M-T
The Canadian Jewish News, Thursday. May 2, 1991-Page 9
Susp
■:^;':By:'-'■V.RUTH WISSE
reality of past
4V Don't youTpeople have an ounce V "Df decency?'' shouts Hollywood directof David Merrill (played by Robert de Niro) at the chairman of the Committee on Un-American Activities hearings in the climactic sceiie of Guilty By Suspicion. The question is belter addressed to those who made the movie.
The movie opens in 1947 when Gongr^, informed by defecting Soviet agents about espionage networks inside the United States, decided to expose Conununist activity through a system of public hearings. The most sensational hearings were held iii HoUyvvpod, because of the public nature of the industry and its vulnerability to scandal, After the jailing of the"Hollywood Jen" — one director, one producer, and eight writers who were cited for contempt of Congress for their refusal to acknowledge the authority of the hearings and to answer quesi tions about their political activities (including Communist Party cards that were submitted in evidencie), the industry began policing itself through an informal blacklist of suspected Communists.
Blacklisting heated up after Senator Joseph McCarthy came on the scene in the early 1950s, using the new medium of television to promote his anti-Communist crusade. Although McCarthy lost his power by 1954, and ''McCarlhyism'' proved a shortlived political phenomenon, it may have left
its deepest scars in Hollywood, where vast sums of money hang upon shifting reputa-Ttions aid public opinion. The Report ©n Blacklisting by the Fund for the jRepublic in 1956 sho\yed the extent of the damage that this practice had inflicted on hundreds of actors, writers, even technicians.
Guilty By Suspicion is sup^ posedly about one such victim, a successful movie director who is blacklisted and prevented ftom fitKiing any work in the movie industry because of his presumed affiliation with the Ruth R Conimunist Party. In the original script the \ director had been a Communist, but in the laundered version that reached our screens, he has no political convictions whatsoiever. Here we begin to see how the corruptionof -the film exceeds the corruption it describes:
A movie that piurports to deal%ith the investigations into Communism does noteven take this political ideology seriously enough "to say a word about its intentions or its reach. It substitutes Joseph McCarthy for Joseph Stalin as the symbolof political evil. The whole question of communism, the extent of its influence on the entertainment in-dustr>' and on the formation of public ^attitudes, is erased — erased injust the way that communism erased from history whatever it found embarrassing;
^The Hollywood bladd isTof the 1-950s was a punitive artd unjust attempt to clear the industry of pK)litica| suspicion at the expense of its individual employees^ut one of the reasons blacklisting worked was because it used the methods the Communists had introduced. Communist party members in Hollywood during the 1930s and '40s systematically promoted their own people and discriminated against non-sympathisers. Members lied to the soft liberals whom they lured into their front or-Wissc ganizations, arid ftirthered their political goals at the expense of personal loyahies. When the tables turned, revenge against leftists by the former victims of their politics played no small part in the application of the blacklist.
Since the avowed purpose of communism was to plot the overthrow of the American system of goyeniment and the spread of Soviet influence, disloyalty through manipulation was the hallmark of ail its activities. HoweverdishO[norable the blacklist niiay have been in its methods, it was at least a step ahead of the Communists in the honesty of its goals. The leastwe should expect from any treatment of this subject is a description of how ■ Communists functioned in Hollywood and an assessment of how far they succeeded. To have been a Communist or a Com-
munist sympathiser in the 1940s is one thing. While ignorance is no more defensible in politics than it is before the law, allowances could be made for political naifs during the Second Worid War who promoted Russia as.an antidote to Germany. But to make siich a movie now, when the estimated rnteriial victims of Soviet communism already number between 40 and 60 million, and when new killing fields are still being uncovered — outside Kiev, in the Urals, in the forest near Minsk — is either an act of moral idiocy or a clever attempt to camouflage guilt.
Dalton Trumbo once boasted that he and his fellow Communists kept anti-Stalinist scripts from ever reaching production. Can one imagine how different the world might have looked if Hollywood had began to expose Stalin's crimes when it first learned of them? Now Hollywood Jews want us to weep about an American director who lost his job; they never thought to make a film about Stalin's murder in 1948 of the great director of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre Shloime MikhOels, or of the execution four years later of all the major Yiddish writers of the Soviet Union.
The suffering of leftists under McCarthy-ism is supposed to obscure from American audiences the sins of leftists who acted as apologists for Stalinism. Judging from the poor attendance at this movie, the public is not buying it. Hollywood has long since been cleared of suspicion, but no one can clear its bad conscience.
Consequences of OPEC bad for consumers, producers
. , , By r ELIE KEpOURIE
^ ■ ^he Gulf War is. hardly over and a I rush has already begun to supply I more and better arms to the M iddle ,: Jl East.
So long as there is a flood of petrodollars to pay for them, it is vain to think an amis limitation regime or a multilateral agreement to control arms sales can succeed except in the very short run.
What is required is to cut — at the source — arms purchases by governments who are under no domestic restraint on the enormous windfalls that come their way.
■', The devastation of Kuwait and Iraq shows they have to be saved from themselves, and their haj>-less subjects from them.
Iraq is a small, generally backward country. As the war showed, its military leadership is inept; its soldiers mediocre; its industrial and technological base is comparatively insignificant. Yet. Iraq was able to build a very large army with vast quantities of modem arms, including weapons of
mass destmction.
