Playing the McCarthyism card (badly)

UPDATED

Now days, "McCarthyism" has been drained of meaning. It gets tossed around by people who have no idea what the Senator did. They simply "know" that he was bad and did bad things.

This puts plenty of fish in the barrel for those who know history. Neo-neocon gives us a lesson in how it is done:

Peter King McCarthy

UPDATE:

Neo links to this Ron Radosh article which is well worth a look:

A New View of the McCarthy Era Could Shake up the Academy

I especially liked this:

This conventional narrative of the left has been told over and over for so many years that it has all but become the established truth to most Americans. It was exemplified in a best-selling book of the late 1970's, David Caute’s The Great Fear, and from the most quoted one from the recent past, Ellen Schrecker’s Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. My favorite title is one written by the late Cedric Belfrage, The American Inquisition 1945-1960: A Profile of the “McCarthy Era.” In his book, Belfrage told the story of how he, an independent journalist who founded the fellow-traveling weekly The National Guardian, was hounded by the authorities and finally deported home to Britain. American concerns about Soviet espionage, he argued, were simply paranoia.
The problem with Belfrage’s account was that once the Venona files began to be released in 1995–the once top secret Soviet decrypts of communications between Moscow Center and its US agents—they revealed that Belfrage was a paid KGB operative, just as the anti-Communist liberal Sidney Hook had openly charged decades ago, and as turned KGB spy Elizabeth Bentley had privately informed the FBI in 1945. The Venona cables revealed that Belfrage had given the KGB an OSS report received by British intelligence concerning the anti-Communist Yugoslav resistance in the 1940's as well as documents about the British government’s position during the war on opening a second front in Europe. It showed that Belfrage had offered the Soviets to establish secret contact with them if he was stationed in London.

The last thirty years have been full of revelations like that.

One of my favorites is earnest liberal (his family owned The New Republic) Michael Straight who wrote a book on the Army- McCarthy hearings (Trial by Television). Naturally, he was appalled by the senator from Wisconsin. But then, he had something of a rooting interest: his brother-in-law (Gustavo Duran) was one of the names that McCarthy named.

Decades after McCarthy's self-destruction, we found out that Straight was a member of the Cambridge spy-ring (Kim Philby, et. al.) Not only that, but another brother-in-law was one of Stalin's minions in Spain during the civil war there.


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