"In the United States, too, recent history is being remade. If the Soviets have purloined our nuclear know-how, we have evened the score by mastering her techniques of the fission and fusion of memory. To be able to dissolve segments of time is at least as important in modern politico-military struggle as the capacity to sear areas of space."
"Out of the solitude of his dungeon he marches with an ensemble of comrades into the full tableau of pre-fabricated history. That the scene is a hoax matters less than that he is no long alone and has a role to play."
"Far from being goaded to their parts by police agents hidden in the wings, the guilty here had to all but force their way onto the stage."
Read Harold Rosenberg's 1955 essay "Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past" (in _The Tradition of the New_) to get a sense of how much McCarthyism (and its soi disant 'liberal' fellow travellers) partakes of precisely the Stalinist falsification of history that the anti-Communist so fervently denounces. There is no escape to the "other side" in that mirror game. The one point I would disagree most firmly with Rosenberg is in attributing the invention of that falsification to the Soviet Union, or, for that matter even to the state. The process was pioneered by the mass-circulation press in the nineteenth century and perfected by corporate public relations in the early decades of the twentieth. Prior to that time it wasn't really necessary because 'bourgeois ideology' had not yet become a fatal threat to itself. Pugliese reminds me of nothing so much as the sectarians he sees under every bed. An imitation of myth produces tragedy; an imitation of that imitation, farce. Iterations beyond farce approach noise asymptotically.
The Sandwichman