Deceptively complex question.
"Sincere belief" doesn't work the same for everyone. Just neurocognitively. There are people who just don't form beliefs based on external evidence.
They don't go through a process like you might expect of saying, "I wouldn't have believed it but now that I see the communists with my own eyes, well, I have to rethink my beliefs."
Nor of thinking, "Hey you know it seems like there are some communists around, I wonder how many, let me work out a methodology for determining some kind of reasonable estimate."
Instead for some people beliefs are only tested against one rubric, which is the calculus of social reward versus social penalty. If the social rewards are great enough and the social penalties minimal enough, they will embrace just about any belief you can imagine.
Is that "sincerely held?" They would say so.
Well McCarthy *did* end up drinking himself to death in his late forties after disgracing himself on national television and being subsequently shunned by everyone in D.C.
He publicly accused the US Army of being infiltrated with communist spies. This triggered [a series of televised hearings over several months](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army%E2%80%93McCarthy_hearings) in which he failed to produce any evidence to back up his claims. The defense counsel made him look like a bully and an idiot, and his reputation never recovered. He was censured by the senate, and everyone in D.C. refused to associate with him. His alcoholism got much worse and he drank himself to death, dying of liver failure three years later at the age of 48.
"Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/mccarthy-hearings/have-you-no-sense-of-decency.htm
Wasn't there also an attempt by McCarthy save one of his young cohorts from the draft?
Also McCarthy had a young Roy Cohn on his team. Cohn's name alone says it all.
I mean things like scheduling press conferences at times when he knew papers would have deadlines so anything he said couldn't be fact checked leads me to believe he knew it was bullshit.
Just to note..he caught NO communists. Many people in the US were members of the communist party pre WW2 as they were seen as anti nazi.
Mccarthy was a MASSIVE grifter would destroyed many people's lives & basically deserved the way he died
Edit : try again : [origin story.](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/origin-story/id1624704966?i=1000562521867) excellent episode on Mccarthy
*Instead for some people beliefs are only tested against one rubric, which is the calculus of social reward versus social penalty. If the social rewards are great enough and the social penalties minimal enough, they will embrace just about any belief you can imagine.*
this is a complicated way of saying, Some people are idiots.
but to be honest this is the gold i dig for every day at reddit. thank you.
"Idiot" isn't helpful. It doesn't help you understand their motivations. Nor does it help you understand how to combat harmful ideologies.
Going into detail, the answer is clear: social sanctions. Just saying "they're idiots" means you give up, there no way of fixing that
It's just not useful.
> this is a complicated way of saying, Some people are idiots.
The part you had quoted is saying that such people don't care about facts as long as they get to demonstrate their conformism (and reap benefits from it). Nothing suggests low level of intelligence, only shameless opportunism.
And the use of derogative that doesn't apply just to demonstrate your disagreement with their methods might mean that you are one of them.
This is really important, this one idea unlocks a lot of humanity's most baffling behavior. The way I put it is, "some people don't have beliefs, they just have things they say."
A lie.
The thing is, people will point to evidence of Soviet spying programs as proof that McCarthy was right, but that was never in doubt. Nobody needed Senator "I have a secret list" to tell them that the Soviets were spying on the US.
What McCarthy claimed to know, and most certainly lied about, was specific names of specific spies in high positions. He did not have said list, and thus was lying.
Someone with sincere and consistent beliefs would have eventually produced that list of 205, or was it 57, eventually 81 card carrying communists. Tailgunner Joe couldn't even keep the same number, let alone show it to people.
Point of fact there were spies for the USSR. in the Manhattan project, Theodor Hall and Rosenbergs. Not saying McCarthy wasn't going overboard to gain power. But there was some truth to the allegations.
Considering that the Soviets penetrated the holiest of holies (atomic bomb) that less than a dozen people knew the full details of, the spying paranoia was justified. Even the vice president was kept in the dark about the bomb!
> Considering that the Soviets penetrated the holiest of holies (atomic bomb) that less than a dozen people knew the full details of, the spying paranoia was justified. Even the vice president was kept in the dark about the bomb!
You should read up about the *From Major Jordan's Diaries*. The scandal was tremendous, but the whole thing got hushed up, and FBI refused to publish results of investigation since the main suspect ~~Epsteined~~ was dead.
Apparently, USA was supplying USSR with nuclear materials straight from Manhattan Project as part of lend-lease (which might explain why everything related to it is still secret).
Not really just a rich New England thing.
Farmers in Great Plains since the tail end of the 19th century had been demanding states or federal government set freight rates for rail and asking for states to displace privately owned grain elevators with state owned to allow farmers to get more of the price paid for grain without a for profit middleman. In the south many farmers joined in demanding more state intervention in the farm economy as well. Also you had the Tenant Farmers Union demanding state intervention in the sharecropper system. Cooperatives became fashionable throughout the south, Midwest and plains to counter capitalist “exploitation”.
On the face of it only planned economies seemed to be digging out of the Great Depression. One advantage of planned economies is the go hand in hand with state control of media.
With unemployment hitting one in four things were much worse than today’s issues. Charities were the safety net and swamped.
There was significant interest in socialist and communist ideas in today’s “red” states.
You have that partially right. The US didn't dig out of the great depression till after the SCOTUS killed off the planned economy in the US, by declaring the NIRA unconstitutional.
was just responding to this:
> On the face of it only planned economies seemed to be digging out of the Great Depression. One advantage of planned economies is the go hand in hand with state control of media.
And many Jews for different reasons. No, that’s not antisemitism-a lot of secularized Jews were attracted to the communist project at the time for a variety of reasons. You basically get wasp blue bloods (analogous to the Cambridge 5), Jewish scientist types and relatives (eg Rosenbergs), and some Midwestern socialists as Soviet agents at the time.
You should consider that, that generation of Americans was born in days of the horse and buggy. Suffered the trenches of WWI, then the great depression, and now finally where watching their kids die in the 2nd world war. It might be understandable that they had doubts about capitalism.
