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Had any other partys chief ministers office been embroiled in a scandal connected to the smuggling of gold in times of pandemic in the manner in which CPIMs chief minister Pinarayi Vijayans office is, the Indian commentariat would have made it daily breaking news and would have gone around telling the world on how the people of India have been let down. Had the Chief Minister belonged to the BJP, the heavens would have fallen, apocalypse would have been foretold and the BJP and its leadership would have been daily assailed and battered. But since it is a CPI(M) chief minister, the noise is muted, the Congress and members of its first family are silent, the intelligentsia is star-gazing and a deliberate attempt is being made to allow the story to either sink away or keep floating on the margins. Since it is a secular dispensation that is involved, these acts are interpreted, by a section of opinion makers and gate-keepers, as mere aberrations in the otherwise uninterrupted peoples revolution.

The Kerala gold smuggling episode with its links deep into the entrails of the Kerala Chief Ministers Office is indeed an extremely disconcerting and dangerous development in terms of Indians national security. It has also exposed the manner in which cronyism has entangled the CPI(M) and its leadership in the state. That an element like Swapna Suresh, with a record of criminality and dubious dealings could have access to the inner circles of the CPI(M) Chief Minister is in itself cause for extreme concern. That no less a person like the Chief Ministers principal secretary, M Sivasankar, a powerful senior bureaucrat who practically controlled the Chief Minister and his office, had such a close liaison with Suresh is also extremely disconcerting. Sivasankar, also the IT Secretary of the State and the Chairman of the Kerala State Information Technology Infrastructure Limited (KSTIL) went out of his way to ensure that Swapna Suresh was recruited as manager at KSTIL. It has now come to light that Sivasankar used his office and standing to put forth Swapna Sureshs name for the post through the international consultant PricewaterHouseCoopers. Why was Sivasankar so desperate in trying to ensure that Swapna Suresh got a job in KSTIL, was her links and network in power circles of the ruling CPI(M) an important reason for her to get this job? Why was Chief Minister Vijayan silent on this? How is it that adverse intelligence reports on Swapna Sureshs past record, a crime branch case against her for forgeries done in 2013 were ignored when she was being recruited? It is said that phone calls were made from Chief Minister Vijayans office to the Customs trying to stall the investigations. This is the level of cronyism that the CPI(M) in Kerala has descended to. The links as they are unravelling does not end here. K.T.Jaleel, the CPIMs minister for Higher Education, Wakf, Minority Welfare, and once a firebrand leader of the banned outfit SIMI, has been in close touch with Swapna Suresh as well.

But since it is Jaleel, an erstwhile SIMI and Muslim League leader, the protest against his misusing of public office is muted. The Left-Liberal intelligentsia in the country, which has a quick and biased opinion on the Delhi riots, which is fast in always demonising and castigating the majority community in India, have been silent on this. The CPI(M), for them, is always above reproach, since it is alone the standard-bearer of secularism in India!

The CPI(M), on its part, has always used Jaleel, who by his own admission is a hard core religious man, as a poster boy for its politics of Muslim appeasement. That Jaleel, who cut his political teeth in separatist politics of SIMI has been in touch with Suresh, the kingpin of the gold smuggling racket speaks volumes of the kind of degenerative and subversive politics that the CPI(M) has come to pursue and represent.

Yet Communists leaders across the country are tight lipped about these dangerous developments. Dangerous, if one examines the National Investigation Agencys statements on the case. While taking over the case, the NIA, clearly stated, that as the case pertains to smuggling of large quantity of gold into India from offshore locations threatening the economic stability and national security of the country, it amounts to a terrorist act and after initial investigation the NIA has come to the conclusion that the proceeds of smuggled gold could be used for financing of terrorism in India. It has also emerged that smuggled gold could also have been used, among other things, to foment anti-CAA agitations. The CPI(M) politburo is silent on these developments, their Delhi based leaders with no popular base, are concerned about Kashmir and the CAA but have nothing to say, no action to take on these highly disturbing developments within the ranks of their party.

