The Return of Mccarthyism

Prabhat Patnaik

THE Trump administration’s current clamp-down on free speech in the United States is eerily reminiscent of the 1950s when there had been a witch-hunt led by Senator Joseph McCarthy that had not only victimised a whole generation of artistes and intellectuals on the charge of being Communists, but had also left a deep negative imprint on the creative life of that country for decades to come. The victims of that witch-hunt had included numerous outstanding individuals ranging from artistes and writers like Dashiel Hammet, Dalton Trumbo, Bertolt Brecht, and Charles Chaplin, to academics like Lawrence Klein, Richard Goodwin, E H Norman, Daniel Thorner, Moses Finlay and Owen Lattimore. Even such notable public figures like J Robert Oppenheimer who had led the Manhattan Project for building an atom bomb, and Harry Dexter White, who had founded the Bretton Woods system (along with J M Keynes of the UK) were not spared: they were asked to appear before one or the other of the committees set up to investigate communism in the US. The loss to the US from this witch-hunt was immense. Some have even suggested that the country got into the Vietnam War because the scholarship available within it on East and South-East Asia had been decimated by McCarthyism; had it been available, the US might have profited from it and prevented itself from getting into the quagmire.

The similarity between the McCarthyite phenomenon and the actions initiated now by Trump, is felt by many; but it has been explicitly articulated by Columbia University Professor Bruce Higgins (MR online, March 21). It may appear at first sight that drawing such a parallel constitutes a gross exaggeration. After all there have only been a handful of cases of arrest and deportation till now; why get so worked up over it and suggest parallels with the McCarthyite witch-hunt? Similarly, it may be argued, the targets till now have been non-US citizens, residing in that country either on a visa or by holding a Green Card; this surely is different from the McCarthyite period when US citizens, not just “outsiders”, had been the victims of the witch-hunt.

But one can scarcely derive much comfort from such considerations. Trump has made it clear that cases like Mahmoud Khalil’s are just the beginning; actions on thousands of other similar cases will follow. Mahmoud Khalil, it may be recalled, was the Columbia student holding a Green Card and married to an American citizen who happens to be eight months pregnant. Khalil has been arrested and awaits deportation on the charge of having links with “terrorists” because he led the Columbia student demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza. Likewise, once large-scale deportation of visa and Green Card holders occurs, US citizens who participate in protests against Gaza-type genocides and also against such deportations, will scarcely be spared punitive action. They too will be victimised for supporting foreign “terrorist” activities. It is impossible in short, once the process of victimisation of a section of the population for freely expressing its views has begun, to feel reassured that it will remain confined to this section alone and will not touch the rest of the population. We are thus justified in feeling that we are at the start of a McCarthy-style witch-hunt.

In fact the looming witch-hunt is even worse in many ways than the one launched by Senator Joe McCarthy. First, the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil is being ordered under a provision in the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 which states that any “alien, whose presence or activities in the United States, the secretary of state has reasonable ground to believe, would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States, is deportable.” Invoking this clause means in effect that no foreigner, whether a visa-holder or a Green Card-holder, can criticise the foreign policy of the United States. In the case of Khalil, for instance, the accusation against him, apart from his being close to a “terrorist” organisation, Hamas (for which no evidence has been adduced), is “anti-semitism” which is one of the traits that US foreign policy is meant to combat around the world; his opposition to the genocide being inflicted on Gaza by Israel is branded as “anti-semitism” and hence as having adverse consequences for US foreign policy. But a similar accusation can be made against any “alien” who criticises any aspect of US foreign policy; and even US citizens who “aid and abet” such “aliens” by participating in demonstrations against US foreign policy, a euphemism for acts of US imperialism elsewhere in the world, can no doubt also be hauled up.

In other words, the scope of the current witch-hunt is even wider than that of Senator Joe McCarthy. It is not just targeted against only one segment of the population, namely the Communists and their sympathisers, as McCarthyism was; rather, it is targeted against anyone who dares to criticise US foreign policy, and above all the US policy of controlling West Asia through an aggressive and expansionist Israeli settler-colonialism.

Secondly, McCarthyism was unleashed in the context of the Cold War. The Cold War was itself a part of imperialism’s fight against the prestige and appeal that the Soviet Union had acquired during the Second World War; it created a bogey of Soviet aggression, even though the Soviet Union, devastated by the war, had no aggressive intentions whatsoever. McCarthyism in short was part of a very specific imperialist strategy in a very specific context; but the current Trump offensive is coming in a situation where imperialism cannot adduce any particular threat from any particular power. It is simply meant to cover up imperialism’s aggressiveness in a world where no specific power can be cited as a threat, but where a large number of countries, pushed to the wall by the crisis inflicted by the neo-liberal order, are looking for some relief from the economic arrangements imposed upon them. The context for Trump’s assault is the moral bankruptcy of imperialism rather than the suddenly enhanced moral stature of any particular non-imperialist power.

Thirdly, the fact that Trump’s assault on free speech has a broader target than that of McCarthyism, is confirmed by the utterly un-Constitutional and peremptory manner in which his administration is dictating to US universities how they should conduct their affairs, and withholding federal funds in case they demur. Thus $ 450 million of federal funds was withheld from Columbia University if it did not accede to the Trump administration’s demand to carry out a number of changes in its functioning; and the university has reportedly acceded to these demands now, which will greatly truncate academic freedom. Making access to federal funds by universities conditional upon their being run to the satisfaction of the government, is as much a violation of a university’s autonomy as of its academic ambience. It constrains universities to become government organs rather than spaces for creative and critical thinking. This constitutes an altogether new innovation compared to McCarthyism.

What we are witnessing in other words is a neo-fascist onslaught on thought that is even wider in its scope than the McCarthyite onslaught of the 1950s. Of course even in the rest of the imperialist countries which do not have neo-fascist ruling regimes, critical thought and free speech are also under attack. In Europe for instance there is not only the drumming up of an utterly baseless threat of Russian expansionism (while the reality is NATO expansionism right up to the borders of Russia and even the stationing of German troops in Lithuania), but also a full-throated support for Israeli action in Gaza. In fact, any criticism of Israeli action is being dubbed as anti-semitism; and meetings to discuss the genocide in Gaza have been cancelled in Germany under official orders.

Thus imperialist countries, whether they are ruled by neo-fascist regimes or by liberal bourgeois regimes, are coming down heavily on freedom of expression, and are becoming more repressive; the neo-fascist regimes of course are comparatively more repressive, but the liberal bourgeois ones are not far behind. Further, this is happening at a time when imperialist countries are also stepping up military spending. Germany has just passed a Constitutional amendment lifting the ceiling on its fiscal deficit, so that it can spend more on arming itself. France and the UK too are increasing their military spending relative to their Gross Domestic Product. Metropolitan capitalism in short is entering a phase of repressive militarism the like of which has not been seen since the Second World War; this bodes ill for the people of the world.

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