"Dalton Trumbo was a socialist, but he loved being rich."
So says Bryan Cranston, who stars in "Trumbo," out this week, and plays the screenwriter who went to prison with the Hollywood Ten in the time of Harry Truman.
Actually, Trumbo was not a socialist. Bernie Sanders is a socialist. Trumbo was a Stalinist, a hard-core Communist when the Communist Party USA was run from Moscow by the Comintern, agents of the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century.
Trumbo was not what Lenin called a "useful idiot," a liberal simpleton. He was the real deal, a Bolshevik who followed every twist and turn in the Moscow party line.
When Hitler signed his infamous pact with Stalin, and Germany and Russia crucified Poland and Hitler overran France, Trumbo justified the Nazi brutality, "To the vanquished all conquerors are inhuman."
As Churchill led his country in defying Hitler, Trumbo, in his 1941 novel, "The Remarkable Andrew," trashed Britain as no democracy, as it had a king, and charged FDR with "black treason" for seeking to aid the Brits in their desperate fight to stave off defeat by the Nazis.
A talented screenwriter who wrote "Roman Holiday," "Spartacus" and "Exodus," Trumbo was attracted to revolutionary violence.
Invited to do a screenplay of William Styron's "Confessions of Nat Turner," about the Virginia slave who led a rampage of rape and murder in 1831, Trumbo wrote back:
"[I]n carrying through his rebellion Turner did nothing more than accept a principle of white Christian violence which had enslaved all of Africa, and used it for the first time in American history as a weapon against white Christians."
Biographer Larry Ceplair quotes Trumbo as describing America as "fundamentally" racist, with racism "the keystone of national policy both domestic and foreign...
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Yes, he was blacklisted, but he kept on writing screenplays under aliases and as a ghostwriter.
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