knowledge that I know is absent in my case.

Apparently Ryskind argues that the traditional narrative of Hollywood actors and screenwriters being persecuted by studios and blacklisted for their communist party memberships or sympathies is only part of the story. The untold story, per Ryskind, is that there was a countervailing set of pressures by which those seeking to expose Soviet sympathies were also in turn effectively blacklisted by a cabal of Soviet sympathizers.

I do not know what the factual merits of Ryskind's case might be. I am happy to learn about the period but it is not one of great interest to me. Or rather, there are other histories I have in a very large stack that I want to get to first. Ryskind's story sounds, or perhaps it is the reviewer who sounds, a little loopy, counterintuitive and rather unbelievable.

But after the reversal of all the other received histories of my childhood, it no longer can be ruled out.

And given the Soviet efforts to undermine Western cultural norms though the instrument of intellectuals and via postmodernism, fostering critical theory and deconstructionism, etc., the dark chapter of Soviet destruction has not yet been completely written. The propagators of Gramscian memes remain highly visible and effective in pushing marxist ideas without ever acknowledging the origins of those ideas, often, I suspect, because they don't even know their epistemological genealogy.

The long arc of history indeed.