I’m often taken to task by some of my readers for characterizing the current
anti-Russian hysteria as “McCarthyism.” After all, they say, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was right
– there were, indeed, high-ranking individuals in the
US government covertly sympathetic to the Soviet regime. And, yes, we now
know that many of these were working directly for Soviet intelligence.
This was the predictable result of our wartime alliance with Russia: combined
with the left-wing proclivities of the Roosevelt administration, and the “Popular
Front” politics of the Communist Party USA during this period, it’s surprising
that Soviet penetration of US government circles wasn’t more extensive than
it turned out to be.
In any case, what we are seeing today with the revival of the cold war mindset
is in many ways the complete opposite of the “old” McCarthyism: the target
may be the same – Russia as the bogeyman de jour – but the methods and sources
of the neo-McCarthyites are quite different.
To begin with, the “old” McCarthyism was a movement generated from below, and
aimed at the elites: the “new” McCarthyism is a media construct, generated from
above and created by the elites.
The average American, while hardly a Putin groupie, is not laying awake at
night worrying about the “Russian threat.” The fate of Ukraine, not to mention
Crimea, is so far from his concerns that the distance can only be measured in
light-years. And when some new scandal breaks as a result of WikiLeaks releasing
the emails of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, Joe Sixpack doesn’t think “Oh,
that just proves Julian Assange is a Kremlin toady!” WikiLeaks is merely confirming
what Joe already knew: that Washington is a cornucopia of corruption.
The Acela corridor
elite, on the other hand, does lay awake at night wondering how they
can pull off a regime change operation that will eliminate the “threat” represented
by Putin once and for all. Ever since the Russian leader started mocking Washington’s
hegemonic pretensions, criticizing the US invasion of Iraq, and pointing out
how US-funded Syrian “rebels” are merely jihadists in “moderate” clothing, Putin
has been in their crosshairs – and the propaganda war has been relentless.
This barrage has gone into overdrive with the launching of the Clinton campaign’s
effort to smear Donald Trump as a Kremlin “puppet.” You
have to go all the way back to the earliest days of our Republic, when pro-British
supporters of Alexander Hamilton were sliming the Jeffersonian Democrats with
accusations that they were agents of the French revolutionaries, to come up
with the historical equivalent of Hillary’s “you’re a puppet” charges directed
at Trump. And the media, being an auxiliary of the Clinton campaign, has been
filled with even more