One is reminded of the last days of the Left Front in West Bengal, when its constituent parties led by the CPI(M) had begun resorting to the most violent and desperate kind of cronyism and syndicatism leading to its rout. The CPI(M) and its leaders had got themselves intertwined and enmeshed into such a miasmic web of petty bourgeois interests that the revolution and its ideal failed to sustain them anymore. It led them to fire on farmers in Nandigram, to try and suddenly jerk an industrial plan after having destroyed industry for over three decades and to terrorise the ordinary voter into voting them back. These expressions of hyper-cronyism destroyed the Left Fronts base in West Bengal. In the Kerala CPI(M )and left front, the trend is similar, only that its extra-territorial, dimension, connections and ramifications makes this brand of cronyism particularly dangerous for India.

The Kerala communists have always been a type apart. Basing themselves on hyperbole and hype, they have in fact, perpetrated a most dangerously intolerant politics. It has been their trait since the early years. In his foreword to a masterly treatise by Dr E. Balakrishnan, on the History of the Communist Movement in Kerala, one of the greatest thinkers to have emerged from among the nationalists in Kerala and in the Malayalam cultural, intellectual, philosophical discourse, late P. Parameshwaran, sometime also a front-ranking leader of the Jana Sangh, writes on how, the Kerala communists and for that matter communists across India, claiming to follow Gandhiji, denounced him in the most uncharitable terms. While eulogising revolution, they betrayed the greatest revolutionary, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and showered him with the choicest abuses without decency or decorum. In Kerala the Communists, P. Parameshwaran reminds us, left no stone unturned to denigrate the most honest politician and sincere-most friend of the poor, Sri K Kelappan. Verbally unleashing volumes of propaganda against communalism, they made the worst compromises with it, thereby pushing Kerala into the mire of fundamentalism. While the Kerala communists under the leadership of the likes of EMS Namboodiripad, tried to sabotage the freedom movement and abused leaders like Kelappan, revered by the people as Kerala Gandhi, they paid unabashed obeisance to the Islamists. In 1993, EMS, for example, publicly equated Abdul Nasser Madani, Islamic fundamentalist leader, accused in the Coimbatore serial blasts and Bangalore serial blasts with Mahatma Gandhi!

Veteran historian MGS Narayanan, for instances, describes the Communist faade best when he says, communists are capable of creating a good image when they are in opposition, so long as they have no chance of wielding powerA romantic and utopian view of Communism is often found among intellectuals and social activists in areas which never had a taste of Communist rule with its hidden agenda of destroying national self-respect and communal harmony in order to impose the partys hegemony. In Kerala that hidden agenda is now being exposed. It has now gone a step ahead, tango with anti-India elements in order to pander and satiate politics of cronyism. For the Left-Liberal cartels, it is look-the-other-way, since these are comrades, who are involved.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Excerpt from:
Gold smuggling in pandemic & politics of cronyism the Kerala communist model - The Times of India Blog

Today, August 1, 2020, marks the 47th anniversary of the death of Nikos Zachariadis, General Secretary of the CC of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) from 1931 to 1956, one of the most significant figures of the european and international communist movement in the 20th century.He was born to ethnic Greek parents in Ottoman Empire's Edirne (Andrianoupolis) in 1903.At the age of 16, Nikos moved to Istanbul where he worked in various jobs, including as a dockworker and sailor. It was there when he started having his first organised relationship with the working-class movement.In 1919-1922 he travelled extensively to the Soviet Union. In 1923 he became a member of the Communist Party of Turkey. He studied in the newly-founded "KUTV" (Communist University of the Toilers of the East), also known as "Stalin School", in the Soviet Union. After the Greco-Turkish War and the exchange of populations, the Zachariadis family moved permanently to Greece, during a period of severe political and economic crisis.

On summer 1924, after finishing his studies in the Soviet Union, Nikos Zachariadis travelled secretly to Greece where he undertook duties at the Young Communist League of Greece (OKNE). In 1926, during the dictatorship of General Pangalos, he was arrested and imprisoned in Thessaloniki. He managed to escape and worked secretly in various party positions. He was re-arrested and re-imprisoned in 1929, but once again he escaped and fled to the Soviet Union. During his stay in the Soviet Union he became a member of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

The death of Joseph Stalin and the right, opportunist turn of the CPSU had a serious impact in the Greek communist movement. In May 1956, the 6th Plenum of the Central Committee of KKE- significantly influenced by Khrushchev's revisionist leadership- (wrongfully) condemned Zachariadis for "serious mistakes" and "sectarian policy". On February 1957 he was expelled from the Party. Nikos Zachariadis passed the rest of his life in exile in Siberia, particularly in Yahuta and Surgut. On August 1st, 1973, at the age of 70, he was found dead in his home in Surgut. According to the official account of his death, Zachariadis committed suicide.

