How amusingly appropriate that Arthur Miller, dramatic laureate of the hysterical witch-hunt, should have died last week writes Kevin Myers
He was not a very great playwright but a good one - perhaps the George Bernard Shaw of his generation. And he is, of course, loved by the left-liberals primarily for The Crucible, his parable of the anti-Communist "witch-hunt", which as you know is set in Salem.
There is a difference of course between reality and drama, one which is unseen when viewed through the peculiar pair of spectacles which the left dons whenever convenient. There were no witches in Salem, nor any danger from them - but there were communists in the US, dedicated to the overthrow of US democracy, and the installation of a Soviet-style Communist dictatorship. To be sure, their ambitions might have been ludicrous, their numbers small and their understanding of the American people limited - but their project was nonetheless evil.
Let us reverse the picture. Let us imagine a dramatic parable about the attempts of the US Congress to root out the followers of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party from positions of prominence in Hollywood and elsewhere, employing a special committee to achieve its ends. Would the liberals not applaud early and vigorous action to nip the emergent cancer of totalitarian fascism in the bud? So what is so morally wrong about acting swiftly against communism? Ask anyone who has lived under communism whether they would have preferred their country had been spared the splendours of the Marxist-Leninist experiment by ruthless preventive action early on. Later is not merely later, but usually too late.
Of course, there is to our ears something quaintly comical about the very name, the House un-American activities Committee - and there is nothing remotely comical about Joe McCarthy, an abominable and pathological liar. But had such a committee and such a creature been deployed against fascism, would the left have been so very angry at their errors, at the injustices they perpetrated, or at the wrongs done to victims innocent of any association with Nazi extremism?
The free world was under concerted attack when the House Committee came into existence. China had fallen to the Communists, who were to kill some 50 million people in the next 30 years. Darkness was falling all over eastern Europe. North Korea was on the verge of attacking South Korea. In Malaya, Burma and Vietnam, violent Communist insurgencies were underway. In the Soviet Union, Stalinism stood poised on the verge of yet another purge which would add another couple of million to the tens of millions who had already been murdered.
Yet far from the atrocious movement responsible for these terrible events being universally deplored in the US, it was popular in the socially chic salons and in academia. Card-carrying Communists who took the Eighth Amendment to avoid implicating themselves in the hearings became fashionable heroes in such circles. You can be sure Lincoln Rockwell and his Nazi goons would not have not have been so lionised, had they taken a similar course of action to avoid detection and destruction.
Why is this? Why do artists find modish chic in one kind of organisation which kills millions and hardly ever in its mirror image? If The Crucible had been set at a time of anti-Nazi purges, and clearly sided with the victims of the purges, would it even have been staged, never mind hailed as one of the great plays of the 20th century? Indeed, the play might well come to be seen as merely representative of the political culture of the mid-20th century rather than as a fine example of theatre. Its characters, after all, are largely representative of types, rather than living, breathing individual human beings. Miller was a political essayist like Brecht, using stage as a pen, and did so competently enough. But unlike Brecht, he never consciously sided with communism and cannot be held accountable to any degree for the totalitarian horrors which accompanied it.
Moreover, he came to understand the truth about communism - and maybe, he began to understand some of the motives of the more honourable people who had been attempting to crush communism in its early days in the US. He described Eastern Europe in 1987 as "a theatre where no one is allowed to walk out and everyone is forced to applause". Communism had just two years left to live when he made those remarks. The reason it perished in the Eurasian land-mass, surviving - in name only - in China, and in a demented deviant form in North Korea, was that it was fiercely resisted by the US everywhere. Conversely, the Hollywood Ten who became the heroic martyrs before the House un-American Activities Committee were dedicated Communists who wanted Stalinism to prevail across the world. We have no reason to be grateful to them that it didn't.
They were the inspirations for The Crucible: civilised, learned men who were enemies of learning and civilisation became the allegorical victims of the witch-hunt in Salem. Thus Miller's metaphor was totally upside down. For though one might applaud the "principled stand" of the Hollywood Ten (in a way one never would that of Nazi sympathisers) and even wish them well as they later clawed their way back from that city made famous by Jaguar and Godiva, we should remember the real witch-hunts of the time. These were the show-trials of the Soviet Union, which were lavishly reported in the Western press: about these the Hollywood Ten must have known, and of them must have implicitly approved.