The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Humor-Deficient Charles Johnson Sides With #Occupy Movement vs. NYPD UPDATE: NYPD Investigates Occupier’s Twitter Death Threat Against Police

Posted on | March 18, 2012 | 72 Comments

Raised during the Cold War — when my uncles and cousins and neighbors were fighting the Viet Cong and the NVA, when American troops stood on guard against that doomsday moment when the Red Army decided to make a try for the Fulda Gap, when any blink of an eye might bring down a worldwide thermonuclear Armaggedon upon us — I developed a profound loathing of communism.

It was a highlight of my journalism career when the news came across the wire that former CPUSA chairman Gus Hall had died, and it was my honor to write his obituary, thus bringing good news to the world because, as every patriotic red-blooded American knows, the only good Commie is a dead Commie.

Has such a perspective become archaic or obsolete, merely because the Soviet Union collapsed into the ash-heap of history 20 years ago? Or, as I think, is it important to remember the deadly evil that Marx and Lenin unleashed upon mankind, and to stand eternally vigilant against any prospect of its recrudescence?

You may disagree with my belief that the Red Menace is still a specter that haunts us, and if you disagree, you probably don’t share my opinion that the Occupy movement represents a new iteration that menace. I understand this and so, when I denounce the Occupiers as “Commies,” it is both a serious indictment of their leftist worldview and a self-conscious jest, satirically invoking the old Cold War mentality toward beatniks and hippies and other such pinko Bolshevik sympathizers.

“They’re the kind of commie scum who give commie scum a bad name and my trademark ‘hypothetical atrocity’ rhetoric was intended to signify nothing other than my bottomless well of contempt for such people. Therefore if I were the commander of the NYPD riot squad, my orders would be to open fire and shoot to kill. We’d make Kent State look like a Sunday school picnic. The brutality would be something more on the scale of Guernica, complete with Predator drone airstrikes.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 8, 2011

If you don’t understand this, OK. But your lack of understanding is not my fault, and if I have to explain that I was friends with such refugees from Communism as the late Balint Vazonyi, if I have to remind you that Communist governments killed 100 million of their own citizens during the 20th century, if you don’t realize that Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were both guilty as hell — well, why do you blame me for your own ignorance? And speaking of ignorance . . .

Little Green Footballs has evidently attracted another fool:

This “Silvio Breckman” is a useless nobody with 41 followers on Twitter, who could be even more easily ignored than his idiotic hero.

Whether Breckman is evil or merely ignorant, I don’t know.

Whenever a left-winger calls me a “fascist,” it recalls to mind the Popular Front era of the 1930s, when the Comintern used front groups to build alliances with liberals in the West in solidarity against Mussolini and Hitler. The Popular Front instantly evaporated in 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signalled Stalin’s alliance with Hitler for the partition of Poland, with Stalin getting a green light for the conquest of the Baltic states as part of this hideous “compromise” among totalitarians. As soon as Stalin and Hitler reached that agreement, all the Reds who had been yelping about the fascist danger changed their tune overnight. Suddenly, the various Comintern “anti-fascist” front groups dissolved and reconstituted themselves as “peace” groups. And this Communist-led “peace” movement continued for 21 months.

While the Nazis conquered Poland, Holland, Belgium and France, while the Luftwaffe rained death on London — through all of this, Communist sympathizers in the United States denounced as “warmongers” any American who advocated or supported U.S. aid to Britain and other allies threatened by the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis. President Franklin Roosevelt and members of Congress who saw the need to aid the Allies and for America to increase its own military preparedness were excoriated by these left-wing “peace” groups.

Ah, but this “peace” movement ended in June 1941, when Hitler surprised Stalin by launching Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the U.S.S.R. Once more, Moscow’s American front groups were dissolved and reconstituted as part of an “anti-fascist” movement demanding U.S. entry into the war against Hitler and immediate military aid to the Soviets.

It was this trajectory of American leftist groups that exposed an important truth: The CPUSA and its various front groups were controlled by Moscow, and were thus subversive agents of a foreign government, rather than being genuinely independent democratic “progressives,” as they and their sympathizers had claimed.

This revelation shocked many liberals into a new understanding of what the CPUSA really was — a tool of Stalinist policy — and the Party’s membership collapsed along with whatever prestige it had previously enjoyed in the United States. When, in the wake of World War II, it was believed that Eastern Europe had been surrendered to Stalin at Yalta, and that Truman had betrayed our anti-Communist allies in China, the reaction of ordinary Americans was harsh and furious. Had we just fought a bloody, costly war against one totalitarian menace, only to deliver half the world into the grasp of another totalitarian menace?