In December 1991, his remains were repatriated in Greece where he was given a funeral at Athens' First Cemetery.

In July 2011, taking a historically and politically significant decision, the National Conference of the Communist Party of Greece fully rehabilitated Nikos Zachariadis as General Secretary and Party member, reversing the unjust decisions of the 6th Plenum.

KKE: EVENT IN HONOR OF NIKOS ZACHARIADIS

Members of the Attica Organisations of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and its youth wing KNE, gathered today at the First Cemetery of Athens in order to pay tribute to Nikos Zachariadis, on the 47th anniversary of his death.

Flowers were deposed to the grave of Zachariadis on behalf of the CC of the KKE, the Central Council of KNE and Zachariadis' son, Sifis.

The event was addressed by Giannis Manousogiannakis, member of the CC of the KKE, who, among other things, pointed out: "Like every year, the KKE and KNE are here, in his grave, as a minimum sign of respect for the selfless and heroic contribution of cde Nikos Zachariadis, General Secretary of the CC of the KKE from 1931 to 1956 [...] Comrade Nikos Zachariadis was dedicated, fully committed to the case of the working class, to proletarian internationalism, to the struggle for social liberation, for socialism-communism".

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Nikos Zachariadis: 47 years since the death of the Greek communist leader - In Defense of Communism

A specter is haunting Italys highways: the specter of Chavismo. Highways: the Venezuelan model has won, claimed journalist Nicola Porro in a video addressed to his 700,000 Facebook and 400,000 Twitter followers. Porro is a famous face on Silvio Berlusconis Mediaset TV stations and deputy editor of the tycoons newspaper Il Giornale; and within just hours, his talk of Venezuela had been adopted by dozens of right-wing commentators, but also a large part of the liberal establishment.

Such fury was not exactly well-grounded. Earlier in July, Giuseppe Contes government decided to take back a 33 percent public share in the company that manages Italys highways, twenty years after it was privatized. This was perhaps a rather tepid move, given the appalling in recent years, deadly neglect of the highways under private management. Yet comparisons with Hugo Chvez and Nicols Maduro abounded in national media, presenting Contes move as extreme and illegitimate.

His attackers drew on tropes already well-established in European and US public discourse, resorting to Cold War anti-communism even three decades since the fall of the Eastern Bloc. Faced with the slightest deviation from neoliberal orthodoxy, defenders of the status quo wheel out the classic rhetoric of economic failure, foreign ideology, and associations with uncivilized non-European countries deploying anti-communism against even forces that stand far from any kind of Marxist politics.

The Italian governments decision has its origins back in 2018, when the Ponte Morandi a cement road bridge in the outskirts of Genoa collapsed, killing forty-three people. This tragedy sparked sharp debates on the apparent lack of maintenance of this bridge and of Italys road infrastructure in general. Especially targeted was the Benetton family, owners of the clothes firm and over the last two decades the majority stake in highway-management firm Autostrade per lItalia (ASPI).

Back then, Conte led a coalition uniting the populist Five Star Movement with the hard-right Lega, and the call to revoke the Benetton familys concession began to make headway. This was a major about-turn in a public debate dominated for over a quarter-century by talk of how the efficient private sector should replace all direct state management, driving a wave of privatizations unrivaled outside the old Eastern Bloc.

ASPI was created in 1950 as part of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI, the then-vast public industrial holding company) and was a key force in the economic boom of the 1960s. Its building of one of the worlds densest highway networks fully suited a development model based on steel (public, at the time), oil (also in public hands) and cars (then, like now, under FIATs private quasi-monopoly).

The privatization of ASPI, along with IRI and many other public firms, came in the 1990s: the now-triumphant neoliberal ideology demanded this, but so, too, the binds established by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the founding act of the European Union, which among other things compelled Italy to slash its public debt through sell-offs of public assets. ASPI was privatized in 1999, and by 2002 the Benetton family had majority control. Since then, shareholders have drawn enormous profits, as road tolls have continually risen while investment in maintenance has been close to zero.

The highways themselves remained public property: what was privatized was their management, and the Ponte Morandi tragedy raised the possibility that the concession would be withdrawn. Yet it was unclear whether it would be entrusted to some other private owner, or if the state would directly take back control.

