Like an ideal deity, the ideal devil is omnipotent and omnipresent.-Eric Hoffer
Though moral panics may differ in their particulars, they all share two important characteristics: the menace is claimed to be both enormous and all-pervasive, and to represent an existential threat to Our Treasured Way of Life. During the “Red Scare” of the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that communists had so infiltrated the United States that there was practically “a red under every bed”; he stated that 20% of all government employees were communists, that they presented a clear and present danger to American liberty, and that it was therefore permissible to abrogate that liberty in a crusade to ferret out communists and neutralize the threat they presented. And today, we are repeatedly told that “traffickers” are everywhere, that they are lying in wait on the internet to abduct “innocent children” into “sex slavery”, and that widespread human rights violations and the expenditure of millions are necessary to stop them. Every small town and rural state in America scrambles for its place on the “trafficking” gravy train by insisting that “trafficking happens here, too!” and eagerly labeling every streetwalker a “victim” and every hapless client or driver a “trafficker” in order to create statistics where there were none. Larger towns join the “king of the hill” competition, each proudly claiming to be a leading source, destination or “hub” for the imaginary slave caravans (usually on the bizarre basis that interstate highways pass through the area). And even poor countries within the American sphere of influence get into the act, accepting whatever arbitrary “grade” is assigned them by the US State Department in its methodology-free “TIP Report”, then persecuting whores and clients in a twisted game of “fetch” to please their prudish masters.
Stories spouting these myths are so common now, I could literally reprint one every day and not ever run out of them; to demonstrate, here are six examples from a six-day period early last month. The first appeared on March 6th and comes to us from the big booming metropolis of Rapid City, South Dakota:
Human trafficking for sex is not a crime that only occurs in other countries or in large cities. It also happens in South Dakota, according to U.S. Attorney Brendan Johnson…trafficking is more prevalent in the Sioux Falls area, but it will happen eventually in Rapid City, Johnson said. Sex traffickers target…vulnerable girls that they ultimately end up selling for sex…Once they’re inside, women feel they can’t ever leave the commercial sex-trafficking ring…
Then 87 minutes later and roughly 600 kilometers south, we got this one:
Human trafficking is occurring all over the state, according to Nebraska Family Council Executive Director Al Riskowski, and current laws do little to prevent or punish offenses…Riskowski said that Interstate 80 is part of the main route that victims, most often female minors, are shuffled along as they are forced from city to city by their captors…[a proposed law] would make it nearly impossible for an escort service to operate within the state because it would require these businesses to register for a permit…Riskowski said he was compelled to take up the issue of human trafficking after finding escort services in the Lincoln phonebook. He went to the chief of police, who said he knew very well that the escort services were prostitution rings. “My only thought was, ‘How could they be advertising prostitution in the phonebook?’” Riskowski said. “The ad even said that a minor would be sent out on request”…
He was shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, to discover escort services in the phone book! That last whopper is incredible even by prohibitionist standards; “Minors available upon request?” Really? Does Riskowski assume his audience can’t look the ads up for themselves, or just that they won’t? The hilarious lawhead delusion that passing a permit law will somehow stop harlotry isn’t limited to the hinterlands, though:
This week the Huntington Beach City Council voted in support of…[a] proposed ordinance [which] would require establishments to obtain certification from the city and would prohibit massage therapists from performing services in their own homes…Police Chief Kenneth Small…urged council members to pass the ordinance…and…expressed significant concern for the sex workers themselves. “Overwhelmingly based on our investigations in Huntington Beach and throughout Orange County and Southern California, the women involved in most of these massage parlors are trafficked in,” said the Chief, who explained that many were forced to work six days a week at the coercion of pimps and panderers…In 2011 the [Orange County] Weekly reported on the issue of human trafficking, child sexual slavery and the difficulty in accurately reporting its numbers. While crusaders such as Ashton Kutcher
