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(Martin Dies, 1939 - managed to take the lunatic fringe to the lunatic edge)

A few months ago I ran a piece on Martin Dies, and his infamous Dies Committee for Un-American Activities. An earlier incarnation of Joe McCarthy, Dies also managed to slide off the rails with vicious accusations and wild innuendos about people in and around power. Famously fabricating lists of "known communists", many of whom did not exist.

But just before World War 2, paranoia was rife. We were dangling on the precipice of getting involved. The war had already started by the time this address was given on October 27, 1939 and fear of being overtaken by some evil foreign entity was running rampant in the newspapers on the radio and on Capitol Hill.

So Dies took up the crusade, cloaking himself in Americanism and preaching the gospel of fear, whipping people into a state of frenzy.

Martin Dies: “These enemies within our country are not easily exposed, it is most difficult to expose fearlessly and without partisanship the termites who have ceaselessly gnawed at the pillars of this republic, because there are those who would like for us to be partisan when the question is involved. I said in the beginning of this investigation that I was determined it would be conducted without fear and without favor and that I would not hesitate to expose any man, whether he’s a Democrat or he’s a Republican. Whether he’s a New Dealer or an anti-New Dealer. Whether he works in the government or whether he’s working in industry. Only on that basis can I reconcile my attitude with my conscience. If the time has come when in the interest of political expediency and in behest to demands of party leadership I must qualify my conscience, I’ll surrender my commission and go back to private life. At least with my honor unimpaired.”

Clearly, fear and paranoia haven't gone out of fashion. And the practitioners of that fear will probably never go broke perpetuating it. The times change, the situations change, the enemies change. But the fear hate and mistrust, then as now, are all the same.

Comforting, isn't it?

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(Ernst Reuter - first Mayor of Postwar Berlin - no easy gig)

With the 20th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall coming up, I've been running through some events involving Germany, and most notably Berlin, during the height of the Cold War.

Ernst Reuter had the somewhat herculean task of being the first Lord Mayor of postwar Berlin. In 1948 he was faced with the blockade of Berlin by the Soviet Army which effectively cut off all supplies of food and fuel to the city. Reuter appealed to the West for help and it began the famous Berlin Airlift, which singlehandedly saved the city from starvation.

On March 30, 1949, Reuter visited the U.S. and was invited to participate in a segment of Meet The Press where the subject of Berlin and the Cold War in general were discussed.

May Craig: “Mister Mayor I’m thinking of it in the larger sense, as long as the Communists hold the basic doctrine of world revolution how can there be peace unless everybody else submits?”

Ernst Reuter: “ As long as Western powers and the free world is not insisting on the liberation and not fulfilling the task to liberate these peoples who want to be free, that will be very difficult. But in the long run the Soviets cannot stay against the greater moral strengths of the western peoples, that is impossible. I don’t know, maybe after twenty, thirty years we will have a war, I don’t know. But for the time being I can see the possibility to come to a solution, at least for the time being without a war.”

Reuter, who died in 1953 never got to see the fruits of his labor, but he was a very integral part of the Big Picture.

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(China - 1949 - The exit strategy got a bit muddled)

October 2009 marks the 60th anniversary of the end of the Kuomintang (Nationalist) regime in China and the beginning of the Communist takeover of China.

Clearly evident was the amount of confusion over who was doing what and where they were going that even diplomats were hard pressed to keep up with the rapidly unfolding events.

As witness, this particular broadcast from October 1, 1949. A program produced by United Nations Radio called "Memo From Lake Success", which featured an interview by Nationalist Chinese Representative T.F. Tsiang regarding allegations the Soviets were supplying the Communist insurgents with arms and moral support. The week prior, accusations were made during press conferences quickly organized by the injured parties with denials from Andrei Vyshinksy, the Russian representative.

Dr. T.F. Tsiang: “The Soviet Union has given force, direct and indirect, with moral and material support to the Communist insurrection in China.”

Andrei Vyshinsky: “The statement of the representative of the Kuomintang regime is nothing but a slanderous attack against the Soviet Union.”

Despite the bickering back and forth, China had fallen to the Communists of Mao Tse-Tung by the time this broadcast aired. So the allegations and finger pointing were something of a moot point.

But that was just the start.

