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It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in the 50s. It's not like they could play the "well the USSR isn't _real_ communism!"

• justizin 11y ago
  > It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in the 50s. The CPUSA is alive and well, and some intelligent people are probably members of it. Do you long for the times of McCarthyism? This is your actual reaction to this? OK. :)
  • bobcostas55 11y ago
    >Do you long for the times of McCarthyism? McCarthy was a bit overzealous but honestly I don't see the issue with it. Imagine if North Korea had its own party in the US, a party that worshiped Kim Jong-Un, and NK was 100 times larger, and had tons of nukes, and murdered wayyy more people than it does, and had spies at the highest levels of US government. What would you think of the people who belonged to this party? Would you work with them? Trust them with positions of power, authority, or influence?
    • angersock 11y ago
      What would you think of the people who belonged to this party? Would you work with them? Trust them with positions of power, authority, or influence? Well, it depends. Are they proposing things and doing a better job than the current turkeys? That's what actually matters--everything else is just branding.
    • adekok 11y ago
      > McCarthy was a bit overzealous but honestly I don't see the issue with it. Some people are unable to learn from the lessons of others. Remind me to turn you in as a communist / whatever in the next round of inquisitions. The accusation doesn't need to be true. It just needs to be seen as "not an issue" by people like you.
    • elektromekatron 11y ago
      A bit overzealous? "If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you've got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker." - Senator Joseph McCarthy
      • bobcostas55 11y ago
        Unfortunately McCarthy wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, the gay stuff was particularly silly. On the other hand he was 100% right about the CPUSA, about soviet spies infiltrating the government, etc. Between Venona and the Soviet intelligence archives we know that he was spot on. The much-maligned HUAC even found the Soviets' most valued asset, Alger Hiss. So yeah, a bit overzealous. The whole circus didn't last long, anyway.
        • elektromekatron 11y ago
          Again, silly isn't the word I'd use here, however I guess, given you are also busy slandering Ray Bradbury as a Stalin apologist based on not properly reading a very short article, it is a bit petty in context to be too annoyed about your continual abuse of serious understatement.
        • jacquesm 11y ago
          Fortunately! He could have done a lot more damage if he was sharper and it would have taken longer for his contemporaries to come to their senses. Ditto Hitler.
        • srean 11y ago
          you mean just like rape is a bit of surprise sex and typically doesn't last very long anyways, right ?
  • ptaipale 11y ago
    Well, as they say, intelligence is not the same as wisdom. Many intelligent people may well belong to communist parties in Western countries, but I don't think they are very wise. (Just recently came back from a trip where visited Stalin's Canal. The GULAG killed there so many workers, intentionally, that they could be laid next to each other along the built-up parts of the canal, head next to the next body's toes, forming a linked chain of bodies buried in the embankments. This construction was where the Nazis visited to learn how to set up a forced labour camp and how to wear off people and kill them with hunger.)
• protonfish 11y ago
  I think it's because Communism is such a good idea on paper that intellectuals have a hard time admitting that it has been tested numerous times and the results are definitive: it doesn't work. But looking at the idea on paper now, it seems obvious what the problem is: it requires unprecedented power to be put in the hands of a few despots with no oversight. What could possibly go wrong?
  • vidarh 11y ago
    No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere. Since you believe it is such a good idea on paper, perhaps you can describe to us what the idea actually is? Because either it will be blatantly obvious you don't know what the idea is, or it will be blatantly obvious it does not match any of the places you might try to claim it has been tried. > it requires unprecedented power to be put in the hands of a few despots A society with power put in the hands of a few despots by definition is not communism, as a society that concentrates power with one group has class rule, and communism by definition requires the absence of class divisions.
    • danharaj 11y ago
      > No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere. I think the experiments in Spain actually showed that it would work. Remember, anarchocommunism in Spain was violently crushed by fascists... after the Stalinists betrayed them. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism wherever you go and its fruits are the same.
      • kinghajj 11y ago
        The interesting part about that episode is that both the West and the USSR acted to bring them down. Authoritarians on either side were scared of the implications of a functional, libertarian socialist society.
      • Kalium 11y ago
        Experiments show that anarchocommunism works... in small groups, in larger, non-anarchocommunist contexts. Which is to say it doesn't scale. At all. Rendering it pretty useless at the kind of scale its adherents postulate it at.
• vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in the 50s. Though I personally could never ideologically support CPUSA, it's hardly "mind-blowing" to me why some would have stood for it back in those days, particularly in light of stances such as these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Party_USA_and_African_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Party_USA_and_Af...