Iraq's ability to engage in two destructive wars in a decade was due to one thing only, namely the prodigious profits that, in common with other states in OPEC, it extracted from oil consumers after 1973. As a very big producer of oil, Iraq enjoyed steady and increasing revenues.
After the war with Iran broke out in 1980 Iraq benefited from substantial financial help provid- . ed by other OPEC states, chiefly Saudi. Arabia and Kuwait.
In one way or another it was only OPEC that made it possible for Iraq to build a military infrastructure roads, communications, bunkers — and accumulate its vast arsenal of weapons.
OPEC is an association of sovereign producers.
Businesses, even multinational ones, must obey . the laws of the countries in which they operate; their market strategies are ultimately subject to control by governments.
When oil traders are states, it is much more difficult to compel them to refrain from policies that inhibit free trade.
The OPEC coup of 1973 meant that the oil business became politicized, involving a vast range
of issues between states, most of which have nothing to do with the oil trade. Sovereign suppliers, apart from extracting an exorbitant-price, for their oil. obtained political and military advantages.
The consequences of OPEC have been bad for both consumers and producers—- arousing.cii-. pidities and creating a cycle of violence that has devastated Iraq. Kuwait and substantial parts of Iran.
To transform oil into an ordinary- commodity for which producers and consumers are not per-_petualjy in a kind of economic war. and which does not lead to the savage conflicts we have seen, will require a great deal of forethought and ..; resolve.;
The interests of oil prOducks outside OPEC have become intermixed with, those of OPEC itself. These producers have come to depend on OPEC to provide a floor for their own more expensive oil.
Now we hear talk of the United States exerting its newly won power and influence in the Middle East to suggest or even preserve a level of prices.
Such government management Of a market has failed again and agaiin in the cases of other commodities, and it goes against the free-trade principles enshrined in the General Agreement on Tafiffs and Trade and champiohed.by the United States,
As the interests of priiducers and consumers . pull indifferent directions, and governments serving various domestic interests are pulled hither and thither, this or that energy policy is prompted but. to judge from experience, ultimately to no purpose.
The OPEC nettle has to be grasped, sOoner rather than later. This course is clearly in the-pub lie interest.
If OPEC producers have been able to use their wealth to purchase miliiar)' power, America's great military victory over Iraq can also be translated into" political power that might exert steady pressure to diminish OPEC's ability to rig the ■ market. ,
That would deterthe accumulation of weapons tliat""increase the temptation, and fear, of war. (Elie Kedourie is visiting professor in Columbia University's political science department.)
Our values, history.
converge
Bv :. ■
RABBI MARC TANENBAUM
"any American Jewish organizations have issued public statements condemning the .early international indifference to the plight of the Iraqi Kurds and Shi'ite Muslims fleeing Saddam Hussein's brutality. ' ' ' \ ' Two. leading Jewish overseas relief agencies — the American Jewish JoiritDistrjbu-tipn Committee and the American Jewish World Service — twojweeks ago launched major national campaigns to provide food, clothing and medical aid to the Iraqi refti-gees. The AJWS also announced that it would be channeling its resources through the International Rescue Committee, a non-sectarian relief group formed in the 1930s to rescue refugees from Nazi Germany. '
I serve on the boards of both the AJWS and the International Rescue Committee. During discussions of what would be an appropriate response to the crisis, everyone sympathized with the victims. But some Jews questioned the idea of providing aid to the bitteriy anti-Israel _ — and in many cases anti-Semitic —.Shi'ite Muslims.
With-like-minded others, I counselled that we have no moral altemative to aiding in the relief of the hunger, disease-and suffering of these unfortunate people, -lam fully conscious of die anti-Israel and anti-Semitic culture that pervades much of _ the Muslim world. But if the sole criterion for deciding when to save lives were the victims' opinions about Israel and the Jews, none of the Jewish relief agencies — or the State of Israel — would be working in countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique or Uganda.
In making the decision to join others in
providing aid to Iraqi refugees, there is a ■ convergence of Jewish values, Jewish history and practicality.
Tikun otom (repairing the world) and saving human lives are primary, fundamental Jewish values. If Judaism is taken serious-ly7 it can only be interpreted as conferring an inescapable obligation to reduce human suffering and salvage human beings from destmction.
The Jewish historical-experience has traumatized us. in the words of Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel, into an awareness "of the indifference to evil and the evil of indifference."
This awareness of evil and its consequences is not a product only of recent history; its roots go back inillenia. The Talmudic scholar Rabbi Joseph B. Solov-eitdbiJk has said that God put the Jews through the hell of Egyptian slaver>' so that
they might become rachamanim b'nei rachanumim — a people made, by their own suffering, hypersensitive to the suffering of others.
Finally, my years of e.xf)erience in working on worid refugee and hunger programs in Africa. Asia and Latin America have persuaded me that involvement by Jews and Israelis in relieving human suffering often leads to re-examination by Third World peoples of the hostile attitudes toward Israel and Jews instilled in them by Arab propaganda. The rescue of Ethiopian Jewry shows what can occur as a result of one country undergoing such a change in attitude.
\;.r\- (JTA)
(Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, for 30 years the director-of the international relations department of the American Jenish Committee, is now a lecturer, writer and consultant. ) '""