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| Salon: Our dangerous new McCarthyism |
| 2015-02-04 |
| A writer from the leftist Salon says some things about the "New McCarthyism" failing to note that the media isn't saying anything about the war in eastern Ukraine coz no one gives a f*ck about eastern Europe. Mildly amusing for the leaps in facts that lead him to say the loopy things he says in the article. It is time to attempt that hardest of things—to see ourselves for who we are, to see what it is we are doing and what is being done to us. Two things prompt the thought. We have the latest news on Washington’s confrontation with Russia, and we have a newly precipitous decline in the national conversation on this crisis. In my estimation, we reach dangerous new lows in both respects. New lows? Something the left reaches for on a routine basis. It is always difficult for the living to see themselves as suspended in history. Being up against the rock face of events, being the stuff of which events are made, allows no distance, and achieving perspective without any takes an arduous effort. But we have to make an attempt at this field of vision now. Every moment counts as history, but some passages are bigger than others. And this, ours, is very big as of the last 10 days, maybe two weeks. We are now invited to let this time take a place alongside the frenzied interval that preceded the American attack on the Spanish in 1898, the Red Scare of the post-1917 period and the second, very deadly (and deadening) McCarthyist scare of the late-1940s and 1950s. Join me, please, in insisting we are a better people than this. Turns out the "Red Scare" and "McCarthyism" was about real, existential threats to America. Konstantin Sonin, a professor at a much-celebrated research university in Moscow, gave the New York Times an interesting quotation over the weekend. “The country is on a holy mission. It’s at war with the United States,” Sonin said. “So why would you bother about the small battleground, the economy?” Think about this, and do so in two dimensions. There is the question of war, and then the question of “small battlegrounds.” What is this man talking about? What assumptions lie behind this remark? What are the implications? In last week’s column I confessed astonishment at the recent turn of events in Ukraine and the Western alliance’s relations with Russia. Western Europe, teetering at the edge of economic crisis, adds significantly to its vulnerabilities as it acquiesces in Washington’s sanctions regime against the Russian Federation. It is a couple of short steps now from crisis to catastrophe. Kiev bails on peace talks and instantly launches an ambitious offensive in eastern Ukraine. As those eligible to be conscripted defect in some number to Russia, Ukraine remains heavily reliant on neo-Nazi militias—a documented reality no one in Washington or the American media cares to talk about. Instead, Washington announces—just this week; read it here —that it will begin sending troops to train Ukrainian National Guardsmen as of this spring. As a note: Ukrainian commanders did not launch "an ambitious offensive" as rebels and leftists say. They launched a local counterattack which was wrecked by rebels, and now Ukraine is on the cusp of losing the functional equivalent of a rifle division to rebels at Debaltsevo. The very latest arrives as this column gets written. Fresh reports from Moscow suggest—verbatim from one summary will do—“U.S. plans Euromaidan in Belarus to overthrow Lukashenko. Local nationalists licking their chops.” The Maidan is the square in Kiev where the Ukraine crisis started two Novembers ago. Lukashenko is Alexander Grigoryevich, who has presided in Belarus for the past 21 years. Much more reverse McCarthyism at the link, replete with falsified charges |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #3 Let me see. You can lose your job as University president for suggesting that maybe men and women are not psychologically interchangeable. You are forced to resign from company presidency for opposing gay marriage. You are fascist racist for suggesting that Muslims who kill in the name of Allan are Muslims. Don't even think of applying for academic tenure, or public service unless you can establish your leftist bona fides. And we are McCarthyists? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2015-02-04 15:41 |
| #2 What I've never understood was that McCarthy was a Senator but the ones going after the Communists were in the House of Representatives. Was he just the most vocal? or did McCarthyism just have a nice ring? |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2015-02-04 14:55 |
| #1 MacCarthyism: Two death sentences (for handling vital info about the A bomb to the soviets), under half a dozen jail sentences, under two hundred governement employees and about same number of employees working in the armament industry lost their jobs. On the other side the regime the "victims of MaCarthyism" were trying to implement in America was killing or working to death an average of five hundred people a day |
| Posted by: JFM 2015-02-04 07:34 |