were pegging the figure between 100,000 and 300,000 sex slaves in America, most researchers offered significantly smaller numbers…
The Orange County Weekly is a Village Voice property, hence the skeptical tone which is wholly absent from this lugubrious idiocy published three days later in Denver (despite the fact that it does quote sex workers rights advocates down near the end):
Describe the tragedy of a 12-year-old being controlled by someone…who takes payment from scumbags for acts that shatter the child’s innocence, and repeatedly damage her body and soul…”We are definitely seeing an increase in the number of cases involving the commercial sexual exploitation of children, forced and coerced prostitution and organized prostitution,” according to Sgt. Dan Steele of the Denver Police Department…It’s called sex trafficking when a vulnerable person (of any age) is forced, coerced or lured…into providing sex acts for cash…the prostitute is a victim who may not even recognize that fact…Nina Martinez, executive director for Street’s Hope…[says] “We are unique in that we are faith-based, and right now a lot of our funding comes from churches”…Billie McIntire…[of the] Sex Workers Alliance Network…says the issue of sex trafficking has been seized by…”abolitionist feminists” and members of ultra-conservative Christian groups, as a way to help push their desire to eradicate the sex industry entirely…
Yes, you read that correctly; a prohibitionist group claims that being religious makes it “unique”. But while FBI collaborations with local cops in Colorado are liable to involve “sting” operations and psychological abuse of sex workers, those conducted in small countries to satisfy State Department demands involve far less refined tactics:
…immigration officials, along with San Fernando CID officers, swooped down on the popular Classic Seamen Hotel…[in] Marabella, where they found 76 scantily dressed women, allegedly soliciting clients…the women ran at the sight of officers but were easily captured as the premises is surrounded by high walls topped by barbed wire…In 2012, the US Department of State’s Human Trafficking Report said that [Trinidad and Tobago] was “a destination, source and transit country for adults and children subjected to sex trafficking”…
And the next day on the mainland, lawyers demonstrate the unbelievable credulity that allows cops to get away with the most outrageous lies in court:
…members of The Jacksonville Bar Association…[were told that] Florida ranks third in the U.S. in human trafficking cases behind California and New York…2.5 million people are in forced labor at any given time as a result of trafficking, 1.2 million children are annually trafficked, a majority of victims are 18-24 years of age and 95 percent of victims experience physical or sexual violence during trafficking…”Human trafficking rivals Microsoft in what it makes annually in sheer profits. It’s one of the greatest growth industries that we currently have in the world, which is a sobering statistic for all of us,” said [Terry] Coonan [of the Florida State University Center for the Advancement of Human Rights]…the…trafficking symposium…included Telisia Espinosa telling her story of being a victim of human trafficking…Members of the law enforcement panel agreed that one of the problems in human trafficking is that some people don’t think that they are victims…
Just a few days after Albany Law School had the sense to feature an actual sex worker on the panel of its “trafficking” symposium, the Florida Bar Association instead featured an attention-seeking religious fanatic whose unverifiable horror tales contradict both the experiences of thousands of sex workers and plain common sense. But that’s the way it is with moral panics; the numbers grow ever higher, and the stories ever more ridiculous, until even the lowest common denominator can no longer believe in them and the whole hysteria collapses like a punctured balloon.
A lot of time and effort has been expended over the years to sell the McCarthy = Anti-Communist = Witch Hunt narrative. The Progressive/Socialist/Liberals who are most invested in it really should get down on their knees every night and thank God for Joe McCarthy, because if he hadn’t existed they would have had to invent him.
McCarthy was a bully, and an opportunistic swine, and any actual damage he did to Communism was purely coincidental. Nevertheless, it remains a historically verifiable fact that at that time the U.S. government was heavily infiltrated with both active Soviet agents and Communist Party members who were probably passing more information to the Party than they thought they were. FDR’s administration had bought Joseph Stalin’s ‘affable Uncle Joe’ act hook, line, sinker, and pole. There are signs that FDR himself recognized it as an act, but Roosevelt thought he could ‘manage’ Stalin; another example of the kind of elitist Hubris to which FDR was prone.
