I read "The Crucible" in a high school English class and it significantly affected my political outlook, but having learned more of the history of that era (much of it not public knowledge when I first read it and certainly not when it was written) it's no longer clear to me that it still works as allegory.<p>From the article: "McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had “lost China” and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that."<p>Well, as the Venona project cables declassified in 1995 show, the State Department didn't just contain intellectuals that were pro-Soviet: it contained actual Soviet agents in contact with the USSR. This was by no means restricted to the State Department, but also included the Treasury, OSS (pre-CIA), and even the White House. See here: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110514040131/http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/commissions/secrecy/pdf/12hist1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20110514040131/http://www.access...</a>.<p>In addition, it is now known that the CIA ran an operation, at the request of Allen Dulles, to feed McCarthy false information about who in the government were Soviet spies with the deliberate purpose of discrediting him: <a href="https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48603/did-the-cia-feed-false-information-to-mccarthy-to-discredit-his-true-claims-that" rel="nofollow">https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48603/did-the-c...</a>.<p>Maybe this calls for a remake of "The Crucible", not as tragedy, but as supernatural horror.
The thing that strikes me about this piece, is the tremendous research and hard work involved.<p>My father worked for the CIA in the "red scare" days. It was an...interesting...time.
The threat of communism is different than environmental destruction, but for those looking for historical precedent to illuminate today's problems, I recommend <i>Bury The Chains</i> by Adam Hochschild. It's on British abolitionism, especially Thomas Clarkson, also William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, in the late 1700s and early 1800s.<p>Their actions and success seem inspiringly relevant to our times. Here's a podcast on the connections: <a href="https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episodes/422-adam-hochschild-part-1-abolition" rel="nofollow">https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...</a>.
It seems from some of the comments that some of HN thinks it's ok for the federal or state government to treat Americans who are communists or socialists differently from those who are not. I hope this is a minority view.
I don't think we're quite there yet, but it conjures up modern-day videos of people being accused of white supremacy and told that the evidence for it is the fact that they don't see it. I wish I was joking. This[0] was posted recently on one of my hyper-progressive acquaintances Instagram. Does it not have a similar level of paranoia as when people chased witches or communists?<p>0. <a href="https://i.imgur.com/0mzw6D8.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/0mzw6D8.png</a>