Divide We Fall: America Has Been Blacklisted and McCarthyism Refashioned for
a New Age
Who needs a government censor when the American people are already doing
such a great job at censoring themselves and each other.
by John Whitehead
July 14th, 2020
By John Whitehead
CHARLOTTESVILLE (Rutherford) -- For those old enough to have lived through
the McCarthy era, there is a whiff of something in the air that reeks of the
heightened paranoia, finger-pointing, fear-mongering, totalitarian tactics
that were hallmarks of the 1950s.
Back then, it was the government-spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy and
the House Un-American Activities Committee-working in tandem with private
corporations and individuals to blacklist Americans suspected of being
communist sympathizers.
By the time the witch hunts carried out by federal and state investigative
agencies drew to a close, thousands of individuals (the vast majority of
them innocent any crime whatsoever) had been accused of communist ties,
investigated, subpoenaed and blacklisted. Regarded as bad risks, the accused
were blacklisted, and struggled to secure employment. The witch hunt ruined
careers, resulting in suicides, and tightened immigration to exclude alleged
subversives.
Seventy years later, the vitriol, fear-mongering and knee-jerk intolerance
associated with McCarthy's tactics are once again being deployed in a
free-for-all attack by those on both the political Left and Right against
anyone who, in daring to think for themselves, subscribes to ideas or
beliefs that run counter to the government's or mainstream thought
It doesn't even seem to matter what the issue is anymore (racism,
Confederate monuments, Donald Trump, COVID-19, etc.): modern-day activists
are busily tearing down monuments, demonizing historic figures, boycotting
corporations for perceived political transgressions, and using their bully
pulpit to terrorize the rest of the country into kowtowing to their demands
All the while, the American police state continues to march inexorably
forward.
This is how fascism, which silences all dissenting views, prevails.
The silence is becoming deafening.
After years of fighting in and out of the courts to keep their 87-year-old
name, the NFL's Washington Redskins have bowed to public pressure and will
change their name and team logo to avoid causing offense. The new name, not
yet announced, aims to honor both the military and Native Americans.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, a delegate to the House of Representatives who
supports the name change, believes the team's move "reflects the present
climate of intolerance to names, statues, figments of our past that are
racist in nature or otherwise imply racism [and] are no longer tolerated."
Present climate of intolerance, indeed.
Yet it wasn't a heightened racial conscience that caused the Redskins to
change their brand. It was the money. The team caved after its corporate
sponsors including FedEx, PepsiCo, Nike and Bank of America threatened to
pull their funding
So much for that U.S. Supreme Court victory preventing the government from
censoring trademarked names it considers distasteful or scandalous.
Who needs a government censor when the American people are already doing
such a great job at censoring themselves and each other, right?
Now there's a push underway to boycott Goya Foods after its CEO, Robert
Unanue, praised President Trump during a press conference to announce Goya's
donation of a million cans of Goya chickpeas and a million other food
products to American food banks as part of the president's Hispanic
Prosperity Initiative.
Mind you, Unanue-whose grandfather emigrated to the U.S. from Spain-also
praised the Obamas when they were in office, but that kind of equanimity
doesn't carry much weight in this climate of intolerance.
Not to be outdone, the censors are also taking aim at To Kill a Mockingbird,
Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Atticus Finch, a white
lawyer in the Jim Crow South who defends a black man falsely accused of
rape. Sixty years after its debut, the book remains a powerful testament to
moral courage in the face of racial bigotry and systemic injustice, told
from the point of view of a child growing up in the South, but that's not
enough for the censors. They want to axe the book-along with The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn-from school reading curriculums because of the presence
of racial slurs that could make students feel "humiliated or marginalized."
Never mind that the N-word makes a regular appearance in hip-hop songs. The
prevailing attitude seems to be that it's okay to use the N-word as long as
the person saying the word is not white. Rapper Kendrick Lamar "would like
white America to let black people exclusively have the word."
Talk about a double standard.
This is also the overlooked part of how oppression becomes systemic: it
comes about as a result of a combined effort between the populace, the
corporations and the government.
McCarthyism worked the same way.
What started with Joseph McCarthy's headline-grabbing scare tactics in the
1950s about Communist infiltrators of American society snowballed into a
devastating witch hunt once corporations and the American people caught the
fever.
McCarthyism was a contagion, like the plague, spreading like wildfire among
people too fearful or weak or gullible or paranoid or greedy or ambitious to
denounce it for what it was: an opportunistic scare tactic engineered to
make the government more powerful.
The parallels to the present movement cannot be understated.
The contagion of fear that McCarthy helped spread with the help of
government agencies, corporations and the power elite is still poisoning the
well, whitewashing our history, turning citizen against citizen, and
stripping us of our rights.
What we desperately need is the kind of resolve embodied by Edward R.
Murrow, the most-respected newsman of his day.
On March 9, 1954, Murrow dared to speak truth to power about the damage
McCarthy was inflicting on the American people. His message remains a timely
warning for our age.
We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into
an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine; and
remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared
to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the
moment unpopular.
America is approaching another reckoning right now, one that will pit our
commitment to freedom principles against a level of fear-mongering that is
being used to wreak havoc on everything in its path.
The outcome rests, as always, with "we the people." As Murrow said to his
staff before the historic March 9 broadcast: "No one can terrorize a whole
nation, unless we are all his accomplices."
Take heed, America.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American
People, this may be your last warning.
Feature photo | Nehemiah Nuk Nuk Johnson, left, with JUICE (Justice Unites
Individuals and Communities Everywhere), confronts a counter protester who
did not give his name in Martinez, Calif., July 12, 2020, during a protest
calling for an end to racial injustice and accountability for police. Jeff
Chiu | AP
John W. Whitehead is a constitutional attorney, author and founder and
president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The
War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at
www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not
necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.
