“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout.” That sentiment from a Lee Hazelwood/Nancy Sinatra song sums up how I wrote the latest Harry Palmer L.A. mystery thriller, The Dark Ages, about censorship and repression in Hollywood in 1951 and its echo in America and the West today as the perils of global war grow ever more real.
Behind pushing to tell the story in novelistic form of writers and actors shunned for their political convictions lay my increasing awareness that, as David Lynch says in Twin Peaks about the return of the repressed, “It’s happening again.”
This time, though, the stakes might be higher, not only in the Middle East or West Asia but also in the always escalating war in Ukraine and in the U.S. military attempt to contain both Chinese economic expansion and the coming together of the developing nations in the BRICS alliance. Harry is aware of the stagnation and protest against the Korean War in 1951 as the excuse in that period for repressing dissent, just as in the present, attempts to promote the global struggle for prosperity and against war must be stifled by the war machine, as must exposure of the decaying conditions on the homefront of a declining empire.
As students returned to college campuses last fall, and as the bombing and genocide which began in Gaza spread to the West Bank and now to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, rules and regulations forbidding protest against these atrocities attempted to silence the movement. Genocide dissenters have found a range of curfews limiting their campus space and hours when any protest can be lodged. Along with that, of course, is the silencing of faculty who support the students, including for the first time a tenured professor, Mauru Finkelstein (who is Jewish), being fired for her position at Muhlenberg College calling out Israeli atrocities, as well as the suspension of Hobart College Professor Jodi Dean. Numerous adjunct faculty have not been renewed, and/or have faced criminal charges or been the subject of disciplinary hearings in campuses such as UCLA for supporting student protest. When Dr. Minouche Shafik, the now ex-president of Columbia University announced at a Congressional hearing that the university was cutting ties with Professor Muhammed Abdou, despite student protests against the action, he announced that she had “blacklisted me globally and tarnished my scholarship.”
Of course, the major purging of campuses occurred in Gaza, where Israel’s invasion and bombing reduced 12 universities to rubble, and where more than 90 professors have been murdered.
The censorship, in what has been called a “new McCarthyism,” extends to journalists and media activists, not only in the U.S. but across the world. The FBI raided the home of Scott Ritter, former weapons inspector who has become an outspoken critic of first the needless, NATO-triggered war in Ukraine and then genocide in the Middle East. YouTube then attempted to ban him and anti-war commentators Rachel Blevins and Norwegian Professor Glenn Diesen, all restored on the network because of a groundswell of protest against the banning.
In the UK, Palestinian scholar Richard Medhurst was detained at Heathrow Airport without being told why. At the same time police raided the home of Electronic Intifada editor Asa Winstanley, who had a major role in exposing false claims of Palestinian brutality in the October 7th uprising, and detained and questioned Palestinian supporter Sarah Wilkinson whose other “controversial” work includes championing deteriorating health care for Britain’s aging population. A new law in Australia makes it a crime to wave Hezbollah flags at a demonstration and has resulted in several demonstrators being investigated for this action.
Besides YouTube, Facebook and Instagram are also censoring speech critical of the Israeli invasions of Gaza and Lebanon and the bombing of Syria and Yemen, claiming that this critique is being waged by “dangerous individuals and organizations.”
What this amounts to is an attempt in the West to shut down all critical discourse on both Israeli genocide, U.S. support for that genocide, and the revving up of the American public for war on three fronts which will likely have a nuclear component.
A recent Brown University study revealed that since the October 7 attack the U.S. has gifted Israel with $22.7 billion in weapons to attack its neighbors while also claiming that the stated casualty number of approximately 45,000 in Gaza, because of disease and malnutrition, must be multiplied by a factor of 25, which comes to over 1 million casualties, the majority of which are women and children.
And now we come to the parallels with the McCarthy period in Hollywood in 1951, the subject of this novel. It’s pretty easy to see that if history does not exactly repeat it certainly does rhyme, especially in a country where what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics,” that is, the consistent need to find foreign enemies at home, continues to reign.
For their support for peace and social and union activism, the blacklistees were branded as friends of Russia and dangers to the homeland, itself an excuse to also purge progressive and working-class modes of thought from the Hollywood screen.