As this was still being debated, there came an unusual change of government. In summer 2019, Matteo Salvinis hard-right Lega split from its alliance with the Five Star Movement, which in turn formed a new coalition together with the center-left Democrats; despite this upheaval, the independent lawyer Giuseppe Conte remainedprime minister.

The Democrats had particular problems in countenancing nationalization. This party is, in fact, the heir to the political forces that led the privatizations of the 1990s, fully embodying the paradigm of progressive neoliberalism; it also has very close links with financial groups like the Benettons, considered leading lights of the enlightened, progressive-minded bourgeoisie notwithstanding their environmental and social violations in Latin America.

But the Democrats new leader Nicola Zingaretti was elected in 2019 on a platform, if not of Corbyn-style rupture, at least of partly walking back the Blairite infatuation of previous years. It would, indeed, have been odd for the theoretically most social-democratic of Italys main parties to be the only one opposed to revoking the concession.

Faced with a popular demand to do something to punish the Benettons considered indirectly responsible for the forty-three deaths if not nationalize the highways outright, the government was also trapped by its need not to appear overly anti-business, in an international context where it could imagine no economic strategy other than attracting private investment. Added complication came from the jungle of norms governing these outsourcing agreements.

Whatever the myth of the state-as-regulator of private business, these rules consistently favor the concession-owner stipulating billions of euros in fines for the state itself should it take the highways back from the privateer management.

The story came to a head on July 15 when the government and ASPI announced an agreement. State-owned financial holding company Cassa Depositi e Prestiti is to buy up 33 percent of the shares in ASPI (at a cost lower than any possible penalties) while another 22 percent will be ceded to institutional investors enjoying government confidence.

Then, the firm will be floated on the stock exchange and the Benettonss share will fall under 10 percent. This is far from a forced nationalization something the Italian constitution does, in fact, allow for but a market operation, contracted with the current owners, which will see the state intervene as a simple shareholder (if a major one) in a private firm.

But there is a clear shift: the state is to return as an economic actor, taking back part of what was privatized twenty years ago. If in 2018 the economist Mariana Mazzucato, theorist of a new state interventionism, wrote an article for leading daily La Repubblica (together with our comrade Simone Gasperin) entitled Highways: Nationalization Is No Taboo, today she is herself economic advisor to Prime Minister Conte.

The operation also bears the typical traits of this government and Contes own leadership, a balancing act between the progressive neoliberalism of the Italian center-left of the last twenty-five years and the need to give a different kind of response to a socio-economic situation in which such recipes have become unsustainable.

Contes government is not socialist and does not have any program of nationalizations. The agreement over the highways is fully internal to the mechanisms of a market economy. But the fact that, for the first time in decades, the Italian states role in a sector of the economy is growing rather than falling, certainly does point to a window of opportunity. This is a crack in the monolithic neoliberal consensus and the Left would do well to try and widen this crack further.

The day after the agreement, the specter of Bolivarianism made its terrifying appearance on the frontpages. Autostrade per lItalia a statization reminiscent of Venezuela claimed Lucio Malan of Berlusconis Forza Italia party in the Senate. Center-right MP Maurizio Lupi agreed, The expropriation of the Benettons is shocking, we arent Venezuela. The popular ultra-free-marketeer YouTuber Rick DuFer complained that Venezuela is near.

Such rhetoric also spread to the liberal press. If Italy becomes Venezuela, who will invest? asked former economy minister Giovanni Tria on Huffington Post Italia. Its editor Mattia Feltri added, this isnt the way a government resolves matters with private business except in Venezuela. One La Repubblica columnist found the comparison with Venezuela a little over-the-top but agreed with stigmatizing a certain drift toward neo-statism allitaliana. On July 20, Economy Minister Roberto Gualtieri was asked by a Corriere della Sera journalist, The government is displaying a dirigiste face, a little Venezuelan. Why would a foreign investor risk their capital in Italy?

There is another immediate reason for this sudden interest in Venezuela. In June, a few weeks before the ASPI agreement, the conservative Spanish daily newspaper ABC reported on alleged Venezuelan financing of the Five Star Movement (M5S), which backs Contes government.

The accusation was groundless but gained traction in the right-wing opposition, which habitually (and falsely) presents M5S as a radical-left force in a bid to erode its support among conservative parts of the electorate. Lega leader Salvini, himself in coalition with M5S just twelve months ago, claimed in June that the government now is a mix of the CGIL [trade union federation] and Venezuela.

