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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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From the latest Radio Times:
McCarthyism: There Were Reds Under the Bed
In the light of recent spy revelations, David Aaronovitch uncovers dramatic evidence that the notorious Communist hunter Joseph McCarthy may have been right after all about Soviet infiltration into the US government.
That’s this coming Sunday, July 25th, at 1.30pm, on BBC Radio 4.
Google, google. Here is more about the programme:
David Aaronovitch thinks the unthinkable about the McCarthy period.
The hunt for the so called ‘Reds under the beds’ during the Cold War is generally regarded as a deeply regrettable blot on U.S history. But the release of classified documents reveals that Joseph McCarthy was right after all about the extent of Soviet infiltration into the highest reaches of the U.S government.
Thanks to the public release of top secret FBI decryptions of Soviet communications, as well as the release under the fifty year rule of FBI records and Soviet archives, we now know that the Communist spying McCarthy fought against was extensive, reaching to the highest level of the State department and the White House.
We reveal that many of McCarthy’s anticommunist investigations were in fact on target. His fears about the effect Soviet infiltration might be having on US foreign policy, particularly in the Far East were also well founded.
The decrypts also reveal that people such as Rosenberg, Alger Hiss and even Robert Oppenheimer were indeed working with the Soviets. We explore why much of this information, available for years to the FBI, was not made public. We also examine how its suppression prevented the prosecution of suspects.
Finally, we explore the extent to which Joseph McCarthy, with his unsavoury methods and smear tactics, could have done himself a disservice, resulting in his name being forever synonymous with paranoia and the ruthless suppression of free speech.
Hearing from former FBI, CIA and KGB operatives as well as formerly blacklisted writers, David Aaronovitch, himself from a family of communists tells the untold story of Soviet influence and espionage in the United States.
Interesting. Phrases like “thinking the unthinkable”, coming from the BBC, generally signify something drearily conformist, of the sort that it is almost unthinkable to contest, like the claim that, I don’t know, economic growth is not all good, or that pollution pollutes. Not this time, I think you will agree.
Although, I distrust that last bit, about McCarthy’s “unsavoury tactics” being to blame for his failure. It was McCarthy’s fault that the Bolsheviks weren’t unmasked? I wait to be convinced that what saved the Bolsheviks of that time and place was Joe McCarthy’s ineptness. I prefer the more obvious explanation, which is that the very Bolsheviks who had, as McCarthy rightly claimed, dug themselves into the US government were the ones who stopped him.
I also rather resent the timing of this revelation. Now, they tell us? I think that one of the habits of the bad guys is to concede the truth, but only when it’s too late to do much good. The purpose of such admissions is not the truth for the sake of it, but to establish what honest fellows the bad guys are, so that their current or next pack of lies will also be believed, until that too is unmasked, too late, and so on. But maybe that’s to be too cynical, at any rate in this matter. I am not familiar with Aaronovitch’s writings and thinkings over the years. Maybe he’s a good guy.
I’ll certainly be having a listen to this. Either at 1.30pm on Sunday, or failing that, soon after.
Michael Tomasky blogs for the Guardian on American affairs. He is a fairly left wing Democrat, and is currently feeling down. He describes in this piece how a piece of internet humour cheered him up. He was sent a letter to the Red States (i.e. the ones voting Republican in the weird American convention for political colours) that reads:
Subject: Letter to the Red States:
Dear Red States.
If you manage to steal this election too, we’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren’t aware, that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all of the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.
To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states.
We get stem cell research and the best beaches. You get faith healing and swamps.
We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood.
We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.
There is more if you click the link.
I am not so much interested in whether the contrasts drawn in the letter are true or fair. I did not even understand many of them. I am very interested in the way that this kind of humour can no longer be kept secret from those who are the butt of the joke. Despite being in the form of a letter to the Red States the original writer of this (from the reference to stealing “this election too” it dates from before Obama’s victory and probably from just before Bush’s second term) must have known that it would be harmful to the Democrat cause to have it actually read by too many Red Staters, particularly come election time. It would arouse even more hostility from a bloc of voters the Democrats would like to reach when accompanied, as it often was, by the Jesusland map.
A couple of decades back – when this sort of thing was photocopier humour rather than internet humour – such a letter would have been seen overwhelmingly by fellow Democrats and Blue State persons. Now it can be found by anyone. It can be found by anyone years after the event. It keeps on being found years after the event.
At first I thought of this in personal terms: one can imagine this letter to the Red States appearing on the website of some minor political guy in 2010 and causing him embarrassment in 2020 when the Republicans run it as an attack ad on TV, or whatever has replaced TV, just as his plane lands at Texas as part of the last-minute tour of swing states. But, imagining harder, he could probably laugh it off. Some of these red-staters might even laugh with him. By then, a cultural change will have occurred. It will have emerged that everybody has multiple skeletons in their cupboard; you can not spend years on the internet without accumulating them.
