None Without Sin

Last night I saw the documentary None Without Sin which depicts one of the most tangled and complicated relationship between the great playwright Arthur Miller and talented director Elia Kazan, a relationship blossomed and then withered against the backdrop of the anti-communist hysteria of the 50s. By looking at those grainy, black-and-white newsreel footages, felt like I was caught in a time warp machine, travel back to the cold war period, a disturbance time I learnt only from my history book. It's so funny and ironic to watch the american government back then, who was so neurotic, scared and paranoid by the word "communism" that they had reached a state of madness: striped everything that had to do with communism, just like what their chinese communist counterparts did in the 1960s during the Chinese Cultural Revolution---trying to eradicate everything about capitalism, even at the sacrifice of lives of innocent people. what's so different between communist and democratic government after all ? It's always about the riches and powerfuls, they are making the history, they are defining the meaning of freedom, and we, the ordinary people are just chesses on their board. Miller and Kazan were also two chesses, except Miller refused to be used and Kazan succumbed. I love how the documentary wrapped up by saying that coming out of that time, nobody was really bad or good, we were all victims and we should be glad that we survived it.