The McCarthy meme
It’s a valuable term but only when applied to government attacks on civil rights
It’s a word popping up more than anyone would like to see. Drop “McCarthyism” into a speech, conversation or, better yet, a news story on TV or in print, and you’ve invoked everything from nutso paranoia to witch hunts, corrupt government and everything in between.
Call it the latest meme—a unit of cultural information transmitted verbally from one mind to another—in the heated ideological war that marks these odd times of war and peace protests. McCarthyism, named for the late Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, is an expression used to describe a zealous search for Communists in various institutions during the 1950s. It has come to mean a vendetta against political dissenters.
The idea’s been spotted in debates on topics as far ranging as the Dixie Chicks and Susan Sarandon to the firing of producer Ed Gernon over comments made to TV Guide about his CBS documentary, Hitler: The Rise of Evil. Gernon compared U.S. support for George W. Bush to German support for Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.
In Nevada, McCarthyism was invoked, not surprisingly, by Sen. Joe Neal (D-North Las Vegas) on two separate occasions at the state Legislature. Neal referenced the concept during the consideration of SB 82, a bill that establishes procedures for health departments to isolate and quarantine people or groups with communicable diseases. The Senate passed the bill on April 3.
Then, last week, Neal spoke for about 40 minutes about McCarthyism, Iraq and his personal experiences growing up black in the Southern United States. While he spoke, the rest of the Senate waited to approve SB 38, a sweeping anti-terrorism bill with language broad enough to make Neal and a few others extremely uncomfortable.
For one thing, does Nevada really need an anti-terrorism law?
“Nobody expects that a real act of terrorism is going to be punished by Nevada,” said Richard Siegel, president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. “That would be punished by the feds under their terrorism laws.”
The bill passed 17–3, with Senators Neal, Maggie Carlton and Bob Coffin—all Las Vegas Democrats—opposed.
ABC’s Jim Wooten called up the M-meme during a World News Tonight report that covered a gamut of recent goings-on, from the Baseball Hall of Fame’s decision not to give antiwar activists Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon a forum for their views to Dixie Chicks boycotts.
“All this has reminded some of the McCarthy era’s blacklists that barred those even accused of Communist sympathies from working in films or on television,” Wooten said. His remark was remarked upon by Greg Pierce of the Washington Times. Pierce called the concept “ludicrous,” quoting Brent Baker of the Media Research Center: “ABC News … raised the specter of McCarthyism and blacklists in condemning how some have dared to criticize the antiwar views of celebrities, as if celebrities must be accorded the right to pontificate without anyone having the right to say anything adverse about those views.”
But, while the squelching of celebrity or journalistic antiwar opinions may be uncomfortable, it’s not exactly McCarthyism. Nor is it McCarthyism when some consumers choose not to see a movie or buy a CD because they don’t like the antiwar sentiments of the artist, either.
In fact, since Vietnam, antiwar protesters have enjoyed a degree of expressive freedom, Siegel said.
“In fact, we’ve gotten used to fighting wars with a great deal of dissent and opposition,” said Siegel, who began speaking out against Vietnam in 1965. “The United States hasn’t gone to war in a unified way since 1941.”
What’s happening today is part of a cultural pattern that occurs when a war is in its early stages or is quickly won, Siegel said.
"[In these cases,] the country has a considerable support for war, so people feel empowered to attack the dissenters,” Siegel said. “I think it’s different from McCarthyism, which is strongly directed from government.”
Ray Thomas of the Sierra Times, “an Internet publication for Real Americans,” agrees: “What [dissenters are] attempting to do when they cry ‘censorship’ or ‘blackballing’ or ‘McCarthyism’ is attempting to censor their detractors. … We’ve been tolerant in the past, but now we’re at war. So we stop buying their products. That’s not censorship. Censorship is when the government calls you in and says, ‘You shouldn’t oughta say that,’ and then punishes you if you continue. They should think about that before they open their fat mouths.”
Siegel, himself, isn’t worried about grassroots opposition to antiwar speech. Far more frightening to him are the expanded powers of government that have been rubberstamped by the U.S. Congress in the name of national security, such as the USA Patriot Act I, a U.S. intelligence agencies’ wish list rammed past lawmakers shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. Or the hundreds of individuals being detained without due process in the past 19 months at facilities around the nation. Or proposals to kick off a national identification card program.
That’s why organizations as diverse as the ACLU and the far-right Nevada Families Eagle Forum are taking a careful look at anti-terrorism bills floating around the Nevada Legislature.
One such bill, Assembly Bill 250, has been crafted into satisfactory form with the help of several concerned legislators, the ACLU and NFEF. The latter two entities have joined forces to make sure that the Nevada Senate’s anti-terrorism equivalent, SB 38, is altered to include AB 250’s clear, precise definition of terrorism.
An “act of terrorism,” as defined by AB 250, is “any act that involves the use or attempted use of sabotage, coercion or violence … intended to: a) cause great bodily harm or death to the general population or b) cause substantial destruction, contamination or impairment of 1) any building or infrastructure, communications, transportation, utilities or services or 2) any natural resource or the environment.”
The bill excludes acts of civil disobedience from its definition of “coercion.”
Support for this narrower version of anti-terrorism legislation runs high, as the Assembly unanimously passed AB 250 on April 16.
The Nevada Senate’s version of the bill, however, approved on April 18, is a bit more troubling, with language having been lifted largely from the federal government’s John Ashcroft-induced Patriot Act.
The text of SB 38 describes acts of coercion that make crimes out of such vague concepts as “substantial deterioration of food” and a seemingly unlimited ban on intimidating or coercive communications, including letters, e-mail, phone calls, faxes, radio transmissions, TV shows and video recordings.
“We’ve added staff on this to help hopefully make the Senate version of the bill conform to AB 250,” Siegel said.
The fear is that a sweeping anti-terrorism law could be used to combat legitimate citizen activists.
“What we’re afraid of is that Nevada may go after something that is not recognizable as terrorism,” Siegel said.
For example, an FBI agent labels the writing of swastikas on buildings in Las Vegas an act of “terrorism.” Under that definition, a teen with a can of paint, instead of being charged with defacing public or private property, could be prosecuted as a terrorist.
It boils down to the powers that citizens are willing to extend to their governments. Current technology with its wiretaps and computer databases of everything from political dossiers to library withdrawals, video rentals and book purchases gives authorities the ability to become a surveillance state of unparalleled power.
“It’s enormously greater than the control government had in technologically backward countries like Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia," Siegel said. "One does not have to have a Fascist or Communist state to use this kind of surveillance with citizens."