An Anticlimax

What was interesting to me about the denouement of Bernstein’s book is that the end of the blacklist seemed anti-climactic in a way. Despite the fact that Bernstein had to go into hiding to escape testifying and then had to testify (in a way) to an executive at Paramount, many of the restrictions created by the blacklist seemed to just fade away. Bernstein and his friends could gradually start working again without much fanfare. It seemed like the people who had been so adamant about obeying the blacklist just got tired of it and the restrictions. While it’s good that everything seemingly returned to normal, it’s troubling that there was no real sense of closure or resolution to the events of the blacklist. To prevent something like this from happening again, I feel that it is necessarily to openly condemn and discuss problems like this. This is similar to what Bernstein said in his author’s note at the beginning of the book, that it might be unthinkable that fundamental rights could be violated in America like this, but since this happened once, it could definitely happen again.
I also wonder if the fact that Bernstein and his friends were able to resume their jobs and livelihoods was partly because many of them had decided to leave the Communist Party when the full extent of Stalin’s actions became known to the world. Was the blacklist discontinued partly because the government realized that the Communist Party had faltered to the extent that it was ineffective? If so, then the ending of the blacklist was not so much a victory for First Amendment Rights as it was a practical matter, something that the people in power just didn’t care about anymore. The fact that we can only see the events occurring from Bernstein’s point of view, when he himself does not have much idea about the decisions being made in government or among movie studios, is frustrating because we cannot see the big picture. The fact that Bernstein makes friends with his FBI stalker near the end was slightly baffling to me and added to the confusion of how the blacklist and this particular censorship movement ended.