FBI Files on Ray Bradbury (1959)
openculture.com
openculture.com
This guy wrote Fahrenheit 451 ffs, how could he square the ideas in that book with his support for that regime...
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. :)
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?
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.
"If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you've got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker." - Senator Joseph McCarthy
So yeah, a bit overzealous. The whole circus didn't last long, anyway.
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.
(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.)
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?
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.
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.
Which is to say it doesn't scale. At all. Rendering it pretty useless at the kind of scale its adherents postulate it at.
Anarchism need not be seen merely as a state of a society. Anarchism can also be seen as a means, a method of collaborating with people. One can see anarchism everywhere in daily life and in struggles that are not specifically for the abolition of states. The root of the many anarchist political ideologies is the thought that a human being is best when she freely associates with her human beings and acts in collaboration with the world. As a method of being, it is useful even to people who care not to get involved in the grand affairs of the world.
Like many ideas and vegetables, the root of anarchism is perhaps its most useful bit.
Then it is condemned by that too. If "psuedo-communism" kills millions, real Communism is so impractical and unhuman that it collapses so fast into tyranny and despotism that one needs specialized equipment from physics to measure its duration.
This is not to its credit as a practical system to run a country on.
I would posit that while central allocation may have been discredited as an economic pursuit (outside, perhaps, of being something a Friendly AI might be capable of), the basic concept of earning the spoils of one's own labor is alive and well. Heck, we're moving toward it—fewer large corporations with layers of capital-suckling management, and more tiny networks of startups where each founder retains decent amounts of equity in (i.e. profits off of) their work.
In code terms, Capitalism is an interface; it says how entities interact but doesn't specify the nature of the entities. Communism is a very fragile over-engineered over-implemented "we'll call you" framework that's wrong in numerous ways, but management (literally!) is forcing you to use it.
Its an exercise in semantic line drawing as to whether it really counts as "Communism" at all, but its certainly a very different thing than Marx and Engels' Communism. (Leninism is at least as different from Marx and Engels' Communism as modern Western mixed economies are from the same reference point.)
AFAIK, every practical implementation of "communism" falls so short of the description, both ideal and transitionally, in things like The Communist Manifesto as to be blatantly lying when they use the name for themselves.
And then you have countries right now like China which blatantly abuse the label. (At the very least: If your country is engaged in capitalism, you are doing it wrong.)
And the same for Christianity or any other religion, but at least they had some positive outcomes.
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_Af...
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)
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
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)
Orwell wrote _Animal Farm_, which is basically one long allegorical denouncement of the Soviet revolution.
Rand is, of course, the founder of objectivism, and explicitly anti-communist.
Heinlein wrote _Stranger in a Strange Land_, _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, and _Starship Troopers_. Those describe cultures that are theo-communist, anarcho-capitalist, and stratocratic, respectively. I don't think they are endorsements, as the man himself was largely libertarian for most of his life.
So if Bradbury could be sympathetic to communists, he could also be sympathetic with Klingon High Command, rogue AC repairman Harry Tuttle, Dr. Zaius, and the pirates of Neverland.
The appalling thing is that no one involved in the investigation had the balls to tell their superior that there was no reasonable suspicion there, and it would be a violation of Mr. Bradbury's civil rights to continue with it.
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-mis...
So your point is somewhat misguided.
edit - If this is true, how could one design a government that naturally trends away from self preservation as an emergent phenomena?
You need something besides human beings to run the government. That's why we have the emphasis on limited government in the US - the founders understood human nature enough to realize that nobody could be given unchecked power.
[citation needed]
A review of the literature will produce a lot of skepticism dating all the way to the beginning (and a bit before) that this could work at all. It is completely ahistorical to believe that the Constitution was written, approved, and everybody involved considered it a perfect work that was certain to stand forever after without challenge.
I tend to agree that they may not have forseen the exact ways in which their goals have been subverted, but then, even if they had, I'm not convinced it would have changed much. I mentally run historical simulations in my head (just to be clear about the exact level of reliability you should place in that), and even had, say, the commerce clause included a "No Seriously Only When The Commerce Is Literally Between States, You Should Never Use This For Anything That Is Even Remotely Plausibly Isolated To One State" clause, I don't expect it would have held for much longer. The historical pressures to violate that were strong, and the stronger you make the commerce clause, the only thing that you do is make it more likely that it would be wiped away with an actual amendment.
People inevitably get the governments they create for themselves, with a 20-40 year delay on them.
Badnarik's constitutional law videos illustrate the process in the context of government affiliates (eg driving/RMV) better than I ever could. Although you have to interpret what he is saying with the goal of finding out how we got to this point, rather than falling into thinking you just need to assert your rights "harder" to regain freedom.
The same thing happens with the "private" sector - complexity grows and its effects on the individual remain unregulated because it does not conform to the simplitic base case of "the government" doing something, even when it has formed a de facto government.
For example, a person can't exist without paying large rents, which necessitates they go contract for a "job". This then controls what they can do even when not working. Historically this inconsistency was resolved by private behavior staying private, but we're in a time of upset because pervasive communication has changed that.
Government applies a hazy justification of "commerce" to regulate absolutely everything. And the constructive behavior of this third "commercial" realm certainly impacts fundamental individual rights. But rather than longstanding "constitutional" rights being applied to the commercial realm, even more complexity is generated as half-baked adaptations are created to address the singular issues of the day. Back to my example of employment, someone can't be fired for being gay but someone else can be fired for wearing a red sweater on Sunday.
Everyone dreams of being free of this yoke (eg "FU money") and finds ways to push back in areas that really matter to them. But don't confuse carving out a niche for yourself with addressing the fundamental problem. Not everyone can be a winner, and the trend is for freedom to be further eroded as the world becomes flatter and winners and losers are more pronounced (eg the destruction of cottage industry).
I'll forgive "the founders" for not seeing that complexity creates contradictions (especially as they preceeded the explosion of logic and computation that makes this fact painfully apparent), but their ideas should not be considered sacrosanct. Of course this same conclusion can be used to support taking even more rights, and in this climate any constitutional amendment certainly would be doing so. So my argument is to enlighten thoughts and change culture rather than any revising of the constitution.
And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
His handwavey mechanism fails to the same complexity-induced irrelevance. People violently revolt only when they are hungry, not when they are merely unfree.
I don't see how limited government necessarily achieves this aim. If anything, it could be argued that limited regulation leads to the existence of corporate and financial elites who wield a vast amount of power.
I certainly wouldn't be better disposed to one that has been tried in practice, and--likely without significance due to very low n and poor experimental controls--demonstrated to be worse by comparison.
If Hoover were alive and at the FBI now I bet he would be blackmailing NSA leaders for access to their data while giddy as a schoolgirl about how much more dirt he has on people.