Category Archives: MCCARTHYISM

Who Lost China? What The Bible Shows

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 Dino Might?   

 

Anti-evolutionists are feeling pretty good about themselves, so confident they’ve got the godless on the run that their analogy generation skills are shot.

From the crypto-creationist Discovery Institute’s evolutionnews.org  [clever name to propagandize the unwary evolution-curious!] comes a metaphor for the ages: “Creation scientists” are Mao Tse Tung, and Beijing is theirs!

“After 1949 when China went Communist, American anti-Communists in their anguish turned on fellow Americans, seeking to pin the blame somewhere and prompting the famous “Who Lost China?” debate. Evolutionists lately have been following this same path, bewailing the public’s continued discontent with Darwinism and support for academic-freedom legislation, and looking for someone to blame, even if that someone is on the Darwinists’ own side.”

 Proof for this headscratcher comes of course from The Atlantic, where Robert Wright knows who to blame: pushy atheists!
In simpler times only Wright recalls, godless and god-smacked respected one another, we all liked Ike, and god apparently wasn’t shoved into the Pledge of Allegiance or onto our coins.
Then, trouble.
Other than dates and such, right on the money!
 Dawkins’ god squad warnings appeared in 2006, seven years after the Discovery Institute’s “The Wedge” appeared, laying out their strategy for stealth creationism, itself a cleaned up version of the god-struck’s historic strategy.
When called on facts and chronology Wright doubled down on absolving creationists and climate denialists:
 First off, demand creates its own supply?  Second, why is Wright pretending this is about hurt feelings rather than power and ideology?  Creationism and climate denial can have roots in religious beleaf, but its whole mobilization infestructure is paid for by somebody. Given their Libertarian pretensions I suspect the Koch brothers may be godless Randians, but they are happy to use the armies of the lord as carbon war cannon fodder.
The Discovery Institute’s analogy does work somewhat about Wright , but on the McCarthy period’s opposite side.  Wright is today’s version of a beloved political type, the liberal or ex-socialist claiming that others on the left created McCarthyism by their insufficient anti-communism.
From Arthur Schlesinger’s eager distinction drawing:
                                                                                           ” Liberals who complain when [HUAC Chairman] Parnell Thomas fails to distinguish between liberals and Communists should remember that too often they have failed to make that distinction themselves.”

To ex-Trotskyite Irving Kristol’s  judgement that

                                  “.. there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalis they feel they know no such thing.”

Lets certify that Communisim was feared, but McCarthy was looking for means of doing in domestic enemies.  The fall of Beijing was to cause the fall of Washington.

Later day former leftist Ronald Radosh still swoons for Kristol’s Lattimore stylings.

Its unclear if Radosh read the report, which is a mishmash of testimony excerpts and theories often proving the opposite of what it claims.*  Radosh even boasts about  Kristol’s outing Lattimore as an opponent of Japanese imperialism in China:
…without pausing to consider the Soviet’s then ally, or the consequences of  backing Japan: Chiang Kai-Shek’s demise fifteen years early.

*After detailing an instance where Lattimore did the opposite of what a communist had asked him to do in editing, the Committee said he was still a bad person, and never mind: “From the communist point of view, a given book or article may be to their interest, even designedly to their interest, though in quantity 95 percent of it is neutral or non communist” [page 95]

So no defense then!

 

Extra Credit For Joe McCarthy

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Look Back In Lethargy     YouTube Preview Image

 

Some of today’s kids are so bored with Advanced Placement US History [APUSH] they’ve vowed to spread the ennui to those not yet victims.

Through time wasting video, of course.

Sprightly young “Sarah61”  has gone YouTubular to explain McCarthyism to the kids, mobilizing the power of Rap to inform and enlighten.

Joining the disturbing APUSH sub-genre which haunts YouTube, our Sarah joins alliteration and droopy beats in the service of History!

Proving once more that the Rap must be retired before every white suburban youth shames a generation with lame rhymes and lamer posing.

 

 Someday, Maybe!   

 

 

 

Pied Pipers of the Politburo Produced President’s Paramour!

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How Owen Lattimore Got Obama Laid, & Policy Made 

 

 

Slate’s David Weigel surveyed how wingnuts and their Politico enablers folded David Maraniss’s exciting Obama college girlfriend revelations into their rich fantasy life, finding “A frantic search for something else to be conspiracy-minded about.”

I say they’re missing the shadows in plain sight.

 

Maraniss tracked down Obama’s girlfriend of his New York years, Genivive Cook, who shared with him, and the nation, her contemporary notes on the affair.  He mentions Cook’s stepfather Phillip Jessup, with a glancing mention of Jessup’s father, the Philip Jessup.  That Jessup was a major Joseph McCarthy target, paired with Truman Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Owen Lattimore as Chiang Kai-shek’s banana peels, the “Pied Pipers of the Politburo“.

