Throughout America’s formative years, the House Un-American Activities Committee hunted down leftists. Today, America is the world’s richest, most powerful democracy. There’s a lesson in here for India
America, the richest democracy on earth, can’t abide socialism. In this year’s election, the 74-year-old Democrat and presidential contender, Mr Bernard Sanders, has done himself no favours by calling himself a socialist. President Obama, approaching the end of his very competent two terms in office, is regularly reviled as a socialist, spuriously, but truth be damned. African-American President notwithstanding, racism is not yet dead in America by a long chalk. But being communist is thought of as being worse than being African-American. The jury is still out on gender equality though.
That is why Mr Noam Chomsky, the notorious linguist/ anarchist professor and Jewish intellectual from MIT and Harvard, with at least 100 books to his name, is mostly regarded as anti-American and subversive by mainstream America. Overall, being called a socialist/communist is abuse in the US. Wish it were so here! But in India, it is a proud privilege. So much so, that the very suggestion of dumping leftist ideology in India, brings on an apoplectic outrage, and acute withdrawal symptoms throughout the intellectual classes and the body politic.
The ideological clap-trap of decades of failed policies has not dented socialism’s appeal, both among the masses, and a goodly proportion of the classes. It is seen as some kind of emetic and purge for the venality and perniciousness of capitalist ‘greed’; anathema to the genetic memory and psyches of many Indians, perhaps from imperial and feudal times.
But, this pro-labour/farmer/poor rubric harnessed with contempt and hostility towards capital and the engines of growth, is combined now with a toxic love for the Islamic terrorist/the murderous Maoist and so on. It isn’t above undermining and sabotaging the very state it lives in, insulting the military, combining forces with anyone who wants to bring it down. The matter has assumed dangerous proportions with many opposition parties supporting seditious elements in the name of democratic freedoms. And, it is being keenly watched by the Pakistani ISI, the Khalistanis, and other inimical forces.
Indeed, our highly subsidised universities, crucibles of this us-and-them dichotomy, seem to compensate for their lack of intellectual rigour with outpourings of what Joseph McCarthy, the infamous communist-hunting crusader in America, called ‘dangerous radicalism’. It was McCarthy who coined the phrase: ‘There’s a Red under every bed’, to spur support for his anti-communist crusade. That the Soviets had been American allies during World War II, being the first to capture Hitler’s Berlin, was the essential basis of the confusion. Particularly, when the post-war aftermath quickly cooled into Cold War, the long night of the ‘Iron and Bamboo Curtains’.
It may be serendipity that we have an American film on freedom of expression, political belief, patriotism and suspected sedition, showing in our multiplexes currently. It is also a serious contender to win an Academy Award or more this year. Trumbo, the feature film — there have been documentaries before on James Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood’s top screenwriter who was jailed and blacklisted for his political beliefs — has come at a time when the tolerance debate has been swirling and eddying between Bollywood, the chasms of the political arena, the mainline and social media spaces.
It looks like the socialists in their bastions and their variegated political bosses in multiple political opposition parties, are in mortal fear of being turfed out by a resurgent RSS/BJP combine. So they are squealing blue murder to try and thwart it. Will their efforts at mass mobilisation to turn the clock back succeed, or have they already gone, kicking and screaming, into the dustbin of historyIJ
As in the America of the 1947-1975 period, when Trumbo lived and worked, our democracy too is evolving, and groping its way towards its true meanings. If Trumbo succeeds as a metaphor for India in transition, it does so because of the tremendous native talent of the subject, the real-life screen-writer, that transcended the prejudice, persecution and opposition generated by his political views.
likewise, India, not by any means an easy place to do business, might nevertheless be worth taking on for foreign investors, because of its tremendous potential and steady growth rates in the midst of an economically troubled world. After all, many abroad do not understand our pretensions and protestations of secularism. They see India as an obviously Hindu-majority even majoritarian state, and think it is right that it be so.
The villain of the piece in Trumbo, one of two actually, is cast as the inquisitorial Congress House Un-American Activities Committee. But, do we not need a similar device here in India, to curb the depredations of so many bold ‘anti-nationals’, openly preaching and practicing seditionIJ The other villain of the piece in the film is The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a kind of Trump-like far-Right Republican Party of Hollywood the RSS/BJP parallel perhaps. This one, more localised than the country-wide commission, was backed by the likes of the iconic John Wayne, and powerful gossip columnist Heda Hopper, who boasted of a readership of 35 million people.
Trumbo himself though was that rare bird, an unabashed, if well-to-do ‘conviction’ communist, but also a solid family man, with a doting wife and three supportive children. Trumbo was so good at writing scripts for movie hits that also often won awards, that the big and small studio bosses, couldn’t do without him. So they accessed his talents by the back door, even when the front door was officially closed to him. And this throughout the period, from 1947 till the 1960s.
The real-life Trumbo won a quartet of Oscars, for several legendary ‘best films’: Roman Holiday, Spartacus, Exodus, The Brave One. He also won a lifetime award, once he could come out from behind the arras, from The Screenwriters Guild of America. For screenwriters to dodge the boycott was one thing, but sympathiser-actors like Edward G Robinson had to buckle under, retract, denounce and conform. Typically, all the liberal support melted away, once the commission began to bite.
Finally, the persecution did come off for Trumbo, when JF Kennedy as President attended a screening of Spartacus and allowed that he liked the movie. Kirk Douglas, the star and executive producer of the film, had already defied the ban by attributing the screenplay to Trumbo.
Bryan Craston, the anti-hero of hit TV drama Breaking Bad, plays James Dalton Trumbo. But director Jay Roach did sanitise the real-life Trumbo’s serious support for Soviet-style communism. And Trumbo was not alone in this. The commission may not have been fashionable, but it was definitely needed, for the idea of a capitalist America to succeed. That is why it was only wound up in 1975.