posted on September 18, 2001 09:53:02 PM new
by J. Edgar Hoover in the late 1950's or early 1960's? It was a little book required as reading in my Florida high school as part of its "Americanism Versus Communism" required course.
It was the outgrowth of post-WWII paranoia from seeing, or thinking you'd seen, nefarious Communist traitors relaying H-Bomb secrets to the Soviets.... Nixon holding up microfilm stored in pumpkins by Whittaker Chambers, McCarthy rooting out Commie cells from Hollywood yammering "Point of Order!! Are you now or have you ever been.....??"
In this booklet, Hoover outlined "how Commie cells work"... meeting in secret in plain houses, hiding among ordinary citizens, ready to emerge to follow orders from their anti-American handlers at any time. Raging paranoia from a rather twisted mind but adults who'd lived through Hitler's horror and knew of Stalin's slaughters of his own populace felt compelled to brainwash their children with the stuff as gospel truth.
A lot of courageous and rational Americans had their lives and careers destroyed by daring to stand up for their rights to privacy and freedom of speech in those days. Now we've ALL seen an absolute nightmare manifestation of exactly those sorts of fantastic threats, not from atheistic communists but from supposed believers in the same diety the majority of Americans accept in Christianity. It isn't some sort of nebulous threat of microfilm being given away to Russian spies by traitors, it's of dozens of apparently educated and intelligent individuals suddenly slicing womens' throats on airplanes and slaughtering 5000 people including themselves.
As we've looked back at those days, many of us have viewed the threats as having been to our rights and not as from the external enemies. Well, we KNOW very well now of very real threats, apparently burrowed into our society as well as in other countries. Can we preserve rights? Are we as a population intelligent enough to do so, and will it be possible in any event?
And under a president who says in the same breaths as disavowals of being anti-Islam, that we're embarking on a "crusade." Brrrrr