Such was the understanding and sentiment which gave rise to the post-war American anti-Communist movement, which is nowadays ridiculed or denounced as a needless hysteria incited by demagogues. But there really was a Soviet threat, and there really were agents of espionage and subversion who secretly sought to advance the ideology, policy and interest of Moscow, and among those who took alarm at this danger was a former bleeding-heart liberal Democrat named Ronald Reagan.

How many times was Reagan called a “fascist”?

How many stars in the sky?

When Reagan became governor of California and cracked down on the “peace” protesters in Berkeley, he was demonized worse than any conservative nowadays can ever imagine. But Reagan well knew whose side the protesters were on, whether they knew it or not. (True fact: During the 1940s, the bleeding-heart Reagan had unwittingly joined at least two Communist front groups.) For all the scorn and mockery he endured, it was Ronald Reagan who was destined to enact the policies that ultimately brought about the end of the Soviet Union.

All this history I recite, so that Silvio Breckman and anyone else may know that I am not ignorant of how “fascist” has been used over the years to stigmatize the Left’s enemies. And I hope that everyone can see how, in this conflict between the NYPD and the Occupy movement, Silvio and his hero Charles Johnson have sided with the Occupiers.

If I sometimes crack wise about my contempt for “Commie scum,” my contempt for them is yet quite serious. What was true during the Cold War is still true: There are no good Communists this side of Hell.

 

 

UPDATE: The ex-Lizards at Diary of Daedalus always enjoy a laugh: Occupy Jazzy McBikeshorts!

UPDATE II: Charles Johnson loves him some Occupiers and, gee, those Occupiers sure hate cops, don’t they?

Police are investigating an apparent Occupy Wall St. protester’s online threat to kill cops.
Someone with the Twitter handle “smackema1” tweeted this message at 11:39 p.m. Saturday, following a clash at Zuccotti Park.: “we wont make a difference if we dont kill a cop or 2.”
The NYPD is seeking a subpoena to find out who’s behind the Twitter account, according to Paul Browne, the department’s top spokesman.

How long until Johnson starts selling “Free Mumia” T-shirts?

Category: #Occupy, Charles Johnson, History

Comments

72 Responses to “Humor-Deficient Charles Johnson Sides With #Occupy Movement vs. NYPD UPDATE: NYPD Investigates Occupier’s Twitter Death Threat Against Police”

  1. Adjoran
    March 18th, 2012 @ 10:52 pm

     I always disagreed with the statement “the only good communist is a dead communist” on the basis that many of the bastards keep doing evil after death.  Consider the legacies of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Che for starters.

    But the dead ones do less active harm, so I should not be construed as opposing making them dead – only a healthy skepticism about how good it makes them.

  2. Adjoran
    March 18th, 2012 @ 10:53 pm

     It’s not they don’t know it, it’s that they believe they are entitled to rewrite it to suit their narratives.

  3. Cube
    March 18th, 2012 @ 10:54 pm

     Ever notice how the agitators who get things started are never the ones who catch the bullets when the real violence starts?  It’s like they don’t care who gets hurt as long as they get what they want.  You’d think the ones joining the protests for something to do would eventually catch on.  But they never do.

  4. Pathfinder's wife
    March 18th, 2012 @ 10:55 pm

    There’s nothing funny about people making death threats against cops either.

    If they kept to just protesting, then hey all good, freedom of speech, sauce for the goose, and all that.  But physical threats and whatnot go past the line.

    And yeah, we are getting into a very dangerous cycle of point, counter point — and it will likely get used by people who are up to no good and do not have our best interests at heart (already is most likely).

  5. Bob Belvedere
    March 18th, 2012 @ 10:55 pm

    Right on about this Summer – not looking forward to it.

    I have no sympathy for the sheeples because they have Free Will.

  6. Bob Belvedere
    March 18th, 2012 @ 10:58 pm

    You have a deep understanding of the Left – spot-on!

  7. Bob Belvedere
    March 18th, 2012 @ 10:59 pm

    Well said!

  8. Bob Belvedere
    March 18th, 2012 @ 11:02 pm

    To feed their rose-colored delusions.

  9. Bob Belvedere
    March 18th, 2012 @ 11:05 pm

    You’re quite right.

    Once the Leftist leaders gain enough power, the first thing they always do is purge their own ranks, shore things up before they come after the rest of us.  See: Red Terror, The.

