Joe McCarthy, American hero?
“I think that if Barbara Lee would read the history of Joe McCarthy, she would realize that he was a hero for America.”
- Rep. Steve King R-Ohio said of Rep. Barbara Lee, D-California
‘McCarthy’ comment by Steve King stirs debate
No, Mr. King. Joe McCarthy wasn’t a hero
Congress Rejects Shirek Post Office Honor
House Republicans kill plan to name Berkeley post office after longtime Councilwoman Maudelle Shirek
The 215-190 House vote on Tuesday came after Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, claimed 94-year old Maudelle Shirek didn’t represent American values. King cited Shirek’s support for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer. He later noted Shirek had an “affiliation with the Communist Party,” citing her sponsorship of a Marxist library.
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A two-thirds vote was needed for passage. Nine Republicans voted yes and 212 voted no; 180 Democrats voted yes and three voted no; and one independent voted yes.
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“They are living in the days, I guess, of Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover and decided they wanted to defeat a local district matter, and I think it’s outrageous and unconscionable,” Lee said in an interview.Bob Patenaude, executive director of Berkeley’s Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library for Social Change, said Shirek was one of many noncommunist liberals who publicly supported the small facility.
“The red-baiting we’re seeing here is ludicrous, to say the least,” Patenaude said.
What’s really strange about this to me is that there would be a big issue over the naming of a Post Office in Berkeley. Aren’t these sorts of votes normally rather pro-forma?
In this case, King (the author Stephen King must be cringing) insinuates that the long-time public servant is anti-American. She does have a bit of controversy in her background, but if a Berkeley P.O. can’t bear the name of a progressive black woman, sheesh.
“The term “McCarthyism” has since become synonymous with any government activity which seeks to suppress unfavorable political or social views, often by limiting or suspending civil rights under the pretext of maintaining national security.”
Joe McCarthy – Wikipedia
McCarthyism is also a specific example of the faulty reasoning of guilt by association – the attempt to discredit an idea based upon disfavored people or groups associated with it. Guilt by association is the reverse of an appeal to authority. In McCarthyism, or the “red scare,” a person, group, or idea is associated in some way with communism, and thus demonized/blacklisted/criminalized. Recent example: previous post on Cindy Sheehan in New York.
According to this reasoning, this is a valid argument:
China is a communist power.
The US is running up a huge debt financing the war in Iraq.
China holds much of our national debt.
Since the Bush Administration is linked to communism through financing, the communists are secretly controlling the Iraq War.
Therefore, America is a commie.
(Some states even call themselves “Red States”!)
McCarthyism itself is only one example of this kind of reasoning, which seems to arise from moral panic or a hysterical need for scapegoats. There are precedents in the Inquisitions and the witch hunts and in most genocidal movements.
It was obvious that hysteria toward the communist threat had easily transitioned into the language of terrorism, but do they really need to revisit all that stuff? Haven’t we learned anything at all? Has no-one noted the fall of the USSR, and communism generally speaking? It didn’t seem to work out the way it was envisioned. I’m not even sure how many Americans understand democracy and freedom or liberty, much less capitalism. Everyone forgets about greed when they make up these ideologies. The economic forces and drives that exist in the global economy today go far beyond Marx and his criticism of capitalism. I’m not sure if there is any economic system today that values all the people.
While there were reasons for identifying communists in McCarthy’s time, and there are reasons for identifying terrorists today, the hysteria comes in at the point in which any person or group can become a target. Often people are targeted simply because they disagree with official spin, or because they become icons for an idea. Under this kind of regime, whistleblowers are investigated more than people who engage in unethical acts and homosexuals blamed for bad hetero marriages. The cultivation of hysteria, the politics of fear, and witchhunting are tools in the kit of domination and suppression.
McCarthy was a thug who ruined many innocent people’s lives.
I wonder why the right feels the need to employ these kinds of weapons.
More Reading (only a sampling)
From the Left
War on the Bill of Rights by Nat Hentoff
Could It Happen Again? by Ruth Rose
The United States of America Has Gone Mad by John le Carré
The New McCarthyism – Bush’s America: For Better or Worse by Johnny Boyd
From McCarthyism to COINTELPRO by Elizabeth Schulte
Balanced View
The Myth of McCarthyism by Thomas C. Reeves
Radical Right
The Myth of McCarthyism by Ann Coulter
“I wonder why the right feels the need to employ these kinds of weapons.”
Well, wasn’t it the left that made the first claim of McCarthyism? Didn’t that start the argument?
From reading the sources you cited, it seems as though Shirek’s connection to Marxism, let alone her support of Communism, is rather tenuous, and it seems like a weak excuse to keep her name off of the post office. Nevertheless, I’d like to think that one can still consider Communism to be unacceptable without being labeled McCarthyist. Note, however, that we’re still having these discussions about Tailgunner Joe decades after the height of the Red Scare; clearly, there’s still some ambivalence about his legacy.
What I found most interesting was that nobody defended Ms. Shirek’s support of Mumia Abu-Jamal, or even tried to.
If you think the connection is tenuous, why do you think they would go out of their way to block it, citing “American values”? She did a lot of work for Americans.
What Shirek supported – and I’m sure there is more complicated story behind this – was Abu-Jamal’s release. For whatever reasons, I don’t know – so I couldn’t say why anyone did or did not engage that topic in the context.
The red-baiting comment did elicit a reference to McCarthy from Rep. Lee. Starting it? Well, I don’t think so, but you’re absolutely free to interpret the dialogue from your own perspective. What struck me as most important is that anyone, even on the right, could view McCarthy as an American hero. He didn’t further the cause of actually investigating people who were involved with soviet espionage/intelligence. Rather, his witchhunt was a method of controlling and silencing any dissent at all – such is neither American nor heroic. I don’t think there is much ambivalence at alll; rather, the tools of McCarthy have simply been picked up, much like the tools of Goebbels.