I just caught the last half of a speech NYTime’s reporter David Halberstram gave at the Kennedy Center a few months ago. It was an excellent history about the military men in Vietnam who were not allowed to tell the truth. Halberstram called it the “lying machine” and it came into existance because domestic politics wouldn’t permit the truth to be told. That’s just what I thought when I was twenty year old and it sounds very familiar today.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the speech was his explanation of how the Red Scare got its legs. He said it began when the unpopular Truman beat Dewey in 1949 because Dewey had run a civilized campaign. After their the long suffering since the blow out of 1932 Republicans were desperate for some red meat. The 1949 fall of China, the Alger Hiss trials and Stalin’s capture of our Atom Bomb technology were the sparks and they served Republicans very well. As a result both political parties had to out hawk each other to avoid getting trounced. That meant calling the various post-colonial revolutions in the third world a paart of a monolithic communist threat.
Maybe I shouldn’t take monolithic Islam quite so seriously. Most people don’t really like cutting off heads even if they really don’t want you to station your soldiers in their country.