• vidarh 11y ago
  They could rationalise it because they had been 1) lied to by western press and governments for decades and had no reason to trust anything they heard by the time of the Bolshevik coup, 2) lied to by the Stalinist regime by being invited in and presented an nicely dolled up image of the Soviet regime that contradicted what they were told by western press, thus further strengthening the idea they could not trust what they were told. It's totally unsurprising that a lot of people were taken in - they were on one hand presented with people they trusted telling them they'd seen first hand what the Soviet state was accomplishing, and on the other hand seeing news media they had learned to see as liars confirm that impression by saying the opposite. It didn't help to have had experiences such as the fawning many right wing elements did over Hitler before the war, or the way Western governments tried their hardest to prevent socialist volunteers from joining the International Brigades against Franco in the Spanish Civil War in the 30's - to many people this meant that the Western governments had no moral authority to speak against Stalin at that point in time; even many people who took issue with Stalin took more issue with Western governments for reasons such as that. They of course have to be responsible for their own opinions, but why they ended up holding them is not that hard to understand in context. (Then again, while some moderated themselves as Stalins excesses became accepted even in Soviet circles, as late as '94 I was in a heated exchange where a Norwegian Stalinist told me flat out that if he was in power I'd be in a gulag - some people genuinely believed the methods were justified)
• elektromekatron 11y ago
  There is nothing in the article that says that Bradbury was a member of the CPUSA. edited to add - “Only a few perceived the intellectual holocaust and the revolution by burial that Stalin achieved… Only Koestler got the full range of desecration, execution, and forgetfulness on a mass and nameless graveyard scale. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was therefore…true father, mother, and lunatic brother to my F.451.” - Ray Bradbury
• danharaj 11y ago
  There are antiauthoritarian forms of communism. Of course, most who subscribe to the derivatives of Marxism laugh at such an idea, fully convinced that only if they were in charge would authoritarianism and hierarchy be abolished. To me, it is a very strange view. I never thought communism was a possibility until I stepped out of the cold war narrative.
• dragonwriter 11y ago
  > It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in the 50s. It's not like they could play the "well the USSR isn't _real_ communism!" card - for decades the CP had been a blatant Stalin worship cult It was probably a lot easier and safer for heterodox (from the perspective of the Soviet-affiliated hierarchy) Communists to continue to network with each other within the CPUSA while maintaining a front of orthodoxy within the party outside of their own inner circles than to do so outside, especially given the political climate toward Communists -- without distinctions for variations within that category -- in the broader society. That being said, nothing in the article indicates that Bradbury was a member of the CPUSA. It indicates that Martin Berkeley, a self-described former member of the CPUSA made a number of claims including: * "That Bradbury was one of the more prominent writers of science fiction in the United States." (which, apparently, the FBI needed an ex-Communist informant to discover?) * That Berkeley "felt Bradbury was probably sympathetic with certain pro-Communist elements in the WGAW" [0] (emphasis added) * That Bradbury denounced supporters of a proposal to expel from the SWG those were Communists or who had asserted their Fifth Amendment rights before the House UnAmerican Affairs Committee as being "cowards and McCarthyites". * That Berkeley perceived that "some of the writers suspected of having Communist backgrounds have been writing in the field of science fiction" and that "science fiction may be a lucrative field for the introduction of Communist ideologies" (emphasis added, in both quotes) * That "some of Bradbury's stories were slanted against the United States and its capitalistic form of government". So, basically, an ex-Communist described Bradbury as someone with (as far as he could describe) no clear Communist links, but who seems like he might remotely be sympathetic to Communist ideology because (1) he writes science fiction, and some other people who write science fiction are suspected (presumably, by the same ex-Communist) of being Communists, and (2) he's opposed to McCarthyism, and (3) some of his writings are read (by, again, the same ex-Communist) as opposing the status quo of the US government. Its appalling -- but not surprising -- that any of that would be noteworthy and considered as evidence of any dangerous Communist leanings by any thinking person in the 1950s. Its even more appalling -- and surprising -- that it would be treated as equivalent to membership of the CPUSA by any thinking person in the 2010s. [0]"Writer's Guild of America, West", formerly "Screen Writer's Guild" (SWG)
  • logfromblammo 11y ago
• cbd1984 11y ago
  > This guy wrote Fahrenheit 451 According to him, that novel was not about censorship: > Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands. > This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship. > Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature. http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted-2149125 http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-mis... So your point is somewhat misguided.
  • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Its fair to say "What does this book mean to you?" I'd be confident that 99% of people asked would say "Censorship". So its fair to use it for a example of that.
    • cbd1984 11y ago
      I fully agee. My point is that it wasn't what the book meant to him.