Posted on 12/12/2007 11:52:56 AM PST by bs9021
Joe McCarthy Demythologized
by: Malcolm A. Kline, December 12, 2007
In a recent critique of Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against Americas Enemies that appeared in National Review, historian Ron Radosh makes numerous assertions about the book by M. Stanton Evans that are completely unsupported by the work itself. We will deal with just one of that multitude in this column.
In a similar fashion, Evans supports McCarthys outrageous assertion about Gen. George C. Marshall, Radosh writes. It is fair game to argue that Marshall had a wrong and naïve view of Mao and his comradeswhich he almost certainly did.
It is another to argue that he acted on behalf of the conspiracy set in motion by Service and the other China hands, who, Evans argues unconvincingly, were controlling U. S. policy in the Pacific. Actually, Evans produces quite a paper trail, much of it declassified, to support that assertion.
And even if Marshall was wrong, nothing can justify McCarthys charge that the general led a conspiracy so immense to undermine America, Radosh writes. And Evans doesnt try to.
You can listen to Evans discuss the book on The Right Hour with Paul Weyrich. Weyrich assembled a panel of interviewers for the broadcast who included John Gizzi, the Capitol Hill correspondent for Human Events, the nations oldest conservative weekly newspaper, Wes Vernon, a former reporter for CBS and yours truly.
Unlike Radosh, all of us read the book. On the broadcast, Vernon tells Evans that many people may think that he went too easy on Harry Trumans one-time Secretary of State.
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
Isn’t Paul Weyrich the guy who threw in with anti-American “peace movement” and spoke at their rally in Upper Senate Park?
Ann Coulter absoultely ripped Radosh about this in a column at her website.
Ops, that was David Keene at an ACLU rally co-sponsored by Code Pink....
Ann had interesting things to say about Joe McCarthy in her book, “Slander.” Changed my whole viewpoint.
bfl
The Evans book is great. These folks noticing it doesn't make them right on other matters of course, but they are correct to point out - as Ann did - that NR's assigned review of it was both rushed, and muffed completely. And unfair as a result.
Still waiting for NR to correct itself on the point...
Bump for l8r
I just finished it, and I quite agree.
I was somewhat aware of how Venona and de-classified Soviet archives had vindicated McCarthy, Ann's book brought it very much into focus for me as well. She deserves credit for that, and whether one approves of her style or not (I do) she always shows remarkable courage in the way she stands up to leftist icons and conventional wisdom. She often reminds me of a mongoose attacking a snake.
Joe McCarthy was an American hero. We need more like him.
Good for Evans, and what a monumental blunder by McCarthy.
Thanks for telling me. I just ordered it along with "McCarthy" by Roy Cohn.
One of the most popular TV shows was I Led Three Lives based upon the experiences of Herbert Philbrick, a Boston advertising executive who infiltrated the U.S. Communist Party on behalf of the FBI in the 1940s and wrote a bestselling book on the topic.
This was a time when even the Washington-based FBI management was 100 percent on our side.
A time when Bob Hope could get a laugh when he said that during his visit to Moscow he learned that there the TV watches you.
Try making fun of our enemies today and watch CAIR, the MSM, moron.org and mediasmatters scream bloody murder. It's sensitivity training for you, buddy!
McCarthy & American Jews.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1927254/posts
Waves of immigrants came to the USA from 1880-1920: the Poles the Italians the Irish the Jews. Most of these ethnic groups voted for FDR by large majorities in 1932, 1936 & 1940, but over time they have assimilated and become less politically monolithic. Yet to this day the American jews still vote democratic by hefty majorities. Why? It is because Hollywood still strenuously maintains the communist lie about the 1950-54 McCarthy era. That lie is maintained by the recent movies A Beautiful Mind, and Good Night and Good Luck.
Shortly before his death in 1953 Stalin initiated the Doctors Plot. There are various reasons given for that. The KGB hated Israel. Many Americans who were enthusiastic supporters of the UN were Jewish. Edvard Radzinsky in his book Stalin argues that while at one time Stalin hoped Jewish financial capital would help rebuild the Soviet Union after the WWII, Stalin hated the prospect of suborning himself to the Baruch Plan and he flat out rejected IAEA nuclear controlspresented in 1946 (an attitude is not entirely dissimliar to that of Iran today.) The Russians were working on their own A-bomb based on stolen US designs. Stalin, himself a Geogian, wanted to insure that the Russians saw a Russian face to a Communist Party which was top heavy with Jews.
Whatever the reason, Stalin fomented the Doctors plot hysteria and broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. He was within days of preparing to exile the Soviet Jews to the Gulag (as was done previously with various other ethnic minorities such as the Crimean Tatars, Chechens, etc.), and initiate another great purge along the lines of 1938.
Stalin already had the concentration camps set up, and some of the preliminary accusations had gone out for the Doctors Plot. 100 or so Russian jews had already been executed when he died in 1953. The important thing to recall is that the Doctors Plot happened at the same time as the McCarthy anti communist business from 1950-54. Also in 1953, in the US the Rosenburgs were tried and executed for treasonand this less than a decade after the Holocaust. This naturally caused fear and suspicion in the US Jewish community. This fear and suspicion was played upon by knowledgeable communists and leftistslarge numbers of whom were themselves jewish. These folk not only knew about what Stalin had done in the 1930s and had been about to do with the doctors plot before he died, but also saw the McCarthy trials as show trials american style . . . that is, a prelude to an american pogrom. For which the Rosenbergs were exhibit A.
