Tom Watson wrote:

On 26 Dec 2005 18:15:05 EST, Tim Daneliuk
wrote:



You're also not giving Coulter her due when she's right. She's said
for a very long time that McCarthy - however big a jerk he was -
was correct about the degree of Communist infiltration of the US
generally, and the government particularly. She has been vindicated
in this claim. For all the gory details see:




Did you go to college?

Yes. And Graduate School. And I taught Grad School as well.


If you did, does the concept of Academic Freedom have any resonance?

It does. It is also a distant memory, killed off primarily by the
drooling chimps on the political Left in this case. See this for many
pungent examples:

http://www.thefire.org/

Moreover, there have always been reasonable limits to academic freedom.
I taught in a private Catholic university. I am not Catholic. I was not
"free" to denigrate Catholicism, promote Protestantism, or otherwise
thwart the stated religious position of the school. Similarly, the
physics professors were not "free" to teach that the sun revolved around
a flat earth.

These days "adademic freedom" mostly gets trotted out by the Left when
they want public monies to continue running their collectivist madrassas
in the public university system. The organization referenced above is
one of the few left actually interested in true academic discourse.


If every teacher at the college level is to be judged by what meetings
they attended, and I mean, attended, which is different than the
degree of participation breathlessly proclaimed by your reference,
then the whole concept goes to hell.


There is a profound difference between a bunch of ignorant Smelly
Hippies going to a Berkeley lecture on the joys of Marxism and active
Communist infiltration of the US government from FDR forward. Mitrokhin
details this and many other Communist activities like KGB funding of the
'anti war' movement in the 1960s in exquisite detail.

Did HUAC and McCarthy go too far? Of course. Congress Critters almost
always do. But their deeply held suspicions about the malodorous
presence of Communism in US government was well founded. And *that* is
what Coulter has been almost alone in defending.


And it is a fine concept.

When I was at school I had a course in Marxism.

Does that make me a Marxist?

Depends whether or not you bought the nonsense Marx peddled.


If I had chosen to work for the government and Fox News dug up the
fact that I had taken a course on Marxism, and referred to it as:

"Mr. Watson was heavily involved in Marxist thought as a young man.",

Without explaining further, without misstating the fact but ignoring
the context of the facts - would you be OK with that?

Do you have no stones of your own? Are you incapable of speaking in your
own defense? Are you so tender and delicate that the first sign of
accusation would have you running to hide? Given your many blustering
posts here, I rather doubt anyone could accuse you of much of anything
without some sharp retort on your part.


Oppenheimer was an academic, who went to work for the government, as
so many do. When Joe decided to go after he and others,Joe acted very
much like Fox News.

Excuse me Sparky, but the fear that Oppenheimer might be an active
Communist again turns out to have great basis in reality. Go read
"Bombshell" by Albright et al for (again) an detailed analysis of the
considerable presence of Communist agents among the US atomic community
throughout the end of WWII and thereafter. There was an active Communist
presence at all levels of the atomic research world that ultimately led
to the bomb being given to the Soviets. And these were not of the the "I
attended a meeting and listened to Marxist drivel" variety. These were
confirmed ideological Communists working for a foreign power while a
part of a key US defense system.

But for the Professionally Enlightened Thinkers like you, it's just too
mean to go after people suspected of such things. If, say, we today
discovered the chief scientist of Los Alamos (the place where they do nuke
weapons simulation) was a radical Islamist, you'd no doubt be outraged
if the US government actually did something about it. Never let sanity
get in the way of Political Correctness.

Again, HUAC and McCarthy behaved badly ... and the rest of the Congress
went along with it, at least for a while. But that doesn't change the
fundamentally correct basis upon which they were proceeding. There *was*
Communist intelligence presence in virtually every strata of US
government, public institutions, and popular culture. It represented an
active an ongoing attempt by the Soviets to overthrow the US. The Soviet
intention of world domination never wavered except at the very end. It
merely changed tactics over time.

The problem with most people who grew up in North America and/or only in
the last 30 years is that you don't grasp how profoundly evil Communism
actually is. You're deeply concerned about "Free Speech" and "Academic
Freedom" without grasping that neither exist at all in a
Communist/Collectivism system. You don't begin to grasp the horrors
foisted upon 10s of millions of people by the Communists in the first
half of the 20th Century alone. Stalin killed between 20 and 30 million
of my countrymen in *less than 3 years* (thus making Hitler look like a
mere piker) and that was before WWII even got started. Having a high
degree of suspicion and fear of Communism was utterly justified in the
1940s-1980s. The behavior of the Soviets, Chinese, Mongolians, Cubans,
Angolans, etc. fully justified the West treating Communism as the cancer
that it was. Only in the halls of the Western academy, filled with
drooling Lefties, could Communism ever have been given a serious voice.



That is why I call Fox News -


The New McCarthyism.

You live in a world of illusion. Fox _news_ is not bent particularly
more to the Right than ABC/NBC/CBS news is bent to the Left. What makes
Fox different is that their _editorial_ bias is to the Right. So what?
For years the major networks and CNN have flogged a bias to the Left in
their editorial mumblings (listen to Lew Dobbs groan on with collectivist
fervor about the evils of offshoring, for instance). I say good for the
Right for finally fighting back. While I almost always disagree with
both the Left and Right on policy matters, in the absence of Fox there
would be NO balance - the whole mainstream news machine would be where
it was 20 years ago - completely tilted Left. Fox itself is not
"fair and balanced" editorially, but they bring balance to a previously
very tilted playing field.

But the real story here is None Of The Above. For the first time since
the Left collectivized the West in the 1940s and forward, people who hate
collectivism are fighting back. The Left is now faced with real critique
by Conservatives, Libertarians, and all manner of people who actually
value freedom. What we're finding, of course, is that the Left is
ideologically, spiritually, and intellectually a vacuum. It is a bag
of lousy ideas glued together with condescension and contempt for
"the people". Moreover, we now can examine the results of the 20th
Century lab experiment in collectivism and see the incredible damange
and suffering wrought at the hands of a system that Western Lefties
defended regularly.

And that's why there is so much screaming about Fox. It is one of many
places that expose the Left for the fraud that it is. Make no mistake
about it, the Right has plenty of really bad ideas. But the Right hasn't
been running things for 70 years. For most of the past century it has
been the Left that controlled culture, politics, policy, art,
literature, and the academy as a whole. It is high time the Left got
hoisted on its own petard...

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Tim Daneliuk
PGP Key: http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/