I thought the first use of "McCarthyism" was in a NY Times political cartoon on March 29, 1950:
Posted on 06/30/2003 1:43:31 PM PDT by kattracks
It is one of the most enduring lies created by leftists: that all Hollywood trembled in fear over the persecution allegedly launched against Tinseltown by Sen. Joe McCarthy.
Along with the infamous Hollywood 10, actors, actresses, directors, producers and even the guys who swept the studio floors were allegedly writhing in agony, fearing they’d become victims of McCarthyism, and driven into unemployment and poverty.
There are just a few things wrong with this – to begin with it’s not true, Ann Coulter writes in her best-selling new book, "Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism."
Nowadays, nobody bothers to point out that the phrase "McCarthyism" first appeared in the pages of the Communist Party’s organ in the U.S., the Daily Worker, which got it directly from the bowels of the NKVD’s Moscow headquarters at 3 Dzerzinski Square, where it was coined by the Stalinist disinformation experts in the belief that leftist useful idiots in the U.S. would adopt it as their own. Which of course they did, eagerly, and continue to do so even today.
The hysterical cry of the terrible consequences of blacklisting – of McCarthy depriving honest hardworking Hollywood celebrities of an opportunity to ply their trade, was based on a lie. But as Coulter observes, everything we know about Joe McCarthy is a lie.
The fact is that the so-called blacklisting began when the House Committee on Un-American Activities held hearings to determine the extent of communist penetration of the film industry, which was extensive.
Witnesses known as the Hollywood 10, acting under orders from their communist bosses, refused to admit under oath that they were members of the Communist Party. For this contempt of Congress they went to jail for a brief of time.
The Supreme Court refused to hear their appeals. And these so-called victims of the McCarthyite reign of terror, instead of being deprived of their civil liberties, "had the benefit of legal counsel, trial by jury, and proof beyond a reasonable-doubt standard," Coulter writes. "Still the cosseted, overpampered Hollywood elites were shocked to discover they could be held responsible for anything they did, and vowed that the rest of the country would never hear the end of it.
"At about the same time – under the legal system Communists revered, Stalin executed, starved, exiled or imprisoned more than ten million people."
Coulter writes: "Ten Hollywood scribblers who subscribed to an ideology responsible for the murder by the million refused to admit their membership in the Communist party to a House Committee," which McCarthy had absolutely nothing to do with.
As Coulter repeatedly points out, McCarthy was a senator, not a member of the House of Representatives, where the committee did its work. He concentrated on communist infiltration into the U.S. government, which the evidence from the Venona intercepts now clearly shows to have been massive.
Recoiling in fear of being labeled employers of traitors, courageous Hollywood film moguls canned all 10 and refused to use them, at least not under their real names. As a result some of them were simply allowed to work under false names and kept on writing films and getting well paid.
Over and over we are told that the so-called blacklist created a reign of terror in Tinseltown, with everybody in filmdom cringing in fear.
Couler reveals the terrible exile endured by one of the blacklistees: Norma Barzman, who was forced to flee not to Devil’s Island, but instead to gay Paree, where, in her own words, she suffered such grievous punishment as having "dinner with Picasso every Tuesday night when we were at our country house in Provence. Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, Jacques Prevert were our friends. Plus we got to work with all the amazing European directors including Vittorio De Sica and Constantin Costa-Gavras. It was hard, but was also the time of my life."
Oh, the horrors of it all!
"Meanwhile," Coulter notes, "back in the country they preferred [the U.S.S.R.], people were being whisked off to Soviet gulags in the dead of night. They were being sentenced to work in forced labor camps. They were sent to Siberia for five years. They were being shot execution-style after being forced to confess to absurd diabolical conspiracies."
But there was a real Hollywood blacklist you never hear leftists talking about. As NewsMax.com reported in The Left’s Lies That Never Die, conservative anti-communists in Hollywood were denied work because of their beliefs. Men such as Bruce Cabot, Ward Bond, Adolph Menjou and many other members of John Wayne’s anti-communist Motion Picture Alliances were blacklisted and found work only in Wayne’s movies.
In "Treason" Ann Coulter proves her point again and again: Everything you think you know about Joe McCarthy is a lie.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
"Detante' is what a farmer has with his Turkey until Thanksgiving Day"
What "public warning"?
Herb Block was interviewed by Brian Lamb on 14th November, 1993.
Brian Lamb: Here's a cartoon from the year 1950 -- The headline on it is, "You mean I'm supposed to stand on that?" And right up here is the word "McCarthyism." Did you invent that?
Herb Block: That's the first use of that word that I know of and I remember how it originated because I wanted to put something on that tar barrel and you couldn't call it McCarthy himself, and you wouldn't say McCarthy techniques or so on and I thought, "Well, maybe just use one word, McCarthyism," and, you know, it caught on.
I would presume because they were under oath to tell the truth. I could be wrong.
If memory serves, all, or most, of the ten had been part of the Federal Writers' Project, which was part of the WPA (Work Progress Admin.). This program was a federally funded "make work" program for unemployed writers during the Depression.
Thus, the taxpayers had directly paid these communists to write their Soviet propaganda.
You ask that question, I assume to point out that their constitutional rights may have been violated. I am just using a bit of common sense here, since I am neither an attorney or an expert on the Constitution, but:
If the announced purpose of a group was to overthrow the US government and any member of that group was sworn to work towards achieving that purpose. Then would that person not have entered into a conspiracy to commit treason and thus would have committed a criminal act?
Does the government not have a right to investigate a group, which proposes to take over the country, by methods which are outside of the legal means to do so?
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