Sen Joseph McCarthy - Martyr to Patriotism
March 13, 2019
McCarthyism is [regarded as] the most frightening and detestable era in modern American history. For much of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990, there was a steady outpouring of books and articles arguing that the Communist Party of the United States was a small, inoffensive group of idealists committed to democracy, civil rights and labor organizing that was demonized and persecuted by an American Inquisition, headed not only by McCarthy, but also by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, and Richard Nixon, persecutor of Alger Hiss...
(Churchill, Truman and Stalin doing their Masonic shake. Cold War was a charade. All wars are ruses to kill patriots increase power and make money.)
Among historians, there was widespread support for the idea that that American government had vastly overestimated the threat of Soviet espionage. The convictions of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were widely regarded as miscarriages of justice. The charges by Elizabeth Bentley that dozens of government employees had given her secret data to turn over to the Russians were derided as the unsupported ravings of a deluded alcoholic. President Truman's imposition of a federal loyalty-security program was attacked as an unjustified intrusion on civil liberties...
Beginning in the mid-1990s, this simplistic version of an American history in which national security fears were merely the pretext for an attack on civil rights and liberties began to lose ground. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, previously closed Russian archives began to open to scholars.
I was the first American to gain access to the previously closed files of the Communist International and the CPUSA itself, located in Moscow, in the summer of 1992. Although I was originally far more interested in issues of the CP's political activities in America, I unexpectedly began to come across documents marked top secret being sent by a man named Pavel Fitin that contained the names of employees of the United States government who had been accused of being Soviet spies by Elizabeth Bentley, a defector from Soviet intelligence back in the late 1940s. It was interesting enough that these documents were labelled top secret; what was even more fascinating was that Fitin was head of the KGB's foreign intelligence branch and that his memos were dated from 1943 and 1944 -- long before Bentley went to the FBI.
That meant they were not reports on her testimony. Because the archivists had not realized that this material was in the files or its significance, I was able to take the microfilm copies out of the country. In The Secret World of American Communism, John Haynes and I reprinted nearly one hundred Russian KGB documents establishing that Soviet intelligence had recruited American communists to spy on its behalf.
We also showed that from its inception in 1919, the CPUSA had been generously funded by the Soviet Union, with subsidies that reached $3,000,000 a year by the mid-1980s, and that the Party leadership had worked closely with Soviet intelligence to ferret out American secrets. And we found snippets of information about a very hush-hush American project, code-named Venona, that had worked to decipher coded Soviet messages.
After our book appeared in 1995 we were asked to testify before a commission chaired by former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan on government secrecy. We pointed out the oddity of finding information about Venona in an open Russian archive while all information about it in America remained closed. Moynihan then pressed the director of the CIA, John Deutsch, a committee member, to consider declassifying the Venona material.
Later that year it was released -- some 2900 messages between KGB and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) headquarters and their stations in New York, Washington, San Francisco and points outside the United States...
VENONA REVELATIONS
As a result of the material that has emerged from Russian archives and the release of the Venona files, we now know a great deal about the extent of Soviet espionage from the 1930s through the 1940s. There is no longer any question about the fact that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were Soviet spies (although Ethel played a very minor role). Julius is identifiable in Venona under the code-name Liberal. By the way, the use of code names shows that the KGB had a macabre sense of humor. The code name for their bitter enemies, the Trotskyists, was Polecats, Zionists were Rats, San Francisco was Babylon and Washington DC was Carthage.
There is no doubt that Alger Hiss, left, was a Soviet spy and continued to provide information through the Yalta Conference which he attended as an advisor to FDR. The Soviets thoroughly infiltrated the Manhattan Project and were able to build an atomic bomb several years before they otherwise would have because of such spies as Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British scientist, convicted of espionage in the late 1940s and Theodore Hall, a young American physicist who died in Britain in 1999, who had never been publicly named as a spy until the Venona material was released...
All told, some 350 Americans turn out to have worked for Soviet intelligence during World War II -- a time when we were allies. American counter-intelligence eventually identified more than 125 of these agents -- but were never able to nail down who the other 200 plus were. Virtually every one of the people accused of being a Soviet agent by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers -- both reviled and denounced for making false charges not only by political partisans in the 1940s but by historians ever since -- turns out to have been a Soviet spy.
