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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't so much that Communism was illegal, but it was:

1) A witch-hunt in the context of McCarthy-ism.

2) The possibility that KGB spies could turn said person into an agent using the person's "Communist leanings."

I'm not saying that I agree with it, but I don't think that Communism was ever "illegal" in any sense (I could be wrong).

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It wasn't illegal, but it was revealed many years later that pretty much every single Communist-leaning organization in the US had been receiving funds from Moscow. This doesn't justify what "Tail Gunner Joe" McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover did in persecuting suspected sympathizers (and anyone else they didn't like), of course.

Paranoia is "the unreasoning fear that others are out to get you". Only in this case, there was an element of truth to this. In the mid 50's Nikita Khrushchev spoke at the United Nations, banging his show upon the desk as he said "We will bury you!" The threat from the USSR was real.

The threat was real but it had about as much to do with the mutual distrust and, yes, paranoia of two nuclear-armed superpowers as with anything else.

A case in point is the mythology you mention - Khrushchev's shoe-banging incident was separate from the famous 'We will bury you' line and 'We will bury you' means something significantly less aggressive in context rather than when excerpted and literally translated into English.

"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will dig you in"

This is an expression of the Communist belief in Communism's inevitable supremacy as a political system all over the world, by 'historical necessity' - it's not Khrushchev threatening the Russians are about to come over, crush their enemies, see them driven before them and hear the lamentations of their women.

"it was revealed many years later that pretty much every single Communist-leaning organization in the US had been receiving funds from Moscow"

This claim needs a bit of elaboration, especially since people have called everything from SDS to the Mattachine Society to SCSC to the Black Panthers to the Union of Concerned Scientists to Greenpeace to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament "Communist-leaning."

The broader point is true: McCarthy in his factual assessment that many US institutions, including parts of the government, were infiltrated by agents of and at least in some respects directed from Moscow, was right, although his overall package was very much broken.

> Nikita Khrushchev spoke at the United Nations, banging his show upon the desk as he said "We will bury you!"

I discovered recently that this conflates two different events

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-banging_incident

Real communism was pretty close to being illegal as it explicitly calls for revolution, in contrast with social democracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act_trials_of_communist_p...

The "witch-hunt" term needs to go away. The government was lousy with communists and soviet agents. McCarthy was ultimately not very helpful, as the media has found it very easy to use him to make the anti-communists look like the real villains.

Most Smith Act convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court because people were convicted when they hadn't done anything besides being a member of a political party. That's not the sort of thing that makes anti-communists look good.

  | Real communism was pretty close to being illegal
  | as it explicitly calls for revolution, in contrast
  | with social democracy.

Marx believed that the transition to Communism would go like this:

  Democracy => Socialism => Communism

with each of those transitions being a bloody revolution. The transition to Communism wouldn't necessarily have to be a bloody revolution just because Marx thought that it would be (as evidenced, to him, by the transition from Totalitarianism => Democracy). Also, the term "Communist-sympathizer" could very well have applied to many people at the time that were more in favour of social programs like universal health care.

  | The "witch-hunt" term needs to go away.

This is one of those times that the term witch-hunt is actually useful. Once you are accused of being a Communist-sympathizer, everything you do is under a microscope, and you're guilty until proven innocent. By the time you're accused it's practically a fore-gone conclusion, and no one wants to listen to you. It's an Us vs. Them mentality, and you are accused of being one of Them, and now you have to prove that you're One of Us. Does this sound like something helpful?

  | the media has found it very easy to use him to
  | make the anti-communists look like the real villains.

This isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. It isn't a case where the 'evil people' are either the anti-communists, or the communists, and that's the end of it. No one things that the USSR was a "worker's paradise," but at the same time, "I'm working against these other bad people," is no excuse for bad behaviour.

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