FBI Files on Ray Bradbury (1959)

http://www.openculture.com/2015/08/who-was-afraid-of-ray-bradbury-science-fiction-the-fbi-it-turns-out-1959.html

by edward • 11 years ago

66 61 11 years ago

No surprise here, the Hoover FBI gathered anything and everything it could, for reasons that are obvious to those who pay attention to this sort of thing.

If Hoover were alive and at the FBI now I bet he would be blackmailing NSA leaders for access to their data while giddy as a schoolgirl about how much more dirt he has on people.

m0v_eax• 11 years ago

Why are we so hostile to alternate forms of government. :( /U.S. citizen..

imglorp• 11 years ago

It seems a natural consequence of any government: after it's installed its primary function shifts from serving the people to be to preserving itself.

edit - If this is true, how could one design a government that naturally trends away from self preservation as an emergent phenomena?

happyscrappy3• 11 years ago

Well that and the absolute total failure of communism in every instance.

AnimalMuppet2• 11 years ago

If this is true, how could one design a government that naturally trends away from self preservation as an emergent phenomena?

You need something besides human beings to run the government. That's why we have the emphasis on limited government in the US - the founders understood human nature enough to realize that nobody could be given unchecked power.

protonfish3• 11 years ago

First off, "we" aren't anything. This was at the height of the cold war vs. the USSR so it is strategic common sense that the government be on the lookout for spies and sympathizers.

rhino369• 11 years ago

Revolutions are horrific for the common person.

logfromblammo2• 11 years ago

I'm rather hostile to the standard form of government.

I certainly wouldn't be better disposed to one that has been tried in practice, and--likely without significance due to very low n and poor experimental controls--demonstrated to be worse by comparison.

bobcostas553• 11 years ago

It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in the 50s. It's not like they could play the "well the USSR isn't _real_ communism!" card - for decades the CP had been a blatant Stalin worship cult, controlled and used by the Soviets. We are talking 25 years after the Holodomor was publicized in the West! How could they possibly rationalize this in their minds...

This guy wrote Fahrenheit 451 ffs, how could he square the ideas in that book with his support for that regime...

justizin• 11 years ago

It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in the 50s.

The CPUSA is alive and well, and some intelligent people are probably members of it.

Do you long for the times of McCarthyism? This is your actual reaction to this? OK. :)

bobcostas553• 11 years ago

Do you long for the times of McCarthyism?

McCarthy was a bit overzealous but honestly I don't see the issue with it. Imagine if North Korea had its own party in the US, a party that worshiped Kim Jong-Un, and NK was 100 times larger, and had tons of nukes, and murdered wayyy more people than it does, and had spies at the highest levels of US government.

What would you think of the people who belonged to this party? Would you work with them? Trust them with positions of power, authority, or influence?

ptaipale• 11 years ago

Well, as they say, intelligence is not the same as wisdom. Many intelligent people may well belong to communist parties in Western countries, but I don't think they are very wise.

(Just recently came back from a trip where visited Stalin's Canal. The GULAG killed there so many workers, intentionally, that they could be laid next to each other along the built-up parts of the canal, head next to the next body's toes, forming a linked chain of bodies buried in the embankments. This construction was where the Nazis visited to learn how to set up a forced labour camp and how to wear off people and kill them with hunger.)

protonfish3• 11 years ago

I think it's because Communism is such a good idea on paper that intellectuals have a hard time admitting that it has been tested numerous times and the results are definitive: it doesn't work.

But looking at the idea on paper now, it seems obvious what the problem is: it requires unprecedented power to be put in the hands of a few despots with no oversight. What could possibly go wrong?

vidarh2• 11 years ago

No, it's because it hasn't actually been tested anywhere.

Since you believe it is such a good idea on paper, perhaps you can describe to us what the idea actually is? Because either it will be blatantly obvious you don't know what the idea is, or it will be blatantly obvious it does not match any of the places you might try to claim it has been tried.

it requires unprecedented power to be put in the hands of a few despots

A society with power put in the hands of a few despots by definition is not communism, as a society that concentrates power with one group has class rule, and communism by definition requires the absence of class divisions.

adventured• 11 years ago

It's not a good idea on paper, that's why it fails in practice and always will. It's a horrifically vile idea on paper, and far more so in practice. The results as you note speak for themselves.

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in the 50s.

Though I personally could never ideologically support CPUSA, it's hardly "mind-blowing" to me why some would have stood for it back in those days, particularly in light of stances such as these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Party_USA_and_Af...

vidarh2• 11 years ago

They could rationalise it because they had been 1) lied to by western press and governments for decades and had no reason to trust anything they heard by the time of the Bolshevik coup, 2) lied to by the Stalinist regime by being invited in and presented an nicely dolled up image of the Soviet regime that contradicted what they were told by western press, thus further strengthening the idea they could not trust what they were told.

It's totally unsurprising that a lot of people were taken in - they were on one hand presented with people they trusted telling them they'd seen first hand what the Soviet state was accomplishing, and on the other hand seeing news media they had learned to see as liars confirm that impression by saying the opposite.

