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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/blum05132010.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/blum05132010.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">May 13,
2010<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Terminally
Stupid People Have Always Been With Us <br><br>
<br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4 color="#990000">We've
Seen the Likes of the Teabaggers Before
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By WILLIAM
BLUM <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">I</font><font size=3>f
you shake your head and roll your eyes at the nonsense coming out of the
Teabagger followers of Sarah “Africa is a country” Palin and other
intellectual giants like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh ... If you have
thoughts of moving abroad after the latest silly lies and fantasies like
“Obama the Marxist” and “Obama the antichrist” ... If you share
Noam Chomsky’s feeling: "I have never seen anything like this in my
lifetime” ... keep in mind that the right wing has long been at least as
stupid and as mean-spirited. Consider some of the behavior of the
same types for half a century during the Cold War with its beloved --
albeit imaginary -- "International Communist Conspiracy”. <br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd> * 1948: The Pittsburgh Press published the names, addresses,
and places of employment of about 1,000 citizens who had signed
presidential-nominating petitions for former Vice President Henry
Wallace, running under the Progressive Party. This, and a number of
other lists of “communists”, published in the mainstream media, resulted
in people losing their jobs, being expelled from unions, having their
children abused, being denied state welfare benefits, and suffering
various other punishments.<br><br>
<dd> * Around 1950: The House Committee on Un-American Activities
published a pamphlet, “100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the
U.S.A.” This included information about what a communist takeover
of the United States would mean:<br><br>
<dd>Q: What would happen to my insurance?<br><br>
<dd>A: It would go to the Communists.<br><br>
<dd>Q: Would communism give me something better than I have now?<br><br>
<dd>A: Not unless you are in a penitentiary serving a life sentence at
hard labor.<br><br>
<dd> * 1950s: Mrs. Ada White, member of the Indiana State Textbook
Commission, believed that Robin Hood was a Communist and urged that books
that told the Robin Hood story be banned from Indiana schools.<br><br>
<dd> * As evidence that anti-communist mania was not limited to the
lunatic fringe or conservative newspaper publishers, here is Clark Kerr,
president of the University of California at Berkeley in a 1959 speech:
“Perhaps 2 or even 20 million people have been killed in China by the new
[communist] regime.” One person wrote to Kerr: “I am wondering how
you would judge a person who estimates the age of a passerby on the
street as being 'perhaps 2 or even 20 years old.' Or what would you
think of a physician who tells you to take 'perhaps 2 or even twenty
teaspoonsful of a remedy'?”<br><br>
<dd> * Throughout the cold war, traffic in phoney Lenin quotes was
brisk, each one passed around from one publication or speaker to another
for years. Here's U.S. News and World Report in 1958 demonstrating
communist duplicity by quoting Lenin: “Promises are like pie crusts, made
to be broken.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles used it in a
speech shortly afterward, one of many to do so during the cold war.
Lenin actually did use a very similar line, but he explicitly stated that
he was quoting an English proverb (it comes from Jonathan Swift) and his
purpose was to show the unreliability of the bourgeoisie, not of
communists.<br><br>
<dd> “First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia,
then we will encircle the United States, which will be the last bastion
of capitalism. We will not have to attack. It will fall like
an overripe fruit into our hands.” This Lenin “quotation” had the
usual wide circulation, even winding up in the Congressional Record in
1962. This was not simply a careless attribution; this was an
out-and-out fabrication; an extensive search, including by the Library of
Congress and the United States Information Agency failed to find its
origin.<br><br>
<dd> * A favorite theme of the anti-communists was that a principal
force behind drug trafficking was a communist plot to demoralize the
United States. Here's a small sample:<br><br>
<dd>Don Keller, District Attorney for San Diego County, California in
1953: “We know that more heroin is being produced south of the border
than ever before and we are beginning to hear stories of financial
backing by big shot Communists operating out of Mexico City.” <br><br>
<dd> Henry Giordano, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics, 1964, interviewed in the American Legion Magazine:
Interviewer: “I've been told that the communists are trying to flood our
country with narcotics to weaken our moral and physical stamina. Is
that true?”<br><br>
<dd>Giordano: “As far as the drugs are concerned, it's true.
There's a terrific flow of drugs coming out of Yunnan Province of China.
... There's no question that in that particular area this is the aim of
the Red Chinese. It should be apparent that if you could addict a
population you would degrade a nation's moral fiber.”<br><br>
<dd> Fulton Lewis, Jr., prominent conservative radio broadcaster and
newspaper columnist, 1965: “Narcotics of Cuban origin -- marijuana,
cocaine, opium, and heroin -- are now peddled in big cities and tiny
hamlets throughout this country. Several Cubans arrested by the Los
Angeles police have boasted they are communists.”<br><br>
<dd> We were also told that along with drugs another tool of the
commies to undermine America's spirit was fluoridation of the
water.<br><br>
<dd> * Mickey Spillane was one of the most successful writers of the
1950s, selling millions of his anticommunist thriller mysteries.
