Deadly Anti-History
Written by: Diana West
Tuesday, May 02, 2017 9:41 AM

Not a reader but a tweeter reminded me that on May 2, 1957, Senator Joseph McCarthy died.

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of his death at the age of 48.

I didn't know very much about McCarthy before I read M. Stanton Evans' Blacklisted by History. To write this book, Evans reconstructed McCarthy's political life from long lost, stolen or forgotten primary documents, in the process eviscerating the mass of McCarthy "anti-history" that keeps the nation reviling one of its greatest heroes. (Here are just a couple of recent examples of such anti-history.)

I am convinced that until we get McCarthy right, we will keep losing to our enemies within.

To add a little context on Sen. McCarthy and his investigations, an excerpt from American Betrayal follows:

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Like today’s cries of “Islamophobia,” like the still-current cry of “McCarthyism,” the cry of “Red-baiting” in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s denoted taboo, requiring an immediate cease to all debate -- and thus a continued block against “exposure.” Interestingly enough, [HUAC/Dies Committee investigator Robert] Stripling notes that Dies Committee investigations into German, Japanese, and Italian subversive activities in the run-up to World War II were widely lauded, even inspiring government action -- as when an investigation into Adolf Hitler’s use of German diplomatic and consular officers as spies in this country led FDR to shut German consulates down. “But,” Stripling continues, “whenever we cast an inquiring eye on the equally subversive activities of the Communist Party, we were instantly assailed, though the strongest microscope could not differentiate between the nature of the Party’s conspiracy and that of the Germans, Japanese and Italians.”17

[Ex-socialist journalist Eugene] Lyons, too, observed this same double standard at work, noting the favorable reception studies of fascism and Nazism in America typically received. “We have yet to hear their authors denounced as brown-baiters, black-baiters or silver-baiters,” he writes, noting the colors adopted by fascist and Nazi followers. On the contrary, “the charges [against fascists and Nazis] are assayed on the basis of their truth or falsity. They are not arbitrarily dismissed with a hackneyed epithet. There is yet among us, it happens, no taboo against examining and if necessary condemning the operation of Mussolini, Hitler and their direct or indirect agents.”18

Not so Communism in the 1930s, Lyons’s “red decade,” or the 1940s, which Stripling would look back on, noting, “Of course, we fully expected to be smeared by leading Communists and by ‘The Daily Worker’ and its abusive carbon copies. But we did not expect what often became an avalanche of abuse from more conservative quarters—from men as high in public esteem as Franklin D. Roosevelt.”19

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While some primary documents have made all-too-easy pickings in open archives, others remain overly protected. Declassified FBI files, which Evans describes as “a treasure trove of information on Communist penetration of American life and institutions, suspects tracked down by the Bureau, countermea- sures taken, and related topics,” remain heavily censored.

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This is astonishing. After all, we’re not talking about three-thousand-year- old cuneiform tablets, fragments of ancient papyrus, or shards of pre-Columbian pottery. These are essential documents of relatively recent vintage. They date back to an era some of us were actually born into, and some of us still predate. It was concurrent with radar, sonar, atomic energy, and the jet engine, not to mention good old Smith Corona typewriters and carbon paper, and it featured functioning institutions equipped with archivists and protocols for record keeping and the like. There is simply no good reason for these missing links, nor is there any sound purpose for the U.S. government’s continuing to withhold so much evidence from Us, the People. There must be a reason and purpose behind the continued secrecy, but it is neither good nor sound. That’s because such secrecy only preserves the life of the lies that the release of the documents would destroy.

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Evans observes, “It’s not too much to say . . . that the loss of so many primary records has created a kind of black hole of antiknowledge in which strange factoids and curious fables circulate without resistance.”25

Maybe in this black hole of antiknowledge lies the epicenter of American betrayal. Of course, Evans’s entire book stands as bold correction of such “antiknowledge.” With hard-won facts, he reconstructs McCarthy’s career without the dirty smears that the Establishment used to depict “the caveman in the sewer,” as Evans describes the elite consensus on McCarthy, that “Red”-hunting monster of the liberal demonology who preyed on such pure souls of chivalric progressivism that they were besmirched even by proximity to his fetid clutches.

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Evans explains the reluctance to reevaluate McCarthy’s role as an anti- Communist warrior: “Such reluctance to tackle McCarthy in light of the new information may seem odd, but is understandable in context. ‘McCarthyism’ is the third rail in Cold War historiography—and of our political discourse in general—and any contact with it could prove fatal to writers trying to get their work accepted in academic or mainstream media circles.”27

Any contact could prove fatal. This should tell us the war isn’t over, not by a long shot. This should tell us it goes on, now, against an enemy who still controls vital territory -- political, academic and mainstream media circles -- to such a degree that research diverging from this party line cannot be published without dire consequences to the author. That’s because the cause these remnant or reflexive anti-anti-Communists championed in the absence—or, rather, the suppression—of facts has never been discredited to a point of acknowledged surrender. On the contrary, having successfully warded off attacks of the facts led by individuals of singular courage, having successfully maintained the vacuum of deception, they long ago usurped the prerogative of the victor—the writing of history—to produce the antihistory we rely on to this day

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http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/Entry...ti-History.aspx