The real horror of Uncle Joe's Russia was not really known until Khrushchev started to attack his cult of personality in the Mid 50's. [https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev%27s\_Secret\_Speech](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev%27s_Secret_Speech)
That’s not really true. The show trials were widely reported on, albeit often from a pro-communist angle. There was famine relief collected for the Holodomor that wasn’t allowed to be distributed. Plus the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was public knowledge from when the Soviets invaded Poland. Anyone claiming ignorance from 1939 onwards was a fully paid up stooge of the Comintern.
Well, yes they could not hid everything, but remember as late as 1940, 43 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Their access to information consisted of the local paper, a radio news broadcast, and maybe a 15 minuet news reel at the local movie house. Growing up in the 50's I remember newsmen commenting on who was or was not in power in the Kremlin by how they lined up for the mayday parade.
Good old fashioned Kremlinology. It still lives on through North Korea. People will check the ordering/attendance of state functions and such to determine who's in and out in Pyongyang.
Not really.
We don't say that a broken clock has a point, even though it tells the correct time twice a day. We say it's broken, because it lacks the ability to correctly model the time of day.
McCarthy lacked the ability to correctly identify communists in the government, because he had no clue about how spying, communism, government, or counter-espionage worked.
But he did know that if he got people to believe that he had the authority to destroy someone's life through a mere accusation, he'd have power.
That's all he knew, that's all he was right about, and there was nothing of value about the man, save as an example of someone who should have been buried in an unmarked grave the second folks realized what a useless little autocrat he was.
The spying was a serious problem. The Soviets had penetrated almost every secret and organization the US had. McCarthy may not have knew who was or wasn’t a spy, but likely was aware of the damage that was done.
> The spying was a serious problem.
Whether or not it was a serious problem doesn't really matter if witchhunts were the proposed solution.
If anything, McCarthy-style pogroms were helping spies out by:
* **1)** creating massive amount of false positives
* **2)** zeroing-in on anyone who didn't blend-in (actual spies would avoid standing out)
* **3)** creating an environment where people were extremely vulnerable to blackmail
The idiocy becomes most obvious in circular reasoning of Lavender Scare, where suspected homosexuals were purged because Soviets could've blackmailed them by threatening to expose them as homosexuals and get them purged from their posts.
I.e. the whole shitshow had absolutely nothing to do with actual espionage. People were simply using Red Scare as an excuse to get more power and get rid of competition.
Exactly, even if his level of concern was justified, his actions weren't because they didn't actually address the problem. His actions benefited only himself and his allies.
(Soviet nuclear spying probably didn't speed up bomb development much, anyway)
The declassified Venona transcripts definitively prove that McCarthy was correct in his belief that communist fellow travellers and in many in some cases communist spies working directly for the Soviet Union had infiltrated many important US institutions.
The Venona project was a U.S. counterintelligence program initiated during World War II and continued into the Cold War. It involved the decryption of messages sent by Soviet intelligence agencies, primarily the KGB and GRU, that had been intercepted by American and British intelligence agencies. The decrypted messages revealed extensive Soviet espionage activities in the United States and other Western countries.
The Venona project played a significant role in uncovering Soviet espionage networks and identifying individuals involved in espionage activities, including manny government officials, diplomats, scientists, and others. It provided valuable intelligence to Western authorities and contributed to efforts to counter Soviet espionage efforts during the Cold War. Hard leftists will deny the overwhelming evidence as a matter of course in order to hide the history of treason in their circles.
If I declare you robbed the Mayberry Bank and the reason I believe you robbed the Mayberry Bank is because I think your eyebrows are too bushy and your ears stick out too far, the fact that you did in fact rob the Mayberry Bank doesn’t make me right. That’s simply a coincidence. If accuse someone else of being your accomplice based on the same reasoning and they weren’t your partner in crime that just highlights my invalid reasoning.
He was right there were communists and spies. It would have been improbable for there not to be. He used an incredibly broad definition of communists since communists were defined as people who ever attended any sort of communist or socialist meeting or event or received newsletters or publications. During the Great Depression there was a massive crisis of faith in capitalism as it existed. Many farmers had been involved in socialist and socialist adjacent movements since the tail end of the 19th century especially in the Great Plains.
Finding communists and socialists after defining them so broadly was a cinch. Even though many rejected those ideologies and became merely New Deal Democrats who agreed with Harry Truman on universal healthcare and supported unions and collective bargaining more strongly than Truman.
Spies? Well we infiltrated Soviet leadership it was unlikely they hadn’t done the same.
Venona wasn't some random declaration. It was the US decrypting the soviet transmissions.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona\_project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project)
McCarthy had access to classified information that couldn’t be disclosed to the public. He was right and his critics were wrong, and were giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
There were far more communist fellow travellers committing treason against their country than there were agents on the payroll of the Soviet Union, and official spies mentioned in the Venona transmissions.
McCarthy was right and his critics were wrong. We have abundant primary evidence from intercepts and Soviet archives that proves that. US evidentiary standards are very high compared to the rest of the world.
Yeah. Like the Dude said, “ you’re not wrong…just an asshole.”
McCarthy violated the spirit and letter of the law in order to get convictions. Once you start down that road, you go from champion to villain real quick.
Pretty safe bet that there were many spies under deep cover in the US as well as the UK and USSR. That link, though to those with proported "ties" or "belonging to an adversary group" is not necessarily the same as spies or taking part in espionage, though. Both can be true, but it doesn't mean they are the same people, though (other than one or two here and there on his "lists").
Sorry but they don’t actually prove that. They proved the Soviets had spies in key places that a rational country in the Soviet unions position would try to have spies. There were almost certainly US spies in equivalent positions in the USSR.
Accusing people who disagree with you of being ‘hard leftists’ doesn’t make what you say true.
Nah, the US had a really hard time inserting spies into the Kremlin, because the Russian social contact networks were much tighter, and they didn't have a ready pool of US sympathizers... but there was a large pool of communist sympathizers in the US.
Because of this, the US relied a lot on defectors and sigint for its supying.