It didn't help to have had experiences such as the fawning many right wing elements did over Hitler before the war, or the way Western governments tried their hardest to prevent socialist volunteers from joining the International Brigades against Franco in the Spanish Civil War in the 30's - to many people this meant that the Western governments had no moral authority to speak against Stalin at that point in time; even many people who took issue with Stalin took more issue with Western governments for reasons such as that.

They of course have to be responsible for their own opinions, but why they ended up holding them is not that hard to understand in context.

(Then again, while some moderated themselves as Stalins excesses became accepted even in Soviet circles, as late as '94 I was in a heated exchange where a Norwegian Stalinist told me flat out that if he was in power I'd be in a gulag - some people genuinely believed the methods were justified)

elektromekatron3• 11 years ago

There is nothing in the article that says that Bradbury was a member of the CPUSA.

edited to add -

“Only a few perceived the intellectual holocaust and the revolution by burial that Stalin achieved… Only Koestler got the full range of desecration, execution, and forgetfulness on a mass and nameless graveyard scale. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was therefore…true father, mother, and lunatic brother to my F.451.” - Ray Bradbury

danharaj3• 11 years ago

There are antiauthoritarian forms of communism. Of course, most who subscribe to the derivatives of Marxism laugh at such an idea, fully convinced that only if they were in charge would authoritarianism and hierarchy be abolished. To me, it is a very strange view. I never thought communism was a possibility until I stepped out of the cold war narrative.

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

It blows my mind that intelligent people could still be part of the CPUSA in the 50s. It's not like they could play the "well the USSR isn't _real_ communism!" card - for decades the CP had been a blatant Stalin worship cult

It was probably a lot easier and safer for heterodox (from the perspective of the Soviet-affiliated hierarchy) Communists to continue to network with each other within the CPUSA while maintaining a front of orthodoxy within the party outside of their own inner circles than to do so outside, especially given the political climate toward Communists -- without distinctions for variations within that category -- in the broader society.

That being said, nothing in the article indicates that Bradbury was a member of the CPUSA. It indicates that Martin Berkeley, a self-described former member of the CPUSA made a number of claims including:

* "That Bradbury was one of the more prominent writers of science fiction in the United States." (which, apparently, the FBI needed an ex-Communist informant to discover?)

* That Berkeley "felt Bradbury was probably sympathetic with certain pro-Communist elements in the WGAW" [0] (emphasis added)

* That Bradbury denounced supporters of a proposal to expel from the SWG those were Communists or who had asserted their Fifth Amendment rights before the House UnAmerican Affairs Committee as being "cowards and McCarthyites".

* That Berkeley perceived that "some of the writers suspected of having Communist backgrounds have been writing in the field of science fiction" and that "science fiction may be a lucrative field for the introduction of Communist ideologies" (emphasis added, in both quotes)

* That "some of Bradbury's stories were slanted against the United States and its capitalistic form of government".

So, basically, an ex-Communist described Bradbury as someone with (as far as he could describe) no clear Communist links, but who seems like he might remotely be sympathetic to Communist ideology because (1) he writes science fiction, and some other people who write science fiction are suspected (presumably, by the same ex-Communist) of being Communists, and (2) he's opposed to McCarthyism, and (3) some of his writings are read (by, again, the same ex-Communist) as opposing the status quo of the US government.

Its appalling -- but not surprising -- that any of that would be noteworthy and considered as evidence of any dangerous Communist leanings by any thinking person in the 1950s.

Its even more appalling -- and surprising -- that it would be treated as equivalent to membership of the CPUSA by any thinking person in the 2010s.

[0]"Writer's Guild of America, West", formerly "Screen Writer's Guild" (SWG)

logfromblammo2• 11 years ago

To be fair, the speculative fiction novel is a very convenient platform for illustrating alternate political views. Bradbury, Orwell, Rand, and Heinlein are all technically science fiction writers.

Orwell wrote _Animal Farm_, which is basically one long allegorical denouncement of the Soviet revolution.

Rand is, of course, the founder of objectivism, and explicitly anti-communist.

Heinlein wrote _Stranger in a Strange Land_, _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, and _Starship Troopers_. Those describe cultures that are theo-communist, anarcho-capitalist, and stratocratic, respectively. I don't think they are endorsements, as the man himself was largely libertarian for most of his life.

So if Bradbury could be sympathetic to communists, he could also be sympathetic with Klingon High Command, rogue AC repairman Harry Tuttle, Dr. Zaius, and the pirates of Neverland.

The appalling thing is that no one involved in the investigation had the balls to tell their superior that there was no reasonable suspicion there, and it would be a violation of Mr. Bradbury's civil rights to continue with it.

cbd19843• 11 years ago

This guy wrote Fahrenheit 451

According to him, that novel was not about censorship:

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.
This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-mis...

So your point is somewhat misguided.

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

Its fair to say "What does this book mean to you?" I'd be confident that 99% of people asked would say "Censorship". So its fair to use it for a example of that.

morisy• 11 years ago

Original Article/Full file: https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/aug/24/ray-bradb...

FBI Files on Ray Bradbury (1959)

Related Stories