Phyllis Schlafly's How to Take Back America and Destroy it in the Process event this past weekend sure was chock full of nuts. What used to take place in the backrooms of the '90s militia-white power meetings is now on full display to America via the religious right and other assorted right-wing outfits. How sad this is happening to America at a time when the country and the world for that matter are struggling to get through the day. People are trying to find work, pay their bills and not go broke because of their lack of health insurance and now they are getting besieged by a stealth attack of Obama is Hitler garbage.

Lee Fang:

At the How To Take Back America Conference last weekend, conservative speaker Kitty Werthmann led a workshop called “How to recognize living under Nazis & Communists.” Announcing the panel in a column preceding the conference, talk show host Janet Porter gushed how Werthmann’s description of Austria in the 1930s is a “mirror to America” today — noting “They had Joseph Goebbels; we have Mark Lloyd, the diversity czar.” The room was packed over capacity to hear Werthmann, who grew up as a Christian in Austria and serves as Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum South Dakota President.

During her session, Werthmann went through a litany of examples of how President Obama is like Adolf Hitler. She noted that Hitler, who acted “like an American politician,” was “elected in a 100% Christian nation.” Although she failed to once mention Antisemitism or militarism, Werthmann explained how universal healthcare, an Equal Rights Amendment, and increased taxes were telltale signs of Nazism. Werthmann also warned the audience:

If we had our guns, we would have fought a bloody battle. So, keep your guns, and buy more guns, and buy ammunition. [...] Take back America. Don’t let them take the country into Socialism. And I refer again, Hitler’s party was National Socialism. [...] And that’s what we are having here right now, which is bordering on Marxism.

These freaks are preaching violence to the conservative base and it's sickening. Violence is spreading like wildfire in America (Just ask the Pittsburgh police after the Richard Poplawski incident) because of them even though they'll deny they had a hand in it like Bill O'Reilly did when Dr. Tiller was murdered. And there will always be a Juan Williams to defend their hate speak at every turn.

If you've forgotten how they operate just read this post and you'll cringe.

I think someone needs to alert the DHS about this since it falls within their guidelines on extremism. Watching Kitty speak just re-enforces the report and explains why the right freaked out over it when it initially became public.

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(Joe McCarthy - Crown Prince of Making It Up As He Went Along)

I've been hearing the name Joe McCarthy being bandied around in recent days - mostly misquoted and misrepresented by people living in a fact-free environment.

Joe McCarthy probably represented one of the darker periods in American history - one based on fear and hysteria and paranoia. A period where innuendo carried weight and facts were so hazy and misquoted that shreds of truth were difficult, if not impossible to find - and it was McCarthy who held court during this reign of terror - one which destroyed and mutilated countless innocent lives. And all because the new-found power was intoxicating and McCarthy luxuriated in it.

Portraying himself as the selfless crusader for Justice in America, he took advantage of the susceptible, the easily led, the malleable - much the same as the Teabag movement is doing now. Make up facts if they don't subscribe to a certain ideology and repeat them over and over until they become true. McCarthy was master at it.

Here he is at an Irish Fellowship meeting on the occasion of St. Patrick's Day in Chicago, speaking to a group of 1500 on March 17, 1954.

Joe McCarthy: “There’s only one Communist Party. The Communist Party that puts out this pamphlet. Setting the line for the Communist Party in the United States, is the same Communist Party that tells 5th Amendment Communists how they should testify. It’s the same Communist Party , if you please, that ordered American boys, have their hands wired behind their backs, and their brains blown out with Communist machine guns. It’s one and the same party, my good friends. Now there are those who say ‘well, it’s all right to dig them out, but oh we don’t like your method. Well, my good friends, up to this date, to this very moment, none of those who said they don’t like the methods have told us any other method they could use that would be effective. And when you hear them crying that they don’t like the methods I suggest that you ask them when and where they ever exposed a Communist by their methods? They say, when they say ‘you don’t treat them like gentlemen’, I’d like to ask them, take the twenty, the twenty whom I’ve named to you. If they don’t give us general statements my good friends, say pick out one of those cases, and tell us where we ever mistreated any of those innocent Communists? You know, it’s easy to make those general comments. And when they say we don’t treat them like gentlemen, while we do I might say that if we did not, I would not cry for them. Traitors are not gentlemen, my good friends. They don’t understand being treated like gentlemen!"

As ever - some things just never change. Only the names and the faces.