Lets repeat: this was a part-nationalization, on market terms, carried out by a very moderate center-left government with both liberal and populist traits. The rhetorical move to associate this kind of policy with Venezuela is new to Italy, given how little there is in its politics of even vaguely socialist coloration.

Elsewhere this comparison is well-established, not least in the United States, where for years Venezuela has been presented as the archetype of the authoritarianism and economic collapse supposedly bound to result from socialist policies.

Even more so in Spain, whose media are much more assiduous in following Venezuelan events, and where Chavismo has often been at the center of public debate. Indeed, right-winger Jos Mara Aznars government was accused of supporting the 2002 coup attempt in Caracas by both the subsequent Socialist prime minister Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero and by Chvez himself.

Still legendary in Spanish politics is a 2007 incident where, faced with Chvezs continual interruptions of a speech by Zapatero at a summit in Chile (aiming precisely to launch attacks on Aznar), the then king of Spain Juan Carlos yelled at the Venezuelan president: Why dont you shut up?

The rise of Podemos in the 2010s then fueled the Spanish rights obsession with Venezuela, not least as party founders Pablo Iglesias and igo Errejn had experience as political consultants working for Latin American left-populist governments. For years, the Right has accused Podemos of being funded by Venezuelan petrodollars, albeit without finding any evidence.

But why Venezuela? If a good part of the radical left internationally condemned Juan Guaids coup attempt and imperialist interference in that country, Bolivarianism hardly enjoys the appeal it did fifteen years ago, when Chvez could boast of opening the way to the pink tide across Latin America. The impression is that this comparison with Venezuela is so successful because it responds to a well-established canon: Cold War anti-communism.

We speak of anti-communism all too little in the West, despite the formidable role of anti-Red propaganda across much of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. It was one of the weapons that devastated the US left, from McCarthyism onward: it has decided elections and deeply molded public debate in multiple countries. The presence, in Italy, of the Wests biggest Communist Party from 1943 to 1991 made it a rather different context compared with countries like Britain and (West) Germany, where anti-communism has devastated anything to the left of social democracy. But it made its mark in Italy, too.

Beyond the folklore of Don Camillo and Peppone (the village priest and the local communist, at the heart of a famous set of conservative films and books after 1945) Christian Democracys anti-communist rhetoric across its forty-year postwar hegemony has left deep traces. It is no accident that even after the Italian Communist Party dissolved in 1991 soon rallying behind moderate Catholic center-left leaders like Romano Prodi in the 1990s and 2000s, Berlusconi continually labeled all his adversaries communists, including the likes of Prodi.

This was a theme right from the moment the billionaire tycoon spectacularly announced that he was entering politics in 1994: the second line of his televised address declared that he had decided to enter the field and concern myself with public affairs, because I do not want to live in an illiberal country governed by immature forces and men double-bound to a politically and economically failed past.

In the attempt to delegitimize any vaguely progressive proposal any deviation from free-market orthodoxy the invocation of communist economic failure is a powerful weapon. So, not by accident, Venezuela comes into play. The point is not that Maduro really does represent a beacon for socialists internationally, but rather that the economic crisis that has struck that country will remind many Westerners of the stereotypes about scarcity in former Eastern Bloc countries. State intervention means communism, communism means poverty.

But the rhetoric about Venezuela doesnt only draw on the economic element of Cold War anti-communism. Also fundamental is the idea of foreign ties and even funding. The Moscow rubles that funded the Italian Communist Party and other Western parties are omnipresent in anti-communist stereotypes, and, behind this, the deeper idea of the communist as a traitor.

This draws on many antisemitic tropes, with which it is, indeed, often associated: communists, like Jews, are held to be more loyal to their international ties than their own country, to be at odds with the fatherland and thus a potential traitor. This guy isnt really one of us: hes paid from abroad, and the point of his radical ideas is to damage us.

In its Venezuelan versions, this rhetoric also draws on the anti-communist idea that communism is something unEuropean and essentially foreign often meaning, typical of non-white, uncivilized, colonized peoples, from the Chinese to the Vietnamese and Cubans, all so many Cossack barbarians readying to invade our civilized Europe. And its easy to identify the deep link between the pink tide in Latin America and the continents indigenous movements, even just looking at the personal biographies of many leading figures on the Left.