Bigger than the effect on any one person, though, is the dispersed effect of lots of Republicans being slightly irritated and slightly more prone to think that when Democratic party politicians come courting their votes they are laughing at them behind their hands. As indeed they are. (I could but heroically will not digress into the question of whether Republicans laugh at Democrats in the same way. You are not missing much; the term “hegemonic discourse” was in there somewhere.) However possibly that dispersed irritation also will be moderated by the coming everybody’s-got-skeletons cultural change: by then we will all know more about how everybody has multiple faces that they show in different groups. (Strange how “two faced” is an insult but “multi-faceted” is praise.) Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we will all be less able to ignore our knowledge of everybody’s rotating mild disloyalty to all the groups to which they belong except the one to which they are talking at any particular minute.
Oddly enough the name of Michael Tomasky has come up in another context concerning stuff on teh interwebs being seen by eyes it was not intended for. American right wing blogs are fizzing about “JournoList”, this being a private internet forum for American left wing journalists, academics and think tankers, where they would work out this week’s media consensus. Tomasky was a member. So was David Weigel, a journalist for the Washington Post, who had to resign from covering conservative affairs for that paper after expressing his opinion of several leading conservatives on JournoList by means of a term that I at first thought referred to their alleged propensity to engage in illicit commerce with rats but I now deduce means to behave towards someone in an underhand manner. You will have deduced that JournoList is no longer private and that some people think that its members were acting towards the American public in an underhand manner.
There will be several scandals like this. Then they will stop because everyone will have adapted. The words “private internet forum” will be regarded as oxymoronic. The politically imprudent humour will continue, though. Nothing can shut a human mouth once it has started on a joke, except possibly the prospect of saving it up for a larger audience on the internet.
I am not talking about classical revolution by arms, but a revolution of ideas. I have been watching, and in may ways participating, in the growing split between world views that is contemporary America. I have little time for the fabric of the leftist views, although I have little problem with many of the lifestyle threads they support. They have now moved so far away from my own ‘center’ that I am much more inclined to throw in my lot with the ‘Country Party’ discussed in this The American Spectator article.
It is well worth reading, and although not perfectly congruent with libertarians, it is certainly far closer than the positions of contemporary liberals.
I just got the news: our friends in Massachusetts have received their Official Massachusetts Government Notification that their Initiative to Roll Back the Sales Tax from 6.25% to 3% is on the November 2, 2010 Ballot.
Carla Howell, I salute you!
Subtracting time needed to get to the area, at 146,000 barrels per day that translates into 9 million barrels that could have been processed since the initial offer was made by the Dutch.
– a commenter here called ‘Willab’ remarking on the belated US decision to accept Dutch assistance in dealing with the BP oil spill.
I have only just come across this article by Lawrence Solomon in the (Ontario) Financial Post of June 26 – about the five-star lunacy of the US government’s response to offers of help in cleaning up the mess. Highlights:
Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. …
…the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana’s marshlands with sand barriers …
… The U.S. government responded with “Thanks but no thanks … By May 5, … the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment
… Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.
When ships in U.S. waters take in oil-contaminated water, they are forced to store it. … In other words, U.S. ships have mostly been removing water from the Gulf, requiring them to make up to 10 times as many trips to storage facilities where they off-load their oil-water mixture, an approach Koops calls “crazy.”
The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer — but only partly. Because the U.S. didn’t want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.
A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out. With oil increasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand berms to minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is on U.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to build the berms. …
Draw your own conclusions.
“Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”
– Benjamin Franklin.
Happy 4th of July to my American friends and relations. This is a good day for all Anglospherists to remember.
In the United States one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has ever seen – people gathering in their millions to lobby unwittingly for a smaller share of the nation’s wealth
The Guardian’s George Monbiot is talking about the US Tea Party Movement.
Which is it, do you think? Has nobody ever told him about the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy, or does he just enjoy winding people like me up?
I have not yet given much thought to writing out a piece here on the oil spill – this is, on one level, a complex issue that does not lend itself to quick-fire blog postings. This article over at the Melangerie blog (which I thoroughly recommend) is a great piece, very fair and perceptive, in my view.
One issue for us free marketeers is this: we like to talk about how pollution is, in some ways, a property rights issue. When a huge oil leak contaminates a sea and damages vast amounts of marine life and say, fishing industries, it is an interesting question on how exactly that issue gets resolved without some way of apportioning costs and compensation. Is a state needed to oversee this? Can it be fixed by entirely non-state means?. There are some free market environmentalists out there who might have some ideas. Rather than write more, I would be interested in comments.
