The first Red Scare seems to have been a pretty transparent attempt to protect the interests of the capitalist elite from the rising power of the collective working class.
Was McCarthyism also a sincere fear of organized labor, or was it just an ideologized way to prevent sympathy with America's enemy during the Cold War?
The Red Scare of the 1910s and 20s occurred when anti-capitalist sentiment was rising quickly, after presidents not named Taft or Roosevelt had done whatever they could to promote investment in America. This was the height of the Lochner Era, when the Supreme Court made it a policy to strike down any labor protections passed by a state government. Communism, anarchism, and other socialist ideologies were pretty popular with intellectuals and workers alike.
By the 1950s, there wasn't much communist sentiment left in the US. While the Depression turned a lot of workers red, the New Deal sated their demands by assuaging the harms of capitalism. In addition, postwar prosperity gave Americans much less to complain about. By the time the McCarthy hearings began, the only communists left were conscious bourgeois intellectuals and some union bosses. Communist ideology was no longer a threat to American civil order, although the USSR was a major threat to American international power, preventing us from having a true hegemony.
Were McCarthyism and associated movements (like the John Birch Society) actually about communism or just about strengthening the resolve of the US against the USSR? If the USSR was not so powerful, would the second Red Scare have happened at all?
shame rus didnt conquer siberia like the east coast did the americas else it might have been something other than propaganda & an inner crescent scare.
Caleb Morgan
McCarty was nothing more than a fraud and not an American hero. If he wanted to actually preserve our interests he would have purged all the marxists from the education system to prevent them from hypnotizing our youth but instead wasted his time going after people in Hollywood
Jose Rogers
...
Isaiah Jenkins
3/3
Ethan Cook
Hollywood is nothing but a bunch of scumbag hat tipping champagne socialists anyway,
Angel Phillips
The Russian Far East is much less habitable than California
Anthony Edwards
But he should have known that going after them would have no effect. If he actually wanted to get rid of them he could have put forth a bill setting a 99% tax rate on the income of actors to see if they put their money where their mouth is.
Sebastian Jackson
Haha I was about to agree with you until I realized where you were going with this train of thought.
Why are you scared of intellectuals being Marxists?
Economics sadly is not the measure of all things. The Red Scare of the 1950s was a complex phenomena involving social uncertainty, the newly invented atomic bomb, and a lot of other factors. Trying to reduce it to such simplistic terms is doing a disservice to the era and its (sometimes) alcoholic players. Lets not forget the role of liquor in this period.
Lucas Ramirez
>Why should you be scared when the people in charge of educating our youth are clinically retarded
Oliver Foster
yes but isnt that why russia is a thing at all/exists?
Brody Mitchell
>Economics sadly is not the measure of all things. classically this is true because the volume of work via population existing often out exists that capable by capital infrastructure however this is quickly changing/turning in the modernized world
t. brzezinski infinitely easier to kill than control t. end game
Xavier Wood
that big gap they talk about in the dark ages is probably nothing/dwarfed compared to the gap between the various outlawings of slavery & recent re-mechanisation of labour.
Ryder James
It was about Communism. It wasn't the first Red Scare the U.S. had seen by any means, but it was by far the most prominent. It was hardly unfounded either. The Soviets had infiltrated even the most secret government projects (Manhattan Project, Rosenbergs) to the highest levels of goverment (Alger Hiss). As time moves on and as the Venona Project collected more data after the fall of the Soviet Union, we've discovered that McCarthy was actually right and arguments to contrary haven't kept up with new information.
>he thinks McCarthy only went after Hollywood >he thinks McCarthy wasn't responsible for the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss Fucking wew lad.
Kevin Carter
The Red Scare was a meme that affected only a handful of people. Meanwhile the last 60 years there has been a "fascist scare" where society as a whole organizes witch hunts against non-existant fascist. It ranges from conspiracy theories ("This guy's grandfather talked to a nazi once during WW2 so they're a NAZI FAMILY") to outright persecution ("This guy said something vaguely racist on twitter so he should lose his job and atone forever").
Ayden Butler
That isn't anti-communist, that's anti-Soviet
Charles Myers
>he thinks there's a difference Leftpol fuck off
Adrian Martinez
What? The difference is enormous.
US collaboration with non-Soviet communists helped us win the Cold War.
Logan Morgan
>non-Soviet communists You mean that ONE country which wasn't even communist? Ok
James Scott
Some of the most vocal critics of the USSR are commies m8
Even all the ironic tankies on Veeky Forums will admit that the USSR was hugely flawed and dangerously hierarchal
Julian Murphy
Nigga, Maoist China was more ideological than the USSR.