Here is his hero, Mike Hammer, in “One Lonely Night”, boasting of his
delight in the grisly murders he commits, all in the name of destroying a
communist plot to steal atomic secrets. After a night of carnage,
the triumphant Hammer gloats, “I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed
every minute of it. I pumped slugs into the nastiest bunch of
bastards you ever saw. ... They were Commies. ... Pretty soon what's left
of Russia and the slime that breeds there won't be worth mentioning and
I'm glad because I had a part in the killing. God, but it was
fun!” <br><br>
<dd> * 1952: A campaign against the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization because it was tainted with “atheism
and communism”, and was “subversive” because it preached
internationalism. Any attempt to introduce an international point
of view in the schools was seen as undermining patriotism and loyalty to
the United States. A bill in the US Senate, clearly aimed at
UNESCO, called for a ban on the funding of “any international agency that
directly or indirectly promoted one-world government or world
citizenship.” There was also opposition to UNESCO's association
with the UN Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that it was trying
to replace the American Bill of Rights with a less liberty-giving
covenant of human rights.<br><br>
<dd> * 1955: A US Army 6-page pamphlet, “How to Spot a Communist”,
informed us that a communist could be spotted by his predisposition to
discuss civil rights, racial and religious discrimination, the
immigration laws, anti-subversive legislation, curbs on unions, and
peace. Good Americans were advised to keep their ears stretched for
such give-away terms as "chauvinism", "book-burning",
"colonialism", "demagogy", "witch hunt",
"reactionary", "progressive", and
"exploitation". Another “distinguishing mark” of
“Communist language” was a “preference for long sentences.” After
some ridicule, the Army rescinded the pamphlet.<br><br>
<dd> * 1958: The noted sportscaster Bill Stern (one of the heroes of
my youth) observed on the radio that the lack of interest in "big
time" football at New York University, City College of New York,
Chicago, and Harvard "is due to the widespread acceptance of
Communism at the universities."<br><br>
<dd> * 1960: US General Thomas Power speaking about nuclear war or a
first strike by the US: "The whole idea is to kill the
bastards! At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one
Russian, we win!" The response from one of those present was:
"Well, you'd better make sure that they're a man and a
woman."<br><br>
<dd> * 1966: The Boys Club of America is of course wholesome and
patriotic. Imagine their horror when they were confused with the
Dubois Clubs. (W.E.B. Du Bois had been a very prominent civil
rights activist.) When the Justice Department required the DuBois
Clubs to register as a Communist front group, good loyal Americans knew
what to do. They called up the Boys Club to announce that they
would no longer contribute any money, or to threaten violence against
them; and sure enough an explosion damaged the national headquarters of
the youth group in San Francisco. Then former Vice President
Richard Nixon, who was national board chairman of the Boys Club,
declared: “This is an almost classic example of Communist deception and
duplicity. The 'DuBois Clubs' are not unaware of the confusion they
are causing among our supporters and among many other good
citizens.” <br><br>
<dd> * 1966: “Rhythm, Riots and Revolution: An Analysis of the
Communist Use of Music, The Communist Master Music Plan”, by David A.
