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February 26, 2003 2:20 p.m.
Two Cheers for “McCarthyism”?
Taking it back — a lit= tle.

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One of the most difficult things for a conservative to write about is McCarthyism. The problem is simple: McCarthyi= sm has come to mean anything liberals or leftists consider t= o be unfair, unjust, un-nice.

What makes McCarth= yism so hard to discuss is that McCarthy behaved like a jerk, but he was also right. Every movement has i= ts jerks, the Left included — but liberals are unwilling to elevate th= ese people to villain status or to make their tactics into a full-blown "ism." Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton= are perfectly willing to accuse any Tom, Dick, or Harry of racism without reg= ard to the damage this might do their careers. But we don't talk about "Jacksonism" or "Shar= ptonism," even though being labeled a racist is the modern equivalent of being labe= led a Communist..

Senator Joe McCart= hy was a lout, generally speaking. But he was on the right side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well. If, in some sort of parallel-universe exercise, the same number of (now proven) Soviet-Commun= ist spies, collaborators, sympathizers, and the like were somehow switched to Nazis, and McCarthy went after them with the same vehemence as he went af= ter Reds, Joe McCarthy might well have universities and foundations named aft= er him today. Just imagine if = a ring of Nazi party members were found to be working in the State Department, t= aking money from Berlin to advance the Nazi cause. = Does anyone really think "McCarthyism" would still be denounced as an unmitigated evil, often put at the front of the parade of horribles alongside Hitlerism and Stalinism?

Now, I'm sure many people are rolling their eyes at this point. "It's not the same thing!" The argu= ment over which was worse, Communism or Nazism, will never be settled. Nor should we expect it to be. But even if you firmly believe t= hat Nazism was more evil than Communism, as even Robert Conquest does, you mu= st concede that Communism was evil enough. If the sight of an American Comm= unist screenwriter being forced to take the Fifth Amendment before Congress and have his "career ruined" still fills you with blinding rage, it= 's indeed curious why the forced slaughter of millions by Stalin seems like a trivial event to you. After= all, there were plenty of men and women invoking their "rights" as t= heir heels left lines in the dirt on the way to the gulag. Needless to say, their careers w= ere ruined too. And if the Amer= ican Communists had had their way, much the same thing would have happened her= e as well.

Regardless, wherev= er you come down on McCarthyism, Communism, and the rest is a matter of opinion. What is a matter o= f fact — unmitigated, irrefutable, undeniable fact — is that there <= i>were hundreds of Communists working for Moscow, directly or indirectly, in the United States during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.&nb= sp; The Rosenbergs were guilty and got what they deserved.&= nbsp; Alger Hiss too. Vict= or Perlo, Judith Coplon, M= orton Sobell, William Perl, A= lfred Sarant, Joel Barr, and Harry Gold were all either p= awns or lackeys of a foreign and evil foe.&nb= sp; The American Communist Party (CP-USA) was in fact a Soviet franchise.

The evidence ̵= 2; from declassified Venona transcripts, Soviet archives, memoirs, etc. = 212; is still mounting, but what we have so far is plenty in itself. The playwright Lillian Hellman declared: "The McCarthy group — a loose term for all the boys, lobbyists, congressmen, State Department bureaucrats, CIA operators — was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much. The Age of McCarthyis= m, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolen= t as two generations of high school and college students have been taught."

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comp= lete article at http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg022603.asp