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Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy M. Stanton Evans New York Crown Forum, 2007
A half-century ago, the American people were sharply divided over Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, with the right wing of the Republican Party standing firmly beside him, while he was condemned by most of the media, the academic community, and most "centrists." Since the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, however, the Left's ideological sway over American thought has been such that the condemnatory view has become well-nigh universal. Hence the title "Blacklisted by History."
In the book under review, M. Stanton Evans notes that even many on the American right have become accustomed to speak of "McCarthyism of the left" whenever they want to point out a particularly egregious bit of demagoguery or abuse by their opponents. Unknowingly, he points out, they have adopted the perspective, historical understanding and language of an ideology alien to their own. This is not especially exceptional, since much conventional wisdom in the United States since the 1960s is derived from the Left's worldview. This includes the specification of who now are American heroes, and who the villains.
The thrust of Evans' book is that the conventional view of McCarthy is a caricature. "McCarthy's alleged stock-in-trade was spreading hysteria about an ersatz internal Communist threat and smearing innocent people as subversives without a shred of fact to go on." The record, Evans says, shows otherwise.
There is occasion to see those years with passion. If it is true, as the consortium of French intellectuals who wrote The Blackbook of Communism estimate, that Communism presided over the murder of 85 to 100 million people, there is arguably every reason to be infuriated by any passivity toward the subject. And yet, in reasoned dialogue about even the more heinous subjects, thoughtful people value the analyst of even temper, the scholar who will dispassionately lay out the facts and hold his emotions in check. M. Stanton Evans is precisely such a scholar, in this book reviewing the issue of Communist subversion and the McCarthy record regarding it with calm understatement.
The principal question about Evans' book must, of course, be "does anybody care?" It is generally comfortable to throw oneself into the flow of contemporary thinking,...