The Ghost of Joe McCarthy Slithers Again

Echoing the unsubstantiated claims by Joe McCarthy during the 1950s that communists had infiltrated the top ranks of the American government, Republican Rep. Allen West stated earlier this week that he believes that more than 75 members of the House Democrats are members of the Communist Party.

We’ve talked at times about George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, and the amnesia that sets in when we flush events down the memory hole, leaving us at the mercy of only what we know today. Sometimes, though, the past comes back to haunt, like a ghost. It happened recently when we saw Congressman Allen West of Florida on the news.

A Republican and Tea Party favorite, he was asked at a local gathering how many of his fellow members of Congress are “card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists.”
He replied, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

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Flailing After Muslims

By BOB HERBERT

It has often been the case in America that specific religions, races and ethnic groups have been singled out for discrimination, demonization, incarceration and worse. But there have always been people willing to stand up boldly and courageously against such injustice. Their efforts are needed again now.

Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island, appears to harbor a fierce unhappiness with the Muslim community in the United States. As the chairman of the powerful Homeland Security Committee, Congressman King has all the clout he needs to act on his displeasure. On Thursday, he plans to open the first of a series of committee hearings into the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism and the bogus allegation that American Muslims have failed to cooperate with law enforcement efforts to foil terrorist plots.

“There is a real threat to the country from the Muslim community,” he said, “and the only way to get to the bottom of it is to investigate what is happening.”

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Bob Hebert is a New York Times columnist. Tom

The New McCarthyism: Today, Speaking With the Wrong Group Can Get You 15 Years In Prison

The Patriot Act goes even further than the Hollywood blacklists that forced a generation of artists, intellectuals, and activists into unemployment and exiled abroad.

Photo Credit: Mike Licht, Notion

At the beginning of the McCarthy Era, my great uncle Adrian Scott -- an acclaimed Hollywood producer and screenwriter -- was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to account for his political affiliations. Now sixty years later, when most of us want to believe that that kind of suppression is long behind us, the Supreme Court is about to consider how far we've really come. I believe we are retracing our most dangerous steps.

Adrian was one of the so-called "Hollywood Ten," a group of high-profile artists and entertainers who were the first of many called before Congress to explain their association with the Communist Party. He and nine colleagues chose to invoke their rights of freedom of speech and association. He stood up to HUAC, saying, "I do not believe it is proper for this committee to inquire into my personal relationships, my private relationships, my public relationships." For invoking his First Amendment rights, my great uncle spent nine months in jail. His Hollywood career was destroyed, he was forced to write under another name, and eventually he had to leave the United States entirely to find work.

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Obama's first term is looking more and more like Bush's third term. Tom

Why Does Our Government Still Spy On, Arrest and Persecute Dissidents?

By Emily Spence, Consortium News. Posted June 30, 2009.

One needn't return in time to the McCarthy Era to find many individuals who have been investigated and persecuted for holding vilified opinions.

Recently, an American Civil Liberties Union report pointed out, "Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression in the form of public protests should be regarded as ‘low level terrorism’.”

Although DoD officials removed the offensive section at the urging of ACLU members, the DoD stance is still troubling since a longstanding practice to designate peaceful, law-abiding activists as dangerous and treasonable still exists in many government departments and agencies.

Indeed the participants of the first antiwar protest against the Vietnam incursion, put together in the mid-1960's using Gandhi's Salt March as a model for a nonviolent demonstration, faced government operatives filming them face by face from rooftops as they moved en masse down Broadway to the UN Plaza.

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