  10. Pathfinder's wife
    March 18th, 2012 @ 11:09 pm

    My kids have a couple of friends who fit this description.  Nice kids, they are well meaning — but they are naive and gullible (having come from good families and never witnessed the grittier side of the human condition, and thus are entirely too trusting).  Their good nature is the very thing that is used against them…and they are usually the type that wind up getting hurt.

    There is regrettably only so much you can do to warn off such kids.  I worry about them.

  11. Pathfinder's wife
    March 18th, 2012 @ 11:18 pm

    I addressed this: there are some who are truly just naive and good intentioned…and very easy to gull.
    Same as it ever was; they will end up paying the price first.  That’s perhaps the greatest evil of all: to take a big hearted person who desperately wants to do something good, to twist them and use them for corrupt and evil ends, using them like…cannon fodder.

  12. Garym
    March 19th, 2012 @ 12:01 am

    “The others that do know history are a different matter. Some are merely deluded enough to think that they will be on the winning side and will be viewed kindly because they believed the politically correct things.”
    There is truth to this, but I think it is thier arrogance that makes them think that they can do it better than before.

  13. Pathfinder's wife
    March 19th, 2012 @ 12:02 am

    That is why it is important to try and cut as many of the sheep out of the flock the wolves have gathered for themselves, and to locate and confront the true wolves.

    Even if the sheep are exasperating and don’t seem worth it; in the end it always is (worthwhile).

  14. Cube
    March 19th, 2012 @ 12:31 am

     Thanks, Bob!

    I was around 13 or so when I read about Kent State and other events involving the Left.  I also read about the atrocities committed everywhere Communists ruled.  Even then I was infuriated at how ignorant people were used and discarded and amazed that so few people seemed to figure out that despite the propaganda, leftists care only about themselves.  As I grew up it astounded me that people who should have known better still held leftist beliefs.

    Apparently Michael Savage is right.  Liberalism is a mental disorder.

  15. Mark J Dietl
    March 19th, 2012 @ 1:30 am

    Preach it brother Robert!

  16. Adjoran
    March 19th, 2012 @ 1:34 am

     Ethel was probably the driving force behind the treason, actually.  Julius wasn’t exactly dragged along, they got what they deserved – but a lot of people who deserved the same fate escaped with a few years in prison, too.

  17. Bob Belvedere
    March 19th, 2012 @ 7:15 am

    I’m not a fan of Savage, but he was onto something.

    I remember Kent State [I was nine] and if I hadn’t read up on it, I would have never known the truth about it if I had just listened to the TV news and newspapers. The same with Forced Busing, which helped make me understand I was conservative. The final piece was fitted after watching interviews with and reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

    If people would just spend a few minutes looking into things, our job would be so much easier.

  18. Zim
    March 19th, 2012 @ 7:57 am

    …my trademark ‘hypothetical atrocity’ rhetoric was
    intended to signify nothing other than my bottomless well of
    contempt….

     

    “One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the
    truth, or else shut up.” — Arthur Koestler

  19. Zim
    March 19th, 2012 @ 8:15 am

    Democrats are what they’ve been since 1861: the party of slavery.

    Leading Democrats like John C. Calhoun were in the pocket of Slavery Inc. going back to the 1830s.

  20. Asian_chic
    March 19th, 2012 @ 9:13 am

    My sisters are influenced by their husband’s view and not to mention, we are surrounded by liberal states. If I could, I would desensitize one sister at a time but we have an unspoken rule, don’t talk about sports or politics. lol You are so right about the propaganda! They lure people into believing welfare and other government programs are saving the poor, the elderly and the less fortunate in our society. What they don’t say is the consequences of these programs. Children of single parent homes are dependent on the state so why have the other parent around? People would rather receive “free” money than work for a living. Like here on the East Coast, they want to raise the minimum wage. Sounds good right? No. People will have a harder time trying to get a job. Who is willing be paying 10.00 an hour to flip burgers? Each quarter, I receive the S.S. benefit letter telling me how much I am going to get in the future. That’s another form of propaganda. The money has been spent! I just hope people will wake up because before long, we will be doomed with the weight of these Government programs!

  21. Eric The Red « The Camp Of The Saints
    March 19th, 2012 @ 9:45 am

    […] C. Johnson [not to be confused with Jazzy McBikeshorts, the bike seat sniffing nimrod] uncovered a video of Holder from 1995, as Joel Pollack reports: […]

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