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And he continued to use the political weapon of 'communism' to further his career.Nixon won his first election in California by claiming that the woman he was running against was, "...As pink as her underwear".
ROFLSome of the fear was unfounded but certainly not all. I never heard anyone blame them for all that, maybe someone did but it wasn't the norm. They were on the march and the USSR became a nuclear superpower.Communism was a threat in a military sense. There was nothing imaginary about the Cuban missile crisis. My former high school buddies who were in the service were put on high alert. What WAS imaginary was the paranoia that there were commies everywhere in the USA subverting out schools, movies, books, fluoridating our water, writing our newspaper articles, The communists were blamed for rock and roll music, juvenile delinquency, teenage sex and pregnancy, infiltrating our State Department and unions, etc., etc., etc. It all became so over the top that when the 1960's were in full swing, kids just naturally rejected the whole American ideal. Of course, that ideal also included Vietnam.
To say it was no threat is just stupid, (not directed at you) people died trying to flee the communist dictatorship. If you wanted to leave here, you could.
Map - Political Systems of the World in the 1950s
For the second time in the 20th Century, the world had tranformed itself beyond recognition. With the fall of Fascism, the rise of Communism and the independence of several major colonies, over half of humanity had made a decisive break with the past. The 1950s were an era in which people tried to assess and react to the changes unleashed by the 1940s.
Two trends dominated:
This clear rift between two ascendant and competing philosophies dominated geo-politics in the 50s. It showed itself in the military alliances of the times, and in the temporary borders that divided disputed territories like Germany, Korea and Vietnam.
- Communism -- which had once been confined to only the Soviet Union and Mongolia -- had now spread to 13 nations and a third of humanity.
- (Full) Democracy -- which had been reduced to a mere 9 nations in offshore enclaves during the darkest days of the War -- had now expanded to include almost half the world's population, the highest percentage in history thus far.
"Communism" and "democracy" are not opposite (or even in a broad sense, mutually antagonistic) terms. They were certainly sold as such but that was more demagoguery bullshit designed to divide and conquer at the expense of logic. Transformed from political science terms into advertising brands. Political demagoguery and commercial advertising using exactly the same methods, learning from each other.
That's why fewer and fewer in the general public could (and still can't) rationally define what they mean. Same with "Liberal" and the latest model, the remix of the century-old "Progressive". No need to take the time to spell out definitions when you're only using the word as a grenade.
It looks to me like you absorbed the culture when you were young, came into adulthood and absorbed a different, leftist, perspective and then stopped learning from that point forward. During the entire Cold War the NSA was intercepting Soviet message traffic and this was classified. This project was named Venona. Early parts of this material has now been declassified. I suspect that you're unaware of this.
That Right Wing paranoia has basis in fact:
The decrypted messages gave important insights into Soviet behavior in the period during which duplicate one-time pads were used. With the first break into the code, Venona revealed the existence of Soviet espionage[21] at Los Alamos National Laboratories.[22] Identities soon emerged of American, Canadian, Australian, and British spies in service to the Soviet government, including Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn May, and Donald Maclean. Others worked in Washington in the State Department, the Treasury, Office of Strategic Services,[23] and even the White House.
The decrypts show the U.S. and other nations were targeted in major espionage campaigns by the Soviet Union as early as 1942. Among those identified are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; Alger Hiss; Harry Dexter White,[13] the second-highest official in the Treasury Department; Lauchlin Currie,[24] a personal aide to Franklin Roosevelt; and Maurice Halperin,[25] a section head in the Office of Strategic Services. . . .
The Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA, housed at one time or another between fifteen and twenty Soviet spies.[28] Duncan Lee, Donald Wheeler, Jane Foster Zlatowski, and Maurice Halperin passed information to Moscow. The War Production Board, the Board of Economic Warfare, the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and the Office of War Information, included at least half a dozen Soviet sources each among their employees. In the opinion of some, almost every American military and diplomatic agency of any importance was compromised to some extent by Soviet espionage.[29]
When the Soviets can place agents in the White House, Dept. of State and the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the the CIA, that's pretty damn impressive deep penetration. Regarding the declassification:
The dearth of reliable information available to the public—or even to the President and Congress—may have helped to polarize debates of the 1950s over the extent and danger of Soviet espionage in the United States. Anti-Communists suspected many spies remained at large, perhaps including some known to the government. Those who criticized the governmental and non-governmental efforts to root out and expose communists felt these efforts were an overreaction (in addition to other reservations about McCarthyism). Public access—or broader governmental access—to the Venona evidence would certainly have affected this debate, as it is affecting the retrospective debate among historians and others now.
So your perception, formed when you were entering adulthood, probably needs to be recalibrated in light of the new, declassified, evidence which shows how damn thorough the Soviet spy penetration of America was in that era.