Don’t compare the trafficking panic to the “Anti-Communist Witch Hunt”; there really WERE Communist agents in the U.S. in the 1950’s, however much the Liberal Intellectual Twits want to deny it.
But what threat were the real live Communist agents? Any organization is going to have people with dubious motivations, if it seems that members need to be subjected to “loyalty tests” so they can be absolutely trusted, it means they have been given too much power.
Go back and check out some of the history of the cold-war era espionage war. Communism, at least as practiced by the USSR, is a cancer, and a lot of the world went cancerous between 1945 band 1989. Tens of millions of people were murdered, and many more brutalized. Ecological damage was done in parts of the Soviet union that make Victorian Age America look like the Sierra Club’s wet dreams. And the active agents and loose-lipped fellow-traveler fools in the U.S. got the Soviets information that let them do a lot of damage.
The Intellectual Left of the West has been in denial about Communism for my entire lifetime. I’m sick to the teeth of it. I don’t want to go the whole Birch John Society (a little Illuminati humor), but it would be refreshing to see more admissions that both Alger Hiss and the Rosenburgs were guilty as so many cats in a goldfish bowl.
If you pick up ten random copies of The Nation, you’ll likely find a reference to The Left mis-judging the USSR, and by that point you will likely have seen several references appropriately (i.e. very) critical of it without referring to what The Left thought of it. The only positive things I read about communism there were along the lines of asking ‘where did it go wrong?’ and thinking that it was early, but not the VERY beginning.
(I’m not a reader anymore, btw)
It occurs to me to point out for those who don’t know: The Nation is a solidly left-wing magazine.
On this subject the book I would recommend is Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story Of Senator Joe McCarthy by M. Stanton Evans. There’s a lot of confusion about how many people McCarthy accused. His many enemies wanted to make it sound like he accused an unrealistically high number of State Department employees. Evans shows that McCarthy’s real accusations were more modest and accurate. The man has been unfairly vilified.
As to Wilson’s question, “what threat were the real live Communist agents?” Well, if I had been in power in the fifties, I wouldn’t have wanted Stalin’s agents in my organization.
I would say that the man has been inaccurately vilified. It seems to me that he was right, but right by accident, and probably a hinderance to anyone doing serious work in the field. He really was a gift to the Radical/Liberal Left; he did them little actual damage and could be inflated into such a bogieman that people would forget, for example, Mitchell Palmer.
Read Evans’ book. McCarthy wasn’t right by accident; he was right because he did his research and knew what he was talking about. He’s been painted as a buffoon, but he wasn’t one.
Wilson,
You might want to look at Britain. “But what threat were the real live Communist agents?” is rather obvious.
Here’s the so-called logic of that:
A man joins the Communist Party in the 1920s or 1930s, when it was trendy. This can be documented. Ergo, in the 1950s, he must be an eager, zealous Communist agent.
*Buzzer* I’m sorry, that answer is NOT correct. People change their minds.
I suppose it can be documented somewhere that I donated money to Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1984 — but no way in hell does that fact imply that I vote Republican now.
It’s been sixty years since since the “Red Scare.” Where is all the _hard_ historical evidence that McCarthy was right?
P.S. Obama is not a Kenyan, either.
The evidence exists. McCarthy was concerned that the Communist Party of the U.S. was being controlled by the Soviet Union. Now – thanks to the fall of the Soviet Union – we now KNOW the CPUSA was, at all times, an instrument of Soviet policy.
We now know the Soviet Union was able to develop nuclear weapons thanks to spies in key places in the U.S. government. This is the kind of thing that McCarthy was trying to protect against – it’s not his fault that the liberal establishment were so “casual” in their treatment of the red threat. It existed – it has been proven – it IS NOT DEBATABLE anymore.