Noebel, published by Christian Crusade Publications, (expanded version of
1965 pamphlet: “Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles”). Some
chapters: Communist Use of Mind Warfare ... Nature of Red Record
Companies ... Destructive Nature of Beatle Music ... Communist Subversion
of Folk Music ... Folk Music and the Negro Revolution ... Folk Music and
the College Revolution<br><br>
<dd> * 1968: William Calley, US Army Lieutenant, charged with
overseeing the massacre of more than 100 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai
in 1968, said some years later: "In all my years in the Army I was
never taught that communists were human beings. We were there to
kill ideology carried by -- I don't know -- pawns, blobs, pieces of
flesh. I was there to destroy communism. We never conceived
of old people, men, women, children, babies."<br><br>
<dd> * 1977: Scientists theorized that the earth's protective ozone
layer was being damaged by synthetic chemicals called
chlorofluorocarbons. The manufacturers and users of CFCs were not
happy. They made life difficult for the lead scientist. The
president of one aerosol manufacturing firm suggested that criticism of
CFCs was “orchestrated by the Ministry of Disinformation of the
KGB.”<br><br>
<dd> * 1978: Life inside a California youth camp of the ultra
anti-communist John Birch Society: Five hours each day of lectures on
communism, Americanism and “The Conspiracy”; campers learned that the
Soviet government had created a famine and spread a virus to kill a large
number of citizens and make the rest of them more manageable; the famine
led starving adults to eat their children; communist guerrillas in
Southeast Asia jammed chopsticks into children's ears, piercing their
eardrums; American movies are all under the control of the Communists;
the theme is always that capitalism is no better than communism; you
can't find a dictionary now that isn't under communist influence; the
communists are also taking over the Bibles.<br><br>
<dd> * The Reagan administration declared that the Russians were
spraying toxic chemicals over Laos, Cambodia and Afghanistan -- the
so-called "yellow rain" -- and had caused more than ten
thousand deaths by 1982 alone, (including, in Afghanistan, 3,042 deaths
attributed to 47 separate incidents between the summer of 1979 and the
summer of 1981, so precise was the information). Secretary of State
Alexander Haig was a prime dispenser of such stories, and President
Reagan himself denounced the Soviet Union thusly more than 15 times in
documents and speeches. The "yellow rain", it turned out,
was pollen-laden feces dropped by huge swarms of honeybees flying
far overhead.<br><br>
<dd> * 1982: In commenting about sexual harassment in the Army,
General John Crosby stated that the Army doesn't care about soldiers'
social lives -- “The basic purpose of the United States Army is to kill
Russians,” he said.<br><br>
<dd> * 1983: The US invasion of Grenada, the home of the Cuban
ambassador is damaged and looted by American soldiers; on one wall is
written "AA", symbol of the 82nd Airborne Division; beside it
the message: "Eat shit, commie faggot." ... "I want to
fuck communism out of this little island," says a marine, "and
fuck it right back to Moscow.”<br><br>
<dd> * 1984: During a sound check just before his weekly broadcast,
President Reagan spoke these words into the microphone: “My fellow
Americans, I am pleased to tell you I have signed legislation to outlaw
Russia, forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” His words
were picked up by at least two radio networks.<br><br>
<dd> * 1985: October 29 BBC interview with Ronald Reagan: asked
about the differences he saw between the US and Russia, the president
replied: “I'm no linguist, but I've been told that in the Russian
language there isn't even a word for freedom.” (The word is
“svoboda”.)<br><br>
<dd> * 1986: Soviet artists and cultural officials criticized
Rambo-like American films as an expression of “anti-Russian phobia even
more pathological than in the days of McCarthyism”. Russian
film-maker Stanislav Rostofsky claimed that on one visit to an American
school “a young girl had trembled with fury when she heard I was from the
Soviet Union, and said she hated Russians.”<br><br>
<dd> * 1986: Roy Cohn, who achieved considerable fame and notoriety
in the 1950s as an assistant to the communist-witch-hunting Senator
Joseph McCarthy, died, reportedly of AIDS. Cohn, though homosexual,
had denied that he was and had denounced such rumors as communist
smears.<br><br>
<dd> * 1986: After American journalist Nicholas Daniloff was
arrested in Moscow for “spying” and held in custody for two weeks, New
York Mayor Edward Koch sent a group of 10 visiting Soviet students
storming out of City Hall in fury. “The Soviet government is the
pits,” said Koch, visibly shocking the students, ranging in age from 10
to 18 years. One 14-year-old student was so outraged he declared:
“I don't want to stay in this house. I want to go to the bus and go
far away from this place. The mayor is very rude. We never
had a worse welcome anywhere.” As matters turned out, it appeared
that Daniloff had not been completely pure when it came to his news
gathering.<br><br>
<dd> * 1989: After the infamous Chinese crackdown on dissenters in
Tiananmen Square in June, the US news media was replete with reports that
the governments of Nicaragua, Vietnam and Cuba had expressed their
support of the Chinese leadership. Said the Wall Street Journal:
“Nicaragua, with Cuba and Vietnam, constituted the only countries
in the world to approve the Chinese Communists' slaughter of the students
in Tiananmen Square.” But it was all someone's fabrication; no such
support had been expressed by any of the three governments. At that
time, as now, there were few, if any, organizations other than the CIA
which could manipulate major Western media in such a manner.<br><br>
</dl>NOTE: It should be remembered that the worst consequences of
anti-communism were not those discussed above. The worst
consequences, the ultra-criminal consequences, were the abominable death,
destruction, and violation of human rights that we know under various
names: Vietnam, Chile, Korea, Guatemala, Cambodia, Indonesia, Brazil,
Greece, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and many others.<br><br>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>William Blum</b> is the author of
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567512526/counterpunchmaga">
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II</a>,
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567511945/counterpunchmaga">
Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power</a>. and
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1887128727/counterpunchmaga">
West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political
Memoir</a>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567511945/counterpunchmaga">
.</a><br><br>
He can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:BBlum6@aol.com">BBlum6@aol.com</a><br><br>
<br><br>
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