Review: the author “ Red Scare '' allows the past to teach us about the present

At the beginning of “red fear”, Clay Risen Risen under the in -depth, passionate but impartial study of the Cold War Hysteria in the United States, the author wishes to explain what his subject is – and is not. “There is a line of the American hard right today,” he wrote, “and to understand it, we must understand his roots in red fear. It was not created at that time, nor the Trumpism and the Magi Movement that the McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. But there is no line links them. “

For 480 detailed and tense pages, Risen throws this line without entering it, allowing the past to become a prologue. He trusted the reader to establish the links between and now, and he does not deviate from the task to be accomplished, or details of time, place, conflicts and culture that led to an extended period of national shame.

“Red Scare” deeply ends the main well -known actors, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Algiers Hiss and the Hollywood Ten, but also the myriads committees, opportunistic catalysts and the long line of chips of the mid -20th century. A friend said that he had endured a “dry crucifixion”, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb that was dragged in the mud (and has revoked his security authorization) largely to ask me publicly what he had done, “replied:” You know, it was not so dry. I can still feel hot blood on my hands. ”

“Red Scare” has integrity to operate on a “yes and …” basis, rather than engaging in the ease “or”. Risen takes problems to emphasize that yes, a large number of Americans joined the Communist Party, especially in the 1930s, when American capitalism changed on the verge of collapse. Some of these people have even posed serious security risks. And at the same time, there was no shortage of ideologists and charlatans who took advantage of this fact to eliminate this most American transidence. One reality does not prevent the other.

The journalist of the New York Times, who also wrote books on Rough Riders, the Civil Rights Act and Whisky, tells how national hysteria can take up his own life, like a deadly fever dream that goes beyond public conscience. But it is a work of history, not a controversy. It includes two world wars and a “police action” in Korea which quickly turned into something much greater. This is the story of the way in which the counterpoup against New Deal fueled reactionary fervor deeply in the 1950s and beyond, and how “communist” became a pejorative capture to dirty civil rights, feminism and, in particular, homosexuality, whose red bait has pulled up in “scratch of lavender” which could easily be homosexuals. After the Second World War, as Raren wrote, “anti-communist fervor was both a catalyst and a symptom of the return to rigid gender roles, and with it a difficult turn against homosexuality as threat to older means.”

“Red fear” is a tapestry of individual dramas and miniature paranoid thrillers, each defined by the zeal of the time, some leading to the real apprehension of Soviet spies. The Algiers Hiss / Whittaker Chambers affair, in which the former member of the Communist Party Trouperifé Chambers revealed that the smooth erudite diplomat was a Soviet agent (with a lot of help from an ambitious member of the California congress named Richard Mr. Nixon), receives detailed narrative treatment. Many other names here are less known: Julius Hlavaty was a 46 -year -old high school mathematics teacher born in what is west of Slovakia. He made the mistake of appearing in a Voice of America radio segment to talk about his immigrant experience in a room broadcast across Central America. As McCarthy and his senatorial committee had chosen Hlavaty's left left -wing affiliations, his career was over, as was that of his wife, also a teacher.

As Risen points out, the suspected subversive purge of the American education system brought a bitter irony: “It was a huge loss for the profession and a self-inflicted injury by a country which, in other respects, was impatient to precede the Soviets in school achievements and technological prowess.”

Red fear used fear of mass to put a long and deep frost on freedom of thought and creativity in America; This can be the closest parallel to what we see today. These pages are filled with people ordered to queue or stop stopping or risking losing all this. The witch hunt quickly became more to punish anyone who challenged the bitch of intimidation than to find the real members of the Communist Party. As Risen writes, “it is a great irony of red fear that she started, the era of Soviet espionage was almost entirely in the past.” None of them makes a less effective cake.

Risen compares the sleeping sustainability of such a national hysteria to the disease described by Albert Camus in his 1947 novel “The Plague”. Camus wrote that “Bacillus plague never dies or does not disappear for good; that it can be dormant for years and years in linen furniture and cupboards; that he is having time in the cellars, trunks and room shelves… ”

It is, as Raren writes, “ready to come back to life. Something similar has happened in the 1950s, that is to say also the 1960s and 70s, and I believe, until today. ”

Vognar is an independent culture writer.