Oppie Was A Commie

Accuracy In Media ^ | June 27, 2003 | Notra Trulock

[Dan(9698)]

>>>...The Hollywood Ten

You have fallen for the liberal line.

The Hollywood Ten were never investigated by the Senate.

McCarthy was a Senator.

They appeared before the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

That just goes to show how the liberals have screwed up history. You may have read in a history book that they were persecuted by McCarthy. That does not make it so.

[MEG33]

Thanks for correcting the record.I have done it several times!The big lie persists.

[liberallarry]

As Freud said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".

My question and the post from CJR were just what they seemed to be - a request for more info. The CJR story presented a 1992 summary and I wanted to know if it was complete and accurate.

Stone was a curmudgeon, disliked by lots of people. He was also pretty much of a loner...with a small but loyal following until his later years. He got his info and his stories by careful reading rather than through influential contacts. I don't know how useful he would have been as a spy.

I did find a knowledgable source completely hostile to him. Perhaps they can provide you with more info.

Roughstuff's Korean War Archive

[liberallarry]

You believe this stuff?

We don't like secrets? We don't do amoral assassinations? We don't have long-range planning? We don't actively spy on other countries? We don't have agents in Muslim countries? We don't attempt to infiltrate Al-Queda and other terrorist organizations?

[DPB101]

Typical Bolshevik response: "America does it too"

Moral equivalency. Willi Munzenberg/Izzy Stone/Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky/Eric Alterman mind rot.

[liberallarry]

Of course, America does it too. We'd be fools not too. That's not the point; The article tries to make it seem as if we don't. What kind of trash is that to post?

There was something interesting however.

"The Russians copied our shuttle down to the last nut and bolt."

Why is that?
The answer, according to the article, is there are spies everywhere stealing everything. That's true - but it's the kind of answer you would expect from spies and it completely misses the point.
The real answer is - because they couldn't make one on their own. Why not? Because their system is closed, secretive, paranoid, and discourages innovation. The result? They have few secrets of value to hide.

Ours is the opposite - open, communicative, chaotic and thus very, very productive. There's a price to be paid for that kind of system. It's relatively easy for spies to infiltrate and all sorts of dissenting and outrageous views must be tolerated. Thus a delicate balance must be struck which provides some security without destroying creativity. In other words, Leo Szilard was right and Leslie Groves was wrong.

The truth (and I'm going to put this very bluntly) - a very bitter one for both Left and Right - is that very productive geniuses like Szilard and Oppenheimer and Teller and Von Braun are worth a hundred or a thousand loud-mouthed, drunken bums like Joe McCarthy. That's why we and the Russians grabbed Nazi scientists if we could and that's why Eisenhower got rid of McCarthy...and that's why small-fry almost always are punished for everything. When a society starts punishing its talent it doesn't have long to live.

[liberallarry]

If you don't my treatment of McCarthy just substitute any of the worthless, American-hating, critics of the Left. The argument applies equally well.

[liberallarry]

I.3. The Great Britain
I.2. The Soviet Union
I.4. France
I.5. The People's Republic of China

[liberallarry]

I.3. The Great Britain
I.2. The Soviet Union
I.4. France
I.5. The People's Republic of China

[MEG33]

I wonder if the Shrine to Scientists has an altar?

[DPB101]

I suspect it has more to it than they were scientists.

[Hildy]

I scanned the article on Oppenheimer today. It was a lot longer than I remembered. Twenty pages! It was a big file being that I scanned it as images... I'm going to try to make it a smaller file tomorrow and get it to you. Wish me luck!!!

[MEG33]

I am so computer illiterate.I appreciate the hard work many do to add to our knowledge.Good luck!

[ThomasMore]

Apparently he was not! See post 201 also!

[walford]

You doubt that Stalin's Russia was worse than Nazi Germany? They killed more of their own and other countries' people, pervaded every aspect of domestic society and successfully exported its form of dictatorship throughout the globe. It created the Cold War, enabled the Korean, Vietnamese, El Salvadorean etc. to take place. It touched every continent with dictatorship and bloodshed for more than 3 generations.

