Protest Kazan award
The thoughtful LA Times articles by actors Richard Dreyfuss,
Robin Bartlett and Allen Garfield on the ill-considered special
Academy Award to Elia Kazan are powerfully persuasive.
As great a talent as Mr. Kazan is - talent long ago recognized by the Academy - a Life Achievement Award honors a whole life as a role model, an honor sadly not due Mr. Kazan. His own choices and actions in participating in the Witch-hunt place him beyond the pale of such honor,
I am proud that my Unions, Screen Actors' Guild [SAG] and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists [AFTRA], AFL-CIO, along with the Writers' and Directors' Guilds created and sponsored "Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist" at the Academy of Motion Pictures in the Fall of 1997. We officially and correctly apologized to our members living and dead - and to the American people - for collaborating in the Witch-hunt and Blacklist of the 1950's.
I was five years old when the terror reached its height; the oldest child in an non-political, Irish Catholic working class family in Philadelphia, Pa. Yet even I carry disturbing ghostly memories of that time. Fleeting images of anger, threat and betrayal; barely remembered spectral nightmares on a tiny black and white screen.
The fact that I didn't understand what was going on and that my parents, themselves wavering between disquiet and approval, couldn't explain what it was all about made it all the more frightening. I can only imagine the fear of people actually caught up in the maelstrom - and of their five-year-old children.
As horrid and disgusting as the personal ruin and ethical abandonments of the Witch-hunt were, there was a broader evil afoot in those events. The lesson to our country was: if they can do it to Hollywood, they can do it to anybody - and then they did.
The government and the employers went on a ten-year rampage that enforced conformity in every walk of American life - from movies, TV and radio, to our magazines and newspapers, in our churches, schools and community groups, to the entire Union movement - to be different was to be disloyal.
A subtle evil enforced by a not so subtle terror, which destroyed an entire generation of American leaders, few of whom were communists. The fact is, if you were a progressive, militant leader in any realm, you were suspect, and quite often hounded out of leadership and livelihood.
Our country lost thousands of dedicated, honorable leaders to the hysteria. And we lost 10, 20, maybe 30 years of progress and human rights.
As an example, the trade-union movement is only now recovering from the destruction of its independent, militant leadership forty-five years ago. (Ironically, it was the Blacklist that destroyed democratic leadership in our Unions and handed them over to the very corrupt, do-nothing, thug "labor leaders" that Kazan attacks in "On the Waterfront.") It took the movements for civil rights, women's rights and against the Vietnam War to revive progress and some serious political debate in our country,
So the moral tab for collaborating in the Witch-hunt goes even beyond the wretched, sordid personal betrayals. It is a debt owed our nation and all its people. We are owed not only apologies, but a refund on our stolen legacy of free speech and free association. Honoring collaborators only increases the debt and the final cost of reconciliation.
This Life Achievement Award asks us not only to forgive - which many by heart and conscience have done - but also insists we forget, which neither by heart, conscience nor right can we ever do.
John P. Connolly
Actor
Hollywood, California
Misleading headline
The headline "New right-wing party is formed in Canada" on
page 3 of the March 22 Militant was edited from the author's
title, "Conference votes to form new right-wing party," in a
way that is not accurate and in fact misleading.
As the article explains, a majority of the delegates at the February 19-21 "United Alternative" conference initiated and dominated by the Reform Party expressed themselves in favor of forming a new party. But no new party was launched there. Before any founding convention is held - possibly in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, at the end of the year or in 2000 - a lot can happen.
For the time being, substantial forces from the Conservative Party and portions of the Reform itself are opposed to it. The right is going through the same kind of crisis in Canada as in Britain, Germany, France, and the United States -fragmentation and rightward polarization, without a clear pole emerging yet.
Michel Prairie
Montreal, Quebec
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