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Discuss how a nation which prided itself on allowing freedom of association and
freedom of speech could have allowed the anti-communist witch hunts to ...
Submitted by kpetroff on June 15, 2006
Category: American History
Words: 2262 | Pages: 10
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2. McCarthyism
Discuss how a nation which prided itself on allowing freedom of association and freedom of speech could have allowed the anti-communist witch hunts to have happened. Can you see any parallels in later years?
McCarthyism in the United States named by the senator Joseph McCarthy was a period of intense anti-communism also known as the ‘red scare’ which primarily occurred from 1948 – 1956, however the length of this time period is debatable as we can still see the aftermath in our society today. This period saw many un-democratic happenings where people’s civil liberties were taken away because of a climate of fear stirred up by the threat of communist spies and informers’ infiltrating America, institutions such as the HUAC and the GEO used this fear to their advantage and had a massive amount of power, with vague mission statements allowing them to control public life. There is no one reason for this period in American history, but internal factors such as the social conservative fear of change and clinging to traditions lead to scapegoat of the ‘other’,- in this instance, communists who threatened this stability. Internationally the threat of the nuclear bomb was realistic when paired with offensive communist militia in Korea, which was brought home through ‘duck and cover’ propaganda, whose vague subject matter in fact propelled the fear. These social factors linked to the political instability of America at the time with polarized parties and an ineffectual president leads to the appliance of McCarthyism. However the worrying fact about this period in history is that we seem to not have learnt from it, and that this situation seems to be re-enacted today with anti-terrorism activity where laws put in place by institutions (the American government) such as the Patriot Act curtail to the same intensity as the McCarthy era, that which America cherishes most, individual citizens freedom and unaliable rights, because of a...
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