[extropy-chat] Witch-hunting (Was gay marriage)

[David Lubkin]

Major wrote:

>If you start treating people who have political opinions and express
>them in a legal way as spies (which is what clause was apparently
>about) you are right back in the McCarthy era.

It's a good comparison because, as the evidence now devastatingly shows, 
the US *was* infested for decades at the highest levels by Soviet agents, 
sympathizers, and dupes.

I'm trying to imagine how much freedom and life would have been preserved 
had we had effective counter-intelligence and anti-Communist zeal instead. 
When would the USSR have had atomic weapons, absent the spies? We surely 
would have been able to block the Soviet imprisonment of Eastern Europe 
without the presence of influential Communists in FDR's administration.

Would my relatives be alive if there'd been honest reporting of Stalin's 
deliberate starvation of the Ukraine? Would Amara have more family alive if 
Latvia had been restored to a free republic when WW II ended? Might Sasha 
still be with us had the Soviet Union collapsed decades sooner?

I sympathize with reasoned opposition to domestic defensive measures or an 
interventionist foreign policy. The question is what to do instead, in the 
face of the presence of a persistent group determined to hurt us. Starting 
from where we are today, not presupposing anarchotopia or libertopia.


-- David Lubkin.