The Censored Censor Themselves

As Walter Bernstein’s memoir begins to discuss issues more directly related to his Communist beliefs and his involvement with the party, it becomes increasingly clear to me that bias is a form of censorship in itself. Both Bernstein’s writing and the generally accepted version of things taught in history classes are biased in some ways, and because of that, both sides either consciously or unconsciously have censored parts of the story that made their side look bad. Reading about Bernstein’s experiences exposes the censorship inherent in the story most people know about how communists were treated at that time: we are taught to think of communists as the enemy, and though McCarthy’s methods are shown in a negative light, in general the belief in the nefarious plotting of communists at that time remains. Bernstein, however, insists that all the members of the Communist Party that he knew were loyal Americans and anyone who showed an inkling of anti-government beliefs was kicked out of the party. This combats the usual narrative and forces one to think about it from a different point of view. At the same time, however, Bernstein is also presumably just as biased in favor of the communists. Both sides of the issue have their own aims and someone looking for an objective account of the conflict has to be aware of that. Anyone who is biased in favor of one side or the other is likely to censor any facts or details that inhibit their cause or cast blame where they don’t want it cast.

I’m also interested in other ways that Bernstein may be censoring himself. One thing that repeatedly jumps out at me is his avoidance of giving his wife (or his daughter, for that matter)’s name. Though he doesn’t hesitate to name drop countless Hollywood bigwigs, each time his family comes up, he simply refers to her as “my wife”. I can’t help but be curious why it is her name that is left out: perhaps it is simply out of respect for her privacy, or perhaps it is more intentional, to convey how detached he felt from typical family life. I suspect that Bernstein is censoring himself somewhat in more significant areas as well. Though he spends some time discussing the beliefs of the Communist Party and why he supported Russia, I feel he doesn’t clearly explain what exactly he had strong beliefs in. On the one hand, I’m not entirely convinced that he has particularly strong communist beliefs: he became a communist as a young, impressionable man, and he even writes that part of him only stayed with the party because he didn’t want to join the throngs of people defecting. But I think it is also possible that he is toning down any description of what he actually believed to make himself and his cause more relatable to an audience that is usually predisposed against communism.