Free Republic

Glad to see everyone is willing to condemn this guy on the basis of a few online newspaper articles.

Why do we even need a justice system? The New York Post says he’s guitly! Hang him high!

My friend’s kids were born in Hawaii. The birth certificates they have at home for them are the same short form ones Obama has produced.

This is not an issue.

Go do something useful.

You’ve got your facts wrong. Originally, Eric Thompson thought Maya civilization was some kind of war-free idyll, but then epigraphers like Yuri Knorosov and David Stuart (the youngest recipient of the Macarthur Genius grant btw) figured out the writing, and we learned that the Maya were as warlike as any other civilization (surprise, surprise).

When the Spaniards arrived, they brought massacre and enslavement. Christianity was an afterthought. (Literally: the priests only came after the original conquistadors had been there a few decades.)

Your post implies that the Maya (and their descendants) are somehow more violent than other people, but that’s not supported by any evidence. In fact, there’s no evidence that any civilization has been more peaceful or more bellicose than any other.

Something else that seems to get lost in the shuffle is the fact that life under Stalin was no different in terms of freedom of thought, association, expression, etc. from life under the Tsars (any of them). The current return we’re seeing to an all-encompassing State in Russia under Putin is just a natural return to the status quo.

In other words, “communism” (an economic theory) had nothing to do with totalitarian oppression in Russia, which comfortably co-existed with feudalism and now with capitalism. China and Vietnam are other examples of totalitarian systems working together very well with capitalism.

What you’re saying would be true if the KGB were claiming him as one of their own. They weren’t. They only said his over-zealous activities were so discrediting to anti-Communism in general that they caused ordinary people to drop their guard.

This is how it works: McCarthy calls *everyone* a communist. In response, people assume *no one* is a communist. This allows those Soviet spies that were active greater leeway in their operations. This is what the KGB meant when they said he was a boon to their operations.

You’re right. Soviet disinformation was very common in the US during the Cold War, and even made its way into pop culture (e.g., that whole story about J. Edgar Hoover being a cross-dresser was Soviet disinformation). In this case, however, the source of the glowing assessment of McCarthy is internal KGB memos, etc.; i.e., not disinformation.

It’s the KGB who said, in their own internal documents, that McCarthy was a boon to their operations. It doesn’t get much more damning than that.

In Christopher Andrews and Vasily Mitrokhin’s “The Mitrokhin Archive,” a history of Cold War espionage written on the basis of internal KGB documents copied by Vasily Mitrokhin during his tenure as chief archivist at the KGB (he was exfiltrated by the British in the 90s), the KGB notes that at his peak, McCarthy so discredited anti-Soviet vigilance in the US and anti-Communist sentiment in general that he could not have been more valuable to the Soviets had he been an actual KGB spy. Think about that—McCarthy did more to extend covert Soviet action on US territory than all the KGB’s spies put together. His intentions may have been patriotic, but the result of his actions was to compromise US security. Ordinarily, that’s called treason.

Why don’t you send her something useful, like a subscription to the Economist or the Wall St. Journal, or something?