No Federal agency was immune to Soviet penetration. There were at least 16 Soviet agents in the OSS, predecessor to the CIA, including Duncan Lee, chief counsel to General William Donovan. The Office of War Information, the Board of Economic Warfare, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, War Production Board, War Department, Signal Corps, Censorship office, the Justice Department were all penetrated. In the State Department Alger Hiss was not the only Soviet spy. Larry Duggan, in charge of Latin American affairs, was an agent. Lauchlin Currie, one of six presidential assistants, provided information. The most highly placed spy was Harry Dexter White, the number two man the Treasury Department and one of the architects of the post-war international financial order -- he designed the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bretton Woods agreement. The KGB so valued White's information -- including meetings at the founding UN conference where he revealed the American negotiating strategy -- that when he hinted at leaving government service because of financial pressures, the KGB offered to pay his daughter's college tuition...
MCCARTHY
There are several things about which Senator McCarthy was right -- although he was by no means the first or only person to note them. There was a very significant issue of national security presented by communist spying and subversion. No government can turn a blind eye to spying as extensive as that directed against the United States by the Soviet Union. Secondly, the American Communist Party was serving as an agent of a foreign power. ..
Thirdly, McCarthy was partially correct that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had been slow to respond to the issue of Soviet espionage. Whittaker Chambers had first gone to Adolph Berle with information about Alger Hiss, Harry White, Lauchlin Currie and others right after the Nazi-Soviet Pact and nothing had been done. It was not just that many liberals refused to believe that people like Hiss could not be spies.
Even J. Edgar Hoover's FBI did not make Soviet espionage a major priority until 1943 and their early investigations, while filled with promising leads, did not go very far...
But if McCarthy was right about some of the large issues, he was wildly wrong on virtually all of the details. ...The new information from Russian and American archives does not vindicate McCarthy. He remains a demagogue, whose wild charges actually made the fight against Communist subversion more difficult. [
But if McCarthy was wrong on the details -- and what is history but details -- many historians today are both wrong on the details about McCarthyism and morally obtuse about the nature of communism. Far too many American historians believe that anti-communism or the search for Soviet spies was baseless paranoia. They recoil so strongly from McCarthy that they are unable to recognize that just because an objectionable politician cynically employed anti-communism does not mean that anti-communism was objectionable. The CPUSA was a haven for spies and Soviet subversion presented a genuine security threat to the United States.
But, for Ellen Schrecker, former editor of Academe, Journal of the American Association of University Professors, all varieties of anti-communism are species of McCarthyism. Opposition to communism, she has written," tapped into something dark and nasty ion the human soul." Blanche Wiesen Cook of CUNY lamented that "everything fine and creative in American thought has been splattered and smeared" by hostility to communism.
ACADEMIA IS COMMUNIST
One of the oddest phenomena in the academic world is the nostalgia so many professor display for communism. The human costs of that ideology, we now know, run upwards of 100 million dead in the former Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Eastern Europe and North Korea. In light of archival evidence that during the Great Purges of the 1930s, the USSR was executing almost 1000 political prisoners a day...
Most disturbing has been the willingness of many historians to blind themselves to historical evidence. As the new material has emerged from Russian archives and the declassified Venona documents, far too many historians have allowed their political and ideological biases to distort their historical judgment...
And then there are those historians who have, sometimes reluctantly, looked this new material in the face, admitted its validity, and provided retroactive support for one of McCarthy's charges -- that one segment of American opinion supported communism and the Soviet Union against their own country. These historians have concluded that the weight of the evidence of Soviet espionage is so overwhelming that it can no longer be denied...
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Related- Our DeFacto Communist Society
McCarthy Charges Now Accepted as Fact
The New World Order is Communism
Peter D said (February 18, 2018):
I thank you for your wonderful website, bringing light into our darkness.
The McCarthy style vilification by the MSM is going on right now in the U.K.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5404789/Senior-Labour-figures-spied-Russians-80s.html
Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the UK labour party - I know that he is pro-Palestine and anti-establishment -
and for these reasons I believe that he is most probably 'The good Guy' in a country where 80% of the politicians
from both political parties belong to 'The friends of Israel' organisation.
Corbyn's vilification by the UK press is relentless - but I think that I see a little light appearing in the darkness
as the mainstream media has lost credibility with a growing percentage of our population, fuelled by the 'alternative
media' on the internet - including such sites as your own.