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anticommunism

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    3/12/2023

    Whittaker Chambers's Odyssey from Communist Spy to Conservative Hero

    by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell

    Praised by the right and loathed by the left, Whittaker Chambers entered the public eye when he accused State Department worker Alger Hiss of being a Communist. But his story before and after reveals much more about the political history of midcentury America. 

  • SOURCE: Jacobin
    1/13/2023

    When McCarthyism Hit Small-Town Vermont

    by Rick Winston

    The events that roiled one small town in 1950 showed the courage and integrity of newspaper editors who resisted a "red scare" but also the harm inflicted on a community by weaponized suspicion. 

  • SOURCE: Law and Political Economy Project
    9/13/2022

    Economism as a Red Scare Legacy

    by Landon Storrs

    An economic historian traces the rise of neoliberal political economy to the post-WWII Red Scare, when Keynesians were driven out of government service under suspicion of disloyalty. 

  • SOURCE: Hollywood Reporter
    9/9/2022

    Blacklisted Actress Marsha Hunt Dies at 104

    Hunt's participation in the Committee for the First Amendment, which questioned the activities of the House Unamerican Activities Committee in 1947, led to her blacklisting. 

  • SOURCE: Jacobin
    1/27/2022

    Remember, too, the Victims Nazis Singled Out for their Politics

    by Adam J. Sacks

    A German organization dedicated to the remembrance of left-wing victims of the Nazis has had its charitable status revoked. While the history of Nazism's persecution and murder of Jews and other groups is rightly commemorated, Nazism's violence against the political left has been obscured. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    11/17/2021

    Law Enforcement Has Long Practiced Double Standards for Activists

    by Denise Lynn

    Nobody should be shocked that the FBI has aggressively surveilled Black Lives Matter organizers while deciding that the online organizing of the January 6 attack on the Capitol was protected speech; this double standard has characterized law enforcement's approach to racial justice protest. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    7/26/2021

    Like JFK, Biden Has Good Reason to Be Wary of the Military

    Joe Biden faces challenges like those that confronted JFK: both presidents faced a substantial presence of right-wing extremists within the active and retired ranks of military leadership. Biden must stand firm in the face of manufactured controversies including over diversity training. 

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    2/21/2021

    What the FBI Had on Grandpa

    by Molly Jong-Fast

    "I never considered my grandfather to be a danger to the republic, but J. Edgar Hoover disagreed." The FBI surveilled writer Howard Fast extensively, though, as he wrote in his autobiography, "the eleven hundred pages detailed every—or almost every—decent act I had performed in my life."

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    11/30/2020

    Joe Biden’s Harshest Critics are Likely to be Some of His Fellow Catholics

    by Theresa Keeley

    Abortion is the most divisive issue for liberal and conservative Catholics in America today, but reflects a decades-long division in beliefs about how the Church should engage with the world. It may be tricky for Joe Biden to navigate as a faithful Catholic.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    10/6/2020

    Did the US Try to Assassinate Lenin in 1918?

    A new book demonstrates that the United States and western allies attempted to thwart the Bolshevik revolution and actually started the Cold War with an ill-fated 1918 invasion of Russia, but is on more speculative ground tracing an assassination attempt against Lenin to the US.  

  • SOURCE: JSTOR Daily
    9/24/2020

    The Red Scare and Women in Government

    McCarthyite attacks on the political left also pushed women out of policymaking positions in the federal government, the historian Landon Storrs argues. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    9/16/2020

    Where Conspiracy Reigns

    Historians Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta and Federico Finchelstein offer insight into how the political right has used rumors of communist plots to maintain power in Brazil, and why the country's political culture today is vulnerable to fake news and conspiracy theories. 

  • SOURCE: National Security Archive
    9/11/2020

    "GUILTY": Justice for the Jesuits in El Salvador

    Applying the doctrine of Universal Jurisdiction for human rights abuses, a Spanish Court found former El Salvador Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano guilty in the assassination of six Jesuit priests and two Salvadoran women in 1989. The National Security Archive supplied hundreds of declassified documents as evidence. 

  • 8/2/2020

    Who’s Our Roy Cohn?

    by Andrew Feffer

    Two documentaries on the notorious lawyer and fixer portray Roy Cohn as a figure of evil, but don't examine the social and political context of power in New York City.