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Maybe, but it's hard to draw parallels: in the past censoring "the population" never really came up. You only needed to censor the tiny fraction of the population that had a chance of getting published/produced, and if you managed that then why would anyone else grab for that brass ring while expecting to be squelched if they ever caught it? Only with the internet is everybody halfway to being their own publisher and censorship needing to be more extensive.
When the systematic blacklist started in 1947? Am I forgetting a shooting war? We hadn't even seen the Berlin Blockade yet, much less the Korean War etc.. In hindsight we really were riddled with Soviet spies, but hindsight's 20/20, and IIRC McCarthy never found more than a handful of the actual threats. Also note the distinction here between "communists" (any of the marks who fell for Marx) and Communists (the few specific organizations paying lip service to Marx who we ended up in conflict with); allow equivocation to that extent and the "fighting Nazis" types can justify censoring just about anyone too.
HUAC's communism-in-Hollywood report was 1938, but while the Soviets were screwing over their own citizens and Poland at that time, they would be US Allies during the intervening years.
Sure, but there's that 20/20 hindsight again. In the 1930s we were still happy to give out a Pulitzer for getting suckered into Holodomor denial.
Executing after a trial, sure. Censoring, definitely not. Whatever direction the next Hitler comes from, the last thing we need is for him to be able to justify an "oh I'm so persecuted" act publicly, spread censorable material privately instead, and chuckle at the irony of nobody being able to really properly rebut his arguments because they'd have to be able to admit to acquiring the contraband themselves first. Or worse, the censorship might actually work ... and then a few generations down the road, when we've actually forgotten the arguments we thought were so dangerous, we could innocently reinvent them ourselves under a different name after having lost all immunity to them.
Korean War started in 1950. Berlin Airlift 1948. Churchill first used the term Iron Curtain in 1945. Germany pre WW2. The War had definitely already began before 1947. First shooting perhaps not till Korea in 1950; but it’s not like we didn’t already see war coming.
Many European countries had already been physically separated from us pre-1947.
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