In a brilliant piece of jujitsu, leftists and communists imputed to Americans on the right exactly what Stalin had planned to do. But it was done soto voce. Basically, a blood libel was perpetrated on Americans without their knowing it. Worse, Protestant America was painted as the tribal enemy tooth and claw of the US jewish establishment without Christian America even knowing it. Never again! Was the battle cry. But there werent any such enemies of Jews in the USA. If there actually had been Christian tribal enemies in the USA, Meyer Kahane and his Jewish Defense League would have provoked them into a bloodletting. Why did Meyer Kahane behave the way he did? Because he heard the same thing as everyone else - all the Jews, that is. He heard about enemies of the jews in the heartland. But when he went to give battle, the only sorts of fights the JDL could find resulted in unintelligible court disputes in places like Idaho. In the end, Kahane married an American woman & helped expedite Stalins last wishto rid Russia of Jews. When his American wife committed suicide, Kahane lost interest in the USA and focused instead on Israel. When Kahane died in 1990 it was at the hands of a Moslem.
While the American public outside NY/LA were generally given the view that the McCarthy era was an age when innocent men were unjustly tried by suspicious anti semites like McCarthy & Nixon, the NY/LA Jewish establishment was given a very different story. They were given to understand that the democrats/liberals had prevented the US from visiting a holocaust on them - and that American Jews owed their loyalty to the liberal democrats because the liberal democrats were the protectors of the Jews. And this Meme went on untouched for decades after McCarthy.
This dual track story line didnt crack until the early 1990s when the KGB/NKVD/GRU opened up their files on the WWII-McCarthy period. In 1995 the USs National Security Agency opened up their Venona files. Both Russian and American spy agency files showed that McCarthy was right. The Rosenburgs were guilty. The US government notably including the Manhattan Projecthad been at one time soaked with Russian Spies. While McCarthy had the details wrong, he got the general outline of the story right. Why did McCarthy get the outline right and the details wrong? The reason is that McCarthys relationship to Hoover was the same as Hoovers relationship to the NSA.
The NSA told the FBI about the Venona intercepts but insisted that the FBI could not use NSA intercepts as evidence in court. The FBI had to develop their own leads. As a result most of the spies escaped prosecution. The FBI did not get their man.
In 1950 J. Edgar Hoover began weekly meetings with Joseph McCarthy. Those meetings ended in 1954. The beginning and end of those meetings coincided with the beginning and end of McCarthy star turn in the national spot light. McCarthy got most of the details of the spy story wrong but he got the general outline of the story right. His predicament was the same as that of the FBI. Whatever Hoover told himMcCarthy could not use in the senate hearings. To this day the FBI denies that Hoover told McCarthy anything about the Venona Cables and maybe Hoover said nothing explicit to McCarthy for which Hoover could be liable in court.
Needless to say, an American style shoah was never in the cards.
The reason that Hollywood hated Ronald Reagan so much was that he was an anti communist in Hollywood during the McCarthy period. To be staunchly anti communist in Hollywood or NYC at that time was to be at least vaguely anti semitic because in the 30s to the 50s communism was considered to be almost a secular form of Judaism in the Jewish communities of NY/LA. Given the reputation of the Jews in capitalist countries as the quintessential capitalists, this seems ironic. But in Russia, communism was a way to get ahead for the jews. And in addition to the opportunities communism presented to Jews, there was a biblical antecedent for jewish communists in the bible in the person of Joseph in Egypt because the relationship between Jews to Josephs Egypt maps over well to that between Jews and Communist Russia. And the history of the Jews from Joseph to Moses looks very similar to the rise to prominence of many Jews in the soviet communist bureaucracy from the 1917-1970 and the decades long expulsion of Russias jews after 1970 when it became clear that communism was not working. The Russians blamed Russian jews for the failure of communism.
Reagan was among the first wave of FDR democrats to switch parties. Reagans star turn in Hollywood ended after McCarthy, but his experiences in Hollywood served him well when he went into public service. He always understood the jujitsu of media talk of the age. Something that cannot be said of Nixon. Nixon’s rise to prominance began with his role with the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC)—a role for which gained visceral leftist enemies with long memories (in the way John Kerry gained prominence during the Viet Nam era and made visceral enemies of the swift boat veterans.) Nixons fall also coincides with the Russian expulsion of Russia’s jews.
I would not argue that Nixon paid the price for Russia’s expulsion of Russian jews. That stretches the point. However, when I hear American based Moslems talking about McCarthyism being visited on them, I have to laugh. They have unknowingly pronounced themselves guilty in the eyes of many Americans.
The history of the McCarthy period now is forgotten among American Jews except for the vague idea that somehow Republicans are bad and somehow Democrats are good.
As for the Democrats, part of the reason for the loss of their inner coherence in the last decade has been that the part of their foundational raison dêtre which stems from the McCarthy era was revealed to be based on a lie. So now the core of the Democratic Party is the sodomites. Those people are not just confusing, they are confused.
David Horowitz interviewed by Rush Limbaugh some months ago — talked about how his parents were communists and he was a communist in college. He said when he was in college his views were always treated respectfully by his professors. But, he said recently, a young Christian college student told him that his homosexual college professor had singled him out in class and asked him Why do you Christians hate queers? Asked why he continued to do what he did in the face of all the abuse he gets, David Horowitz said that - like Rush - he took public political positions because he had to. But also he said he did it as a matter of atonement.
He gets it.
Venona Historical Writings that include comparisons of venona and russian spy lists and the changing venona story in the academy. http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page43.html http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/index.html
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