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Dispatch International: "Joe McCarthy Was Right All Along"
Diana West ^ | 1/25/2013

Posted on 02/24/2013 9:28:42 AM PST by Altura Ct.

I cannot overestimate the fearless excellence of M. Stanton Evans' work as a historian, and, I am fortunate to say, mentor. His 2007 book Blacklisted by History is not only a shattering revision of half a century of lies about Joseph McCarthy and "McCarthyism" -- and, by extension, obfuscation about the successful penetration and subversion of the US government -- it is also an exercise in courage, in confronting a false and crippling consensus with an unshakeable dedication to fact and logic. On a personal note, the book served me as a rosetta stone by which I was able to begin deciphering the mendacious history we "know" as our shining cultural legacy. The results of this unnerving research-odyssey will be published in my forthcoming book, American Betrayal.

That said, I am delighted to post an article written for this week's edition of Dispatch International. My task was to introduce a European audience, in brief, to Evans' work. The piece below is the main article, which is available for free at the DI website. I also wrote accompanying piece assembling a series of thumbnail sketches of some of the sensational revelations Evans and co-writer and Cold War expert Herbert Romerstein discovered in their brand new book, Stalin's Secret Agents. It is behind the online-subscription wall -- so subscribe!

"Joe McCarthy Was Right All Along"

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Most Europeans are unlikely to be familiar with the facts behind the American term “McCarthyism.” They probably know it describes something very bad in American politics – the “Communist witch hunts” of more than half a century ago. They may also know that simply uttering the term, like casting a spell, stops all debate cold by associating someone with the eponymous Joseph McCarthy. As the story goes, he was himself very bad. After all, he conducted those long ago “Communist witch hunts,“ ruining his name in perpetuity. This probably exhausts general knowledge.

But here’s a secret: Most Americans know little more than this same familiar but completely false narrative. In recent years, stunning revelations from archives in Washington and Moscow have confirmed that McCarthy’s investigations – and those conducted by other officials before and after – netted not innocent and imaginary “witches,” but secret cadres of hardened Communist agents determined to bring down the American republic. Surely, this makes Joe McCarthy a great patriot and deserving “the plaudits of a grateful nation.”

So wrote M. Stanton Evans, the consensus-smashing, revisionist biographer of McCarthy in Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (2007). Evans was attempting to convey the significance of just one particular Soviet intelligence operation, circa 1945, that McCarthy was instrumental in bringing to light, circa 1950.

Even a few details about this operation, named initially as the Amerasia affair after a pro-Communist journal of the day, will add a little needed context to modern-day perspective on the so-called McCarthy era.

Amerasia’s editor, Phillip Jaffe, came under FBI surveillance in 1944 after the contents of a confidential OSS memo appeared in his magazine. (The OSS was the precursor to the CIA.) The FBI soon learned Jaffe was in possession of hundreds of stolen, secret US government documents, plus a photographic set-up. The magazine ran no photographs, so the FBI plausibly believed it had come across an active espionage operation. Further surveillance, including wire-taps, determined that Jaffe was in frequent contact with US Communist Party leader Earl Browder, Soviet “diplomats” in New York, a top Chinese Communist envoy of Mao and US diplomat John Stewart Service (home from Chiang Kai-Shek’s China, where, it later emerged, Service roomed with two leading Communist agents, Solomon Adler and Chi Chao-ting).

On June 6, 1945, FBI agents arrested six people, including Jaffe and Service, and seized hundreds of top secret documents, many concerning military matters. An open-and-shut espionage case, it would seem.

An open and quickly shut-down case is more like it. What followed was cover-up, perjury and grand-jury rigging by, among others, high-ranking Washington officials. Some were eager to prevent a national security scandal from engulfing the Truman White House. Others were acting to shield a far wider Communist-led conspiracy mounted by confederates inside the State Department, Treasury, White House and elsewhere in the US government, working not merely to filch secret documents but to ensure, through influence and subversion, the Communist takeover of China. These powerful forces of suppression proved overwhelming. The Amerasia case was scuttled, the scandal was buried, and, within a few years, China was Red.

Five years later, McCarthy’s laser-beam focus on the still-festering case would be instrumental in follow-up investigations launched by both the Senate and the FBI. These massive probes yielded, as Evans notes, some 5,000 pages of Senate hearings, plus 1,000 pages of exhibits and, from the FBI, 24,000 pages of now-declassified records.

