McCarthyism -- Anyone hurt by it? (Help debunk Ann Coulter)

Great Debates
41

Alan, you mentioned that you are old too. Did you watch the Senate hearings on television?

I am 60 now. My parents wanted me to watch the hearings because they knew that what was happening was of historical import. And I remember it with searing images. Men yelling, interrupting each other, badgering, humiliating, accusing. The constant hammer of the gavel. That was literally my first glimpse of my government at work.

I don’t know what you consider “hurt.” I would feel hurt if I had lost my livlihood, been unable to put my real name to things I created, gone to jail, had my passport confiscated and my Constitutional rights violated.

But there was even more damage done to the country. People of my age were afraid that the Communists were in the process of overthrowing our government and that we would be treated like slaves. At school we were given dogtags to wear around our necks. They had our name, our father’s name, our address, our blood type, and our religious faith on them. It was explained to us that the “P” for Protestant was so that others would know which pile to put our bodies in for religious services and mass burial. I still have those tags.

Neighbor did not trust neighbor. People with liberal viewpoints were labelled traitors and they were treated that way. Businesses were boycotted. People were afraid to speak out.

It filtered down to the most basic things. Students literally couldn’t get faculty members to sign petitions for coffee machines, much less anything of a political nature!

Even fluoridation of water systems was considered by large segments of the population to be “a Communist plot.”

By the time I became a teacher, the furor had died down, but there were still people who would say things like, “What if a Communist gets a job teaching in our schools?” It was so stupid! That was in the late 1970’s.

For twenty years I have not heard anyone defend McCarthyism. Not until Ann Coulter and now on the SDMB. I understand from my recent reading elsewhere that this “new McCarthyism” has been on the rise for longer than that.

If Ms. Coulter thinks that no innocent people were hurt, I think that she should provide a list of 320 convictions for the 320 people blacklisted. Otherwise, those people should be presumed innocent.

42

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Zoe *

I’m the same age as you, Zoe, and I share your disgust and horror at Senator McCarthy. However, many of his critics shade the truth in their attacks on him. E.g., the quote you provided implies that the artists listed were innocent. Because I a big fan of many of them, I have read biographies. Sadly, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, and Paul Robeson were indeed communists or fellow travelers.

IIRC these dogtags also related to the possibility of a nuclear attack by the USSR. In the first grade, we were trained to hide under our desks in case of nuclear attack. Unfortunately, this threat was all to real at the time.

Yes, this nutty campaign went on for a long time. E.g., the John Birch Society pursued it for decades as I recall. Maybe they were the first environmentalists. :wink:

43

And your point is…? Should they have been removed from their jobs? Been put in jail? Had their passports revoked? They were guilty of thought crimes?

Was there any evidence that any of these people were plotting the violent overthrow of our government?

And what is a “fellow traveler”? A socialist? Someone who is friends with a Communist?

What did any Communists or Socialists do to you personally? How have they changed your life?

44

Oh, please, Coulter’s book is obviously a stinking pile of right-wing revisionism. She’s no better than a Holocaust denier, which is where the far right is probably headed next.

A little historical background. Back in the 30s Communism had a LOT of credibility, because the capitalist system had fallen apart, leaving millions jobless and hungry. The Great Depression, remember? Communism offered an alternative which seemed to proetect against that miserable failure that capitalism was in the 30s. A LOT of people got interested in it, and joined organizations that either were Communist or socialist, or were allied with them.

Their views changed durign the 40s when it became evident that the Soviet oligarchy was no better than the Nazis insofar as to how it treated people – but even then, the Soviets were our ALLIES during World War II.

The witch hunter were just going after the decent folk who felt for the starving and jobless during the Great Depression and tried to look for alternatives. The New Deal and the witch hunts were a classic one-two punch of power politics – having lost so many minds to Communism thanks to the massive failure of the Great Depression, the powers that be first diluted the power of Communism with the New Deal, then when times were better and the Soviets were no longer our allies, went in and terrorized the left with the witch hunts.

Coulter’s attempt to sanitize this process is just sad. But it’ll be interesting to see if it works.

45

I don’t think so.

Only if they committed crimes.

Of course. They were supporting the USSR and the Communist Party, whose goal was to undermine and overthrow the US government.

