Posted on 10/31/2005 9:29:26 AM PST by Borges
Q. In your review of "Good Night, and Good Luck," the new George Clooney movie about Edward R. Murrow, you said about Sen McCarthy: "He destroys others with lies, and then is himself destroyed by the truth." The only problem is that McCarthy wasn't lying. He might have gotten a few of the details wrong, but he was substantially correct.
The Venona Project was a top-secret U.S. government effort to decode Soviet messages which ran from 1943 until 1980. Untold thousands of diplomatic messages were decrypted, providing invaluable intelligence. Some of that intelligence proved that there were, indeed, spies imbedded in the U.S. government in far greater numbers than the public suspected. Many of the people that McCarthy singled out as being spies actually were working for Russia, traitors that were selling out their country to the most murderous regime the world has ever seen.
The threat was very real, and Murrow did the free world no favors with helping to bring McCarthy down. The film has no mention of Venona, no mention of Soviet spies that certainly did exist, no nuance and no truth. Instead we're treated to a rehashing of the same old debunked story about how journalists managed to bring down a greater threat to freedom than Stalin. What is beyond my comprehension is how most of the people who know and care about the Red scare of the 1950s are completely unaware of Venona. Many of the decoded documents have been available to the public for more than a decade.
James R. Rummel, Columbus, Ohio
A. If McCarthy had that information, why didn't he cite it to save himself? Obviously, because it was not available until years after his death. Evidence at the Army-McCarthy hearings and elsewhere indicated that he fabricated most of his charges out of thin air. Do you have any sympathy for the majority of his targets who were completely innocent? What about the blacklist that ended careers and destroyed lives because innocent people exercised their constitutional privileges?
It is significant that government security officials in possession of facts about spies did not choose to share them with McCarthy, who was a loose cannon. Presumably the security experts were taking care of business while McCarthy was disgracing himself. Edward R. Murrow is the public servant in this scenario.
Gee, wouldn't that have potentially exposed American assets working against the Soviets?
Duck the truth Ebert.A movie critic I respect is Michael Medved. As he said, McCarthy was a tragic figure who got the big picture of communist infiltration correct. He was a real patriot. Murrow, on the other hand, began the style of editorializing journalism.
Besides, this story is old hat.
Can't these liberals find anything new?
Yeah, right.
The military knew all about Josef (Uncle Joe) and his thugs from the middle (or close) of WWII.
Sleazywood does it again. What Verona Project?
Clooney probably REALLY does't know about it. His good looks conversely match his low I.Q.
Dummern box of hair.
McCarthy got his "information" from somewhere. Much came from Sec. Forrestal who committed "suicide" by jumping out a window.
Sleazywood won't let this die either. That is because many Sleazywoodians were blacklisted. They were commies. But, that's okay in Sleazywood....anti-Americanism runs deep in that neck of the woods.
Sleazywood won't ever give up on Nazi films either. Just too much fun to bash the Germans. I think the Japanese and Italians are due for a good WWII bashing. After all, they were right in there, lockstep, so to speak, with all the horrors of WWII.
The Japanese actually got a six-year jump start on war with their invasion of China in 1932. But, the killing of 34 million Chinese just isn't important enough to Sleazywood.
Perhaps there just aren't enough Chinese and Japanese actors there to fill in the roles. They COULD outsource. :o) China has enough people to fill all roles, for all movies, for all time.
Reminds me of a Star Trek (NG) "villain" who, with a thought, killed ALL Huznak, all 50 billion. Ah, there but for the grace of sci-fi go I. Harhar.
The man is Mr. James R. Rummel, whose main point is ignored, and thus not given its due. The main point is that McCarthy was right, by his loose canoon "feelings" perhaps, but right none-the-less. Like a person in a windowless office who says it's raining outside because he feels it in his bones, McCarthy was right in his assesment of the "weather". The government was rife with spies and sympathizers. Ebert ignores that main point -- that there were spies, a whole lot of them and the movie ignores that fact.
Ebert's rebuttal is possible, but given that he gives no honor to his questioner, it is ignorable in whole for that rudeness.
Ans since Julius and company were spies for an ALLY, their act was not Treason, as Treason is clearly defined in the Constitution. Their execution was an overreach of federal authority.
Nazis are bashed, as they should be....but so is everything German. See Hogan's Heroes," which ran for YEARS on T.V. There wouldn't have been a Hirohito's Heroes -- that would have been racist and ethnically non-p.c.
The bashing is continual, as if those 13-years in German history are the only part of Germany that ever existed.
JAPAN started war first with their conquest and occupation of China WAY back in the early thirties, before the Nazis got to full force. Thirty-four million Chinese went to their deaths in camps, prisons, firing squads, experiments, brothels, mass graves. See the Rape of Nanking for rare footage of what the Chinese endured at the hands of our Japanese friends.
ONE movie. And it wasn't even about the Japanese, but about this boy. Snerf. I did shed a tear at the end when he was re-united with his parents.
Ebert, regarding the 2000 election, which Gore tried to steal in the partisan packed Florida court:
GOP won by planting seeds of deception
by Roger Ebert
December 14, 2000
What the Republicans did, cleverly, was to establish effective "memes" in the minds of the public and the pundits. A meme, so named by the British evolutionist Richard Dawkins, is like a gene, except that instead of advancing through organisms, it moves through minds. Memes are simply ideas that demonstrate a high rate of survival and transmission.
I think that the time is ripe for an American film to document the EVILS of Italian Fascism, although I doubt few would pay to see it. Many Italian films on this subject, however.
Kurosawa, like many of his generation, was in denial over the extent of the atrocities committed by the Japanese in China and SE Asia. Its more a fault of culture than Kurosawa himself.
Better re-check the time frame.
The Soviet Union was our ally when it counted. During a war. We never officially declared them an enemy, afaik. Patton and later MacArthur had the right idea -- we should have gone into Eastern Europe with tanks (Patton), and into China (MacA) with our Army and Air Forces both while the wars were still hot. Still, at the time of their spying Julius Rosenberg was spying for an official ally.
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