And just as students are now reporting teachers for any comments critical of Zionism, so too in 1951, as Helen tells Harry, “It’s not just a Hollywood blacklist. It’s going on everywhere in the country. There are state and federal investigators out grilling citizens on what they’re reading, who they vote for, and what church they attend. They’re banning books from public and school libraries and some communities are even holding book burnings, just like the Nazis did in Germany.”
She concludes, “The level of fear and paranoia is astounding.”
As to the similarities in the wide net this new repression is casting, with students “turning in” their professors, Helen also tells Harry about “Cecil B. DeMille, who wanted every director when they finished a film to file a report on what they had been able to find out about the political leanings of everyone on the film. The report could then be checked by future directors as a means of ensuring no one with suspect convictions was hired as writer, actor or crew.”
The present attack on college protest is being waged and managed not only on university campuses but also by right-wing legislators and corporate heads who have been looking for an excuse to rein in “highly democratized freedoms of expression” enjoyed both on campus and on social media.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp, head of a CIA-backed surveillance and data mining tech company with ties to Israel, spilled the beans when he said that if the anti-genocide and pro-peace protests are not stopped, “the West will lose the ability to wage wars.”
Likewise when Harry accuses one of the blacklisted writers of being an agent of Russia, his response is, “Russia was our ally during the war, and we supported the Soviet Union as they defeated the Nazis. Today, we’re not agents of a foreign power but we are for peace between Russia and the U.S. and that makes us enemies of those who want war between our two countries.”
The Hollywood attack, as the novel states, was also prompted from outside by the New York and California banks, afraid of losing money in a fallow period for the industry and looking for an excuse to cut personnel. They, in collusion with a Congress that engineered the repression from both the Republican and Democratic sides, fed and fed off this mood of paranoia as the most dominant country in the world—as is the case today, worried about losing its total dominance—and felt the need to suppress all dissent and cut off what would have been healthy critique.
The writers and actors Harry encounters believe they are being tortured for their support and creation of labor unions and their pushing of labor militancy in Hollywood. Likewise in the present, there is an overlap between the support of those most tenuous in the university system, the precarious labor of adjuncts, and the anti-genocide protests. As one faculty labor organizer and professor at Parsons College put it, “the labor movement and the pro-Palestine movement go hand in hand.”
In addition, there is also the question of how fired tenured Professor Finkelstein puts it, “good Jews and bad Jews.” She thought that her Jewishness would protect her, but it did not. In the same way in the last Dark Ages, many of the blacklisted writers and actors were Jewish and they were attacked by a clearly anti-Semitic House Un-American Activities Committee where part of the “investigation” and “exposing” work of the committee was to reveal the “real” Jewish names of the actors as if this was, rather than the traces of a racist society which compelled them to Anglicize their names to be accepted, instead a mark of shame and the revelation of a shady past.
The “good Jews” in the novel and at the time were the Hollywood moguls who as Harry discovers went along with the blacklist partially out of fear themselves but mainly as a way of reducing the work force in a lean time and expelling labor agitators.
The concept of good and bad Jews, as Professor Finkelstein points out, itself is anti-Semitic.
What Israel is engaged in in the Middle East in its indiscriminate mass bombing of civilians with U.S. supplied 2000-pound bombs, rationalized as killing terrorists, has been labeled a holocaust. As one observer of the situation said, “If you want to know what you would have done in the last holocaust, simply take a look at what you are doing in this one.”
The point of the present repression is to make us all passive observers of mass slaughter or, as one of the writers tells Harry, regarding another writer Dalton Trumbo, “more than the shrill cries of those seeking to destroy freedom, he was concerned with the silent ones, the contented, the frightened and the acquiescent.”
Watching this spectacle unfold every day in front of us and its attendant repression of protest as it is shunted aside in the last presidential campaign and in its aftermath makes us all culpable and cut off from human feeling. As one of the writers tells Harry in a line that is as true today as it was at the height of McCarthyism where colleagues turned on each other: “If you’re going to undermine the moral fiber of a society and impose a police state, you have to change decent into indecent behavior, and destroy all loyalty between friends.”
The Dark Ages, the fifth Harry Palmer L.A. Mystery Thriller is available on Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Apple and wherever fine books are sold. [Editor’s note: A review of this book is forthcoming.]
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