As well as the normal “liberal” distortions (in this case pretending that the de facto ban on both Alaska land drilling, off shore shallow water drilling, and Mountain State oil shale production, do not exist – these being the restrictions that force difficult and expensive deep water drilling) that Michelle Oddis outlines – please ponder the John Stossel story.
J.S. said whatever libertarian says on race – that racism is evil, but people should be allowed to keep people they do not like (for whatever stupid reason) off their property.
And for that all Hell broke lose – with “MediaMatters” and all the rest of the (very well funded) leftist (in the modern sense) organizations demanding that he be dismissed. The man is Jewish (counts for nothing – the left will smear him as a racist anyway), the man was a Democrat before he became a libertarian and has never been a Republican (counts for nothing – the left will smear him as …..), the man has “socially liberal” attitudes seeing nothing wrong with homosexual acts or whatever (counts for nothing – the left will smear him as……).
Being opposed to the left (in the modern sense of the establishment – to the elite that control most of the institutions in society, including many private ones) and yet in the public eye is to undergo trial by fire every day – against a ruthless enemy that will stop at nothing to destroy you. They will lie and cheat and smear, do anything they believe they “have” to do for the collectivist cause).
So one faces a choice – either give in and become a de facto leftist (like the house “conservatives” the New York Times employs to attack real conservatives, or like David Frumm, or Andrew “cash for clunkers is an example of good limited government” Sullivan) or accept that you will be treated as a monster – and that even after you die your name will be spat on and the left will try and train even your own children to hate your memory.
That is the alternative that, for example, Glenn Beck has accepted (he knows that the left will eventually destroy him – and has asked his children to keep private journals so that they will have something real to remember their father by), but it is a hard road to walk. As Mr Stossel is discovering.
Stossel is lucky that he works for the one major media organization that might not fire him or force him to resign – but even that is not certain, for Rupert M. is no hero.
“Why do journalists not dissent from the leftist consensus” – because the left will DESTROY you if you do dissent (if they can find any way to do so).
Deep down the left support the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States about as much as they support the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. And the British left is not different.
This is what Oddis wrote:
I turned on the TV Sunday morning just in time to hear TIME Magazine’s Joe Klein on the “Chris Matthews Show” claim that Obama’s approval ratings won’t be affected negatively by the Gulf oil spill.
He is “incredibly lucky in his opposition — the oil spill is a great example,” said Klein. “The Republicans look worse on that than the Democrats do.” A chuckle was shared between Klein and Matthews.
In hindsight Democrats should be reminded that we are drilling in deep offshore wells (5,000 feet or more) because berserk environmentalists refuse to let anyone drill into the rocky tundra of ANWR even though over 75% percent of Alaskans support this kind of exploration.
Now how does this situation make Republicans look worse? Read more here and watch Glenn Beck back in 2008 explain the truth about ANWR.
A ‘muslim’ babe called Rimah Fakih wins a beauty pageant in the USA and apparently this is a Hezbollah conspiracy.
Rimah Fakih strikes a nice Islamic pose much favoured in Hezbollah circles whilst onlookers chant “Allahu Akbar!”
Rimah Fakih contemplates sharia in Michigan
Rimah Fakih models the latest in approved burqa fashions Yup, clearly a sign of how deep radical muslim infiltration of key American institutions go. Moreover as we all know that beauty pageant winners are known for their original thinking and deep political insights, and moreover some radical in Lebanon (this one, not this one) shares her family name apparently, the Islamisation of the good ol’ USA is clearly at hand.
I have posted these images as a wake up call to American to act before they are overrun with bikini wearing pole dancers intent on destroying the home of the free and land of the brave.
No need to thank me… just another high minded public service from samizdata.net 
The non-mainstream anti-Obama media in the USA have been describing this Gulf of Mexico oil spill as, potentially, Obama’s Katrina. President Obama has, they say, been too slow in responding.
I dissent. Not about the reality of it all. Maybe Obama has indeed responded too slowly. About that, I don’t know. I would only say that just because he has been taking his time about making big speeches about it doesn’t mean he hasn’t kept abreast of it.
No, my dissent concerns the political significance of all this. I think this disaster could be the making of the Obama presidency, in much the same way that the Oklahoma bomb rescued President Clinton at a time when he was staring the ignominy of a one-term presidency in the face. As I said in this posting here, and as others have explained in greater detail, the Oklahoma bombing enabled Clinton to completely change the political narrative in the USA and to put the Republicans on the back foot – which was why no seriously good Republican candidate was even willing to stand against Clinton when Clinton was trying to get re-elected and why the bloke they did pick made such a confused mess of his campaign.
I think this oil spill could be about to do the same kind of thing for President Obama. → Continue reading: Why the Gulf of Mexico oil spill could be a double catastrophe
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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