Just as the Left continues to deny that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy despite the evidence unvailed in the opened KGB files, Hollywood --- and particularly the young activists out there --- continues to portray the Hollywood Ten as wrongly accused and blacklisted.

Two books I recommend:

Hollywood Party, How Communism Seduced The American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1040s, by Lloyd Billingsley

Red Star Over Hollywood, The Film Colony's Long Romance With the Left, by Ronald & Allis Radosh. 

Trumbo and the other members of the Hollywood 10 were indeed Communists, but that never bothered liberals.  However, they always hated anti-communists (including Ronald Reagan) and threw around words like "red scare", "red-baiting", and "witchhunt".

 As someone once said, "There were no witches in Salem, but there were Communists in Washington and Hollywood."

Does "FBI informant" mean someone who gave the Soviet Union information on the FBI, or someone who gave info to the FBI?

Now if only we could get Hollywood to stop blacklisting conservatives.

Check out my latest YouTube...but only if you support the troops and their mission: Better Men Than Me/The Battle For Fallujah

Absolutely excellent article by Garvin for more than just the Trumbo background.  BTW here is more background on Tumbo explaining his relationship to the CPUSA.  But aside from the activities of one somewhat significant figure from Hollyweird, I found Garvin's article fascinating for the myths it explodes in the leftwing view of the world, yet also points out how they have managed to gain an outsized influence on academia and the film industry.  He also points out the speed with wich the old Soviet Union collapsed.  But while I couldn't find a statement to that effect, I got the impression that he, like many others I have read, believes that communism itself is dead, except in American universities and hollywood with their apologist mentality that covers not only communism, but islamism also.

For a long time I have thought that this is a mistake, even though I have not been able to come up with much to back my thoughts up.  I remember that my dad, who had a high security clearance civilian job with the government in the 50's-60's, used to say that the riots and such of that time were communist inspired.  I just thought he was paranoid.  Turns out that he probably wasn't totally wrong.  Putin is former KGB, and there area a lot of former KGB and spetsnaz running around and those guys don't just fade away.  Once a Marine, always a Marine.  Same for KGB, etc.  There is an article over on FrontpageMag.com called "Radical Road Maps:  Uncovering the Web of Connections Among Far Left Groups in America", that details a lot of the communist infiltration in the 30's-40's in Chapter 3:  "It Has All Happened Before".  It details some of the history of the communists during the Roosevelt administration, and goes on to explain that they did not just go away.  Their descendants are still around.  So the question is always out there: what are they up to now?  Aside from the socialst types in this country, i.e. healthcare, environmentalism, AGW church activities, etc.  where are the real hard core, down and dirty commies now? 

An article by Michael Geer, "Osama bin Marx and the Real Jihad" shows the tentacles of communism in the current islamist movement:

...They're not called Revolutionary Guards by happy accident in Iran. Their penetration was nothing less than amazing, given that Communism is the zenith of scientific atheism. But communism tilled a fertile field in Islam to build up a terrifying cult to wage war upon us, their ultimate enemy. [1]  

Which is what is at war with America. It is all-encompassing and it will never stop. Islam is the current hammer. Ferocious, deadly, and as driven as the tides. It is the ultimate of weapons from the supernatural. But Islam is not the final enemy behind all enemies...

Early Communists correctly analyzed that they would never be able to produce victory over the West through force of arms. They deduced that in order to destroy us, they would have to attack like shadows. They would have to devise Other Means, Other War Fronts, Asymetric Struggles, Other Strategies and Other Tactics. In other words, redefine the field of battle. And that their war would be longer than mere generations because their war, the real war would be aimed at fundamentally turning us upside down inside and backwards until we turned on each other....

He goes on to reference another article from the Weekly Standard, Post Modern Jihad, that points out the common roots between the communists and modern islamists:  MANY ELEMENTS in the ideology of al Qaeda--set forth most clearly in Osama bin Laden's 1996 "Declaration of War Against America"--derive from this same mix. Indeed, in Arab intellectual circles today, bin Laden is already being likened to an earlier icon of Third World revolution who renounced a life of privilege to head for the mountains and fight the American oppressor, Che Guevara. According to Cairo journalist Issandr Elamsani, Arab leftist intellectuals still see the world very much in 1960s terms. "They are all ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists," he(Cairo journalist Issandr Elamsani) says, "who look at everything through a postcolonial prism."

I'm not sure how islamist and communist are going to fit but I have the suspicion that Bin Laden is being used, just as Trumbo was.  If they can't get us directly, they will wear us down, one brick at a time by grinding out all the mortar that holds us together.

"The future is not set.  There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."

http://www.michaelyon-online.com