New Blacklist Update: Ed Asner, Martin Sheen Want Oscar Boycott for 'Zero Dark Thirty'

Hollywood celebrities will never stop talking about the horrors of the Blacklist, an era when Communist sympathizers within the industry were hounded for their beliefs, losing work and even their freedom in the worst cases.

Yet when stars like Ed Asner and Martin Sheen insist Academy voters boycott a film because it doesn’t align with their worldview, those same Blacklist bashers fall silent.

We’ve already seen veteran actor David Clennon declare his intentions to punish the film Zero Dark Thirty this awards season for allegedly promoting torture.

Now, a pair of higher profile stars are repeating Clennon’s wish to smite the film for having the wrong ideology.

Asner and Sheen have joined a list of actors protesting the movie because of the torture scenes. “I would like to condemn the movie,” Asner told the New York Times. Asner and Sheen are asking Oscar voters to “factor in matters of conscience when casting awards votes,” the report says.

Those who think dredging up thoughts of a New McCarthyism are simply the views of Breitbart News can take a gander at this op-ed from The Huffington Post.

The saddest effect of the anti-ZDT camp is its swerve toward a new McCarthyism. I admit that it’s not the most adept analogy, but it’s altogether too disproportionate to make comparisons between the anti-ZDT camp and the denunciations of artists by the early Leninists, Stalinists, and Maoists that escalated into the exiling, imprisonment, and execution of artists. But we should remember that it was such slides of the left into wholesale fascism that set even the most benign factions of the left back politically in America and Europe for over half a century. Which is why I ask Sheen, Asner, Clennon and their supporters to consider how they are helping to fracture the left with their censoring of art from the awards it deserves.