When Your Heart Still Bleeds For Communist Actors

Recently, I started reading Senator Joe McCarthy by Richard H. Rovere. It’s a really good biography going over the history of Joseph McCarthy’s political career, how he got so powerful, and how he fell.

I mention this because a new-subset of the populist right seem to agree with what McCarthy said, but didn’t agree with what he did. Or, they believe McCarthy was right, but that the real victims were those poor Communists. Yes, they’re that dumb.

Many know this comic:

Well, there’s an edit of it going around that compares them to communist actors fired during the Red Scare:

First off, the point of this comic is still accurate. You do have a right to blacklist, fire, and refuse to hire anyone because they’re a communist. Just as you can do all these things if or even because they’re not a communist. That’s simply how freedom of association works.

Also, I must admit I find the idea of this comic to do downright evil. The real victims of the Red Scare weren’t the people who weren’t communists but were wrongly fired and blacklisted as such, but those who actually were communists?

Of course, there’s the obvious question “Why do you care so much about communists being fired?” Is it because you — the hypothetical person who agrees with the point of this comic — are a communist? Is so, that’s your right as someone who lives in the United States. However, do not hide behind the argument of “I have a right to be,” when people don’t want to deal with someone who promotes an ideology that has led to the death of over 100 million people.

That’s the thing that gets me. While most people have the knee-jerk opinion of “no idea is dangerous,” this is wrong. The failures of Communism and Socialism started before Karl Mark laid out the idea in The Communist Manifesto — starting when it killed half the population of Jamestown ten years before the Plantations William Bradford wrote about.

As such, sharing this meme does show you sympathize with the most dangerous idea in the 20th century — and clearly the one that has killed the most with pure numbers.

I should note this article wasn’t even suppose to be a response to this meme specifically. It was actually suppose to be a response to an article called Please Stop Sharing This Viral But Misguided Free-Speech Comic. However, I couldn’t.

Why not? Because it would cost me $5 a month or $48 a year to read this article. Thanks a lot, information so good I can’t get it.