Why The New McCarthyism Is So Dangerous

“To me this is one of the more remarkable things of this campaign, which is that any of us who grew up in politics or came of age as an American in the sixties or the seventies or the eighties, or even the nineties knows that central to American political discourse has always been trying to tie your political opponents to Russia. To demonizing the Kremlin as the ultimate evil, and then trying to insinuate that your political adversaries are somehow secretly sympathetic to, or even controlled by, Russian leaders and Kremlin operatives and Russian intelligence agencies. And this was not just the McCarthyism, which was sort of the peak of that, but even long after. This was typically a Republican tactic used against Democrats. So, if Democrats advocated greater detente with the Russians, arms deals or other negotiations with Russia to decrease tensions or decrease conflict, Republicans would immediately accuse those liberals and Democrats of advocating that, of being — either having allegiance to the Kremlin or being useful idiots or stooges of Russian leaders.”

The above was spoken by powerhouse journalist Glenn Greenwald in an interview with Democracy NOW in August of last year, when the McCarthyite demonization of the Democrats’ political opponents was just getting underway. He was not only referring to the insinuations that the Democrats had begun making about Trump, but about Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange as well.

I’m hearing some concern from my readers that I’ve been investing too much energy and attention in pushing back against the lying McCarthyist smear pieces that the Daily Banter has been putting out about me asserting that I’m a Kremlin propagandist with no training in journalism. I understand this concern, but with all due respect to my lovely readers this is where the fight is. This is the toxic mind virus that we clear-eyed rebels have been fighting. The new McCarthyism is the teeth of the dangerous neocon agenda to manufacture support for escalated tensions with a nuclear superpower in order to advance a geopolitical power grab by the US power establishment.

The raw, ferocious power of 1950s McCarthyism was used with terrible efficacy to demolish much of the socialist advances that FDR had put forward, to undermine unions, and ultimately to put America on the trajectory toward the neoliberal Walmart economy that we see before us today. What makes today’s McCarthyism so dangerous is that we are seeing this exact same fearmongering, demagogic political tactic being used not just to advance a domestic political agenda (it’s being used more defensively at this point in that regard since that agenda has already been pretty much fully actualized), but to kill off any public criticism of escalations with Russia itself.

We are already at a point where the public is self-censoring for fear of public backlash if they don’t support the establishment narrative that Russia is somehow uniquely nefarious in world affairs and has successfully infiltrated the very highest levels of the US government. Emily Tock writes the following:

Every time I post anything critical of this Russaphobia insanity, I’m piled on by friends. I found this post on fb by News & Guts (https://www.facebook.com/newsandguts/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED&fref=nf). The fb comments are truly frightening, as is the article. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/us/politics/trump-comey-russia-fbi.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0

One commenter on fb actually said that he’s been on Irish websites and has a ‘feeling’ that the commenters who don’t take the Russian threat seriously are Russian plants.

I have a degree in Russian lang & lit and lived and worked in Russia for several years and am very much a leftist; therefore, my friends just think I’m a Putin apologist because in their black and white world you’re either with the US or with Russia. They will not even admit that this idiocy is spilling over into everyday life. I have Russian friends in the US who will not speak their native language in public because they are afraid. I’ve been told to take my Russian-language abilities off of my resume, because it ‘might put people off’. This mania is insidious and much more far-reaching than during the first Cold War.

I’m receiving more and more complaints about the way establishment loyalists, fueled by the xenophobic demagoguery of McCarthyist pundits like Rachel Maddow, attack, bully, slander and intimidate people into silence when anyone tries to inject any critical thought about the establishment Russia narrative into US political discourse. I can personally attest that not a day has gone by in quite some time where my own writing has not been attacked and diminished by these establishment loyalists as the work of a subversive Kremlin operative, often with such vitriol and hatred that I could easily see a lot of people being cowed into silence by it. Saying that someone is literally a paid intelligence operative conducting psychological warfare upon the American people on behalf of a hostile foreign government is a very serious accusation which could scare anyone into sitting down and shutting up, and it is being flung about with ever-increasing carelessness.

“You know it’s easy to joke about this, except that we’re at maybe the most dangerous moment in US-Russian relations in my lifetime, and maybe ever. And the reason is that we’re in a new cold war, by whatever name. We have three cold war fronts that are fraught with the possibility of hot war, in the Baltic region where NATO is carrying out an unprecedented military buildup on Russia’s border, in Ukraine where there is a civil and proxy war between Russia and the west, and of course in Syria, where Russian aircraft and American warplanes are flying in the same territory. Anything could happen.”
~ Stephen Cohen

Stephen Cohen is arguably the leading American authority on US-Russian relations, and he has been warning again and again that we are currently in what could be an even more dangerous nuclear situation with Russia than we were at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis due to all the many fronts on which tensions have been astronomically escalated, and the fact that Trump has to deal with political pressures to never back down or concede an inch to Russia while negotiating these tensions. In the current environment of US political discourse, we’re not even allowed to talk about this horrifying prospect. The people whose interests the US government is meant to represent have been transformed by corporate media into their own prison wardens; swept up in the McCarthyist hysteria, people now think that it’s okay to attack, slander and lie about critics of the establishment narrative and silence any critical thinking about the world-threatening implications of what we’re dealing with here.

Both Jeremy Fassler and Ben Cohen have been citing the fact that I criticize establishment narratives as justification for the lies that they have been knowingly publishing about me. It’s not entirely their fault that they think this way, though; they happen to be the ones I’m butting heads with at this point in time, but there are millions more just like them in rank-and-file America who, because of Washington think tank-generated corporate media brainwashing, think that this is an acceptable way to conduct oneself in political discourse. It’s not entirely their fault that they have fallen victim to this reprehensible political tactic, but they do ultimately have responsibility for their own lives, and this toxic mind virus does need to be fought.

For this reason, I invite everyone who sees this McCarthyist feeding frenzy for the dangerous force that it is to please join me in fighting back against it. Support each other in insisting on your right to speak, speak your truth even if your voice shakes, fight back tooth and claw against anyone who tries to intimidate you into silence as though your lives depend on it, because they probably do. I’ll keep everyone informed of the legal action I’m taking against the Daily Banter, so stay tuned.

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