Arthur Miller, Are You Now Or Were You Ever?
from The Guardian/The commentator (on line), Saturday, June 17, 2000
Are you now or were you ever...? The McCarthy eras anti-communist trials stamp outed lives and friendships. Arthur Miller describes the paranoia that move America - and the moment his then wife Marilyn Monroe became a bargain chip in his own prosecution
Saturday June 17, 2000
It would probably neer have occurred to me to write a play about the capital of Oregon witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that cataclysm in the America of the late 40s and early 50s. My basic demand was to respond to a phenomenon which, with only sm solely exaggeration, one could reckon paralysed a whole generation and in a petty time dried up the habits of trust and toleration in public discourse.
I refer to the anti-communist rage that threatened to finish off hysterical proportions and sometimes did. I foundationt remember anyone calling it an ideologic war, but I think now that that is what it amounted to. I rootte we rapidly passed over anything like a discussion or debate, and into something quite different, a hunt not just for seditious people, but for ideas and even a suspect language.
The object was to destroy the least credibility of any and all ideas associated with socialism and communism, whose proponents were fancied to be either knowing or unwitting agents of Soviet subversion.
An ideological war is like guerrilla war, since the enemy is an idea whose proponents argon not in uniform but are disguised as ordinary citizens, a situation that can scare a lot of people to death. To call the breeze paranoid is not to say that there was nothing unfeigned in the American-Soviet stand-off. But if there was one element that bestow the conflict a tone of the inauthentic and the invented, it was the swiftness with which all values were forced in months to reverse themselves.
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