McCarthy - was: A question for our British friends...

[Brooks R]

No: HPFGUIDX 876

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Warmsley" <warmsley at b...> wrote:
> >Okay, Brits only please.  This question does have some
> relevance to something.


> >...
> 
> Bloke who claimed to have list of 50 people in Senate who were
> communists?


Actually it was in the State Department, not the Senate.  


Some people aren't going to like this, because  McCarthy was a
clearly a b*****d, a horrendous bully, and doing this solely for 
political gain - but since the fall of the Soviet Union we have found 
out that he was basically right.

  Around 1995 the US started declassifying the VENONA transcripts, 
which was a code-name for the program where we had found, intercepted
 - and decoded  - the messages sent by the NKVD guy who ran Soviet 
intelligence operations in the US from late in WWII through the early 
1950's.  Because we were actually reading the Russian Spymaster's
mail, we know that there really *were* a surprisingly large number of
people in the State Department and other areas of the US government
who 
were providing information to Soviet intelligence.  There was even an 
Undersecretary of the Treasury, one of the guys who participated in
the Bretton Woods conference which laid out post WWII international 
economic policy for a generation, who was also in the pay of the
Soviet government. It has been impossible to identify most of these 
people, because even in the encoded messages, those people who had
been 
recruited and were providing reports, were referred to by code names.
 
There was an occasional slip-up though.....

Even stranger, Omar Bradley, post- WWII chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, refused to pass this information up to President Truman, who
as a result believed that some of the people who were accused of
things 
were simply political targets.  In fact there was proof that they
were guilty, but to have put that evidence in court would have
exposed 
the intercept operation and the ability to read the code - which would
have cut off the value of the intelligence we got from reading it.

With the information obtained from the FSU itself, and the
transcripts of these messages, a lot of history books are having to be
re-written.  
Some things that it has been popular for 40 years to write off as 
"anti-communist paranoia' turns out to have been quite literally
true.  
And while communism itself may be 'just an economic theory', I doubt 
that that viewpoint would get much sympathy from the 15 million
Russian 
and especially Ukrainian people who starved to death in the 1930's
from 
forced collectivization, or the unknown number of students and others 
who died at Tienanmen Square.  Those governments that claimed to have 
espoused it created one of the two nastiest politcal systems the
world 
has ever seen.  They are among the true Dark Wizards of our times.


-Brooks A Rowlett