I used the phrase to mean someone who was committed to the Communist Party, but not a formal member of it. That is, someone who would take instruction from the CP. The three great artists I mentioned were indeed committed to the CP. That doesn’t reduce their marvelous artistic achievements. However, since great artists can be effective spokesmen, the public deserved to know that their goals were based on what Joseph Stalin wanted.

The Commmunists killed something like 100 million people. They conducted aggressive wars in a number of areas. They greatly harmed the advanced civilizations of countries in Eastern Europe. They continue to make life Hell in North Korea, Cuba, and parts of China. The fact that I wasn’t harmed personally is due to people like Harry Truman, JFK and many others who successfully prevented even more expansion of Communism.

The threat of Communism and the threat of an attack by the Communist USSR is what led to the McCarthy era. McCarthy was a boor, a demagogue, a liar and a self-promoter, but he couldn’t have succeeded if there hadn’t been a real threat.

46

I’m glad to know that you weren’t harmed personally. Many liberals were. And I am quite satisfied that the great majority of Communists never killed anyone. That was the madman that was Stalin. I believe he died a little before the McCarthy hearings.

Communists in this country did not necessarily support the USSR. They weren’t blind to what was going on there. There is also a great difference in desiring the violent overthrow of a government and wanting the improvement of a system already in place. As Evil Captor pointed out, the system desperated needed help at the time when the Communist movement was at its strongest – and not automatically associated with evil.

I have never had such a strident view of thought policing.

I am grateful that you acknowledge the horror that was McCarthy. Thanks for that.

47

This is really sad: That after all these years you continue to believe this fairy tale.

A belief in the philosophy of Marxist Communism cannot be equated to a desire to overthrow the U.S. government except to people who willfully choose to believe it. The rank and file CPUSA members looked to encourage the American populace to reform its own government by adopting their ideals. They may have hoped to overthrow the U.S. economy as it was constituted, but even there, they did nothing beyond arguing their philosophical position.

The CPUSA was a joke after the signing of the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact and their “efforts” to overthrow the U.S. government amounted to nothing more than grumbiling about the unfairness of U.S. economics and politics. (Yeah, I know, they actually accepted money from the Soviets–money that was squandered on fruitless publicity campaigns that were ignored by the populace.) Despite several of them being sent to prison on trumped up charges, none of the CPUSA leadership has ever been shown to have actually committed a crime against the U.S. nation. Julius Rosenberg was possibly recruited through contacts he made in the CPUSA, but just as we now have a generation of people who had earlier tried pot living in an atmosphere of no tolerance for drugs, not everyone who toked up went out and became a raving drug addict. Similarly, not everyone who joined the CPUSA went out and became a subversive agent. The claim that anyone who was a member of CPUSA was looking to “overthrow the government” is fatuous.

And tying the political desires of Joe Stalin, (who had no world-conquering desires beyond those of President Bush–to make his country safe by suppressing any possible opponents), to the Marxist/Communist philosophy that Stalin inherited and basically ignored except as an internal control mechanism and a publicity forum on the outside is equally nonsensical.

The Soviet Union was a real threat to its neighbors because, in the manner of ancient Republican Rome and modern Israel, it looked on the annexation of adjacent land as a solid method to protect its borders. It was only a threat to the U.S. in that it perceived the U.S. (which had already invaded Russia, once), as a real danger. That is the nature of national politics throughout history. The largest nations in any area are always looking to weaken their perceived adversaries. Following WWII, the “area” became the world, so the distant U.S. and U.S.S.R. faced off in a power struggle. To this end, each tried to undermine the other’s influence in the world, each tried to build a military to overwhelm the other, and each used spies to try to gather and disrupt intelligence that the other used.

The Soviets did have spies in the U.S. We did need to weed them out. However, the witch hunts did not accomplish that task–solid detective work by the FBI (before it became a bureaucratic joke) did accomplish that task.

None of the people you have named ever did anything more than express an interest in a philosophy that (falsely) promised a way to provide people equality and sufficiency. None of them even agitated for subversive action. They generally argued in literary circles in the hopes of persuading other people to join their beliefs about human and economic equality. Suggesting that they should have suffered anything more than stern tongue-clucking at the silliness of their views is equivalent to justifying the Soviet suppresssion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Roy Medvedev who were simply doing the same thing, in reverse.

Anyone who claims that Dashiell Hammet was “bad” and does not condemn Sakharov is a hypocrite.