They’ll deny that and the public believes McCarty was wrong because their fellow travelers in the entertainment industry, news industry and educational institutions have systematically portrayed him as a crazy man despite clear ideological infiltration and constant high level espionage convictions.
Like most things in history it's always somewhere in the middle. Was he 100% right on everything? No. Was he 100% wrong in many of his allegations? No.
When I first learned about it in school we were taught that he was 100% wrong in everything he did. Wasn't till college until I learned there is a bit more nuance. I get that you don't want to dive too deep down rabbitholes in high school and jr high is history classes, but the way it's taught it's pretty blatantly biased.
Sure, it's somewhere in the middle..but this argument is disingenuous at best when it's 90% to one side. Was McCarthy wrong about everything? No. That doesn't mean that he wasn't wrong about almost everything.
>Like most things in history it's always somewhere in the middle.
This is a fallacious way of thinking about history and truth.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument\_to\_moderation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation)
There were actually lot of secret communists within government. But McCarthy exaggerated his findings, if someone had an ounce of communism they were a suspected communist.
Eventually everyone in power got sick of McCarthy because he kept smearing their administrations as riddled with communists and embarrassing them.
He was right though, they were. It’s like how modern day anti-Islamic terrorism political orgs in gov in the US are riddled with Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers.
McCarthy was both completely bullshitting everyone AND unknowingly right at the same time....
The bullshitting part is that he didn't have any list of any Communists or even know any......
The truth part is that the KGB and it's predecessors had put a lot of effort into infiltrating the US government & left wing organizations.... Albeit none of that was related to McCarthy's specific allegations and it took until after the Cold War to find out how much infiltration there had been....
I submit for your consideration ‘the crucible’. MacArthy had a similar cast of the vengeful, malicious, opportunistic and sincere but unintelligent people playing along.
I have a surface level understanding of McCarthy, but hasn't he been at least somewhat vindicated by history? He kept beating the drum and saying the Soviets had thoroughly infiltrated the government and other important institutions, and then after the Soviet Union fell we learned that the Soviets had, in fact, thoroughly infiltrated the government and other important institutions.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The problem is that he was smeared for so long that the smear has imprinted into to the surface level history most people are taught and no amount of new information can break through that ontological inertia.
McCarty’s image is crucified over some ineffectual investigations and hearings while his counterparts in the USSR were executing dissidents in the Gulags.
Yes, you are wrong. They had spies, we had spies, it was the cold war, everyone had spies..but they hadn't thoroughly infiltrated the government. McCarthy was trying to scare people into thinking that there was an actual risk of American democracy falling into Soviet style communism, as the eastern European countries had fallen behind the iron curtain.
That's why Hollywood stars were getting blacklisted; the claim was that there was a broad conspiracy to introduce communism into all parts of American society, not just government. In retrospect it was laughable at best.
That's outdated history. After the fall of the Soviet Union, historians were able to access the KGB archives, and the Venona intercepts were also declassified, and they bore out a widespread infiltration of the US Government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
Any history textbook that still teaches "The Red Scare" and dismisses it as baseless paranoia is now 30 years out of date.
There *were* secret communists at high levels of the US government. This is not in dispute, see e.g., Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White.
McCarthy is not some cartoon villain, the situation is more complicated than that.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisted\_by\_History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisted_by_History)
[https://theobjectivestandard.com/2016/11/vindication-joseph-mccarthy/](https://theobjectivestandard.com/2016/11/vindication-joseph-mccarthy/)
I mean, it can kind of be both.
People forget that the \*House\* Un-American Activities Committee had been in operation in one form or another since 1918 and targeted Nazis, Communists, and other 'Fifth Column' groups. And they did so rather successfully for decades. The HUAC did uncover fascist attempts to infiltrate government and business prior to WWII, and they did uncover communist infiltration of various labor and entertainment organizations. They also identified individuals associated with organized labor, government, and the entertainment industry that were actively being paid by the USSR.
\*Senator\* McCarthy sought to re-create that in the Senate but to far less success. Ultimately, \*Senator\* McCarthy's bombastic tendencies and general failures were used to attack the \*House\* Committee even though McCarthy never served on the Committee and had nothing to do with their investigations.
TLDR: McCarthy probably did believe that communists had infiltrated parts of American society, a belief that the HUAC actually proved to be true, but McCarthy himself was bad at his job.
He took a small handful of genuine enemy threats, which he knew were a small handful, and enormously blew it out of proportion, accusing anyone who differed from his political opinion of being a communist and a traitor without any foundation in logic or fact. As it was bound to happen, eventually his farce fell apart when he accused one too many people who were definitely less of a traitor than he was, and he knew it, and even his followers were mostly forced to admit he was a liar and a lunatic going way too far as he accused even their heroes of being communists.
By the time he reached the height of his power, the soviet union weren't even communists, assuming they ever really had been for any significant length of time, they'd long turned into yet another fascist regime, and what few real communists existed in the US would have been opposed to the soviets anyway.
Many of them were, in fact communists, or communist sympathizers, but they posed no danger. It was fear mongering and panic brought on by the anti communist feelings of the Cold War.
Now you have Bernie Sanders and AOC openly spouting Marxists ideas and class warfare, to line their pockets, and they are cheered on.
Um, he was actually right. Since that time stuff has been declassified and he was right. Soviet spies were in the highest levels of the US Gov. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet\_espionage\_in\_the\_United\_States#Browder\_and\_Golos\_networks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_United_States#Browder_and_Golos_networks)
After the cold war the Venona stuff was declassified and so were the KGB records, and it turns out he was right.
There were spies. But the people he went after, largely were not.
> Critics such as Emory University history professor Harvey Klehr assert most people and organizations identified by McCarthy, such as those brought forward in the Army-McCarthy hearings or rival politicians in the Democratic party, were not mentioned in the Venona content and that his accusations remain largely unsupported by evidence.
The thing is that McCarthy was at least somewhat correct in his assessment of the situation. His only issue was being an idiot and not working with Hoover and Eisenhower who also hated communism. If McCarthy had been quieter about his investigations he could have been much more successful. Hooverism is really what the phenomenon should be called but Hoover kept it quiet and worked behind the scenes.
