I never said that. But I will continue to push you to retreat still further:
Left wing historians writings filled with righteous indignation and emotional abhorrence toward Joseph McCarthy and cool aloofness toward Joseph Stalin
…claim that McCarthyism was the most disgraceful episode in twentieth-century American life, but show a fading memory of the Communist threat.
Those who ‘suffered’ were chiefly Communists…hiding behind the smokescreen that they were innocent liberals falsely accused.
The thrust is that it was McCarthyism, more than Soviet espionage or Communism infiltration of government, that was – in the words of the October 23, 1998, NYTimes editorial, “a lethal threat to American democracy.” This, in the same editorial that admitted that the evidence against Julius Rosenberg, and “most likely” Alger Hiss, was clear.
The deciphered Venona messages document the CPUSA’s integral role in the Soviet Union’s massive espionage against the US.
The federally funded “National History Standards” for elementary schools were released in 1994, cemented a revisionist view of American Communism for schoolteachers, as the guide mentions McCarthy over twenty times, while Edison and the Wright Brothers got no mention. “It …repeatedly condemns McCarthyism as an unmitigated evil…[but] the Hiss-Chambers and Rosenberg cases, the two dominant controversies of the anticommunist era, are described with bland, neutral language crafted to keep from implying guilt while not being quite so foolhardy as to actually assert innocence..’National Standards’…implies that the cases are part and parcel of the McCartyite horror.” From “In Denial,” by Haynes and Klehr, pg. 151
Revisionist views are found, for example, in the work of
Ellen Wolf Schrecker, Ph.D., a professor of
American history at
Yeshiva University, who states “ whatever threat to the United States such espionage [by US citizens working for Soviet intelligence] may have posed, it was gone by the time the main justification for the McCarthy-era purges.” The revisionists claim that the greater sin was not the betrayal of the country by American Communists, but anticommunists using that betrayal as “a rationalization for the most widespread and the longest-lasting episode of political repression in our nation’s history.”
The Professor’s view is based on the relatively small number of prosecutions and convictions, but this overlooks the objectives of the FBI, which weighed exposing sources vs. prosecutions. The aim in counterespionage is always to disrupt the cells and prosecutions are secondary. The ongoing decryption of the Venona cables severely damaged and disruptions of Soviet espionage rings (over 300 Soviet agents active in the US Government during WWII and thereafter) in the last half of the ‘40’s and ‘50’s, and, while only a few spies were prosecuted, scores of others were identified, removed from their government posts and neutralized. Others who functioned as support personnel for Soviet espionage networks (couriers, recruiters, hosts of safe houses, and providers of false identities and sham jobs) were identified, questioned and frightened into inactivity. The Cold War and Korea reduced government and public toleration for Communists and Communist sympathizers. Truman’s legal assault on communism, including the Smith Act, prosecuted leaders and included removing security risks from government. (see “In Denial,” Haynes and Klehr)
Senator Joe McCarthy confronted government officials concealing communist involvement and excessively lax security with regards to Communists in sensitive U.S. Government posts. In many cases he was on target, with over 81 of the names he gave the Tydings committee resulting in resignations or movement of security risks. Given that over 200 of the spies uncovered in the Venona decrypts were never identified, we can only speculate as to the national security impact of removing Communists from key DoD and State Dept posts. Arthur Herman, author of "Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator," says that the accuracy of McCarthy's charges "was no longer a matter of debate," that they are "now accepted as fact." And The New York Post's Eric Fettmann has noted: "growing historical evidence underscores that, whatever his rhetorical and investigative excesses - and they were substantial - McCarthy wa
s a lot closer to the truth about Communism than were his foes."
Whittaker Chambers wrote in his book WITNESS that liberals are/were incapable of ever effectively fighting Communism because they did not see anything in Communism that was antithetical to their own beliefs. In short, Liberals are Communists and Communists are Liberals. The revisionist is aware of the horrors of Communism; the tortures, the Gulags, the over 100 million persons done to death. She is even aware that the American Communists were taking their orders from Moscow and were attempting to impose the Red Utopia upon the United States. If successful, this would have led to millions tortured, enslaved, starved and murdered. It would have led to the death of human freedom for untold years. As the US was the bulwarked of freedom and Democracy, it's communization would have turned the entire world into an abattoir.
