Good Night and Good Luck

Wicked Dox, who posts hard to find older articles, has posted this 1999 article by Mark Skousen titled 'They Were Right'.

Excerpts:

[...] But despite this grounds-well of concern over the threat of communism, communist sympathizers at high levels combined with media forces to ridicule and vilify patriotic conservatives. Most historians deplored the anticommunist movement of the 1950s and 1960s as "extremist," "paranoid," "right-wing" hysteria. Accordingly, there was little credence given to this alleged vast communist conspiracy; reaction went rarely beyond references to McCarthyism, red-baiting, and blacklisting. They challenged the anti-communists' claims that the Soviets had planted numerous agents in government, that Stalin had infiltrated the film industry as a means of promoting communist propaganda, that the Communist Party USA was a pawn of Moscow, and that the Soviet Union was a serious military threat.

They depicted the anticommunist era as an unwarranted "witch hunt" against liberal progressives and idealistic movie stars and a groundless attack on patriotic government officials who they say were falsely accused of espionage. They carried on a 40-year campaign to prove Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg innocent. My uncle's book so angered members of the political science and history departments at Brigham Young University that Richard D. Poll, a history professor, wrote a scathing critique of his "extremist" views on Karl Marx and communism. [...]

The KGB files prove beyond doubt that Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and numerous other Americans accused of spying for the Soviets were guilty. They confirm what J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee were saying all along: that spies reached the highest levels of the State and Treasury departments, the White House, and the Manhattan Project, and that the Communist Party USA (which had 50,000 members in World War II) got its marching orders from Moscow. [...]

After writing three books on the Soviet archives, historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr summed it up this way about the anti-communists: "They were right." And being right, they deserve our praise and gratitude.

Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek were thought to have lost the economics debate with the communists. Even as late as 1989, "...[Paul] Samuelson claimed that "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.""

The 8 foot statue of Senator Joseph McCarthy in my front yard stays up!