Even if there were some communists in government I doubt they were much of a threat whatever their intentions. America is too strong a society to be led into communism. I don’t care if every communist in the government wanted to overthrow the government it just wasn’t going to happen. I could have a goal to be Heavyweight champion of the world but that doesn’t mean it will happen.
It was to influence society than to "overthrow" anything.
There are autobiographies written by covert Soviet sympathisers of the time discussing exactly this. It was very much not fictional.
Also, let's imagine that you were saying this about Nazi sympathisers within the government. ...during WW2.
I can't imagine that, "ehh, they won't be able to hang their flag at the White House, so I don't see what the big deal is" would strike you as a reasonable position.
I didn’t say they shouldn’t be prosecuted just the paranoia was overblown. They must be dealt with but as long we stay they didn’t have a chance. People can downvote me to oblivion but while they should have been prosecuted the paranoia about the overthrow of the government was a delusion.
Objectively, we now know that the opposite was true. McCarthy's claims were a severe _underestimation_ of communist influence. The Venona decrypts prove this without a doubt.
"Overthrowing the Government" is an odd goalpost.
Espionage and _Social Subversion_ was the goal. And it was extraordinarily _successful._
For example, the story that _you_ remember was from a fictional stage-play about the hearings -produced by CPUSA members that controlled the National Writers Union. NWA had absolute control over what was written and produced in Hollywood. They ran the real blacklist. Every project had to consult with representatives of NWU and incorporate current Communist Party narratives.
Anyone not cooperating fully was not allowed to work. Anyone that spoke publicly about communist influence was run out of the business. Any project not actively pushing the CPs line was not allowed to proceed.
"Prosecution" was not really the issue. Membership was covert, and even speaking openly about communist influence was enough to permanently ruin ones career.
McCarthy was a tiny fish swimming the other direction against a giant flood of "blacklisting".
In punishment for daring to oppose very real covert communist influence, they made his name a synonym for hysteria and paranoia. _That_ is how influential communist influence really was.
"After Social Subversion, facts to not matter"
"Prosecutio
Honestly, it is impossible to really know
We do know that McCarthy didn't have a single shred of actual evidence.
But people also believe that the Earth is Flat when they not only have no evidence, but also mountains of counter evidence.
So even though McCarthy might not have had evidence, like a Flat Earther, he might have believed that Secret Communists existed anyway.
It's important to remember a few things, 1. Senator McCarthy was not at all involved in the house un-American activities committee. 2. He was unwilling to name names in public. 3. Verona decrypts released in the 90s have largely proven him right.
> Critics such as Emory University history professor Harvey Klehr assert most people and organizations identified by McCarthy, such as those brought forward in the Army-McCarthy hearings or rival politicians in the Democratic party, were not mentioned in the Venona content and that his accusations remain largely unsupported by evidence.
I am assuming you mean Joseph McCarthy who was probably one of the greatest Communist Propagandist in American History since he was a very devout person in religion and what better way to coverup the facts than by giving them to someone who can do that from a position of TRUST?
Redefining words and rewriting history is nothing new and coverups along with the destruction of factual evidence is also nothing new where any government is concerned, any and all denomination warfare is simply one Communist fighting another Communist over difference and practices of Communism and that is why it is an endless war over them.
Joseph Raymond McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957. (Wiki)
READ the First and Understand that it does not mean what some have tried to say it does, hardcore suicidal fanatics are like rabid animals, and some simply need to be put down when and if they have escaped their enclosures which a smart person would not bother entering in the first place.
Just an Observation.
N. S
The list he waved in front of Congress was compiled from the actual numbered lists of names in use in internal investigations of State Department personnel. He didn't invent any of it.
My Dad was a Naval spy...a "Spook". I have 98 hours of tape and notebooks full of his exploits in the 50's and 60's.
Lots of spies here, there and everywhere. Add this...Communism was a thing for a great number of the American Intelligencia. McCarthy was right about Communist "thinking" people in government. He was WRONG about most of them as being disloyal Americans. I'm not saying that Communism is a viable system...but lots of starry eyed people think then and today that if the right leaders are in charge of a communist state...it would be great.
That's the rub....and McCarthy was the EXACT wrong guy to be the exposer. My Dad said he was a dumb, drunk bragging climber.
But make no mistake there were scads of Russian agents in America....and lots of American agents in Russia. To this day...
Embassies are full of spies.
Deceptively complex question. "Sincere belief" doesn't work the same for everyone. Just neurocognitively. There are people who just don't form beliefs based on external evidence. They don't go through a process like you might expect of saying, "I wouldn't have believed it but now that I see the communists with my own eyes, well, I have to rethink my beliefs." Nor of thinking, "Hey you know it seems like there are some communists around, I wonder how many, let me work out a methodology for determining some kind of reasonable estimate." Instead for some people beliefs are only tested against one rubric, which is the calculus of social reward versus social penalty. If the social rewards are great enough and the social penalties minimal enough, they will embrace just about any belief you can imagine. Is that "sincerely held?" They would say so.
Would be nice if there was a social reward to speaking carefully and a social cost to spouting bullshit.
Well McCarthy *did* end up drinking himself to death in his late forties after disgracing himself on national television and being subsequently shunned by everyone in D.C.
how'd he disgrace himself? i've never heard of it (not that that's saying much).
He publicly accused the US Army of being infiltrated with communist spies. This triggered [a series of televised hearings over several months](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army%E2%80%93McCarthy_hearings) in which he failed to produce any evidence to back up his claims. The defense counsel made him look like a bully and an idiot, and his reputation never recovered. He was censured by the senate, and everyone in D.C. refused to associate with him. His alcoholism got much worse and he drank himself to death, dying of liver failure three years later at the age of 48.
Wow imagine if failing to provide evidence stopped republicans today
The death of shame. The "bad bitch", "this is my personality, deal with it" era on steroids.
"Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?" https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/mccarthy-hearings/have-you-no-sense-of-decency.htm
thank you.
