Fuzzy anti-left rhetoric, part 94

JWZ links to an article in the National Review (pretty far-right US magazine, apparently) where Jonah Goldberg defends McCarthyism. Some of it raises the not unreasonable problem of “McCarthyism” being bandied about as a bogeyman buzzword, which the comments on JWZ’s livejournal liken to Godwin’s law - as soon as someone mentions Hitler, the discussion is, effectively, over, from the point of view of getting anything useful or interesting out of it.

The main point of his article, as I understand it, is summed up in one of his first phrases: “What makes McCarthyism so hard to discuss is that McCarthy behaved like a jerk, but he was also right.” He contends that a fair amount of evidence is surfacing these days, now that it’s been declassified, which shows that there were evil Communists in the midst of the US plotting against the State on behalf of its enemy. And, hell, those people who were accused of being communists, took the 5th and then complained that their career had been ruined, well, if they’d been in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany they’ve have gone to concentration camps, so what are they complaining about?

He also ignores the dictionary definition of witchhunt when he claims “you are free to describe McCarthyism as a witchhunt if and only if you are willing to concede that actual witches existed in our midst.” Similarly:

When they denounce McCarythism, they are working on the clear assumption that McCarthyism victimized only innocent people. That is a lie. And it also a lie that the USA Patriot Act is being used solely to punish innocent people.

Ahem. Nobody is saying that McCarthy didn’t target actual subversives; nobody is saying that the Patriot Act can’t be used to find real terrorists. What critics of such draconian policies are saying, is that they are over-the-top, unjustified, and harrass innocent people - who often, how convenient for the Republicans in power, happen to be their political opponents or the constituency of their political opponents.

And to hell with the claim that, hey, if you behaved like that in Soviet Russia (then) or Iraq (now) you’d be killed by murder squads or interned, so, hey, if you get searched at an airport and you miss your flight, why are you complaining, you big girl’s blouse? The whole point of being a mature, enlightened western democracy is that you don’t behave like the regimes you despise. Our society is built upon the rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of association and a whole other number of fundamental individual rights and limitations on Government that we have enshrined in our Constitutions or basic legal texts. And we believe that such a basis to our civilisation makes it happier, more enlightened, more productive and stabler than other alternative forms of government. Are we really to dismiss these principles that have stood us so well in the past, just because some enterprising fanatics managed to crash two planes into a landmark building?