The Time Bomb Is Ticking.

[captain_kook]

Sweeet
 
thanks for that extract by Ellen Schrecker
 
She makes a good case that McCarthy was full of shit and gives the historical context too.
 
More on her:
 
Schrecker has said that she is "a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union who undertook the study of McCarthyism precisely because of my opposition to its depredations against freedom of speech," and that "in this country[,]
 
McCarthyism did more damage to the constitution than the American Communist party ever did."
^[
4
]

 
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Schrecker

[Oz]

Can any one of you name one thing... just one... that Obama has done that is Communistic?
 
 
(No, you can't.)

BTW:  You should look up that a Communist is....or does.

See, communism is where the government owns everything....

[mikefx]

Jim, you are continuing to show your desperation over Romney's inability to present a credible conservative alternative to Obama

Over the top rhetoric won't hurt Obama and it won't help Romney. 

[sweetwater5s9]

Schrecker has also been outspoken with respect to contemporary issues, describing the Academic Bill of Rights movement as "worse than McCarthy", and arguing that the University of Southern Florida's 2003 dismissal of Sami Al-Arian following his federal indictment for supporting terrorism is an example of contemporary McCarthyism.

On March 2, 2006, Al-Arian entered a guilty plea to a charge of conspiracy to help the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a "specially designated terrorist" organization; he was sentenced to 57 months in prison, and ordered deported following his prison term.

Schrecker has been excessively concerned for the reputations of persons connected with the Stalin-supporting Communist Party USA.  In making her case, Schrecker has underplayed the undemocratic nature of the Communist Party USA.

In a reply to an essay that Schrecker and Maurice Isserman wrote in The Nation in 2000, John Earl Haynes quoted the leader of the UDA, the predecessor of the politically progressive ADA, who stated that "an alliance between liberals and Communists [would] betray liberalism's bedrock democratic values." Characterizing himself as neither "left" nor "right" but anti-"tyranny", Haynes cited as evidence of Schrecker's illiberalism her statement that "cold war liberalism did not, in fact, 'get it right.'"

Despite her intolerant attitudes and collectivist prejudices sits on the academic freedom committee of the American Association of University Professors.

This, in a nutshell, is the Orwellian universe we now inhabit, where totalitarians and character assassins are referred to as “liberals” and where defenders of political indoctrination sit on academic freedom committees and call their critics “McCarthyites.”

[Oz]

Who did you plagarize that pile of crap from ?
 
And why?
 
 

[jackbp]

Kook....when you quote a source why don't you try using one that isn't written and edited by a bunch of self serving dolts!!

[captain_kook]

Oz
 
Sweeet posted a quote from Ellen Schrecker demonstrating that the defense of McCarthy was bullshit and that McCarthy was an asshole.
 
I think Sweeeet didn't read it first -  he thought it did the opposite.
 
So now he looked up some shit attacking her.
 
HA HA HA

[mikefx]

The conservatives hate Romney almost as much as they hate Obama

It is funny and also sad to watch the right wing whackos writhe in pointless posts, bombastic bromides and schizophrenic solopsisms syndromes.

[captain_kook]

for jack: the source of the quote from Ellen Schrecker:

^


Schrecker, Ellen (Winter 2000). "Comments on John Earl Haynes' The Cold War Debate Continues". Journal of Cold War Studies



. http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/comment15.htm
. Retrieved 2009-02-27
.

Emphasis in original.





or here:



http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/comment15.htm



full quote [from the end of her article]:



As a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union who undertook the study of McCarthyism precisely because of my opposition to its depredations against freedom of speech, I find such a characterization personally offensive. No doubt, if I were a Russian historian, I would be even more distressed about the repressive nature of that society. But, I'm not and - to be quite frank - it's getting a little tiresome to have to explain yet again that _in this country_ McCarthyism did more damage to the constitution than the American Communist party ever did.