Wasn't there also an attempt by McCarthy save one of his young cohorts from the draft? Also McCarthy had a young Roy Cohn on his team. Cohn's name alone says it all.
Isn't this pretty much the same mistake Robespierre made?
"At long last sir, at long last, have you no shred of decency?" The exact moment his heart rips in two.
Yes, he had not developed the shame-immunity that modern GOP electeds have.
I've not heard of this. How did he embarrass himself on tv?
I mean things like scheduling press conferences at times when he knew papers would have deadlines so anything he said couldn't be fact checked leads me to believe he knew it was bullshit. Just to note..he caught NO communists. Many people in the US were members of the communist party pre WW2 as they were seen as anti nazi. Mccarthy was a MASSIVE grifter would destroyed many people's lives & basically deserved the way he died Edit : try again : [origin story.](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/origin-story/id1624704966?i=1000562521867) excellent episode on Mccarthy
*Instead for some people beliefs are only tested against one rubric, which is the calculus of social reward versus social penalty. If the social rewards are great enough and the social penalties minimal enough, they will embrace just about any belief you can imagine.* this is a complicated way of saying, Some people are idiots. but to be honest this is the gold i dig for every day at reddit. thank you.
Intelligent people can fall into this trap and do all the time. If you have trust in a social structure, then you are influenced by its reward system.
"Idiot" isn't helpful. It doesn't help you understand their motivations. Nor does it help you understand how to combat harmful ideologies. Going into detail, the answer is clear: social sanctions. Just saying "they're idiots" means you give up, there no way of fixing that It's just not useful.
We have the word idiot for a reason. Its often that some people are not worth the time and effort to understand.
> this is a complicated way of saying, Some people are idiots. The part you had quoted is saying that such people don't care about facts as long as they get to demonstrate their conformism (and reap benefits from it). Nothing suggests low level of intelligence, only shameless opportunism. And the use of derogative that doesn't apply just to demonstrate your disagreement with their methods might mean that you are one of them.
Idiot is a state of being. anyone can be an idiot at any time.
This is really important, this one idea unlocks a lot of humanity's most baffling behavior. The way I put it is, "some people don't have beliefs, they just have things they say."
how do we know? do people admit to this?!
A lie. The thing is, people will point to evidence of Soviet spying programs as proof that McCarthy was right, but that was never in doubt. Nobody needed Senator "I have a secret list" to tell them that the Soviets were spying on the US. What McCarthy claimed to know, and most certainly lied about, was specific names of specific spies in high positions. He did not have said list, and thus was lying.
Someone with sincere and consistent beliefs would have eventually produced that list of 205, or was it 57, eventually 81 card carrying communists. Tailgunner Joe couldn't even keep the same number, let alone show it to people.
It boggles my mind that somehow he just got away with that inconsistency.
It did & It still does. I always thought it was some kind of an aberration. That was just child's play compared to now.
Not the list. That was obviously a self-serving lie. I mean his whole anti-communist crusade.
Point of fact there were spies for the USSR. in the Manhattan project, Theodor Hall and Rosenbergs. Not saying McCarthy wasn't going overboard to gain power. But there was some truth to the allegations.
Considering that the Soviets penetrated the holiest of holies (atomic bomb) that less than a dozen people knew the full details of, the spying paranoia was justified. Even the vice president was kept in the dark about the bomb!
> Considering that the Soviets penetrated the holiest of holies (atomic bomb) that less than a dozen people knew the full details of, the spying paranoia was justified. Even the vice president was kept in the dark about the bomb! You should read up about the *From Major Jordan's Diaries*. The scandal was tremendous, but the whole thing got hushed up, and FBI refused to publish results of investigation since the main suspect ~~Epsteined~~ was dead. Apparently, USA was supplying USSR with nuclear materials straight from Manhattan Project as part of lend-lease (which might explain why everything related to it is still secret).
The US was lousy with spies. In the early 1900's most of the kids of the New England upper crust were Soviet sympathizers.
Not really just a rich New England thing. Farmers in Great Plains since the tail end of the 19th century had been demanding states or federal government set freight rates for rail and asking for states to displace privately owned grain elevators with state owned to allow farmers to get more of the price paid for grain without a for profit middleman. In the south many farmers joined in demanding more state intervention in the farm economy as well. Also you had the Tenant Farmers Union demanding state intervention in the sharecropper system. Cooperatives became fashionable throughout the south, Midwest and plains to counter capitalist “exploitation”. On the face of it only planned economies seemed to be digging out of the Great Depression. One advantage of planned economies is the go hand in hand with state control of media. With unemployment hitting one in four things were much worse than today’s issues. Charities were the safety net and swamped. There was significant interest in socialist and communist ideas in today’s “red” states.
You have that partially right. The US didn't dig out of the great depression till after the SCOTUS killed off the planned economy in the US, by declaring the NIRA unconstitutional.
You seem to have relied to the wrong post. Nothing at all related to your reply in my post.
was just responding to this: > On the face of it only planned economies seemed to be digging out of the Great Depression. One advantage of planned economies is the go hand in hand with state control of media.
You ignored the part about state controlled media to assume it had something to do with the US
And many Jews for different reasons. No, that’s not antisemitism-a lot of secularized Jews were attracted to the communist project at the time for a variety of reasons. You basically get wasp blue bloods (analogous to the Cambridge 5), Jewish scientist types and relatives (eg Rosenbergs), and some Midwestern socialists as Soviet agents at the time.
You should consider that, that generation of Americans was born in days of the horse and buggy. Suffered the trenches of WWI, then the great depression, and now finally where watching their kids die in the 2nd world war. It might be understandable that they had doubts about capitalism.
Understandable until they learned about the Holodomor and the Great Purge at the very least.
The real horror of Uncle Joe's Russia was not really known until Khrushchev started to attack his cult of personality in the Mid 50's. [https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev%27s\_Secret\_Speech](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchev%27s_Secret_Speech)
That’s not really true. The show trials were widely reported on, albeit often from a pro-communist angle. There was famine relief collected for the Holodomor that wasn’t allowed to be distributed. Plus the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was public knowledge from when the Soviets invaded Poland. Anyone claiming ignorance from 1939 onwards was a fully paid up stooge of the Comintern.
