It has long mystified me that Communism has a stranglehold on so many people. When you stop and think about it, there’s little difference in the reality of life under the thumb of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung, Hugo Chavez and Benito Mussolini.

In fact, there has never been a Communist leader who didn’t have a great deal of blood on his hands. And yet, here in America, millions of people have always had a soft spot in their hearts for tyrants, so long as they called themselves Communists.

If you go back to the late ‘30s and early '40s, America’s card-carrying traitors vehemently opposed our getting into World War II. It was only after Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded Russia that the likes of Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson, Dashiell Hammett, Dalton Trumbo, Anne Revere, Marsha Hunt, Larry Parks, Howard Da Silva, Burgess Meredith, Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin, Aaron Copland, Sterling Hayden and Edward G. Robinson decided it was imperative that we enter the war as soon as possible.

During the 1950s, while spies like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were swiping the secrets of the atom bomb for the Soviet Union, their fellow communists and fellow travelers were waging a campaign calling for America’s disarmament.

And when Sen. Joe McCarthy began spreading the word that our State Department was rife with Russian spies, including Alger Hiss, who was Harry Truman’s fair-haired boy and the first secretary-general of the UN, the Left did everything in its power to stigmatize Wisconsin’s junior senator. It even blamed him for the Hollywood blacklist, even though as a U.S. senator, he had nothing to do with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which conducted all the hearings that led to the jailing of the Hollywood Ten and turning scores of others into personas non-grata.

It didn’t help McCarthy that in real life, he came across looking and sounding every bit as thuggish as he was depicted in Herblock’s vicious cartoons.

I have never understood why so many Americans would have betrayed their homeland for the sake of the Soviet Union, a country that not only killed millions of its farmers for being unwilling to turn their land over to the state but was as anti-Semitic under Stalin as it had been under the various czars, and then, for good measure, turned Eastern Europe into one enormous gulag.

As someone who has worked in Hollywood for nearly 50 years, I have no idea why so many in the industry are still under the impression that Communism is preferable to capitalism, and why they think that those who were blacklisted during the 1950s were innocent martyrs. There may not have been a law prohibiting membership in the Communist Party, but these were writers, producers, actors and directors who took their marching orders from the Kremlin and who tithed a tenth of their salaries to the Politburo. You can’t help wondering what possessed them.

There is a very illustrative story told about screenwriter Albert Maltz, who would eventually be one of those who came to be called the Unfriendly Ten, and about whom Billy Wilder cracked: “Two had talent, the other eight were just unfriendly.”

It seems that Maltz, a member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), had the temerity to write an article for the New Masses, a left-wing magazine, in which he chastised his fellow Party Members for placing their political agenda over their artistic integrity.

In Hollywood, which in many ways is like a small town, the shock waves hit as if an A-bomb had been dropped on MGM. Immediately, the card-carriers mobilized. That meant that every left-wing stooge for miles around converged on Maltz’s home for what would now be called an intervention.

For hours on end, they bombarded Maltz, doing their best to show him what an act of betrayal it had been to suggest, as he had, that one had a loyalty to something other than the Soviet Union. Eventually, he caved. His punishment consisted of writing a second article, which appeared in the Daily Worker, in which he pretty much pleaded guilty to temporary insanity.

As if that weren’t enough, Maltz then had to denounce himself at a series of CPUSA meetings.

We would all like to think we would have told the creeps gathered in his living room to go fly a kite. But you must keep in mind that Hollywood’s left-wing faction was a very tight fraternity, almost a family. For the most part, the husbands and wives had no social life, exclusive of the party. The husbands all worked together at the studios. Their kids played together and went to the same schools and summer camps. To have stood up to the gang and defended what he had written would mean that Maltz and his family would have been set adrift, treated like untouchables.

What’s more, the Communists had their own blacklist. As producers, directors and story editors, they could pretty much freeze you out of the industry.

But at least they couldn’t ship you off to Siberia or line you up in front of a firing squad. At least not at the time. But they had hopes.

Perhaps the sorriest case to come out of the blacklist was Lee J. Cobb (born Lee Jacoby). For some reason or other, HUAC had permitted him to testify in secret. It allowed him to not only continue working but to maintain his reputation among his fellow communists. For over a year, he was allowed to carry on the charade, allowed to sympathize with friends who saw their own careers crash and burn. However, one day, someone on the committee, whether intentionally or accidentally, let it slip that Cobb had named names, as they used to say.

A sidebar to the story is that Cobb was soon provided with the role of his movie career, that of Johnny Friendly, the corrupt union boss in “On the Waterfront.” Ironically, the movie was directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, both of whom had named names openly, claiming it was their duty as patriotic Americans.

The thing that I find weird is that whether you named names or refused to name them determined who, for the next 50 years, would be your friend or who would want to see you dead.

The saddest thing of all is that HUAC already had a list of Hollywood Communists. The hearings were merely a test to see who would sell out their friends to save their own necks and who wouldn’t.

Still, if Hollywood had been home to hundreds of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, nobody would have dared object if you identified them at a congressional hearing. Only when the names were those of Communists did it suddenly become a case of “squealing” or “snitching” or “ratting out.”

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I recently heard from a friend who, while describing his life as an engineer, mentioned that the Peter Principle prevailed.

For those too young or too old to remember, the Peter Principle was the brainstorm of Laurence Peter, who formulated a theory that stated the selection of a candidate for a position is more often based on their current role than on an ability relevant to the intended role, which is why managers tend to rise to the level of their incompetence.

One sees examples bearing out the principle in all areas of life. Someone is a great teacher, but along the way he is likely to be promoted to principal or member of the school board, a job for which he will prove himself eminently unqualified.

Or take Jeff Sessions, who was a perfectly fine senator, where he was merely called upon to occasionally cast a vote, but has shown himself to be an embarrassment as the Attorney General.

One might even say that the Peter Principle was itself an example of the concept, which first appeared as an amusing magazine article. But because it got so much attention, a publisher suggested that Mr. Peter expand it to book length. The result was filled with charts and numbers and was nearly unreadable.

The book was nevertheless a best seller, but like other best-sellers, such as Dr. Zhivago, and those various sagas churned out by the Clintons and other politicians, I doubt if most people got past page 10.

I prefer to remember Laurence Peter as the man who observed: “Noblest of all dogs is the hot dog; it feeds the hand that bites it.”