Joe McCarthy was never defeated -- and Donald Trump now leads the movement he created
Joe McCarthy was never defeated — and Donald Trump now leads the movement he created
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McCarthy was elected to the Senate from Wisconsin in 1946, and his early years in office were unmemorable — except for one revealing episode. He denounced the death sentences handed down in U.S.-occupied Germany to a group of Waffen-SS soldiers convicted of murdering American troops in an event known as the Malmedy massacre. This moment in McCarthy's career, though virtually forgotten today, is highly instructive On the surface, he presented himself as a crusader for justice, arguing that the Army was covering up judicial misconduct and that this called into question the validity of the Germans' confessions. (He never provided any evidence for this.)
In fact, McCarthy was doing something much more sinister. On some level he understood that defending a group of Nazis would appeal to the antisemitic American far right at a moment when expressing public hatred for Jews was unacceptable. At least implicitly, McCarthy was accusing the Jewish Americans who helped investigate the crimes of seeking vengeance and perpetrating injustice. Today we might call this flipping the script: Suddenly Jewish people, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, were persecutors, and "Aryan" Germans — those who had committed mass murder — were their victims.
That wasn't enough to make McCarthy a right-wing superstar, probably because any hint of pro-Nazi sympathies was completely out of bounds in the postwar years. McCarthy needed a different vehicle to achieve political stardom and found it in 1950 when, while delivering a speech in West Virginia, he claimed to have a list of more than 200 known Communists who were allowed to work in the State Department. (No such list existed.) '
The speech was a smash hit and over the course of four years, the Wisconsin senator accused countless people of either actually being Communists, being "Communist sympathizers" (whatever that meant) or being "soft on Communism," a hopelessly vague term that could be applied to almost anyone who didn't support open military confrontation with the Soviet Union. With America on edge during the early years of the Cold War, McCarthy inflamed widespread paranoia, without once provided evidence that any of his targets had done anything illegal. That didn't much matter: He was saying what unhappy right-wingers wanted to hear, and they supported him with enthusiasm. (Yeah, some of this might sound familiar.) gave him tremendous political influence as a result.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/joe-mccarthy-was-never-defeated-and-donald-trump-now-leads-the-movement-he-created/ar-AANRN8D?ocid=msedgntp