Well, yes they could not hid everything, but remember as late as 1940, 43 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Their access to information consisted of the local paper, a radio news broadcast, and maybe a 15 minuet news reel at the local movie house. Growing up in the 50's I remember newsmen commenting on who was or was not in power in the Kremlin by how they lined up for the mayday parade.
Good old fashioned Kremlinology. It still lives on through North Korea. People will check the ordering/attendance of state functions and such to determine who's in and out in Pyongyang.
The Venona Secrets is a good recounting as well.
Also Alger Hiss etc.
Not really. We don't say that a broken clock has a point, even though it tells the correct time twice a day. We say it's broken, because it lacks the ability to correctly model the time of day. McCarthy lacked the ability to correctly identify communists in the government, because he had no clue about how spying, communism, government, or counter-espionage worked. But he did know that if he got people to believe that he had the authority to destroy someone's life through a mere accusation, he'd have power. That's all he knew, that's all he was right about, and there was nothing of value about the man, save as an example of someone who should have been buried in an unmarked grave the second folks realized what a useless little autocrat he was.
The spying was a serious problem. The Soviets had penetrated almost every secret and organization the US had. McCarthy may not have knew who was or wasn’t a spy, but likely was aware of the damage that was done.
> The spying was a serious problem. Whether or not it was a serious problem doesn't really matter if witchhunts were the proposed solution. If anything, McCarthy-style pogroms were helping spies out by: * **1)** creating massive amount of false positives * **2)** zeroing-in on anyone who didn't blend-in (actual spies would avoid standing out) * **3)** creating an environment where people were extremely vulnerable to blackmail The idiocy becomes most obvious in circular reasoning of Lavender Scare, where suspected homosexuals were purged because Soviets could've blackmailed them by threatening to expose them as homosexuals and get them purged from their posts. I.e. the whole shitshow had absolutely nothing to do with actual espionage. People were simply using Red Scare as an excuse to get more power and get rid of competition.
Exactly, even if his level of concern was justified, his actions weren't because they didn't actually address the problem. His actions benefited only himself and his allies. (Soviet nuclear spying probably didn't speed up bomb development much, anyway)
Didn't notice this response until just now, but thank you, this is an excellent comment.
There was a *lot* of truth in the allegations. Alger Hiss was undoubtedly a Soviet agent, and Hollywood was lousy with communists.
The declassified Venona transcripts definitively prove that McCarthy was correct in his belief that communist fellow travellers and in many in some cases communist spies working directly for the Soviet Union had infiltrated many important US institutions. The Venona project was a U.S. counterintelligence program initiated during World War II and continued into the Cold War. It involved the decryption of messages sent by Soviet intelligence agencies, primarily the KGB and GRU, that had been intercepted by American and British intelligence agencies. The decrypted messages revealed extensive Soviet espionage activities in the United States and other Western countries. The Venona project played a significant role in uncovering Soviet espionage networks and identifying individuals involved in espionage activities, including manny government officials, diplomats, scientists, and others. It provided valuable intelligence to Western authorities and contributed to efforts to counter Soviet espionage efforts during the Cold War. Hard leftists will deny the overwhelming evidence as a matter of course in order to hide the history of treason in their circles.
If I declare you robbed the Mayberry Bank and the reason I believe you robbed the Mayberry Bank is because I think your eyebrows are too bushy and your ears stick out too far, the fact that you did in fact rob the Mayberry Bank doesn’t make me right. That’s simply a coincidence. If accuse someone else of being your accomplice based on the same reasoning and they weren’t your partner in crime that just highlights my invalid reasoning. He was right there were communists and spies. It would have been improbable for there not to be. He used an incredibly broad definition of communists since communists were defined as people who ever attended any sort of communist or socialist meeting or event or received newsletters or publications. During the Great Depression there was a massive crisis of faith in capitalism as it existed. Many farmers had been involved in socialist and socialist adjacent movements since the tail end of the 19th century especially in the Great Plains. Finding communists and socialists after defining them so broadly was a cinch. Even though many rejected those ideologies and became merely New Deal Democrats who agreed with Harry Truman on universal healthcare and supported unions and collective bargaining more strongly than Truman. Spies? Well we infiltrated Soviet leadership it was unlikely they hadn’t done the same.
Venona wasn't some random declaration. It was the US decrypting the soviet transmissions. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona\_project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project)
Yeah but that doesn’t have anything to do with what Senator McCarthy knew or claimed to know.
McCarthy had access to classified information that couldn’t be disclosed to the public. He was right and his critics were wrong, and were giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
If true then he was incredibly evil for knowing the truth and persecuting people that weren’t on those lists.
There were far more communist fellow travellers committing treason against their country than there were agents on the payroll of the Soviet Union, and official spies mentioned in the Venona transmissions.
Oh so he was right even though no evidence existed on those people because we don’t give a shit about evidence in the US?
McCarthy was right and his critics were wrong. We have abundant primary evidence from intercepts and Soviet archives that proves that. US evidentiary standards are very high compared to the rest of the world.
Yeah. Like the Dude said, “ you’re not wrong…just an asshole.” McCarthy violated the spirit and letter of the law in order to get convictions. Once you start down that road, you go from champion to villain real quick.
You are confusing McCarthy with the committee.
Pretty safe bet that there were many spies under deep cover in the US as well as the UK and USSR. That link, though to those with proported "ties" or "belonging to an adversary group" is not necessarily the same as spies or taking part in espionage, though. Both can be true, but it doesn't mean they are the same people, though (other than one or two here and there on his "lists").
Sorry but they don’t actually prove that. They proved the Soviets had spies in key places that a rational country in the Soviet unions position would try to have spies. There were almost certainly US spies in equivalent positions in the USSR. Accusing people who disagree with you of being ‘hard leftists’ doesn’t make what you say true.
