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We were taught about the Hollywood blacklists in school in the 90s, not long after the Berlin Wall fell, when the full extent of Soviet deprivation and historical oppression was becoming clear, and I thought it was so noble of everyone in these more enlightened times to be willing to stand up for the political and economic freedoms of even such dangerously foolish people. The architects of the Holodomor and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been slipping spies up the ranks, trying to subvert Western governments and culture, and acquiring nuclear weapons secrets, but if we couldn't ferret out the evil people without doing evil things ourselves, hurting innocent and merely-mistaken people in the process, that was too high a price to pay.
It's been so dismaying, in the decades since, to discover what fraction of the modern population loves blacklists after all. Of course you're supposed to boycott anyone who would hire someone with bad politics!
Were we actually enlightened before but we fell so far in a single generation? Was so much of the "opposition to blacklists" never truly more than a love of communism, reexpressed in a way that wouldn't spook idealists like me who bought the cover story?
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