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Originally Posted by Mr. Kotter
Once McCarthy went Locco, in the hearings, yes....prior to that, during the HUAC activities leading up to the hearings, though....he was more right than wrong; he simply went off the deep end.....and, near the end, tried to take some people with him....
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I have read fairly extensively about this topic, and have not seen any support that he was "more right than wrong" at any point regarding his statements. In fact, he was a paranoid alcoholic that was used, abused and discarded by J. Edgar Hoover. The whole thing started when he held up a sheaf of papers at a rally and said he had a "list" of Communists who had infiltrated the State Department. The papers, in fact, contained no such thing, and he made the rest up as he went along, mostly with Hoover's help.
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Down-playing the very real (though never "widespread") socialist-communist infiltration into radical groups is historical revisionism.....remember, the Bolsheviks were a very small group in Russia, prior to 1917. And though the US was not Russia, the threat here was very real to the people who lived through the 40s-50s.
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Russia in 1917 was ruled by a despotic monarchy that was fantastically unpopular throughout a country that had been welded together by Ivan the Terrible approximately 400 years earlier. It had very little cultural, geographic or other ties holding it together. Only the tight fist of the oppressive government held it together. This was proven when the whole former USSR flew apart into what is now a whole bunch of separate countries.
The average Russian in 1917 was extremely poor, illiterate, far removed from what was going on in Moscow or elsewhere in his country, and thoroughly used to being oppressed by his government and suffering from various privations.
Russia itself was a backwards country compared to its European neighbors, and militarily and economically weak.
It is beyond difficult to compare Russia in 1917 to what the US was in the late 40s. Like, completely impossible.