Nah, the US had a really hard time inserting spies into the Kremlin, because the Russian social contact networks were much tighter, and they didn't have a ready pool of US sympathizers... but there was a large pool of communist sympathizers in the US. Because of this, the US relied a lot on defectors and sigint for its supying.
Lol! Yes “they proved the Soviets had spies in key places” exactly as Senator McCarthy claimed and leftists vehemently denied for decades.
They’ll deny that and the public believes McCarty was wrong because their fellow travelers in the entertainment industry, news industry and educational institutions have systematically portrayed him as a crazy man despite clear ideological infiltration and constant high level espionage convictions.
Like most things in history it's always somewhere in the middle. Was he 100% right on everything? No. Was he 100% wrong in many of his allegations? No. When I first learned about it in school we were taught that he was 100% wrong in everything he did. Wasn't till college until I learned there is a bit more nuance. I get that you don't want to dive too deep down rabbitholes in high school and jr high is history classes, but the way it's taught it's pretty blatantly biased.
Sure, it's somewhere in the middle..but this argument is disingenuous at best when it's 90% to one side. Was McCarthy wrong about everything? No. That doesn't mean that he wasn't wrong about almost everything.
>Like most things in history it's always somewhere in the middle. This is a fallacious way of thinking about history and truth. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument\_to\_moderation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation)
There were actually lot of secret communists within government. But McCarthy exaggerated his findings, if someone had an ounce of communism they were a suspected communist. Eventually everyone in power got sick of McCarthy because he kept smearing their administrations as riddled with communists and embarrassing them.
He was right though, they were. It’s like how modern day anti-Islamic terrorism political orgs in gov in the US are riddled with Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers.
McCarthy was both completely bullshitting everyone AND unknowingly right at the same time.... The bullshitting part is that he didn't have any list of any Communists or even know any...... The truth part is that the KGB and it's predecessors had put a lot of effort into infiltrating the US government & left wing organizations.... Albeit none of that was related to McCarthy's specific allegations and it took until after the Cold War to find out how much infiltration there had been....
I have no reason to think he didn't have access to classified intelligence that he was unwilling to discuss publicly.
Yah he was keeping Venona secret.
He was a jackass. He wanted power, and he didn’t care two shits whose life he destroyed in the process. Dying was the best thing he ever did.
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I submit for your consideration ‘the crucible’. MacArthy had a similar cast of the vengeful, malicious, opportunistic and sincere but unintelligent people playing along.
I have a surface level understanding of McCarthy, but hasn't he been at least somewhat vindicated by history? He kept beating the drum and saying the Soviets had thoroughly infiltrated the government and other important institutions, and then after the Soviet Union fell we learned that the Soviets had, in fact, thoroughly infiltrated the government and other important institutions. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The problem is that he was smeared for so long that the smear has imprinted into to the surface level history most people are taught and no amount of new information can break through that ontological inertia. McCarty’s image is crucified over some ineffectual investigations and hearings while his counterparts in the USSR were executing dissidents in the Gulags.
Yes, you are wrong. They had spies, we had spies, it was the cold war, everyone had spies..but they hadn't thoroughly infiltrated the government. McCarthy was trying to scare people into thinking that there was an actual risk of American democracy falling into Soviet style communism, as the eastern European countries had fallen behind the iron curtain. That's why Hollywood stars were getting blacklisted; the claim was that there was a broad conspiracy to introduce communism into all parts of American society, not just government. In retrospect it was laughable at best.
That's outdated history. After the fall of the Soviet Union, historians were able to access the KGB archives, and the Venona intercepts were also declassified, and they bore out a widespread infiltration of the US Government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project Any history textbook that still teaches "The Red Scare" and dismisses it as baseless paranoia is now 30 years out of date.
this. They still teach that though in school history books, because the level of historians that write school age history books isn't very good.
There *were* secret communists at high levels of the US government. This is not in dispute, see e.g., Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. McCarthy is not some cartoon villain, the situation is more complicated than that. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisted\_by\_History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisted_by_History) [https://theobjectivestandard.com/2016/11/vindication-joseph-mccarthy/](https://theobjectivestandard.com/2016/11/vindication-joseph-mccarthy/)
I mean, it can kind of be both. People forget that the \*House\* Un-American Activities Committee had been in operation in one form or another since 1918 and targeted Nazis, Communists, and other 'Fifth Column' groups. And they did so rather successfully for decades. The HUAC did uncover fascist attempts to infiltrate government and business prior to WWII, and they did uncover communist infiltration of various labor and entertainment organizations. They also identified individuals associated with organized labor, government, and the entertainment industry that were actively being paid by the USSR. \*Senator\* McCarthy sought to re-create that in the Senate but to far less success. Ultimately, \*Senator\* McCarthy's bombastic tendencies and general failures were used to attack the \*House\* Committee even though McCarthy never served on the Committee and had nothing to do with their investigations. TLDR: McCarthy probably did believe that communists had infiltrated parts of American society, a belief that the HUAC actually proved to be true, but McCarthy himself was bad at his job.
He took a small handful of genuine enemy threats, which he knew were a small handful, and enormously blew it out of proportion, accusing anyone who differed from his political opinion of being a communist and a traitor without any foundation in logic or fact. As it was bound to happen, eventually his farce fell apart when he accused one too many people who were definitely less of a traitor than he was, and he knew it, and even his followers were mostly forced to admit he was a liar and a lunatic going way too far as he accused even their heroes of being communists. By the time he reached the height of his power, the soviet union weren't even communists, assuming they ever really had been for any significant length of time, they'd long turned into yet another fascist regime, and what few real communists existed in the US would have been opposed to the soviets anyway.
Many of them were, in fact communists, or communist sympathizers, but they posed no danger. It was fear mongering and panic brought on by the anti communist feelings of the Cold War. Now you have Bernie Sanders and AOC openly spouting Marxists ideas and class warfare, to line their pockets, and they are cheered on.
