Irving Progressive

One of the less savoury trends in modern American life has been the return of bullying and intimidation to the public sphere. It is quite clear to me that many Americans either never paid attention to their modern History lessons in school, or cannot read, because the lessons taught by the McCarthy era appear to have been largely forgotten. One of the main lessons that has been forgotten is that the media of the time totally failed to challenge McCarthy on any of his supposed basis for initially claiming the existence of "hundreds of Communists" in the government. He was able to pull horseshit numbers out of thin air for years, using exactitude as a tool for burnishing superficial credibility. Ironically, his downfall was only sealed when the Army blew him up in public in hearings. Up until that point just about everybody in the media and public life had been complicitly marching in various degress of lock-step with McCarthy as he abused whole areas of the legal and legislative processes to demonize, marginalize and victimize anybody who refused to kow-tow to his worldview. McCarthy should have been a compelling story to Americans of the dangers of credulity when listening to bullies, but sadly nearly every lesson of the McCarthy era seems to have already been forgotten.
In the past 8 years I have seen many of the tactics originally deployed by McCarthy and some of his fascist predecessors resurrected and used in the same way against people who asked awkward questions and who challenged leadership orthodoxy, particularly after 9/11. If I believe many of those bullying little shits, I am a traitorous and un-American piece of vermin. I also have taken note of how John McCain and Sarah Palin have been firing up supporters at rallies in the past few weeks by repeating factually inaccurate lies and slurs about their opponents, then standing by as riled-up supporters suggest wonderfully positive approaches to their opponents like "Kill him!". This sort of "take them to the edge" behaviour is also rather familiar to those of us who watched film footage of Nazi and Fascist ralies in the 1930's when (unlike many people in this country) we actually studied World History in some detail in high school. My British compatriot Oswald Mosley was adept at the same behaviour at Brownshirt rallies in the UK, as I well recall from history film viewings.
The film director William Freidkin also appears to have fallen into the sights of a bullying pressure group, as he explains in this article on Huffington Post. Just like Joseph McCarthy, who often adhered to the tabloid journalism principle that one should never let the facts get in the way of a good story, the Americans For Limited Government Foundation appears to be unable to get even basic facts about Freidkin's life or political affiliations correct, although none of that information is any of their damned business in the first place. Friedkin's take-down (supported by a jocular, but still perfectly serious lawyer's letter) is worth reading, partly for entertainment value, but also because this is indeed the right way to respond to this kind of threatening, bullying crap.