Nazi Germany was only a pale shadow of the wholesale slaughter and misery created by Soviet Russia. Could you explain your position? Or are you like typical liberals in that your perspective is based upon feelings rather than reality?

[walford]

"..That they thought Nazism to be far worse than Communism is understandable to me. Communism was a utopian vision of a better world for everyone..."

I can't let that one slide LL

http://mason.gmu.edu/~walford/utopiatext.html

"...The tactics used to eliminate vestiges of the bourgeois ideology in countries that were founded upon the principles of Marxism/Leninism are well-known. Stalin’s purges of the 1930’s and the artificial famines orchestrated to force agricultural collectivization resulted in the deaths of many more millions of Russians before WWII than those because of the war. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge considered persons to be dangerous for merely wearing glasses, because they may have been exposed to ideas other than those approved by the State, which required a clean slate in the minds of its population in order to achieve the utopian social order. During Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, children were encouraged to denounce their parents as ‘capitalist roaders,’ the result being that the parents would be either executed or sent to labor camps, never to be heard from again. Then the state could assume the role of parent...

...After Lenin died in the USSR and Mao in the PRC, these countries were communist in name only, and were run simply as one party states with absolute, arbitrary power. Nonetheless, Marxism/Leninism was and is “widely studied in order to gain insight” into the policies of these governments. The ideological roots of fascism have been neglected and are pertinent in the study of utopianism, because fascist ideology is derived from essentially utopian principles and is cousin to Marxism.

The difference lies in the rejection of materialism in favor of idealism. With materialism, people are fated to ride the course of history; even the decisions that people think that they are freely taking are actually determined by larger forces. The elite Marxists are those who are best able to read the tea leaves of history to predict the future, and thus able to formulate the policies which will propel society toward its inevitable destiny sooner rather than later. Fascists invest their elite with superior knowledge of how to deal with the moment. Citizens of a fascist society have their destiny invested in the power and vitality of the State, because “the supreme entity was the State, a State which embodied the citizen’s ethical personality, and the stronger the State, the freer the individual” (Hamilton 58). Whether under Marxism or fascism, the result is the same..."

[liberallarry]

Could you explain your position?

I grew up during WWII. I remember the death of Roosevelt. The Nazis were the arch-enemies...the embodiment of evil. You're statistics are as good as any so I'm willing to concede you're right on some level. But those childhood, visceral memories will always be more real for me than any argument.

[Archimedes2000]

>>>No Hildy, I am before all other things a History Junkie, and my favorite fix is WWII. I have read fewer volumes about Manhattan than about, say, Axis military dynamism and economic/political evolution and/or American industrial/economic recoil and response, but I genuinely thirst for all info about this era.<<<<

I find this fascinating. I happened to be reading this thread, and came across this claim.

Petronski, I'm genuinely, sincerely curious, in light of our conversation a while back. Do you believe that you know anything about "Axis economic/political evolution" when you seem to have absolutely no idea of what these people actually believed? Can you suggest to me even one single first person account that you've actually read from any of the leaders of the movement you seem so confused about?

[Petronski]

Do you believe that you know anything about "Axis economic/political evolution" when you seem to have absolutely no idea of what these people actually believed?

Is this my exam, 'professor?' Do you really expect me to make some kind of demonstration for you? Or to be concerned what you would think of me if I didn't?

[liberallarry]

Could you explain your position?

There's more.

The Nazis wanted to eliminate you on the basis of your genetics, the Communists on the basis of your ideas. The former is primitive and barbaric, the latter more in line with civilized norms.

True, the distinction does not hold up under scrutiny - as Orwell and many others noted - but it is powerfull.

But Nazi genetic ideas were so distorted (mongrelization?) that their philosophy was no different than tribalism - the Hutus vs. the Tutsis.

The Nazis also had a great gift for self-dramatization - there is no Communist equivalent to "Triumph of the Will" - which magnified their evil.