From: mars1933@hotmail.com   
      
      For students of the twentieth century, the phrase "witch hunt" in-   
   evitably evokes the "infamous" "McCarthy era."1 As popular legend   
   has it, the Junior Senator from Wisconsin, an amoral drunkard, sought   
   to opportunistically advance his political career by persecuting al-   
   leged communists, sympathizers, fellow-travellers and Soviet agents.   
   Now even liberal academics, when looking at McCarthy's evidence,   
   concede that he was correct in his allegations.2 But the Establishment   
   is unforgiving.3   
      
      The impression usually given is that the anti-Communist investiga-   
   tions of the Senate and the House, of which the McCarthy hearings   
   were one in a line starting from the early years of Bolshevism in Rus-   
   sia,4 were an aberration of US history centred solely around the "un-   
   scrupulous" McCarthy. The myth goes that McCarthy somehow   
   wielded such power that Americans high and low trembled at the   
   mere mention of his name, and all feared lest they were next to be put   
   on the "Black List" and hauled before his sub-committee, where their   
   lives would be ruined. A recent portrayal of such a scenario is Holly-   
   wood actor and director George Clooney's 2005 movie Good Night, and   
   Good Luck5 where, with the adept use of archival footage, McCarthy is   
   presented in monstrous form, and media luminary Edward R.   
   Murrow is depicted as the hero who was largely responsible for ending   
   McCarthy's career by exposing the Senator as a rogue on his CBS   
   television programme.   
      
       One point that stands out from the movie is that McCarthy, sup-   
   posedly in his usual reckless manner, falsely accused Murrow of hav-   
   ing been a member of the extreme Left Industrial Workers of the   
   World (IWW), which had been cited by the US Attorney General as a   
   "terrorist organization," an accusation viewers are assured was an   
   outrageous lie.6 Yet, as should be expected, the facts are not so   
   clearcut. Even standard biographies of Murrow are not so dismissive,   
   and it is conceded that at the least Murrow was a "sympathizer" of the   
   IWW.7   
      
       Furthermore, Murrow-the heroic underdog against the bullying   
   McCarthy-was one of several leading media personalities who were   
   at the forefront of serving the CIA within the news media. McCarthy   
   intended investigating the CIA, claiming it to be a "sinkhole of Com-   
   munists," and had been given information by FBI director J. Edgar   
   Hoover. The first of the CIA operatives that McCarthy intended to in-   
   vestigate was Cord Meyer, who was primarily responsible for recruit-   
   ing anti-Stalinist Leftists for the CIA Cold War propaganda offensive   
   against the USSR.8 Meyer was not only considered a "communist" by   
   the FBI, but was co-founder with James P. Warburg (of the Warburg   
   banking dynasty) of United World Federalists,9 which aims to estab-   
   lish a World Government via the United Nations. Meyer was involved   
   with "Operation Mockingbird," the CIA program to influence the   
   news media. The head of this program in the USA was Philip Graham,   
   owner of The Washington Post,10 the flagship newspaper of the   
   American Establishment. It is notable that The Washington Post was in   
   the forefront of the media attack on Senator McCarthy, and it is here   
   that the derogatory term "McCarthyism" made its first appearance.11   
   Simpkin comments on McCarthy's intention to investigate the CIA   
   that he "did not realise what he was taking on (accepting)."12   
   Wisner [head of Operation Mockingbird] unleashed Mocking-   
   bird on McCarthy. Drew Pearson, Joe Alsop, Jack Anderson,   
   Walter Lippmann and Ed Murrow all went into attack mode and   
   McCarthy was permanently damaged by the press coverage or-   
   chestrated by Wisner.13   
      
      Although these facts are well-documented, one will not see the   
   likes of George Clooney, in eulogising Murrow as champion of the   
   underdog against the bully McCarthy, mentioning that Murrow et al.   
   were merely following the directives of the CIA and the plutocratic   
   Establishment it serves.   
      
      This was at a time-the height of the Cold War-when the "Ameri-   
   can Establishment" was trying to confront not "Communism" per se,   
   as McCarthy naively believed, but a specific type of Communism; that   
   of post-Trotsky Russian Sovietism. The Cold War had emerged within   
   several years after World War II, when Stalin, the former ally in the   
   fight against Fascism, had rejected US plans for the post-war world   
   with the USSR as a junior partner.14 McCarthy was destroyed when he   
   came too close to what was behind the Cold War rhetoric.   
      
      What emerged soon after the defeat of McCarthy was what might   
   be called a "witch hunt" against the Right, including anything of even   
   a moderately conservative nature. While the USSR remained the   
   USA's primary global rival, the American Establishment's aim was   
   that of "containment," a label coined by the Establishment's Russia   
   expert George F. Kennan.15 The aim was not the defeat of Marxism or   
   even Communism per se. A robust opposition to Marxism on ideolog-   
   ical, moral, cultural and spiritual levels would imply a militant   
   Americanism that would necessarily be even more of a threat to the   
   internationalist agenda of the American Establishment than Stalinism   
   or Russian Sovietism. The American Establishment's way of combating   
   Sovietism was to promote alternative forms of Leftism.   
      
      Kennedy, speaking to the Democratic Party in Los Angeles on   
   November 19, 1961, condemned those who find the danger from "within".   
      
      American Nationalism was on the ascent, despite the Establishment   
   persecution and destruction of Senator McCarthy several years earlier.   
   W. Cleon Skousen, former FBI agent and Police Chief of Salt Lake   
   City, a conservative authority on Communism, and one of those cited   
   in "The Reuther Memorandum," described the era in a book written a   
   decade later, entitled The Naked Capitalist, a sequel to his 1960s   
   bestseller The Naked Communist.39 As the title of The Naked Capitalist   
   suggests, by 1970 Skousen had come to realize that there was a nexus   
   between Communism and Capitalism, and identified some of the more   
   subterranean forces that had destroyed Senator McCarthy.40   
      
      Skousen, as a prominent anti-Communist of the times, states that   
   around 1960 "a solid front" had begun to build among both Republi-   
   can and Democrat Americans that was pro-American and anti-   
   Communist. In 1958 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover came out with Mas-   
   ters of Deceit at the same time as Skousen's Naked Communist, and by   
   1961 both were national best-sellers. "Study groups, seminars, radio   
   and TV broadcasts began springing up all over the country," and   
   Rightist luminaries such as Dan Smoot, Dr. Fred Schwarz, and Robert   
   Welch "became familiar to readers and reviewers in the mass com-   
   munications media. It was a grass roots movement which, unknown   
   to its participants, was racing towards a head-on collision with the   
   Left-Establishment coalition."41   
      
      Few understood at the time that it was this "Left-Establishment co-   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)