Tito's Yugoslavia was also communist in ideology. In practice, Yugoslav socialism wasn't less socialist than what existed in the USSR. It was just different.
Dominic Thompson
>Nigga, Maoist China was more ideological than the USSR. yeah, give me my rice so i can stop cannibalising the next village over
Kevin Reyes
You're seeing it now though how influential the media and celebrities are. Purging academia of cultural marxists/Frankfurt School types would be great but you'd still have the media types there to push that ideology and make it "cool" and palatable to the average American, especially impressionable kids and teens.
Aaron Evans
Mao attacked the USSR for not being communist enough
The USSR attacked Mao for being fucking insane
John Powell
McCarthy was right almost in spite of himself really. He was correct in his belief that the Soviets had infiltrated all levels of society and the government, he just obviously went about proving it in an incompetent, blustery manner that did much more harm to his case when he was unable to really prove anything despite history vindicating his belief.
Luke Howard
>replace one form of propaganda with another
Jaxon Parker
Technology has diminishing returns and will never solve the problem of mortality and consequence, no matter how hard you social engineers would like.
Everything decays, even your machines.
Adam Brooks
Because Marxist intellectuals seek to undermine our rights as American citizens. From infringements on property rights, to gun control, to censorship of "problematic" media, you can be assured that there's a fucking red behind every shitty attempt to use the constitution and the bill of rights as toilet paper.
Brandon Diaz
Technology has diminishing returns Wrong.
and will never solve the problem of mortality That's a bit presumptive.
>Everything decays This also applies to pseudo-intellectual hand-wringing.
Andrew Parker
>Anti-leftism >Propaganda Kek
Jayden Thompson
It's called the second law of thermodynamics, moron.
Entropy is always increasing and your constructs will not stand the test of time.
You are the pseudo intellectual who holds himself in eternal optimism for the possibilities, when the probabilities all around you say otherwise.
Instead of accepting both life and death in balance, cowards like you hold on to life even if it means the destruction of beauty, strength, courage and other noble qualities, as long as you have quantities, you can keep maintaining your disgusting machine.
Jeremiah Jackson
It's actually shocking to discover how many current politicians and media people used to be a member in some kind of Marxist/Radical group during their college years. Like it's completely baffling.
>Because Marxist intellectuals seek to undermine our rights as American citizens
It's actually the opposite. You work to undermine their rights as citizens.
Jonathan King
the commies in sowjet russia exiled people to Siberia to settle and cultivate the land. It's just fucking cold.
Bentley Hall
The West is fucked because it lost its soul in World War One. Everything else is a lagging indicator. There is little to no hope. Ethnic seperatism might work in small areas, but the civilisation belongs to the third world and everything will assimilate. Enjoy your Rajastani grandchildren, future father in law of Jamal. 中國萬歲。我們去哪兒?我不知道。需要學習西方的新神經,伊斯蘭和中國。Blanda up.
Brody Watson
>The West is fucked because it lost its soul in World War One. How did WW1 kill the West? WW2 did way more damage.
Hunter White
Irrelevant round 2. Once the soul has died, once a civilisation has become thoroughly appalled with itself and all the old beliefs turn to valueless lies, it's time for a death-spiral. Hold on player, it's going to be spicy.
Andrew Scott
Marxists are staunchly opposed to gun control.
How can we have a revolution if the bourgeois state seizes our weapons?
Benjamin Martinez
THE RIDE NEVER ENDS
Noah Allen
But "property rights" are imaginary. It's absolutely ridiculous that a man like John McCain can own seven mansions while millions of Americans are homeless.
Property rights in an 18th century context were important by protecting citizens from state oppression, but the cult of property also excludes the have-nots from the goods, services, and shelter they desperately need. In this way, propertarianism actually creates poverty and keeps people unfree.
Liberalism, as in enlightenment-era ideology, was great by helping abolish the oppressive aristocratic order. But without liberating the people who never had property to be stolen by the state, liberalism isn't sufficient.
Alexander Bailey
Except for the fact that you no longer need to farm land to survive or own a factory to make money, hell these days a printer is a means of production and you can make millions with nothing but your own body.
Not to mention that ownership as a concept is necessary for a civilized society, people require the freedom to apply themselves to resources in a world of scarcity, they require the ability to own themselves, their actions and the results of their actions.
> inb4 arbitrary distinction between possessions and property
Dominic Moore
>collective working class Such a thing does not exist in America. Racial divides are far stronger than class divides. One of the (many) reasons why Socialism can never take root in America.
The other big reasons are fears of a shitshow like the Russian Revolution happening in America, fear of foreign involvement, and the severe curtailing of freedom during WWI.