High on their own fumes heroes managed to link Bill Clinton with Lattimore by inventing connections and ignoring actual facts, and here is an Obama link with the boys who lost China!

Dreams Of Her [Step] Grandfather  

The 2nd Life of Super Rat Harvey Matusow

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Informer, Comic Book Star?  

Our old pal Harvey had a 2nd [or 3rd? 4th?] life in England after fingering Owen Lattimore and others, then recanting.

Wire magazine has a post up focused on this period, when Matusow became an avant garde music impresario in England.

They feature a “portal” [remember when they were all the rage!] of links to parts of Matusow’s life in this era.

Radio interviews, bits of his unpublished autobiography, and a comic about the crowd he hung out with.

 Matusow: The Later Years

Arthur Schlesinger, Air Tight

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Svetlana Alliluyeva  

Ever cutting-edge, shed of it’s Boston shackles, The Atlantic responded to the death of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva by going to the vaults, resurrecting a review by Arthur Schlesinger.

He was a fan, and using his historian glasses hunted up proof of Alliluyeva’s version of her mother’s death.

“There is independent testimony (Alexander Orlov, Alexander Barmine, Victor Serge, Victor Kravchenko) that Nadya was appalled by the violence, repression, and famine which came in the wake of the forced collectivization of the countryside. “

Of the four, Barmine is the only one playing a roll in the Lattimore case, but lets look at these guys.

Orlov spent the years of collectivization, Alliluyeva’s death and Stalin’s murder of most of the party leadership working abroad for Soviet intelligence in Berlin, the US, Vienna, London, and Copenhagen. He ended as intelligence chief in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, where while apparently brooding over Alliluyeva’s suicide four years previously turned grief into strength hunting down Spanish Trotskyists and shipping Spain’s gold reserves to Moscow.  He didn’t break with the Soviets until 1938, and didn’t surface his tales of the Kremlin until the US anti-communist market appeared in the fifties.

Barmine claimed to have known Stalin’s brother-in-law, who filled him on all the dope. Who knows, but Barmine’s constant discovery of new memories was on display in his Lattimore testimony, where, years after writing his post-Soviet memoir and debriefing the FBI, he suddenly recalled a fancy Soviet intelligence boss as mentor, and Lattimore’s participation in a preposterous Soviet scheme to smuggle arms into China.  To a province they already occupied.

Serge spent the late twenties and the thirties hounded as a dissident, in the Gulag and then in exile, and is fairly reliable on other matters. He claimed his information came from Kremlin gossipers he knew before his last imprisonment.

Kravchenko was a minor official who defected in the mid 40s while in New York for a wartime Soviet purchasing commission.

That these four told similar tales, years later and often with the benefit of each others books, tells us that they can read and write.

Schlesinger is the “Even The New Republic” of the Lattimore case, the liberal fig-leaf held up by a certain stratum of Lattimore-Was-Guilty-Of-Something-ists as showing that even one of their guys hated him.


Before They Were Stars: Harvey Matusow In The Minor Leagues

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“Why, oh why, oh why oh, did he ever leave Ohio?”

Dateline: Dayton Ohio, February 25, 1952

The Ohio House Un-American Activities Committee probes the Red Menace.

In the chair is Harvey Matusow, a young ex-Communist looking to get big in the burgeoning field of Anti-Communism, and hoping Ohio’s laboratory of democracy will loose him upon the world as a made man:

“Q. In addition to the folk singing, did they also use square dancing?”

Was there no aspect of America’s faux folk past safe from Communist marauders?

Fortunately yes, as the Committee’s Chief Counsel rushed to assure:

“You are not saying, and you are not testifying, or want to give the impression that there is anything subversive or un-American about folk singing or square dancing?

A. That is correct.”

The Committee is interested in Yellow Springs’ Antioch College, a Pink festering sore on Ohio’s ass since the days of the Abolitionists.   Harvey was gunning for the big leagues, and Red subversion of innocent youth was to be his ticket out of there.  Shortly after this out of town production he came to Washington, started lying about Owen Lattimore, and left Ohio behind.

Matusow ran through a greatist hits of folk Commie Classics during his testimony, mangling lyrics as he went.

One of the better songs he namechecked: Banks Of Marble

Case Closure: Owen Lattimore Innocent All Over Again

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Past Time: Lattimore Re-enactors

A Re-enactment of Lattimore case highlights was staged back in May by the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit, and their video is now up online.

Several veterans of the case participated, including former Judge Luther Youngdahl clerk Berl Bernhard and two lawyers with connections to Lattimore’s defenders at Arnold Fortas & Porter, Patricia Wald and Bud Vieth.  The prosecution was played by Miguel Estrada, famously  blocked by Democrats from a federal Appeals Court seat, who demonstrated the menacing skills they were so afraid of.