Not by chance, on February 28 at the peak of his primary run Bernie Sanders was himself attacked on similar grounds, as a violent column in the New York Times accused him of having been on the wrong side in the Cold War. This article had many disturbing traits, not least where it attacked Sanders on the grounds that The guy who was angry about the downfall of Salvador Allendes Marxist regime in Chile in 1973 is still angry about it today. The writer forgot to mention that this Marxist regime was a democratically elected government; its downfall, a fascist military coup.

In the Italian case, the sudden interest in Venezuelan matters thus seems to have very little to do with Maduros policies which, indeed, no one is indicating as a model to follow or as the leadership of an international socialist movement. Rather, it seems connected to deeper traits of the dominant culture in the liberal West. An established repertoire of anti-communist attacks can be called on to smear anyone who tries to question free-market orthodoxy, even as in the case of the Italian highways in the most ambiguous and timid forms.

The Cold War ended in 1989, but its cultural legacy is much more overbearing than we often imagine. And its clear that no one on the Left can hope to win broad support, without being prepared to confront this kind of rhetoric.

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How Partially Nationalizing the Highways Turned Italy Into Another Venezuela - Jacobin magazine

At the start of 1950, Joseph McCarthys political future did not look promising. McCarthy had been elected senator from Wisconsin in 1946, after switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and running as a decorated Marine veteran with the nickname Tail Gunner Joe. Even then, he had a reputation as a scofflaw. He had exaggerated his war record. He first ran for Senate (and lost) while he was still in uniform, which was against Army regulations, and he ran his second Senate campaign while he was a sitting judge, a violation of his oath. Questions had been raised about whether he had dodged his taxes and where his campaign funds had come from.

When McCarthy got to Washington, he became known as a tool of business interests, accepting a loan from Pepsi-Cola in exchange for working to end sugar rationing (he paid it back), and money from a construction company in exchange for opposing funding for public housing (which he eventually voted for). He plainly had no ethical or ideological compass, and most of his colleagues regarded him as a troublemaker, a loudmouth, and a fellow entirely lacking in senatorial politesse.

So when, in 1950, Lincolns birthday came around, a time of year when the Republican Party traditionally sent its elected officials out to speak at fund-raisers around the country, McCarthy was assigned to venues where it was clearly hoped that he would attract little notice. His first stop was the Ohio County Republican Womens Club, in Wheeling, West Virginia, then a diehard Democratic state.

McCarthy didnt know what he was going to talk about (he never planned very far ahead), so he brought notes for a couple of speeches: one about housing for veterans, and one, consisting mostly of clippings cobbled together by a speechwriter, about Communists in the government. McCarthy had seemingly had very little to do with that second speech, but he decided to go with it.

It is not known exactly what McCarthy said in Wheeling, and he later claimed that he couldnt find his copy of the speech. But a local paper reported him as having waved a piece of paper on which, he said, were the names of two hundred and five Communists working in the State Department. The story was picked up by the Associated Press, and soon it was everywhere.

McCarthy had, in fact, no such list. He did not have even a single name. He may have calculated that a dinner speech at a womens club in West Virginia was a safe place to try out the I have in my hand gimmick, and, somewhat to his surprise, it worked. In subsequent appearances on his Lincolns-birthday circuit, he gave the same speech, though the numbers changed. In Reno, the list had fifty-seven names. It didnt matter. He had grabbed the headlines, and that was all he cared about. He would dominate them for the next four and a half years. Wheeling was McCarthys Trump Tower escalator. He tossed a match and started a bonfire.

Larry Tyes purpose in his new biography, Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is to make the case that Donald Trump is a twenty-first-century Joe McCarthy. Tye draws on some fresh sources, including McCarthys papers, which are deposited at Marquette, his alma mater, and unpublished memoirs by McCarthys wife, Jean, and his longtime aide James Juliana, who served as his chief investigator.

Tye also quotes from transcripts of the executive sessions (that is, hearings closed to the public) of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Government Operations Committee, which McCarthy essentially hijacked in 1953 and put to the business of exposing Communists in the government.

Tye describes these transcriptsalmost nine thousand pagesas recently unveiled... and never before closely examined. This is a little misleading. The transcripts were released in 2003, and they have been quoted from extensively, notably by Ted Morgan, in Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America.