They reveal the workings of a vast, complex influence operation, Evans writes, that “assiduously worked to guide official and public thinking, and hence the course of U.S. policy,” in this case regarding the Far East. Other such intricate influence operations, of course, targeted the West. And who was doing this dirty work of Communist-directed subversion from within? Many officials and public figures highlighted by Joseph McCarthy (among others), who, we have since learned from US and Soviet archives, were secret agents and fellow-traveling supporters of Stalin.

McCarthy, as Evans has pointed out, threatened to blow the lid off the official cover-ups and other acts of treason. Thus, he had to be isolated, demonized and destroyed, and so he was. History would be written by the isolators, the demonizers and the destroyers, and repeated by rote for the next half century.

Then along came the declassification of FBI records and releases of intelligence documents, and scholars such as M. Stanton Evans to sift through them. But the far-reaching implications of such research – that anti-Communist “witch-hunters” were right all along – have done shockingly little to change the way Americans regard their history. Such hidebound attitudes extend also to American conservatives, who, it would seem, are the modern-day heirs of the anti-Communist legacy. What Evans calls “court history” is that deeply entrenched as national lore.

Will this ever change? “There’s no concise answer to that,” Evans replied in a recent interview with Dispatch International. “There is a mindset, a narrative, a template that has been out there for a long time.” The reflex reaction, to date, is to preserve that template rather than assess the new evidence.

Thus, it is minimized or denied. Evans mimics the usual reaction to the specter of historical Communist penetration: “ `Well, this thing was overblown, there wasn’t a big problem, these people were persecuted.’ The new evidence, he continues, “challenges this so they dismiss it. We’re dealing with an establishment mindset that is impervious to refutation – to fact. It’s like throwing popcorn at a battleship.”

This hasn’t stopped Evans, 78 – once the youngest metropolitan newspaper editor in the USA (Indianapolis News), and formerly a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and commentator for CBS News and Voice of America – from reloading and firing again. In fact, following his McCarthy book, which corroborates many McCarthy cases and documents the Washington Establishment’s craven efforts to destroy the maverick senator rather than address subversion and cover-up, Evans embarked on a new project. With so much evidence now available attesting to the presence of Soviet agents watching over wartime Washington, Evans set out to write a concise history of what it was these agents of the Kremlin actually accomplished.

The new book, published in November 2012, is Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, co-written with Herbert Romerstein, a leading Cold War expert and longtime congressional investigator. Assessing the achievements of agents of influence, is very different, Evans emphasizes, from standard histories of spying as defined by stealing secrets.

The series of history-changing events Evans and Romerstein identify as having been subverted by Soviet agents is itself history-changing, demanding a rewrite of much of the history of World War II. Despite the familiarity with which we regard the era, in many ways, Evans and Romerstein are pioneering a new field of study. The best way to approach it with what Evans himself calls his Law of Inadequate Paranoia: “No matter how bad you think something is,” he says, “when you look into it, it's always worse."


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: blacklistedbyhistory; communists; coulter; infiltration; leftwingcomplicity; mccarthy; mccarthyism; mccarthywasright; mstantonevans; spies
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To: Altura Ct.

Ann Coulter pays respects to the grave of Senator McCarthy, Appleton, Wisconsin, 2003.
41 posted on 02/24/2013 11:33:42 AM PST by Albion Wilde (Gun control is hitting what you aim at. -- Chuck Norris)
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To: ProtectOurFreedom
You're quite welcome POF. Shoot me a PM if you find a free moment while reading it, I'd be interested to hear what you think about it. You mentioned being 'flabbergasted' by the revelations in the other books you mentioned and I've been that way often myself. Double Lives will do that too I promise. There were times I wanted to throw the book across the room. It's maddening to know gullible and stupid our countrymen can be sometimes, and infuriating to know how horribly we've been betrayed by those we trusted and admired. Also, in spite of the fact that Munzenberg served a wicked cause, he was so incredibly effective at what he did that you'll find it almost difficult not to have a grudging respect for him.
42 posted on 02/24/2013 11:34:15 AM PST by VR-21
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To: shove_it
Nixon was a commie hunter too and look what happened to him.

That's WHY it happened to him.

43 posted on 02/24/2013 11:36:13 AM PST by Navy Patriot (Join the Democrats, it's not Fascism when WE do it, and the Constitution and law mean what WE say.)
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To: VR-21

Bookmark


44 posted on 02/24/2013 11:38:41 AM PST by publius911 (Look for the Unin label, then buy something else.)
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To: Bernard Marx
"These truths are disheartening to me after 40-years of being scoffed at and called paranoid by friends and relatives when I tried to make them see what was happening."

Don't I know. It's sometimes like one of those old low budget horror films, where one person can see the monster and everyone around him is blissfully unaware.

