Breaking Through Censorship

One thing that struck me in reading the beginning of Inside Out was how Bernstein seemed able to evade official forms of censorship. As he writes at the beginning of the book, he was able to work through the blacklist by using fake names and enlisting his friends in the industry to cover up his true identity. Even during World War II, Bernstein discusses how he consciously wrote some essays for the New Yorker rather than Yank, because he knew they could not be published in an official military magazine. Later on, his ability to enter Yugoslavia outside of official Allied routes shows the porousness of closed borders, as well as his ability to maneuver through restrictions.

Bernstein's experiences illustrate the ultimate penetrability of official censorship, and the ways that free expression manages to move outside official channels. Of course, Bernstein was a particularly lucky and well connected victim of censorship. However, this just shows a breakdown of the system, whereby there are ways that certain individuals and works manage to remain protected from censorship. Even when he attracts negative attention from his military commanders for an article he published in the New Yorker, Bernstein's editor was able to protect him from being court marshalled.

Bernstein also writes about the “constant support of friends” that sustained him through the blacklist, and about the tight knit community formed as a result of official censorship. This community consolidation seems to have been fairly effective in protecting some members from the full force of the red scare. Of course, there are just as many instances of harsh persecution and the inability of some groups to resist the McCarthy era crack down on perceived leftists, communists and homosexuals. As the memoir develops, it will be interesting to see how different groups responded to McCarthyism, and how they dealt with betrayal from the inside and outside.

As the book enters the post-WWII Cold War era, I hope to see Bernstein show us the ways people resisted the blacklist, and who became complicit in its effectiveness.