Posted on 04/16/2012 11:04:00 AM PDT by Shout Bits
I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department. – Sen. Joseph McCarthy, February 9, 1950
There's about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party. – Rep. Allen West, April 10, 2012 Rep. West touched on the Left's favorite live wire, McCarthyism. Of course West has a long history of pushing the Left's buttons to gain attention and raise campaign funds, but apart from syntax, his comments are valid and worth consideration. But first, a bit of history on McCarthyism.
Sen. McCarthy did not invent McCarthyism; that falls to House Democrats. From the beginning of progressivism through the end of WWII, House Democrats convened a series of committees aimed at thwarting communist influence and infiltration in the Federal Government and the media. Indeed, these House committees continued, under Democrat control, through the Carter Administration. Hollywood Blackballing, communist baiting, and show trials are all Democrat institutions. The Left enjoys blaming Republicans McCarthy and Pres. Nixon for anti-communist excesses, much as they pretend that slavery and Jim Crow were not exclusively Democrat Party institutions. By pretending that their own failings were really the Republicans, they whitewash history, which explains their excruciating sensitivity to anything communist.
The Left likes to vilify red-baiters not because the allegations were false, but because they were very true. Paul Kengor's Dupes is a must read for anyone who might trivialize the communist threat and its ties to the US Left. Soviet records unsealed in the 1990s demonstrate an elaborate network of communist agents and secret Communist Party members embedded at the highest levels of the Federal Government and in media. The Communist Party USA was, indeed, illegally funded by the Soviets, and the CPUSA did take direct secret orders from Moscow. The ugly history of US communism and its impact on Democrat politics can only be rebutted by vainly trivializing the threat. McCarthy's list of communists may have been a fiction, but he was right all along, albeit without much proof.
Most likely West was referring to the Congressional Progressive Caucus whose members represent the most extreme left elements in Washington and number about his tally of Communists. The CPUSA is largely defunct, now that the Soviets no longer pay their bills, and none of the CPC members are actual members of the CPUSA anyway. In that sense, West was wrong, but his error was the only semantic. Since the dawn of progressivism (itself a euphemism for socialism), obvious anti-capitalists like Woody Guthrie or John Dewey defended themselves by stating that they were not Communists in the CPUSA sense. At most, they would self-identify as 'fellow travelers' with the Communists. The defense that someone who believes in Marxism and is fully anti-capitalist is not a communist only because he never officially joined the CPUSA is a hollow shell.
Such is the criticism of West's comments. Yes, nobody from the CPC is a member of the CPUSA, but so what? CPC members such as Reps. Maxine Waters, John Lewis, Pete Stark, Ed Markey, John Conyers, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Sen. Bernie Sanders hold the same values as any hardened communist. They despise capitalism, seek complete government control of the mechanisms of wealth creation, and routinely employ class warfare tactics. Former CPC members such as Reps. Alan Grayson, Cynthia McKinney, and Nancy Pelosi further demonstrate the extreme leftist agitprop rhetoric of this body.
The members of the CPC act like communists, talk like communists, agitate the classes like communists, and want to restructure the US into a socialist state. Even if West was wrong on the semantics of an upper vs. a lower case 'C,' the point remains that the agenda of communism lives on, whether under the banner of progressivism, or just making "the rich" pay a "fair share." 'Communist' is a fair word to describe anyone who wants to dismantle capitalism and impose a new order of government mandated wealth distribution. The fact that communists are offended by being called communists should not concern capitalists desperately defending the US's exceptional history of individualism and prosperity.
Shout Bits can be found on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ShoutBits
Yes, Virginia, there are Communists in the affordable housing next door.
Joe was right then and Alan is right now! I have been blogging about this since 1999!
Same bunch covers the president in office now and they are even more a threat than before.
Yep, the mistake McCarthy made was he gave a specific number of individuals, and, of course, it changed during the investigations. The press seized on the changes as if all of it was entirely fabricated.
Joe was a poor public advocate for the issue, which was in fact, truthful.
The real time to take the threat seriously was about the time Lenin began funding Communist operatives in the USA.
When Stalin took control he vastly expanded Lenin's program and Stalin had the New York Slime on board suppressing news of his death camps and pogroms while lauding collective living so much Israel tried to duplicate the reported (but false) successes in their Kibbutz collectives.
Joe died at 48 years old in 1957, that was just 2 years after Edward R. Murrow assassinated Joe’s career and person. That put an end to shining a spotlight on the infiltration of the communists.
He was best friends with Joe and John Kennedy. Both were very anti-communist. Five years after Joe died of liver failure, JFK was assassinated. I think that was the event that marked the end of the Democratic party as a legitimate constitutionally based party.
Shortly thereafter LBJ took their first step toward socialism and communism with his “Great Society” or “Great Socialism Plan”.
We, the Republic, are being denied the choice to say NO to socialism.
It’s a setup.
The fix is in.
We, the Republic, have been loosing a war of financial attrition for decades. We, the Republic are engaged in a war with those who govern us. Drastic measures are required to defeat this enemy in order to stop the bleeding that each of us are seeing in the depreciation of our savings, the constant onslaught of taxes, fees, and licenses. Each of them designed to remove our ability to live free.
If a slave is a person who works for no money, then a paid person who works with no money left for savings or investment is therefore a slave.
The Communists are very good at planning each move, they have been at it for over sixty years, to bury us. They are so close to succeeding. Let’s look at this:
Obamma publicly insults the SCOTUS.
Obamma appoints communist judge.
Obammacare get’s challenged and rejected by SCOTUS.
Obamma propaganda machine tells populaces that the SCOTUS rejected Obammacare, not on grounds, but in spiteful revenge.
Obamma’s OWS crowd demand “justice”.
Riots begin, marshal law declared.
Checkmate-Kruschev.
Succeeding? They have succeeded & you have pointed it out.
Meanwhile the drumbeat of Dictator Obama grows louder:
regulate -— control -— destroy -— Regulate -— control -— destroy -— REgulate -— control -— destroy -— REGulate -— control -— destroy -— REGU
They may not all be Communists with a capital “C”. Marx would probably categorize the majority of the Congressional Progressive Caucus as “crude communists”.
Compare the CPC agenda with Marx’s description of unthinking, crude communism (rohe Kommunismus):
“This type of communism – since it negates the personality of man in every sphere – is but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which greed re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way. The thought of every piece of private property as such is at least turned against wealthier private property in the form of envy and the urge to reduce things to a common level, so that this envy and urge even constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism is only the culmination of this envy and of this levelling-down proceeding from the preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited standard ... the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it.”
They’re communists alright, but not even Marx would have them.
The CPC is probably comprised of a few Communists who understand Marx, a bunch of “unthinking, crude communists”, and a large fraction of useful idiots. I seriously doubt that more than a few of CPC members have read any Marx other than the Communist Manifesto, which was no more than a propaganda pamphlet for the Communist Party. They all are tools, however, for the destruction of everything good about America.
extremely interesting observation. I will have to research this.
I wish you would post this to the shoutbits.com web site to archive it for others.
The quote is from Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.
Marx was a crank as an economist, but a fairly brilliant political critic. He was no good at devising a working political philosophy, but he was quite often correct in his criticisms of his opponents.
Feel free to use my earlier observation and elaborate as you wish on your blog.
Your appraisal is probably correct.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.