But they are important. The other senators on McCarthys subcommittee stopped attending the hearings, since McCarthy dominated everything, and so it became his personal star chamber. He could subpoena anyone (Tye says he called five hundred and forty-six witnesses in the year and a half he ran the show), and was answerable to no one. These transcripts give us McCarthy unbound. As for Tyes McCarthy-Trump comparison? He more than makes the case. The likeness is uncanny.

McCarthy was a bomb-throwerand, in a sense, that is all he was. He would make an outrageous charge, almost always with little or no evidentiary basis, and then he would surf the aftershocks. When these subsided, he threw another bomb. He knew that every time he did it reporters had two options. They could present what he said neutrally, or they could contest its veracity. He cared little which they did, nor did he care that, in his entire career as a Communist-hunter, he never sent a single subversive to jail. What mattered was that he was controlling the conversation.

McCarthy had the support of a media conglomerate, the Hearst papers, which amplified everything he said, and he had cheerleaders in the commentariat, such as the columnists Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell, both of whom reached millions of readers in a time when relatively few households (in 1952, about a third) had a television set. He tried to block a hostile newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal, from his press conferences, and he egged on the crowds at his rallies to harass the reporters.

Right from the start, McCarthy had prominent critics. But almost the entire political establishment was afraid of him. You could fight him, in which case he just made your life harder, or you could ignore him, in which case he rolled right over you. He verbally abused people who disagreed with him. He also had easy access to money, much of it from Texas oilmen, which he used to help unseat politicians who crossed him.

To his supporters, he could say and do no wrong. Tye quotes the pollster George Gallup, in 1954: Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would probably still go along with him. His fans liked that he was a bully, and they liked that he scandalized the genteel and the privileged.

McCarthy forced government agencies, by the constant threat of investigations, to second-guess appointments, and to fire people he had smeared just because he had smeared them. He didnt need to prove anything, and he almost never did, because it didnt matter. Your name in McCarthys mouth was the kiss of death. He was a destroyer of careers.

To call McCarthy a conspiracy theorist is giving him too much credit. He was more like a conspiracy-monger. He had one pitch, which he trotted out on all occasions. It was that American governmental and educational institutions had been infiltrated by a secret network of Communists and Communist sympathizers, and that these people were letting Stalin and Mao have their way in Europe and Asia, and were working to turn the United States into a Communist dictatorship.

What distinguished McCarthys claims was their outlandishness. He didnt attack people for being soft on Communism, or for pushing policies, like public housing, that were un-American or socialistic. That is what ordinary politicians like Richard Nixon did. McCarthy accused people of being agents of a Communist conspiracy. In 1951, he claimed that George Marshall, the Secretary of Defense, the former Secretary of State, and the author of the Marshall Plan, had been, throughout his career, always and invariably serving the world policy of the Kremlin. Marshall, he said, sat at the center of a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.

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Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods - The New Yorker

It was 1945. The Russians came in. They stayed for 45 years. Hungary was poor before the war: often referred to as the country of 3 million beggars. After the war, and its devastation, the country was even poorer. Communists seized power in 1948. They gave land to the landless. They nationalised industry. They wanted to create Paradise on Earth. For the many not for the few. For the workers and peasants- for the intelligentsia. Well, not for the old intelligentsia. Those belonging to that elite had not done much for Hungary. They had served Horthy; they had liked Hitler, they had idolised the ideas of the Nazis. The Communists wanted a new intelligentsia which would change the country: new engineers, new teachers, new scientists, new economists.

So how do you go about creating a new intelligentsia, an intelligentsia that the Party can count on? They must come from workers and peasants who will be able to build a new country, a socialist country, full of shiny happy people. How do you do it? Well, you have to start from scratch. It is not as difficult as it sounds. There is bound to be a vast pool of talent, people who missed education when they were of school age but retained the capability to think, to reason, to understand. Among four million eligible people there must be many bright ones. How many? Say one in four hundred? That still means ten thousand people.

Okay, then what? You take a couple of thousand intelligent people, men and women, preferably young, and tell them, that they are privileged, that they can have a year of study to get a school-leaving certificate, that will entitle them to enter any University without an entrance examination. To bolster their confidence they are told that they are the chosen ones, they can do anything. I shall call them SALC (Special A-level Certificate) students.

