Christ Frankie! As in many things the Communists were in fact taken too seriously. There was never any threat that we would become communists here. This was not in the 30's or 40's or 50's anything like Russia. A Stalin type could never have taken over our country and forced his will on America. Communism is a stupid idea on a scale as large as our country or Russia for that matter and it predictably failed.
OK there were a handful of wackos that thought communism was a good idea and maybe even a tiny number had weaseled their way into the government. So What? There have always been crazy people in this country and guess what?.. there always will be a few. It has never been illegal to be a communist. It isn't illegal to be a Morman either and those people are scarier than some goofy commune types.
Your bid to get McCarthy on the granite in S Dakota is pure fail. Get over it.
"...maybe even a tiny number had weaseled their way into the government. So What?"
Wow! I knew CF would get through to you!
Now take the next step....
...realize that the 'tiny number' persuaded FDR to trust Uncle Joe, and turn Eastern Europe over to the Soviets, and give us the Cold War!
...and the "tiny number" influenced Truman and Treasury to hold up loans to Chiang Kai Shek and essentially turn China over to Mao...and cost 60 million Chinese lives.
What makes you think we ever trusted the communists? It was clear when the Russians were starving and we tried to help them by sending them wheat by the trainload that the operators of the relief trains were stealing most of the grain and that the communists were a joke. We never trusted Russia. They were useful in defeating Hitler. That is about all we needed from them. They also lost over 10 million people in their part of WWII. What some of you seen to be unaware of is how much they sacrificed. They did a hell of a lot more to help defeat the Nazis than the British did.
Now don't get me wrong...I'm not defending communism. It is a stupid way to operate a country. Same with China... If China had not take drastic control over it's population...and I mean that in both senses... there would be disease and starvation there today and for the last 40 years on an unimaginable scale. Bellyaching about Taiwan and Mao is ridiculous compared with what the Chinese were faced with. Now that they can see a glimmer of daylight from what was and could have been they are turning to capitalism. BECAUSE THEY CAN. You guys that like to revise history may be able to fool people that were not alive when much of this was going on may find dupes to impress...me... not so much.
Huggy, Huggy, Huggy...
...not only did FDR and Truman trust them...although Truman learned the truth, but liberals defended them, denied that they were a threat, and after President Reagan ended the Evil Empire's reign, liberals continued to try to pretend that there was not a thing wrong with communism. In fact,
libs tried to make democracy and capitalism evil!
1. After the fall of communism, liberals who resisted every effort to produce that fall, immediately fabricated reconstituted memories of how they were all Cold Warriors. Along with hostility toward America, they expanded their field of battle to include hostility toward freedom itself, a sort of nostalgia for the deposed communism.
a. “Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, some journalists suggested
communism was truly popular among the people it enslaved,” said Noyes. “After the liberation of Eastern Europe, many journalists argued that the move to
capitalism just made things worse,..”
Liberal Media
2. ABC’s Jerry King reported in October 1990, “East Germany is staggering toward unification, and may get there close to dead on arrival, the victim of
an overdose of capitalism.” Liberal Media
3. From Bert Quint, CBS Evening News, April 11, 1990: “Southeastern Poland, a place where the transition from communism to capitalism is making people more miserable every dayA month later, also from Quint:
a. “Communism is being swept away, but so too is the
social safety net it provided….”Notable Quotables,” Media Research Center, December 24, 1990
b. Connie Chung on CBS in 1991: “In formerly communist Bulgaria,
the cost of freedom has been virtual economic disaster.” Best of Notable Quotables 1992 -- Media Research Center
c. Barbara Walters nearly dissolved into tears as she said sadly, “In the old Soviet Union, you never saw faces like these—the poor, the homeless and the desperation of the Russian winter.”
http://www.mmisi.org/ir/40_01/edwards.pdf
Had Ms. Walters never heard of the millions slowly starved and the millions executed?
d. Tamara Jones, writing in the Los Angeles Times, noted, "Ten months after the new Germany emerged, women in the eastern sector are coming to the stunning realization that, in many ways,
democracy has set them back 40 years."
4. The commentators of the Left are very careful to couch bad news so that it reflects in the direction they intend. When NBC’s John Chancellor reported about problems in Russia, this is how he did it: “It’s short of soap, so there are lice in hospitals. It's short of pantyhose, so women's legs go bare. It's short snowsuits, so babies stay home in winter. Sometimes it's short of cigarettes, so millions of people stop smoking involuntarily. It drives everybody crazy.
The problem isn't communism. No one even talked about communism this week. The problem is shortages." NBC News, Aug. 21, 1991
Still sure about liberals and their feelings toward communism?
5. Jimmy Carter began his presidency at Notre Dame with a speech that included “…We are now free of that
inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.”
6. Pols believed that the Communists were just 'good ol' boys'...just like us! In 1978, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance told Time magazine that President Carter and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev
shared “similar dreams and aspirations” about the future of the world. Commentary magazine, Gershman, "The Rise and Fall of the New Foreign Policy Establishment," July, 1980.
7. American policy toward China, was based on the guidance of Communists:
"Over the next years, as the Communist Revolution came to power in China, the IPR was charged with Communist sympathies and even for
the loss of China. Despite the heated rhetoric, however, the only charges actually brought were several perjury indictments against Lattimore...Among IPR staffers identified later as Communists or collaborators with Soviet intelligence agents were Kathleen Barnes, Hilda Austern, Elsie Fairfax-Cholmely, Chi Chao-ting, Guenter Stein, Harriet Levine, Talitha Gerlach, Chen Han-seng (a member of the Sorge spy ring)[9], Michael Greenberg (named as a source in 1945 by defecting Soviet courier Elizabeth Bentley), and T.A. Bisson (Venona's "Arthur")[10], as well as Kate Mitchell and Andrew Roth, both of whom were arrested in the 1945 Amerasia case.[11]
The IPR lost its tax-exempt status as an educational body in 1955, when the Internal Revenue Service alleged that the Institute had engaged in the dissemination of controversial and partisan propaganda, and had attempted to
influence the policies or opinions of the government."Institute of Pacific Relations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
8. “On September 2, 1939, the day after the outbreak of war in Europe, Whittaker Chambers had told much of what he knew about Soviet espionage in the United States to Adolph Berle, Assistant Secretary of State and President’s Roosevelt’s advisor on internal security. Immediately afterwards, Berle drew up a memorandum for the President which listed Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and the other leading for whom Chambers acted as courier. One was a leading presidential aide, Lauchlin Currie
….Roosevelt, however, was not interested. He seems to have dismissed the whole idea of espionage rings within his administration as absurd.” ‘The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archives, the History of the KGB,” by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.p.107
Yeah, American pols trusted and listened to Communists.