45 posted on 02/24/2013 11:41:00 AM PST by VR-21
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To: VR-21

Yep. And I’m having deja vu all over again when I try to warn people about the sneaky “smart growth” proponents of Agenda 21. It’s being implemented right in front of their noses but they’ve been conditioned not to see the elephant in their parlors.


46 posted on 02/24/2013 11:55:19 AM PST by Bernard Marx
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To: Albion Wilde

Ping


47 posted on 02/24/2013 11:59:12 AM PST by jazusamo ("Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." -- Adam Smith)
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To: Altura Ct.
The communist have been patient and the changes they have implemented have been slow and over decades. The socialist,fascist,communist group is waging war against God and in the end will lose.

Every American should watch this video as it lays out the communist agenda and pedigree to Obama. I think most Freepers are aware of the information in this video but it confirms that McCarthy was spot on and how the left have been so effective with propaganda in destroying our culture. Grinding down America

48 posted on 02/24/2013 12:10:57 PM PST by pterional
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To: jazusamo

bump for later


49 posted on 02/24/2013 12:12:43 PM PST by bassmaner (Hey commies: I am a white male, and I am guilty of NOTHING! Sell your 'white guilt' elsewhere.)
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To: Albion Wilde

Thank you for the ping! Yes, indeed, Senator McCarthy was right as rain!


50 posted on 02/24/2013 12:19:38 PM PST by WXRGina (The Founding Fathers would be shooting by now.)
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To: Altura Ct.

             Do ya miss me yet ??

51 posted on 02/24/2013 12:26:52 PM PST by tomkat
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To: griswold3
"Who gets to be the scapegoat?"

You touch on something that's extremely important I think. Utopian (eventually totalitarian) political movements invariably find some segment of society to marginalize, and as you say, 'scapegoat.' Hitler had his Jews, Stalin had his Kulaks, and now the utopian monsters in our own government are attempting to do the same thing to free-market capitalists and wealthy people. Though they are as rapacious as all other utopians, and are unequaled at dividing people by race, sex etc., the philosophical bedrock of the American left will always be envy.

52 posted on 02/24/2013 12:27:50 PM PST by VR-21
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To: nonliberal

Thanks, NL. Added to my Amazon Wish List.


53 posted on 02/24/2013 12:30:25 PM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
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To: Altura Ct.

Radical Ideas and Real Politics.


54 posted on 02/24/2013 12:38:48 PM PST by thecodont
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To: Altura Ct.; 3D-JOY; abner; Abundy; AGreatPer; Albion Wilde; AliVeritas; alisasny; ...

PING!


55 posted on 02/24/2013 12:40:19 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (Happy New Year!)
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To: Altura Ct.; 3D-JOY; abner; Abundy; AGreatPer; Albion Wilde; AliVeritas; alisasny; ...

PING!


56 posted on 02/24/2013 12:41:03 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (Happy New Year!)
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To: Altura Ct.

To the people who destroyed Joe McCarthy: HAVE YOU NO SHAME???


57 posted on 02/24/2013 12:42:31 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (Happy New Year!)
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To: Altura Ct.
It was such a tragedy that Senator McCarthy was driven to an early demise and even yet his name is used by the left. If it was not so, one could laugh out loud at the clumsy lies and posturing of his detractors. Page 244 is one of my favourite pages.

The Tydings Hearings concerning Senator McCarthy.

For there is one Senator Millard Tydings posing with a phonograph. Senator McCarthy had gone to Wheeling West Virgina in 1950. It was freely floated by the leftist press and their lackeys, that he had claimed 205 traitors within the Administration. Old newspapers shown, including the Denver Post quoted the Senator as saying "57 Reds" were within the administration. Tydings admitted under oath he had no such recording of McCarthy, as he indicated that he had. Tydings waffled and said he saw it in print.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. By all means anyone should get a copy. The detailed lists by the authorities released under freedom of information act are of immeasurable importance. I will never understand how people living under the First Amendment to the Constitution and likely living well, could espouse such a perverted cause as communism.

58 posted on 02/24/2013 1:13:05 PM PST by Peter Libra
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To: VR-21

I have read “Double Lives” and given it to several people. It is a great book - showing that an agent of influence like Munzenberg is a thousand time more dangerous than a spy.


59 posted on 02/24/2013 1:20:11 PM PST by kabumpo (Kabumpo)
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To: VR-21

I don’t have respect for Munzenberg’s “brilliance” as much as I have disdain, loathing and lack of respect for the idiot “intellectuals” who allowed themselves to be influenced by him.


60 posted on 02/24/2013 1:25:16 PM PST by kabumpo (Kabumpo)
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