5 ms·

It was. People aren't taught about the Venona Papers. I wonder why that is.

• Synaesthesia 5y ago
  That's interesting, and yes there was significant infiltration, by a handful of dedicated underground spies. But the idea that there was widespread communist sympathies or subversion needing some kind of crackdown, there's no evidence for that. Quoting from the article above: >As anyone who is reasonably familiar with the history of the period must know, the premise for most of the McCarthy rehabilitation literature is a sort of blanket historical amnesia. To credit the revisionist argument, you must believe that mid-century liberalism denied the threat of domestic and global communism and took no stand against it. But this was scarcely the case. Not only mainstream liberals, but also most left-liberals and social democrats adopted a staunchly anticommunist stance from the middle 1940s onward. The model here, of course, is Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., whose seminal work The Vital Center identified the dangers of communism and castigated the muddle-headed thinking of those on the left who thought it either possible or advisable to cooperate with communists even while disagreeing with their larger objectives. But Schlesinger was scarcely alone. The social democrat Walter Reuther employed stern and even draconian measures to purge communists from the CIO in the 1940s. And even the perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas supported efforts to ban communists from teaching positions on the grounds that they had surrendered their right to academic freedom through subservience to Moscow.
• iluvcommunism 5y ago
  The same reason “McCarthyism” was injected into our language by the media & education establishment.
  • hedberg10 5y ago
    "Witchhunt? Only we do that."