-Caveat Lector-

"McCarthyism": Insult or Compliment?

On February 20th, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, under fire from
critics for his ethically questionable activities relating to the sale and
subsequent financing of an inn that he once owned, struck back by comparing
the criticism to a witch hunt. Invoking the specter of McCarthyism, he said
of Tory leader Joe Clark: "He has started as Joe Who. Now, he's perhaps Joe
McCarthy."

Chrétien obviously intended it as an insult, but as Canada's National Post
for February 22nd reported, "according to academics, being labeled a 'Joseph
McCarthy' . can now be considered a compliment." Post reporter Siobhan
Roberts quoted Geoffrey Smith, a professor of American history at Queen's
University in Kingston, as saying: "Many of McCarthy's allegations have been
proven by recent historians to have more substance than we thought they did
in the late 1940s and early 1950s." And noted American author M. Stanton
Evans, who is currently working on a book about McCarthy scheduled for
publication next year, told Roberts that "people who stand up and start
yelling McCarthyism, first of all know zero about McCarthy," and "are
probably trying to change the subject from the substance of the charges
against them. That is the intention: to divert attention from any
substantial criticism toward this extraneous emotional slogan."

Additional evidence that McCarthy had accurately called the shots surfaced
in 1996 with the release of documents from Soviet archives and our National
Security Agency. As summarized by Scripps Howard News Service at the time,
McCarthy and other anti-Communist activists "weren't too far wrong about the
extensive Soviet penetration of U.S. government agencies in the 1940s....
Transcripts of cables sent by KGB agents to Moscow in 1944 and 1945 were
intercepted by U.S. cryptoanalysts and indicate that more than 100 Soviet
agents had infiltrated the State Department, Justice Department, War
Department, Treasury Department and even the Office of Strategic Services,
the precursor of the CIA."

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