Responding to the news that Fast & Furious 9 actor John Cena apologized in Mandarin for ‘accidentally’ calling Taiwan a country, Dylan Matthews of Vox tweeted the following:
China apologists are always warning about a new Cold War but one difference is that in the last Cold War pro-Soviet actors and writers were blacklisted, whereas now anti-CCP actors and writers are bullied by their studios until they repent https://t.co/dy1EFbU5kh
— dylan matthews (@dylanmatt) May 25, 2021
Matthews seems to be on the right side of this particular question, so I don’t wish to be too mean in response. But this tweet reflects an incomplete understanding of 20th-century Hollywood history. Blacklisting, the formal banning of Communist-affiliated Hollywood talent from being involved in film productions, began in earnest in 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee turned its attention to Hollywood. Before that, Communist infiltration in Tinseltown was already quite real. Before the U.S. entered the war, for example, Party members in Hollywood secretly obeyed a Moscow directive to take an isolationist rather than pro-Hitler stance once the Nazi-Soviet nonagggression pact was signed in 1939.
