Barrel Strength

I had the pleasure of wading through Blacklisted by History, the story of Senator McCarthy’s struggles against the American Democratic establishment to reveal the extent of Communist penetration of the US government. The author, Stanton Evans, makes it clear that Joe McCarthy, the Catholic ex-Marine and Republican Senator from Minnesota, was substantially right. The US government had been significantly penetrated by Communists during the Roosevelt period, and the Democractic establishment in the Truman period did its best to stonewall McCarthy and ease the Communists out gently and without a public purge. Some Communists, such as Alger Hiss, stayed protected by the Democratic establishment  long after a more realistic apprecation of the facts would have counselled greater vigilance. A lot of anti-McCarthyism was a class reaction of  the Establishment against attacks by an upstart from a lower social class.

Many issues do not matter in the least except for the fact that someone digs in on them and the issue becomes a generational divider. The US Government during the 1930s and 1940s was significantly penetrated by Communists. It would have been no surprise that, during the heavily pro-Communist 1930s and 40s, many Americans had turned to that doctrine and joined the Party. It also should not have been a surprise that many American Communists stayed on in government after the War and maintained their Communist affiliations, and worked for Communist goals, including especially those of the Soviet Union,  the Mecca to which their secular religion turned.

Following the results of World War Two in Europe, the Western allies had to accede to the division of Europe into Communist and non-Communist zones of occupation. Ultimately the Cold War  was the result of Stalin’s unwillingness to abide by his treaty commitments at Yalta and elsewhwere, and his desire to communize the rest of Europe. No surprise here either.

The growing realization  by most people of good will in the late 1940s that Communism was not our friend led to a slow but eventually massive turn of Western public opinion against the Soviet Union, our wartime ally.

The Truman Presidency followed Franklin Roosevelt’s. Senator McCarthy made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that accused the government that significant numbers of Communists were still employed  in the State Department. It is worth reading to capture the flavour of the times. Thus the struggle between Joe McCarthy and the American Democractic Establishment began. Stanton Evans’ compendious research shows that the Establishment went to great lengths to soft-peddle the issue and to ease the Communists out gently  by the back door. It also went to extraordinary lengths to protect Alger Hiss, a senior and upper class American diplomat, including the staging of a fixed trial, long after a more balanced approach would have seen him tossed out of government.

The subsequent release of the Mitrokhin archive of the KGB after the fall of Communism in 1989 has shown that Communist penetration and subversion of Western society was just as widespread and effective as anything imagined by the paranoid John Birch Society. Hiss was a Soviet spy; the KGB records say so. Communists were in the State Department, in the numbers and at the levels McCarthy said so. The KGB records confirm this.

You have all heard something about Senator Joe McCarthy: how he was a reckless prosecutor of Commmunists, how the reputations of the innocent were besmirched by his wild allegations, how he engaged in what we now know as “McCarthy-ite” tactics. The truth is that , among his many opponents, there were a large contingent of Jewish Communists in Hollywood who continue to blacken his name for revealing that they were indeed Communist agents and symapthizers. George Clooney’s Goodnight and Goodluck (2005) continues to portray McCarthy as a reckless besmircher of reputations.

The transcendent facts of the time were that Communists were enslaving the masses of eastern Europeans,  building nuclear weapons to destroy us if they could, subvering governments, and carrying out a ruthless campaigns of ethnic cleansing and theft on a national scale during the 1940s and 1950s, which they cotinued up to the end – Angola, Namibia, Mozambique, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaya, Greece, Tibet, and all of Europe behind the Iron Curtain. 

Senator McCarthy’s investigations need to be considered against this backdrop. Somehow the political Left in the west finds it convenient to forget that Communism ever existed and was a real threat to our lives and freedoms.