Posted in its entirety with permission from the author, and a history lesson. Have we not learned from it? I think not.
http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2011/01/12/the-cost-of-demogogues/#more-1152The Cost of Demagogues
By CraigGrant, on January 12th, 2011
You only have to look at the past to see that a democracy that yields up its microphones and cameras to the demagogue with ambition pays a very high price. When the ambitious Joseph McCarthy trumped up phony “war profiteering” charges against Republican Senator La Follette Jr. and narrowly defeated him by a few thousand votes, no one could foresee how this surrender to demagoguery could end up costing hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Senator McCarthy became a lackluster junior Senator but was still filled with ambition when, in a January 1950 meeting with his closest advisers, he told them that he had to find some dramatic tool that would allow him to capture headlines and be a candidate for Vice President in 1952, when the Republicans were likely to win the White House after 20 years. So a list was made of several hot topics and various speeches made with little notice, until on February 9th, he tried one item low on the list, citing the “scandal” of Truman coddling 57 communist spies in the government.
Committees were formed and investigations held, but before Senator McCarthy would eventually disembowel himself on reckless charges of traitors in the Army (talk about a bridge too far), the glare would fall on Mr. John Stewart Service. Mr. Service was universally hailed as the most brilliant of the “China Hands” that worked in the State Department. All but one of this group were children of missionaries who had grown up in China, and were fluent in Mandarin and Chinese history. Service’s analysis that the Kuomintang had lost the will of the people became the recognized consensus of the US mission, and he was sent to observe the communists in Yan’an in 1944 when all were allied against the Japanese. He accurately reported that Mao had established an orderly society where everyone worked and there was no crime or suppression. Other journalists (some with strong anti-communist credentials) also confirmed the contrast between the PRC and the KMT.
After the People’s Republic of China defeated the KMT, the demagogues went after the China Hands, accusing them of treachery. During his trips home, Service would respond to requests of journalists for interviews on deep background, as was the normal practice. One of the journalists that Service met repeatedly was a communist agent, although this was unknown to Service.
There were dozens of investigations over a five-year period and all of them acquitted Service. A grand jury acquitted him 20-0. Service and the other China Hands would be forced out of the State Department, and Acheson would fire him with the statement that “where there was smoke
there had to be fire.” Acheson would secretly continue to meet with Service to get his views on the PRC reaction to events of the Korean War. The Supreme Court would unanimously rule that Service’s termination was illegally performed, lacked substance, and that he was never a security risk.
So what was the legacy of the demagogue McCarthy? The cost is not measured in the few lives that he directly touched; it lies much deeper. When a new conflict arose on another border of China, the State Department had pruned itself of those who knew Asian languages and had lived there for long periods. Those inclined to give strong opinions based on real evidence were shuffled off. So when the French surrendered at Dien Bien Phu, there were no State Department officers who might have been able to go to Hanoi and give us a fresh analysis of the state of opinion on who held the real future of the nationalists in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans paid the price.
So now Fox and the apologists are telling us that there is no cause and effect between the lies, the demagogues and the victims in Arizona. This is like arguing that you can drive your Hummer because no one can trace the CO2 from your car to the atmosphere, and there is no proof that your emissions are not, in fact, absorbed by the trees or the ocean.
So when Palin poisons the health care debate with lies of “death panels” and it results in a compromised system with higher morbidity and a medical loss ratio double the rate of other industrialized countries, do we really have to show you the particular tombstone that is directly related to the particular individual who was denied access to health care over a lie?
How ironic it is that Arizona is the place where that can be done. Approximately 95-100 patients have been taken off of the transplant list, and news sources now identify two who have died directly as a result of it. Mark Price was the first to die. Tiffany Tate, 27, is likely to be the next to die. Ironically there is a direct line between Palin’s lies about death panels and state panels denying coverage, resulting in the known death of particular people.
It is not up to the rest of America to show the exact cause and effect of the Palins, Becks and Limbaughs, any more than we have to show the pollution of a particular factory was the cause of a particular case of cancer.
As to Loughner, if the rabid political hate speech had no effect, then two questions remain. There are many schizophrenics in our country. I went to school with two who have lost touch with reality. So the first question is what poison motivates him to lethality, and why a Democratic Congresswoman. Why didn’t he go after a McDonald’s employee or a meter maid or the postman, all much closer actors in his distorted world? And what motivated him to move beyond the basement existence of my past classmates to search out weapons? Do people really believe that with all of the talk of “targeting Democrats”, “Second Amendment remedies” and labeling Democratic Congresspeople as “traitors” that Loughner in his mind purposely walked by hundreds of other people in his daily life and randomly aimed his weapon at a Congresswoman? He was fed something, either on the TV, the radio or through a family or friend.
The cost of the demagogues in a democratic society isn’t always in the handiwork of the insane. It can be in a failed policy like Vietnam, or in the failure to arrive at universal comprehensive health care. The innocent always pay a high price for it.
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