december, do you have any specifics on how many actual spies in the State Department that McCarthy had managed to ferret out?
Unfortunately, this sort of wild claim makes your other claims (and their sources) suspect.
Heusinger was a professional soldier who nevcer joined the Nazi party. After the assassination attempt, he was actually arrested by the Gestapo as a suspect. When none of the other connections directly tied him to the plot, he was released, but was not allowed to return to service, his reputation remaining under a cloud because of his association with some of the plotters.
As with your link to Pilger’s site in the “Danger of Communism” thread, you throw out lots of claims, many of which are easily refuted, casting doubt on the ones that are not so easily recognized.
So you say. I haven’t seen any of my claims refuted yet. And if they were, that would cast doubt on the claims that were refuted. Are you saying that claims have some sort of guilt by association? That is highly illogical, comrade.
No. Nor do I care. As I said, it wasn’t a Senator’s job to ferret out spies. It was appropriate for a Senator to participate in public hearings in order to ferret out general problems in how the State Dept. was administered.
I detest Joseph McCarthy, but even McCarthy shouldn’t be criticized unfairly on these boards.
I asked a simple question, december. I didn’t even ask for a cite. I was curious. I thought you might know the answer since you had brought it up. Honest questions on topic are not unfair.
If you don’t care about information in a debate, maybe someone else can provide answers. Does anyone know how many State Department (or other government agency) spies McCarthy was able to find? In other words, how successful was he at what was his business?
The OP was on the subject of whether or not Joseph McCarthy was patriotic and doing good and necessary work.
I am saying that if you post an article that claims to demonstrate some terrible event and I note that that same article by the same author contains errors of fact, I am under no compulsion to accept any of the claims in that article without independent confirmation. (And if the supporting documents or articles have similar errors of fact, then I will begin to wonder just how accurate any supplied information may be.) This is exactly the standard to which I hold this administration with their lies about uranium from Niger and aluminum tubes (that would need to be redically modified) to make nuclear centrifuges and terrorist camps that are not associated with the Iraqi government and individual terrorists who are falsely claimed to be members of al Qaida.
A serious error in facts does contaminate quality and lead to “guilt by association” regarding claims and indictments.
Tom:
So far you haven’t refuted any of my claims. You have merely offered different opinions. For example, with Heusinger, you haven’t offered any evidence that he was not a Nazi, merely an unsupported opinion. My evidence comes from statements given to the NAZI WAR CRIMINAL RECORDS
INTERAGENCY WORKING GROUP, posted on the National Archives web page. Where is your cite?
As for John Pilger’s claims, they were corroborated by other cites I gave. Again, where are your cites?
Are certain dopers exempt from the requirement to post cites?
Your “evidence” was a single, sunsopported reference by a single individual in testimony. He provided no evidence that Heusinger was a Nazi, only noting that he had a high position in the Wehrmacht in order to make an implication that he did not actually address or corroborate.
Google translation of German bullet biography of Heusinger (Note that he was an aide to Konrad Adenauer, no lover of the Nazis.)
Original in German
British bullet biography of Heusinger
Another translated biography, noting his actual positions within the Wehrmacht (and a conspicuous absence of any reference to joining or even participating with the Nazi political party)
The original in German
In fact, the only two damaging claims made against Heusinger (aside from the innuendo of Irwin Nack) is that the Soviets wanted to try him for crimes committed by the army in Russia (with no indication that they distinguished between Nazi and Wehrmacht) and the fact that he did not join the assassination plot agiant Hitler (although he also, apparently, did not reveal the plot to Hitler).
So we are left with one banking inspector throwing out Heusinger’s name with no context other than his position in the Wehrmacht, several biographies that fail to mention Heusinger as anything other than a career soldier, the confidence of Konrad Adenauer, and a desire for retribution by the Soviets–and not one shred of evidence that Heusinger was a Nazi.
Pilger’s claim that resolution 678 was not valid is not supportable and his claim that Iraq offered to withdraw from Kuwait is written to make the U.S. look like it was deliberately sabotaging the efforts when a different reading of the events could suggest that Iraq’s “offer” (which included holding on to key portions of Kuwait) was actually the bad faith in the negotiations.
I am not claiming that I will refuse to consider any source you quote. I am pointing out that you have now picked several biased and misleading sources and that you are now under the same cloud as the administration when you make sweeping claims, portraying the U.S. as a malevolent entity in the way that Bush describes his “axis of evil.”
Hussein was/is evil, but there is no evidence that he was a threat to the U.S.
The U.S. has committed horrendous acts, but there is no evidence that it is consistently directed for the purpose of establishing an empire.
In each case, the people making the claims have damaged their overall credibility for their grand thesis, even when they correctly identify individual actions.
Tom, you are just quibbling. It is irrelevant whether or not Heusinger was a member of the Nazi party. He was a general in Hitler’s army and was responsible for Nazi war crimes. In that broader sense, he was a Nazi. As a Nazi, of course he whitewashed his past, as did von Braun and Dornberger. The OSS and the Army CIC collaborated in the scrubbing of their Nazi loyalties, because it was convenient for the US to do so. This was part of an overall pattern of US-Nazi alliances in Europe to counter what was perceived as Soviet aggression (most of which turns out to have been disinformation propagated by Reinhard Gehlen), e.g., the US put into power Nazi collaborators in Greece who brutally suppressed the partisans who fought against the Nazis.