I come into that picture in 1949 in my second year as an undergraduate at the faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Technical University of Budapest. It was the beginning of October. Several hundred SALC students joined in the first year. They were proud, domineering, fearful, bewildered. The previous record of 320 students in the first year suddenly doubled. There was only one Lecture Room that could accommodate that number of undergraduates.

The Communist Party appealed to the students, particularly to students of the second year in the same faculty. Among others I volunteered. I accepted a woman of advanced years to look after. She was 32, I was 19. Her manners were easy, but her maths was terrible. She could manage fractions but that was all. I couldnt imagine how she could have passed the SALC exam, however easy it may have been. She did not understand algebra; she had only the vaguest notion of what a co-ordinate system was and she was unable to differentiate even the simplest function. The concept of integration was utterly alien to her.

My job was to make sure that she would pass her first year exam in mathematics. I started her off with fractions, to give her confidence. I spent one hour with her every day of the week, excluding Sundays. She was receptive and progress was steady. By next April she was quite competent. By June she was ready to take the exam. I thought with a bit of luck she might get the highest mark (there were five grades, the lowest 1, meaning failed, the highest 5) but reckoned that in the worst case she would get a 4.

She had an oral exam with one of the recently appointed Mathematics Professors. Examinations were public. I sat in a back row. The Professor realised that she was a SALC student. He asked her to go to the blackboard and do a very simple derivation. She did it. He asked her to do a fairly simple differentiation. She did it. It was all over in 6 minutes. He gave her a 3.

Well, in a way, the only important thing was to pass the exam. She passed. She was satisfied. I, on the other hand, was not. In fact, I was pretty annoyed. We had worked hard for 8 months. She could have done all the derivations, given all the proofs required and been able to solve any of the examples coming up in the exam. So why did she not get at least a 4? Because the Professor was a coward. An unprincipled coward. He had been recently appointed to the post and until then had been teaching mathematics in one of the better secondary schools in Budapest. He was catapulted into the Technical University as a Professor of Mathematics based on his early membership of the Communist Party.

I deplored what happened, but I suppose I understood the Professors predicament. It was a public examination. If the audience saw a student knowing very little mathematics, the Professor had no choice but to fail the student. Failing a SALC student would have been a betrayal of his Communist Party membership. It was against the Party line to fail a member of the future intelligentsia. So he balked at taking any risk. He had obviously figured out that it would make no sense for him to ask any difficult questions not even a simple integration. The woman of advanced age, 33 by that time, thanked me and gave me a peck on the cheek. I wished her good luck. The year after I migrated to another faculty. I never saw her again.

Sixteen years later when I became a Fellow in Engineering at Brasenose College, Oxford, I tried to introduce a similar system. (Student mentorship by other students, rather than Communism.) I kept on asking my best students whether they were willing to look after weaker students, to help them when the need arose, particularly between tutorials. In two decades I succeeded only once. He was a believer. He did it as his Christian duty. Of all those who refused to accept my plea, only one deigned to explain why. He belonged to the third generation of Brasenose men. His grandfather donated to the College a magnificent silver bowl often displayed at the High Table. He said, Sorry, I just cant take this on. No way. I like your tutorials and you obviously know your stuff. But you were never an undergrad here. You dont know how busy an Oxford undergrad is, you dont know how much I have on. Yes, Im decent in engineering but other things matter to me too: sport and women. I play lacrosse for the University, and as for women, youve already seen me with several girls this year. I would have to make time to take on this lame duck of yours. And why would I do that?

So what is the moral (morality?) of the story? There are several, possibly contradictory. Some Professors in Hungary had already been corrupted by 1950. The main idea was to serve the Party. If the Party wanted SALC students to pass, then it was the duty of the Professor to act accordingly. How about the moral stance of my lacrosse playing womaniser? He made his point. He wanted to enjoy life. There was nothing wrong with that. After all, Carpe Diem was not invented in the 20th century.

But let me go back to another, more interesting question. Are we to condemn the mass production of SALC students on the grounds that it is a clear example of social engineering for the benefit of a dictatorial regime? I am not sure. At the time I was proud of the role I played, and I am still proud. If you make it possible for someone to realise his/her potential, does that put you on higher moral ground? Whether it is social engineering or not, is immaterial. Surely, helping someone consistently for months on end, without being paid, must leave you standing on high moral ground. Mustnt it?

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Communism, social engineering, corruption and moral superiority - TheArticle