Heaven: A Great Big Blacklist

When Biased BBC gets nostalgic, it's not for soppy stuff like old TV shows, vintage sports cars or 70s' fashion.

No, B-BBCers mist up over more muscular material - like McCarthyism. Tom wishes McCarthy was read rather than dead:

Yesterday evening on Radio 4 there was a discussion about the effects of HUAC and the Hollywood blacklist.

Are you now, or have you ever been, a Radio 4 listener?

Both of the guests (Michael Freedland and Corin Redgrave) were very much against the hearings and the resulting blacklist.

How odd. Doesn't everyone enjoy a good witch-hunt?

But instead of challenging them on this point, the presenter seemed to be in total agreement that Macarthyism was a terrible thing.

I'm sure you mis-heard.

How impartial is that?

They'll be taking sides on evolution next. And phlogiston. And the Flat Earth Theory. WTF?

I can think of a number of reasons to celebrate the blacklist.

I'll take over when you reach a hundred.

If, for instance, you think Hollywood is bad now, imagine how much worse it would be if it had been dominated by a self-perpetuating clique of stalinists for sixty years.

Shaun Of The Red? 24 Hour Communist Party People? Eternal Sunshine Of The Five-Year Plan?

You don't have to imagine.

You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Just look at the BBC.

Only if Biased BBC tells me to. Otherwise sinful.

Funny how no-one ever mentions the blacklist against right-of-centre writers operated by the corp itself.

And the show-trials. Who can forget Huw Edwards: "I have here in my hand a list of 205 people who were known to the Director General to be supporters of the Conservative Party..."

GCooper, one of Biased BBC's legendary sages, names and shames the guilty people.

it is a point of fact that McCarthy, horrible though he may have been, actually did unearth and identify a significant number of Communists and Communist sympathisers at work in Hollywood.

Can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. With a chainsaw and a hand-grenade.

Sam Duncan wants a complete reappraisal of the Blacklist.

A number? As I understood it, according to the KGB files every one of the Hollywood blacklist was on its payroll.

And we are bound to take the KGB seriously on fact.

Even if that's not the case, there was clearly a huge Soviet propaganda operation underway in Hollywood.

Otherwise, how would Ronald Reagan have done so well. And Charlton Heston. And John Wayne. Chuck Norris, too. Oh, and Schwarzenegger.

But the BBC still calls the affair a “witch-hunt”, insinuating that it was all imaginary.

No, the witches were real.

I couldn't help wondering as I listened to that astonishing interview last night what would have happened to screenwriters in the Soviet Union who were found to be in the pay of the CIA.

Indeed. The Soviet Union being the moral equivalent of the United States. (Are we sure?)

Pedantic detail: The American Heritage Dictionary defines McCarthyism as "the practice of publicising accusations of political disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence" and "the use of unfair investigatory or accusatory methods in order to suppress opposition."

Losers.