48

tomndebb, I disagree with many of your points above. I would like to start a new thread to debate just how great was the threat of Communism, Stalinism and the CPUSA. May I have your permission to quote you and use most of your post in the OP?

49

Sure.

50

As many have pointed out here it may be too difficult to name innocent people harmed by McCarthy’s witch hunts. However, there might be a means…just approach the issue from the reverse direction.

How many people did McCarthy (not the FBI) catch who most could reasonably say did deserve the scrutiny and possibly jail for their actions?

51

Zoe,

Are you for real?

Let’s see now. the 20th century saw 100 million + dead as a result of the actions of enlightened socialists like Uncle Joe Stalin, who was only responsible for, say, 15 Million of this total?

You are hilarious.

52

McCarthy wasn’t in law enforcement. Catching individual Communists wasn’t his responsibility. As a Senator it was appropriate for hiim to be concerned about the workings of a government agency, such as the State Department.

A better question is whether there really was a problem of Communist infiltration of certain government agencies and whether McCarthy’s actions fairly and effectively called attention to the problem. IMHO there was such a problem and McCarthy did call attention to it effectively, but not fairly.

53

McCarthy hurt everyone because he distracted the Americans from the real problem, which was the infiltration of the US government by Nazis, as elaborated in “Blowback” by Christopher Simpson. Thus the US has swung far to the right and our foreign policy is a continuation of Nazi genocide, a silent holocaust.

54

Those are some mighty strong accusations. Do you have any examples or cites more immediately accesible than one book that we can view (via the internet) to back those assertions up?

55

There are the writings of former CIA agent John Stockwell, from whom I borrowed the phrase ‘silent holocaust.’

How 6 Million People Were Killed In CIA Secret Wars Against Third World Countries

John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. He spent 13 years in the agency. He gives a short history of CIA covert operations. He is a very compelling speaker and the highest level CIA officer to testify to the Congress about his actions. He estimates that over 6 million people have died in CIA covert actions, and this was in the late 1980’s.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4068.htm

“What I learned about US foreign policy” is a good video.

http://www.addictedtowar.com/dorrel.html

William Blum’s books are good: “Killing Hope” and “Rogue State.”

http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/books/KillingHope.html

And, of course, anything by Chomsky. That should get you started.

56

http://www.namebase.org/cgi-bin/nb01/JV

Simpson, Christopher. Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988. 398 pages.

At the confirmation hearings for Robert Gates as CIA director, Senator Bradley exposed the CIA’s manipulation of intelligence data to produce exaggerated estimates of Soviet economic and military strength – estimates that produced the Reagan-era extravaganza of military spending. However, the Bradley-Gates colloquy did not explore the historical roots of such exaggerations. Simpson fills in the void left by the Senate’s lack of historical perspective.

He traces the post-World War II recruitment by the U.S. of defeated Nazi chief of intelligence for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Reinhard Gehlen, and the increasing reliance of U.S. intelligence on the Gehlen organization’s estimates of Soviet strengths and intentions.

In the critical period from 1945 to 1948, the correct assessments by U.S. military intelligence that the Soviet occupation forces in Eastern Europe were worn out and posed no threat, were supplanted with the Gehlen organization’s lie that these same forces were a major military threat posed to invade Germany. The rest is our history, known as the Cold War.

– Lanny Sinkin

57

OH. You meant neo-Nazis.

I thought you meant Nazis.

58

Both.

59

You are speaking of Socialists. I was speaking of Communists. Think of the average Communist citizen in the USSR and other Communist countries. I would still suggest that most have killed no one. Communist leaders have killed. The military has killed. Most citizens have not.

60

“Clearly the information contained in these still classified files will prove to be embarrassing to our government. In the name of containing Soviet aggression, many hard-core, high ranking Nazis were welcomed into the camp of the Western Allies. Men like General Adolf Heusinger, who served as Deputy Chief of Operations and Planning for the entire German armed forces. A man so close to Hitler that he was literally standing next to him on July 20, 1944 when the room they were in blew up in what ultimately proved to be a failed assassination attempt. Nevertheless, Heusinger was welcomed by the western allies after the surrender and rose to new heights in the postwar period when, on April 1, 1961, his appointment as Chairman of the Permanent Military Committee of NATO with an office in the Pentagon was announced by none other than President John F. Kennedy.”

http://www.archives.gov/iwg/research_papers/nack_september_1999.html