Posted on 07/27/2009 8:52:23 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign during the post-war era in the US remain one of the great totemic events in liberal-Left mythology. Every time there is a revival of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, solemn words are trotted out about how this metaphor for the appalling witch-hunts which ruined careers is a devastating indictment of irrational fear, blah blah blah.
Well, not exactly. The point of The Crucible is that there were no witches. But back in the real world, there certainly were spies. A new book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, tells us quite how many. It offers further proof that Soviet infiltration in the US was vast. The most important revelation in the book is the remarkable number of prewar and wartime Americans – over 500, from a great variety of backgrounds – who assisted Soviet intelligence.
One of their number, Alger Hiss, became a liberal hero, an innocent who was maligned by McCarthy’s obsession. As the book recounts, this view persisted despite persuasive evidence of his treachery. Academic chairs were set up in his honour. But this new book, having looked at all the fresh evidence, is damming. The files show that after the Yalta conference Hiss was secretly awarded the order of the Red Star during a visit to Moscow.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
Marxists are elitists, convinced that they are innately superior and hence entitled to be in charge of the entire life of society. The famous “workers” (aka, the mob) have always been nothing but the weapon used by the elite, a group of self-annointed illuminati who know better than anyone or anything else.
This even pre-dates communism; look at some of the bloodier figures of the French Revolution, intellectuals all. It is no accident that Alinksy dedicated his book to Lucifer, because that is, essentially, the leftist attitude: they cut loose from religion and reason because there is no person and no institution that knows more than they and no wisdom greater than theirs.
In Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, virtually all of the worst traitors were from blue-blooded New England families, or were trust fund babies, or were professors at the Ivies...you get the idea. They were people who had been born with or acquired a sense of entitlement and Marxism enabled them to impose this vision of themselves on others.
I’m reading “Blacklisted by History” by M. Stanton Evans. It’s about McCarthy and the situation leading up to the hearings. The facts are jaw-dropping, and one interesting thing was how complicit the US government under Roosevelt and then Truman was in covering up the communists within, blocking investigations, etc. The State Department was particularly riddled with them, including some in policy-making positions.
My guess is that Obama’s gma and gpa were two of them.
bflr
[Thee] They'd come to the "correct" conclusion, those sophomores.
Ah, but not if they were students at a university or college where Western Civilization is taught without the poisonous drippings of academic Marxism.
A fair assessment could be had, I think, at Clairmont-McKenna, for example, or Pepperdine, or Regis College, or Bob Jones University, or Oral Roberts, or Abilene Christian, or Texas A&M University, or at some number of other campuses that people in a better position to know could name (people like, say, Charles Krauthammer or Alan Keyes or any of a number of other mappers of Gramscian academic political and intellectual corruption), where faculty Marxism hasn't polarized, frozen, personalized, etc. etc., the pursuit of truth and beauty.
Would anyone else like to nominate campuses where they think a fair show could be held, in an atmosphere actually conducive to learning without Frankfurt School indoctrination?
“Marxists are elitists, convinced that they are innately superior and hence entitled to be in charge of the entire life of society.”
All the more reason to exterminate all of them.
The Communist espionage apparatus from the earliest days relied on class ties to facilitate penetration. The Philby ring began with homosexual faculty at Oxbridge, and a (probably homosexual) professor, never identified to this day, who used his personal corruption of students to facilitate his recruitment for Feliks Dzherzhinsky's OGPU/NKVD spy rings.
People in the States in the 40's were not unaware of the penetration of academia, having been warned during the days of the Palmer Raids and later on, when ex-Communists denounced Columbia and Indiana University as hotbeds. Even as young people "back home in Indiana", my parents' generation knew Indiana University was full of "pinks".
In the 50's, my father told me about a planeload of fissionable isotopes that was air-freighted from an air base in the northern U.S. to Siberia. An Army Air Force security officer tried to stop the shipment at a Montana air base somewhere (so the story went, half-remembered now), and he started telephoning his superiors for directions on how to handle the obviously contraband shipment. He soon found himself talking to none other than Harry Dexter White, who fulminated at the security officer, threatening all sorts of retribution divine and not-so-divine, if he didn't release that shipment post-*******-haste and rush it off to Siberia. The security officer, intimidated and convinced the shipment was legitimately at the orders of the President and C-in-C, released the flight, and off the isotopes went to Russia and the waiting Joseph Stalin.
There was a similar story about a shipment of Rolls-Royce Nene jet engines from England to the Soviets. The Nene engine, copied in thousands, became the powerplant of the MiG-15 fighter, which killed scores of American pilots over Korea.
Because the left is so damned ignorant they often conflate and confuse McCarthy with HUAC. McCarthy AFAIK, was only concerned with commies in the army. Whereas HUAC, were the ones that went after Hollyweird as well as Hiss. But to a liberal, it’s all “McCarthy” because they only know what they have been spoonfed. Even the so-called literati make this mistake all the time.
Not really. They're just "staying 'on message'" -- the message that came from Moscow Centre, i.e. KGB Active Measures.
Always convenient to have a single scapegoat to focus the hate on, McCarthy, Bush, etc.
Well, how about that. Interesting story!
Evans' contention is that much of our China policy was also undermined by the Communists in the State Dept.
Heck, Whitaker Chambers voluntarily gave of the names of 24 communists in government (14 of whom would later be CONFIRMED to have been conducting espionage for the Soviets) in 1939.
1939!!!
And nobody did a damn thing about it, not even the most cursory investigations, until YEARS after World War II.
Due to Chambers, Bentley and several other communists spies who turned "traitor" (to the U.S.S.R.) after the Nazi-Soviet pact and other atrocities, the Russians actually sidelined a number of their American spies. But, after 5 or 6 years, when it became clear the Americans were doing next to nothing on counterespionage, the (doubtless bemused) Soviets said, "what the heck," and began reactivating their American spies and their networks.
Let that sink in. The Soviets KNEW that many of these spies had almost certainly been named, and their networks and the leaders of those networks, and the structure of those networks revealed, but reactivated them anyway. That's how anemic the American response to Soviet espionage was.
Yeah, maybe some anticommunists went a bit overboard at times during the 50's, but how the hell can you blame them!!! This kind of history fully called for and justified an extreme, if not panicked, reaction.
Sometimes I wonder how the hell we ever won the cold war.
yep and as Levin points out in his book, socialists were in Hollywood
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