I caught the last half of the 2003 PBS documentary "None Without Sin" last night. It's a fairly straightforward tale of the relationship between Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller and how it collapsed under the weight of Kazan's naming of names to the House Un-American Activities Committee and Miller's refusal to do so.
It seems to me that the current political climate is very similar to that of the McCarthy era. Back then it was embodied in the notorious question "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" Now the question appears to be "Are you pro-terrorist?" It's typically posed to those who express disagreement about Administration foreign policy. The one major distinction (so far) is that no Congressman or Senator has yet convened committee hearings to ask that question of government employees or artists who have shown their dissatisfaction with their government's actions abroad.
Posted by Linkmeister at August 24, 2006 11:26 AM | TrackBackWell, the significant difference is that NOBODY is actually pro-terrorist, while in the 1950s there were indeed a good many people who had belonged to lefty political organizations in their younger days and it was easier to threaten those people with being "outed". There's nobody to "out" as being "with the terrorists", so it's all hot air and nonsense.
The tactics on the part of the righties are about the same -- smears, lies, things taken out of context -- but that's to be expected from the likes of them.
Posted by: Brian at August 24, 2006 03:27 PMI'd agree with you, Brian, except that they've mastered what they used to call The Big Lie (a Communist precept, by the way) and have managed to turn it to their advantage over and over again, as we've seen repeatedly. What are Rove's tactics (Dems "soft on terror") or the Swifties' tactics (Kerry shot himself and his medals were self-awarded) but recycled propaganda of the sort they used to rail against (rightly)?
Posted by: Linkmeister at August 24, 2006 03:35 PMActually, the idea of "The Big Lie" is credited to the Nazis, not the Communists.
And the righties have been quite good at the big lie when it comes to things like Iraq, but whatever ability they had shortly after 9/11 to make their opponents cower in fear was rather short-lived, mainly because (and this was my original point) they don't have anything to back up the accusations.
I saw this documentary the first time it aired, BTW, and enjoyed it quite a bit. If you'll recall, there were still quite a few people who refused to acknowledge Kazan when he won his "Lifetime Achievement" Oscar a couple of years ago.
Posted by: Brian at August 24, 2006 03:53 PMWas it the Nazis? I get my totalitarian loonies mixed up sometimes. ;)
they don't have anything to back up the accusations.
Yeah, but my point is that they've succeeded in owning or suborning enough of the media that they can merely repeat something often enough and it becomes conventional wisdom even to the journalists who should know better. See "Al Gore invented the Internet," which he never claimed but which was repeatedly thrown at him (and still is, by NYT columnists) until it became "common knowledge."