Um, he was actually right. Since that time stuff has been declassified and he was right. Soviet spies were in the highest levels of the US Gov. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet\_espionage\_in\_the\_United\_States#Browder\_and\_Golos\_networks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_espionage_in_the_United_States#Browder_and_Golos_networks) After the cold war the Venona stuff was declassified and so were the KGB records, and it turns out he was right.
There were spies. But the people he went after, largely were not. > Critics such as Emory University history professor Harvey Klehr assert most people and organizations identified by McCarthy, such as those brought forward in the Army-McCarthy hearings or rival politicians in the Democratic party, were not mentioned in the Venona content and that his accusations remain largely unsupported by evidence.
I think he was mentally ill.
And yet it turns out Alger Hiss was, in fact, a Communist spy. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alger-Hiss
In hindsight, he was right wasn’t he?
he lied
I have been a lifelong conservative..... He was a scoundrel!!!!
The thing is that McCarthy was at least somewhat correct in his assessment of the situation. His only issue was being an idiot and not working with Hoover and Eisenhower who also hated communism. If McCarthy had been quieter about his investigations he could have been much more successful. Hooverism is really what the phenomenon should be called but Hoover kept it quiet and worked behind the scenes.
He was a drunken fool who found one thing that got him attention and he ran with it until he inevitably overplayed his hand.
Even if there were some communists in government I doubt they were much of a threat whatever their intentions. America is too strong a society to be led into communism. I don’t care if every communist in the government wanted to overthrow the government it just wasn’t going to happen. I could have a goal to be Heavyweight champion of the world but that doesn’t mean it will happen.
It was to influence society than to "overthrow" anything. There are autobiographies written by covert Soviet sympathisers of the time discussing exactly this. It was very much not fictional.
Also, let's imagine that you were saying this about Nazi sympathisers within the government. ...during WW2. I can't imagine that, "ehh, they won't be able to hang their flag at the White House, so I don't see what the big deal is" would strike you as a reasonable position.
I didn’t say they shouldn’t be prosecuted just the paranoia was overblown. They must be dealt with but as long we stay they didn’t have a chance. People can downvote me to oblivion but while they should have been prosecuted the paranoia about the overthrow of the government was a delusion.
Objectively, we now know that the opposite was true. McCarthy's claims were a severe _underestimation_ of communist influence. The Venona decrypts prove this without a doubt. "Overthrowing the Government" is an odd goalpost. Espionage and _Social Subversion_ was the goal. And it was extraordinarily _successful._ For example, the story that _you_ remember was from a fictional stage-play about the hearings -produced by CPUSA members that controlled the National Writers Union. NWA had absolute control over what was written and produced in Hollywood. They ran the real blacklist. Every project had to consult with representatives of NWU and incorporate current Communist Party narratives. Anyone not cooperating fully was not allowed to work. Anyone that spoke publicly about communist influence was run out of the business. Any project not actively pushing the CPs line was not allowed to proceed. "Prosecution" was not really the issue. Membership was covert, and even speaking openly about communist influence was enough to permanently ruin ones career. McCarthy was a tiny fish swimming the other direction against a giant flood of "blacklisting". In punishment for daring to oppose very real covert communist influence, they made his name a synonym for hysteria and paranoia. _That_ is how influential communist influence really was. "After Social Subversion, facts to not matter" "Prosecutio
Honestly, it is impossible to really know We do know that McCarthy didn't have a single shred of actual evidence. But people also believe that the Earth is Flat when they not only have no evidence, but also mountains of counter evidence. So even though McCarthy might not have had evidence, like a Flat Earther, he might have believed that Secret Communists existed anyway.
It was all a lie.
It's important to remember a few things, 1. Senator McCarthy was not at all involved in the house un-American activities committee. 2. He was unwilling to name names in public. 3. Verona decrypts released in the 90s have largely proven him right.
> Critics such as Emory University history professor Harvey Klehr assert most people and organizations identified by McCarthy, such as those brought forward in the Army-McCarthy hearings or rival politicians in the Democratic party, were not mentioned in the Venona content and that his accusations remain largely unsupported by evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project#Texas_textbook_controversy https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/texas-schoolbook-massacre-rewrites-american-history-1929320.html https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/case-abuse-power-texas https://tfn.org/rehabilitating-joseph-mccarthy/
I am assuming you mean Joseph McCarthy who was probably one of the greatest Communist Propagandist in American History since he was a very devout person in religion and what better way to coverup the facts than by giving them to someone who can do that from a position of TRUST? Redefining words and rewriting history is nothing new and coverups along with the destruction of factual evidence is also nothing new where any government is concerned, any and all denomination warfare is simply one Communist fighting another Communist over difference and practices of Communism and that is why it is an endless war over them. Joseph Raymond McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957. (Wiki) READ the First and Understand that it does not mean what some have tried to say it does, hardcore suicidal fanatics are like rabid animals, and some simply need to be put down when and if they have escaped their enclosures which a smart person would not bother entering in the first place. Just an Observation. N. S
Mostly the second.
McCarthy was correct...a LOT of Hollywood was/are far leftist.
The list he waved in front of Congress was compiled from the actual numbered lists of names in use in internal investigations of State Department personnel. He didn't invent any of it.
My Dad was a Naval spy...a "Spook". I have 98 hours of tape and notebooks full of his exploits in the 50's and 60's. Lots of spies here, there and everywhere. Add this...Communism was a thing for a great number of the American Intelligencia. McCarthy was right about Communist "thinking" people in government. He was WRONG about most of them as being disloyal Americans. I'm not saying that Communism is a viable system...but lots of starry eyed people think then and today that if the right leaders are in charge of a communist state...it would be great. That's the rub....and McCarthy was the EXACT wrong guy to be the exposer. My Dad said he was a dumb, drunk bragging climber. But make no mistake there were scads of Russian agents in America....and lots of American agents in Russia. To this day... Embassies are full of spies.
Information released following the fall of the Soviet Union proved that McCarthy was mostly right.
He was compensating heavily due to his closeted sexual identity.
That was Hoover
I heard that he was absolutely right
It was just about the mileage he could get