Always Smite the Commies

I have mentioned before the fact that I am pleased to have participated in the Cold War, first as a child doing the public school nuke drills at Germantown Elementary in Annapolis, and then later as a sailor looking at Russia through a periscope. But personal experience aside, the hot wars of the first part of the twentieth century, and then the Cold War that occupied the second half, were enormously complicated, massive in scope, and certainly not reducible to a simplistic understanding of “two sides,” white hats on one side, black hats on the other.

Given this complexity, is there a Rosetta Stone to help the student of history understand the position America was in during that time, along with the various and multiple factions that were shaping and directing our foreigh policy? Yes, there is, and his name is Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Let me go right to the bottom line here. Anyone who believes that the word “McCarthyism” is an appropriate synonym for “witchhunt” does not understand the Cold War. Anyone who believes that Joe McCarthy was a courageous man, correct in all his central assertions, is well on the road to understanding that era.

I recently purchased Blacklisted by History, but have not yet had an opportunity to get to it. But this morning I read a review of that book in the latest edition of Chronicles. What I read lines up nicely with what I have previously studied on the crucial subject of this fascinating man. But please note that this is no longer an ideological question — in other words, it is not the case that I think this way because I am a conservative . . . although I am a conservative. I am able to speak this way because we are fifty years after the events, the FBI records are now public, the Soviet Union collapsed and their Venona files are now public, and facts is stubborn facts. If McCarthyism was witch-hunting, we now know that the Federal Government in the fifties was stuffed full of actual witches, and that this explains a great deal of the State Department hoodoo.

Let me quote just a couple teasers from John Willson’s review:

“Commie studies have not gone well for their apologists and sympathizers for the past couple decades. For a long time, they could say almost anything about McCarthy or anticommunists in general and still get it published in mainstream journals and respectable presses.”

“As recently as 2005, our popular culture could still allow George Clooney to portray the liar Edward R. Murrow as a hero, and the hero Joe McCarthy as a liar.”

“As a friend said in 1995, ‘And here we thought there was a commie under every bed; come to find out, there was one under only every other bed. All the rest were working for the Federal Government.”

As the incipio-fascists of progressivism reveal more and more of their agenda, conducting their witchhunts, it is sometimes tempting for us to accuse them of “McCarthyism.” In just the same way, it is easy to accuse the current wowsers of guilt-manipulation of “Puritanism” because they try to further their cause with everything from tobacco-guilt to global-warming-guilt to Western-wealth-guilt. The problem is not that the content of this charge against them is false. The problem is the implicit slander contained in the name. McCarthy was not guilty of McCarthyism, and the Puritans were not Puritanical. There were people guilty of “McCarthyism” back in McCarthy’s day — they were the ones who brought him down. But as Willson’s review demonstrates, they got at him too late. He got them first, and that turns out to have been the central thing that he did that was unforgiveable.