[sweetwater5s9]

"The post-Soviet 1990s will be remembered, among other things, for the intensive left-liberal campaign, led by a single-minded group of academics, to whitewash the Communist Party USA and its membership and thereby salvage what remains of Marxist socialism. The campaign is led by Professor Ellen Schrecker. Her controversial book, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America exemplifies, as did her earlier books, what George Orwell was talking about when he wrote that 'the sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-fascist without being anti-totalitarian.' The strategy of the Schrecker school of whitewashing is to admit that, yes, Josef Stalin was bad, there was-maybe-a certain amount of Soviet espionage but the thousands upon thousands of American communists were really old-fashioned liberals interested in civil rights for Afro-Americans, support for labor unions, higher wages for workers and achieving socialism. As the New Republic put it in the fellow-traveling 1930s, communists were 'liberals in a hurry.' Those kindly CP members, in whose defense Miss Schrecker has rewritten the history of communism, had to swallow crimes against humanity-the Great Terror, the Ukraine genocide, Stalin's anti-Semitic crusade, the seizure of Eastern Europe-why go on? Professor Schrecker knows all this, but for her there is only one enemy, Joe McCarthy and one hero, the party member."

Arnold Beichman


I read it Kook...did you?


Even before the Bolshevik Revolution gave birth to the American Communist party, many of the groups and individuals who were to become its main opponents had been actively fighting other radicals.

The anti-Communist network was not a monolith, but a coalition that gradually attracted groups and individuals. Each element in the network appealed to a different constituency. 

From the start, HUAC was to focus on the alleged Communist influence in the labor movement and New Deal agencies.

By the late 1930s the anti-Communist coalition had expanded and many of its new recruits, among them trade union leaders and Socialists, came from groups that had themselves once been under attack.  The Soviet takeover of the traditionally Catholic countries of Eastern Europe after World War II and the subsequent persecution of the church there intensified Catholic anticommunism, especially within the Polish-American and other Eastern European ethnic groups.

In the late 1930s, a handful of enterprising priests and laypeople began to organize anti-Communist nuclei within a few left-led unions. Though ineffectual at first, these efforts were to provide the organizational structure for later, more successful campaigns to eliminate the party's influence in the labor movement.

Perhaps the most important recruits to the anti-Communist cause during this period were former fellow travelers and ex-Communists. Some had been fairly high-ranking party leaders who were expelled from the party during the sectarian warfare of the 1920s and early 1930s. Others abandoned communism for their own ideological or personal reasons.

By the 1940s, they had become ubiquitous figures at trials, deportation proceedings, and congressional committee hearings. It is hard to conceive of McCarthyism without the former Communists; the support they gave the rest of the network was indispensable.

Chronologically, the last group to join the anti-Communist coalition was the liberals. When the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 transformed American Communists from dedicated antifascists to critics of the U.S. government, the Communist party lost many of its political allies. Most of the non-Communists who had tolerated the party because of its dedication to the antifascist cause turned against it. No longer would these liberals and moderates serve as a buffer for the party against its traditional enemies on the right. Instead, they joined them.

Eager to squelch criticism from both the left and the right of its increasingly interventionist foreign policy, the Roosevelt administration began to treat the Communist party as a threat to the nation's security. It imprisoned the party's leader, Earl Browder, for a passport violation and tried to deport leading foreign-born Communists. Roosevelt expanded Hoover's authority to put the party under surveillance. At the same time, Congress passed several laws clearly directed against the party. The 1939 Hatch Act barred Communists, Nazis, and other totalitarians from government employment. The 1940 Voorhis Act, which stipulated that groups with foreign affiliations register with the government, was designed to force the American Communist party to sever its ties to Moscow. And the 1940 Smith Act, the first peacetime sedition act in American history, authorized the government to crack down on speech as well as action by making it illegal to "teach or advocate" the overthrow of the government or to join any organization that did.

Private organizations also turned against the party during the Nazi-Soviet Pact period. Some labor unions threw party members out of leadership positions and others passed resolutions condemning Nazism, fascism, and communism. These "Communazi" resolutions popularized the concept of totalitarianism, which treated communism and fascism as but variants of the same repressive, authoritarian creed. The purges spread to the academic community where several colleges and universities, most notably the City College of New York, dismissed Communist professors. Even the American Civil Liberties Union turned anti-Communist and expelled a leading party figure from its board of directors.

Washington's imprimatur was crucial; not only did the federal government itself crack down on the party, but in doing so it gave the stamp of approval to the previously more marginal activities of the traditional anti-Communists. In addition, the anti-Communist campaign of the Nazi-Soviet Pact period perfected many of the techniques and developed many of the institutional structures that would become crucial during the McCarthy years.

Ellen Schrecker

[captain_kook]

Sweeet
 
still hasn't read it.
 
 

[jackbp]

Perhaps a look at the card carrying bit about the ACLU might give you a hint at her particular political leanings.......just saying.....