As further proof of Heusinger’s Nazi-ness, he liberated Nazi war criminals, according to “Heusinger and the Fourth Reich” by Charles Allen (p. 19):
"The New York times put it bluntly when it reported that ‘In the opinion of General Adolf Heusinger…it will be impossible to recruit desirable officers for West Germany…unless a substantial number of war criminals were released.’ (NY Times, July 25, 1952)
Among the war criminals for whom he demanded freedom was the former head of the entire Nazi concentration camp system which had slaughtered millions throughout Europe during WWII. Heusinger got his way; most of them were released." (T. H. Tetens, The New Germany and the Old Nazis, p.16)
Your claim that my sources are biased and misleading is just hypocrisy. All you are saying is your bias is better than my bias, unless you are claiming some pipeline to the absolute truth. I will stick to my substantiated, biased position and you can stick to your substantiated, biased position. But nobody has refuted anything here.
The point I will stick to is that McCarthy harmed everyone. The Red Scare was a red herring which distracted America from the fact that Nazi war criminals were entering our country as well as S. American countries like Argentina. The influence of these Nazis gave us the cold war and a sadistic pathological foreign policy.
"In the final analysis, the cold war became the means for tens-of-thousands of Nazi criminals to avoid responsibility for the murders they had committed. The breakdown of East-West cooperation in the prosecution of war criminals-motivated, again, in part by the short-term interests of the intelligence agencies of both sides in protecting their clandestine operations assets-provided both the means for criminals to escape to the West and the alibis for them to use once they arrived here. “Nazi criminals,” as Simon Wiesenthal has commented, “were the principal beneficiaries of the Cold War.” (p. 288 of Blowback by Chris Simpson)
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Quotations_B_CS.html
More excerpts here:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Blowback_CSimpson.html
Zoe,
No country ever actually bothered to call itself “communist”. So what.
Most of them referred to themselves unofficially as communist, and officially as “Socialist” - eg. former USSR - (also words like Peoples’ Democratic Republic were often added to the stew that made up some countries’ names, but these words were about as meaningful as sugar on the brown word.
As far as actual killers of non combatant citizens is concerned, only a small minority of the population in any given polity would be needed to perform the actual butchery. This would apply to National Socialist Germany as well as to other socialist or collectivist regimes of the 20th C.
So far, no one on this thread appears to have demonstrated that McCarthy caused anything remotely resembling a great terror.
Names have been hesitantly put forward by quite a few people with an: “is this a good example, or what?” approach.
It has been so long since the USA has experienced a real terror campaign that many of its people have lost any sense of proportion. Joe McCarthy did not engage in anything remotely resembling a “Great Terror.”
John Brown in the ante bellum South did so engage.
The KKK between 1870 and 1920 did so engage.
Tailgunner Joe, despite his killer nickname, did not.
(I am not forgetting the twin towers, by the way, but that was not a home grown act of terror).
So, McCarthy did not actually order anybody killed, is that your point, Bess? Because I don’t recall anyone maintaining that he did. But there’s ample evidence that he destroyed the careers of many people who simply did not deserve what happened to him. He was an evil fucker and his Committee was an instrument of evil and the only reason no innocents other tha Ethel Rosenberg were murdered during the Red Scare is that the American public was pretty fucking sick of killing after WWII and Korea.
Frankly, McCarthy was PLENTY enough of an evil asshole to deserve every insult and dig that comes his way.
(No, I’m not maintaining that McCarthy was responsible for Ethel Rosenberg’s murder, that one rests squarely on the head of the FBI.)
Evil,
Please calm down. I don’t believe Tailgunner Joe was any nicer, nastier, or sillier than you are.
Ethel Rosenberg is not relevant to this thread, so you’re going OT big time.
Like december said, it wasn’t his job to find spies. It was his job to give an accounting to the public of how far upper levels of government had been permeated by spies and/or Communists. There is a difference…analogous to, say, a committee in the future investigating the influence of Saudi Arabia upon our administrative foreign policy. So saying “he never found any” or some such thing…pointless. They were found, but not by McCarthy himself.
How successful was he…? Amazingly successful, I think, at bringing to the public the matters of Soviet influence within the government at the time.
Well, nmae the people or situations he exposed, then. I do not recall him actually getting any usable testimony. He went back after the Chambers/Hiss situation, but that had already been public for six years.
Just what did he expose?
Fair question. Disclaimer: I wasn’t around then, my parents weren’t born yet…it’s a time I don’t recognize at all, but I did get the impression from various things I’ve read that the public was unhappy with the foreign policies of the time, post WWII. John Kennedy and Richard Nixon both were among the staunch anti-communists then when McCarthy made his speech with his “list.”
He illustrated a few things: some people in the State Department were sympathetic to Communism. Some people in the State Department had been on the Soviet payroll. And that these people and others like them were responsible for the unpopular policies within foreign affairs. I don’t think exposing the criminal activities of individuals was the whole point then.
So there was Alger Hiss, and Dean Acheson who wasn’t convicted of anything but had worked for the Soviet Union at one time. Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service, and Philip C. Jessup. Among others. All State Department who had reason to be held accountable to the people, since they worked for the people.
That’s a rather elaborate way of saying “I got nothin’.”
And from Crouch’s testimony in Tee’s link:
we see that the HUAC had already been digging into that before McCarthy’s grandstanding.
(Of course, we don’t know how much Crouch made up to look good, but that’s just something else to wrangle over.)
Evil C,
We have lot in common.
I know it. You don’t.