McCarthyism

This particular essay is prompted by a McCarthy propaganda film that was shown on TCM a few days ago. Judging from the beginning time and the ending time, it was about 40 minutes long, but I only watched it for about five minutes before I was so turned off that I turned the television off. (Since I wanted to watch the next movie, I also saw the last couple of minute.)

Watching this made one thing very clear. McCarthy differed from Hitler only in the degree of success he had. That is, both McCarthy and Hitler used fear of Communism to stir up emotion. McCarthy, being later than Hitler, also used anti-Hitler propaganda, which I found ironic in view of the similarity.

Elsewhere I've seen it said that McCarthy was motivated, in reality, by antisemitism. Hitler was as well. That is, he told his people that he was fighting the Communists, but in reality he was killing the Jews. From what I've heard, some Germans were genuinely surprised to see what Hitler did to the Jews. (Probably mostly the people who didn't concern themselves with anything outside their own lives.)

Hitler used the mechanism of the existing German government to further his cause, as did McCarthy. Both tended to encourage xenophobia. That is, internal problems were blamed on other people, rather than the cause being accepted by the people actually responsible.

It can be shown that the United States is still reeling from McCarthyism. That is, McCarthy used his undo influence to re-instate the voting practices that allowed party bosses to control the politics in many local governments. This is still in place, although I suspect the influence of the party bosses has been challenged by Internet, and, even before that, a general distrust of government. (I saw a special talking about a riot at a particular city in the 1960. The special traced the reasons for the riot directly to the fact that the local party bosses didn't want to allow the general public to avail themselves of any government services. I think the special ended by showing that although the riot was one part of a solution to that problem, it was only one part, and was really not that good at changing public policy.

Perhaps the biggest legacy of McCarthy is the dependence of the United States to using war as a means of distracting people from the real problems that exist in the United States. That is, prior to the WW II, the United States did not have a big military, and military involvement in other countries was relatively minor. The only bases the United States had in other countries were to support war efforts. Therefore, the United States would have bases in Europe during WW I, but once the war was over, or before, they were closed. This is not true of WW II.

Personally, that propaganda film turned me off, and, once more, illustrated that the United States is far from perfect, and that the quote is definitely true, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." In this case, the "vigilance" is a constant vigilance to make sure that the government is not taking our liberties away without saying anything. Indeed, this requires more vigilance than that that is required to protect against foreign entanglements.