What is your Political Compass?

[_Droopy]

Sorry if I seemed to be attacking you there Malcolm, but "McCarthyism" is a very touchy subject with me (and many other conservatives/libertarians) who are actually conversant with the history of the Cold War, the nature of communism and the CPUSA, and the post Berlin Wall scholarship that has been done since then in lite of the many new primary source materials that have come out of Eastern Europe, including the old Soviet Union.

The Left in out country has a deep, and equally touchy stake in preserving their own mythology of an alleged "witch hunt" era of "terror" that allegedly engulfed the country, based on an anti-communist "paranoia" claimed to exist among both the general population and the government (or as our own past President, Jimmy Carter once stated it, our "inordinate fear of communism").

But the "witch hunt" narrative is a fiction, just as is any claim that writers, actors, poets, or any other intellectuals were hounded or persecuted because of their political beliefs. The focus at that time was on Communist party members and supporters of the party ("fellow travelers"), who, thought not official members of the party, were supporters of its aims and goals and who worked with its members in various subversive activities.

At that time, the CPUSA was, although indigenous to America, nothing more than a tool of the Soviet Union and subversive organization, fully beholden to a hostile foreign power, and therefore traitorous. McCarthy (and no one doubts his clear defects of character or the degree to which some people he accused and prosecuted were innocent) was not after Americans who held communist views per se, but Americans seeking to assist the Soviet Union in the destabilization and weakening of the United States.

He is now known to have been correct, in the vast majority of cases, regarding the people he pursued (including what are still martyrs and heroes to our Hollywood Left, the infamous "Hollywood Ten") and to have, in fact, underestimated the degree of penetration of the federal government by Soviet agents and Americans sympathetic to Soviet goals and willing (like Alger Hiss) to assist them in working toward those goals.

[_Droopy]

By the way, how can you be a "conservative" while supporting the likes of Mandela? Nelson Mandela is a revolutionary Marxist and cut his political teeth within the South African Communist party in the 1950s.

He publically moved more to the "center" , its true, during his stay in prison and in the eighties as the leader of the anti-apartheid movement, but his wife, Winnie Mandela, continued as head of the "direct action" wing of his own political coalition, known as the African National Congress (ANC), which became famous for filtering out political incorrectness among the general population with an ingenious use of old automobile tires.

He's been a major figure among the international Left since then.

[_Malcolm]

By the way, how can you be a "conservative" while supporting the likes of Mandela? Nelson Mandela is a revolutionary Marxist and cut his political teeth within the South African Communist party in the 1950s.

He publically moved more to the "center" , its true, during his stay in prison and in the eighties as the leader of the anti-apartheid movement, but his wife, Winnie Mandela, continued as head of the "direct action" wing of his own political coalition, known as the African National Congress (ANC), which became famous for filtering out political incorrectness among the general population with an ingenious use of old automobile tires.

He's been a major figure among the international Left since then.

Hi Droopy,
You did right to point out my ignorance of McCarthy, I stand corrected
I certainly do not take offence over such things, after all that's what the board is all about, and I am never too old to learn. As for the Mandela thing, I was surprised to see that in answering the questions on the compass I was put in that quarter. I guess if you ask a set of questions in a set style, the answers will be rudimentary. No I have never liked what the world has created with him, he is almost Saint Mandela in the British Press. I was the one that voted for Margaret Thatcher and even heard one or two GA's extolling the virtue of thriftyness that she propounded at one time. At the present time the UK is floundering in the slough of despond, we could use another woman Prime Minister, one with balls.