Carrol
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: USA mistaken ideological portrayal Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2003 17:08:56 -0700 From: William Mandel <wmmmandel at EARTHLINK.NET> To: SOCIALIST-REGISTER at YORKU.CA
I happened to be in Germany just before Hitler took power. It was obvious from the situation in Hamburg, the port city where I had a day and walked from end to end, harbor and city center, that an explosion between the Storm Troops and the anti-fascists was in the immediate offing. Squads of cops on bicycles with rifles on their shoulders were patrolling constantly. When my ship got to London a day later, the papers reported that exactly that had happened. There is no such situation in the U.S. today.
In the U.S., I faced in 1949-1953 exactly the kind of hysterical fear you purvey today. We had laws on the books corresponding to the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act today. There is nothing I have written in sixty years of being published, and nothing I have broadcast, of which I am as proud as of a lecture I gave in May, with the Rosenbergs just one month from execution, to a leftist fraternal organization. I read from its publication in that organization's monthly:
"The American people have demonstrated in absolutely unmistakeable terms that they are not willing to act as fascists against anybody here at home. Peekskill", a Robeson concert in 1949 which we, including myself, defended physically against a mob of 2,000 heaving rocks so large that murder was their obvious intent, "was a fiasco for the fascists, and no attempt has been made to repeat it. Mass lynchings rarely occur in the South [any longer] and have had to be replaced by 'legal' executions, police killings, and private murders.
"Fascism cannot be brought about by legislation. Many feared this when the McCarran Act was passed in 1950...But by 1953, when the McCarran Board handed down its very specific list of organizations to register on pain of tremendous fines and long years in jail, there was no similar fear reaction at all....
"Today the Negro people have reached a state of organization and political consciousness sufficient even to have elected, recently, a few city officials in the South....
"The Administration group is deeply aware of the moral authority it enjoys so long as the American people believes it has a free choice at the polls and that government reflects that choice at least to some degree. It is quite willing to use the Smith Act, the McCarran Act, the McCarran-Walter Act, the Taft-Hartley Law, spy trials and Congressional witch-hunts to suppress...militant organizations, but recognizes the importance of maintaining the appearance of legal forms as long as possible...."
The situation was similar to today even in the unwillingness of America's allies to go along with the foreign policy that underlay McCarthyism:
"Why has Churchill so sharply changed his attitude, so that he who initiated the Cold War with his Fulton, Missouri, speech of 1946, now demands a conference with the Soviet Union for the settlement of world problems?....Now that the McCarthyites bent on the final folly of extending the [Korean] war to China through blockade demand that London surrender one of its few remaining sources of income abroad [carrying freight to and from China], Churchill has decided that it is time to break free before it is too late. In so doing, he bids for the creation of a new grouping, involving all of western Europe and Japan....
"The urgency of the moment is to stop McCarthy before the power of government is effectively in his hands....Clearly, only the people -- you -- can stop McCarthy. He can be stopped, but he can be stopped only if all Americans, setting aside political prejudices and disagreements, unite to do that job." [pp.277-8 of my autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER]
That lecture was two months after McCarthy had subpoenaed me, and my testimony was such that someone performed me presenting part of it in a play thirty-five years later that had a seven-month run in Los Angeles and a month in McCarthy's home state of Wisconsin. William Mandel
Richard Menec wrote:
>Have you not read Patriot Acts 1 & 2?
>
> It's always convenient to turn face, because confronting the problem
> head-on (in part -- and at the very least --acknowledging that the US
> today has all the ingredients of a pre-fascist state) would mean that
> some sort of immediate action is necessary. I would argue that it
> makes sense to err on the side of caution; to concede that the US
> today is equivalent to Germany at about the time when Adolf
> ('Adi') Schickelgruber became Chancellor
The title of my autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Introduction by Howard Zinn), is based on my demolition of Sen. Joe McCarthy and later of HUAC in hearings of 1953 and 1960. It is a history of how the American people fought to defend and expand its rights since the 1920s (I'm 85) employing the form of the life of a 30s AND 60s activist, one who was involved in most serious movements: student, labor, 45 years of efforts to prevent war with the USSR and Cuba, civil rights South and North, women's liberation [my late wife appears on 50 pages], 37 years on Pacifica Radio [where I reinvented talk radio, of whose previous existence I had been unaware], civil liberties, and opposition to anti-Semitism and to Zionism. You may hear/see my testimony before the three different McCarthy-Cold-War-Era witch-hunting committees [used in six films and a play]) on my website, http://www.billmandel.net I am the author of five books in my academic field, have taught at UC Berkeley, and earlier held a postdoctoral fellowship, by invitation, at Stanford's Hoover Institution.
The book may be ordered through all normal sources. For an autographed copy, send me $24 at 4466 View Pl.,#106, Oakland, CA. 94611