Posted on 05/08/2014 4:47:15 AM PDT by Kaslin
In 1920, a bond salesman walked into Joseph Yenowsky's Waterbury, Conn., clothing store. Yenowsky was a tough sell. During their lengthy conversation, Yenowsky told the salesman he thought Vladimir Lenin, the Russian Bolshevik leader, was "the brainiest man" in the world. The bond salesmen turned Yenowsky in to the police for sedition. Yenowsky got six months in jail under a Connecticut statute.
This was hardly an isolated incident during the so-called "Red Scare" of the World War I era. In Syracuse, three activists were arrested for circulating fliers protesting the conditions of America's political prisoners. The subversive flier quoted the First Amendment. They got 18 months in prison. In Washington, D.C., a man refused to stand for the The Star-Spangled Banner. A furious sailor shot the "disloyal" man three times in the back. When the man fell, the Washington Post reported, "the crowd burst into cheering and handclapping." An Indiana jury deliberated for two minutes before it acquitted a man of murdering an immigrant who'd said "To hell with the United States."
A number of conditions were necessary for this totalitarian fever that gripped America. The law -- state, federal and local -- was arrayed against any free speech deemed "un-American." But so were the people. There was a broad consensus that there was a real threat posed to the U.S. from abroad -- and from within -- in the form of Bolsheviks, anarchists and disloyal immigrants or "hyphenated Americans" (e.g. German-Americans or Irish-Americans). Woodrow Wilson's administration fueled this climate. Wilson himself proclaimed that "Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready."
It's valuable to remember all of this for several reasons. First, it's good to know such things can happen here ("even" under the leadership of liberals and progressives). Also, it's good to understand that things have been worse than they are today. There's a tendency to think our government has only become more intrusive and censorial than ever. That's simply untrue. Last, we should be wary of thought-crime panics.
Again, things aren't nearly so bad as when Wilson's Attorney General, Mitchell A. Palmer, set about to eradicate the "disease of evil thinking." That's a pretty low bar for an open and tolerant society. Still, in the last few months, many institutions have been struggling to clear it. Rutgers University invited Condoleezza Rice to be a commencement speaker, but she was bullied out of it. Brandeis University offered Ayaan Hirsi Ali -- a Somali-born women's rights champion and critic of Islamic fundamentalism -- an honorary degree until protests from faculty and students kiboshed that. Azusa Pacific University recently chickened out of a speech invitation to Charles Murray.
I visit about a dozen campuses a year, and at nearly every one, it's common to hear tales about how the social or administrative policing of thought crimes is all the rage. The latest buzz phrase is "microaggression." These are allegedly racist, homophobic or sexist statements made by people with no bigoted intent. Essentially, if someone can rationalize a reason to take offense that's all the proof required. Microagressions are the new vectors for the "disease of evil thinking."
Off campus, things haven't been much better. Watch MSNBC for 10 minutes and you will learn that Republicans are simply champions of "white supremacy" deserving no respect or quarter. I have no sympathy for disgraced L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling's views about race, but there's something troubling about how so many people are comfortable with vilifying a man for something he said in private, possibly even during couples' counseling. While conservatives and libertarians have lamented various calls to silence dissent, mainstream liberals seem unconcerned by calls to prosecute climate change skeptics.
In Washington, Democrats increasingly resort to charges of racism or sexism whenever they hear ideas they don't like. Democratic House leaders Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Steny Hoyer have dubbed critics of Obamacare "simply un-American." Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid insists the libertarian Koch brothers are "un-American." President Obama himself has a knack for suggesting that he cares about America while his opponents don't. He also likes to suggest the time for debate is over on the issues where he's made up his mind.
Defenders of the thought-crime crackdown will fairly insist today is different from things in Yenowsky's day. Fighting bigotry is an obvious good, unlike the crackdown on domestic radicals. Yes and no. Sure, fighting bigotry is right and good, but so is defending the United States from those who would do it harm. The test isn't in the motives but in the methods. Today, it is a kind of evil-thinking not to be part of the war on evil thinking. And so the cause of tolerance demands evermore intolerance.
“...the so-called “Red Scare”...”
Gee... evidently, it wasn’t just a “scare”.
And here we are now...
That does not look like a picture of Jonah Goldberg...
The Bolshevik/Anarchist threats were real, but the Wilson Administration sets some really dangerous precedents in how it handled them.
from within — in the form of Bolsheviks, anarchists and disloyal immigrants or “hyphenated Americans” “
Still true today.
“...the Wilson Administration...”
Being a “progressive” himself, maybe Wilson just saw it as a chance to take more control.
Nowadays, if you don't show the proper enthusiasm and ardor for these species protected and exalted by the liberals you are taken to court, boycotted, run out of business, personally attacked, threatened, or worse. No, simple "tolerance" or acceptance won't do. You have to actively promote them right alongside the liberals...
Add to Mr Goldberg’s list the recent ‘firing’ of Mozilla co-founder and new CEO Brendan Eich for the thought crime of not being politically correct towards the current victimhood of the GLBT crowd and their supporters. This demonstrates the chilling effects can be spread towards the business community as well and when you add the various court decisions about a ‘right to be served’ over-ruling a right of religious preference, it becomes even more of a bad trend.
A big problem with ‘thought crime’ is that it is a guilty-until-prove-innocent concept and the ruling of innocence only comes from the accuser. It is antithetical to our Constitution and our Judeo-Christian ethical system, which, of course, means nothing to the humanist-atheist left that practices it.
“Micro-aggressions”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microaggression
http://time.com/32618/microaggression-is-the-new-racism-on-campus/
“The idea is that whites should now watch out for being microaggressors, in the same way that they learned long ago not to be racist in more overt ways. Importantly, the microaggressor is quite often a “goodly” person, of the kind we assume is too enlightened to pop off with racist or sexist insults.”
So.........from what I’ve read, the only way for whites to not be racist is to entirely keep to themselves (thought not in groups of two or more), to say nothing and when asked, respond in one word answers.
At least back then they had the right enemy.
" . . . and it took an evvvvvvvvvvvil Republican Administration (Warren G. Harding's) to end it."
Ah, but DID it really end?
Not so much....
McCarthy was right, as Venona proved. But by the time he got there, they were well-entrenched at many levels.
And again... here we are now.
Here’s an interesting snippet regarding progressive Woodrow Wilson:
“President Woodrow Wilson was the fairy godmother who provided Trotsky with a passport to return to Russia to “carry forward” the revolution. This American passport was accompanied by a Russian entry permit and a British transit visa. Jennings C. Wise, in Woodrow Wilson:
Disciple of Revolution, makes the pertinent comment, “Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson, despite the efforts of the British police, made it possible for Leon Trotsky to enter Russia with an American passport.”
See:
http://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Sutton_Wall_Street_and_the_bolshevik_revolution-5.pdf
Page 13
So modern commie progressives didn't come up with that on their own?...
Ah, yes. The old Black Code, Jim Crow hisself, in racial drag.
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