McCarthy didn’t start the “red scare” – it existed well before he came along and for good reason. Let’s not forget here that the Marxists in Europe were advocating the VIOLENT OVERTHROW of democratic instutions and a literally world-wide revolution in favor of Marxism. McCarthy was RIGHT about this.
McCarthy didn’t “blacklist” anyone either.
The thing is … American liberals now want me to feel sorry that a bunch of Communists got beat up by Joe McCarthy. Well – I’m sorry, I don’t. I don’t like Richard Nixon either but if he gets into a fight with Satan – guess who I’m “rooting” for?
It’s just another silly manipulation – not unlike the human trafficking meme – whereby marxists who want to rule me seek my sypathy to help them do it. “Oh woe is us … JOE MCCARTHY BEAT OUR ASS 60 YEARS AGO!!”
It won’t work with me.
The problem with this is, as Heinlein said in Take Back Your Government, that Communists do not have any problem with denying that they’re Communists, or that they’re still Communists.
If our gracious hostess wanted samples of panics over nothing, I could have suggested the “Satanic panics” of the 1980s—the “Satanic sexual abuse” panic, the “D+D is Satanic and causes kids to commit suicide!” panic, and so on.
The CPUSA was never more than a small party. Obedient poodles are still poodles — nothing to fear. Of course Stalin was desperate to get our nuclear secrets, and of course he found a way. So what does that prove?
Nothing. It proves nothing, it means nothing. But JS fanned Americans’ fear that it meant more.
PEOPLE LOST THEIR JOBS BECAUSE THEY REFUSED TO INFORM ON THEIR FRIENDS. AND IF SOMEONE DID INFORM ON YOU, THE ALLEGATION THAT YOU WERE A COMMUNIST WAS TREATED AS FACT.
The “Red Scare” sickens me. Because I’m a “liberal”? No, because I value the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights that don’t glorify AK-47s.
Jeez, Krulac, every week Maggie details that the same stuff is going on now with “human trafficking.” You can’t see the similarities?
In any case, “those evil Commies” couldn’t even manage hauling food from their own collective farms to Moscow — I’m supposed to believe that they had this clockwork master plan going to take down our government?
“Marxists in Europe were advocating violent overthrow of democratic institutions and a literally world-wide revolution in favor of Marxism.”
Two words: Talking trash. Drunks in bars make threats too.
Speaking of which: North Korea will bluster and threaten, then will “offer” to drop the whole thing if we give them food aid.
It’s proof positive that McCarthy’s assertion that there were Soviet agents in critical government positions was … CORRECT.
Oh okay – American agents handing the entire nuclear program to the Soviets was … NOTHING? Are you listening to yourself?
To this day, the only people that I can find that were “harmed” were people who were actually later proved to be communists. But – whatever – I think it’s very interesting that liberals cry a river over a few Holywood actors who might have lost a couple of movie roles to Joe McCarthy … but you guys never want to acknowledge the MILLIONS of people killed by Communist regimes around the world. I mean … Jane Fonda – no fan of Joe McCarthy but she stood with the North Vietnamese. So please – no, I’m just not going to get upset about Sean Penn’s dad getting painted as a Communist because – well, his SON certainly IS one.
They may not have been capable of hauling food to Moscow – yet they were capable of drawing an iron curtain over all of Eastern Europe, China, the Korean Pennisula, Cuba, and a good portion of Southeast Asia. So you’re incorrect in attempting to paint these guys as “buffoons” – they were far from it. And – maybe you don’t remember the days of the Cold War where their missiles were pointed at us – and they got that technology from their American agents – who were aided by the CPUSA.
Well now you’re just ignoring history. The fact that they did more than “talk trash”. Russia … China … Korea … East Germany … the Czech Republic … Slovakia … Yugoslavia … Cuba …
That’s a big chunk of the WORLD brother … that’s a bit more than “talking trash”.
There are a fair number of right-wing historians who are of the opinion that McCarthyism and the “Red Scare” actually hampered the just cause of anti-communism by turning it into cheap political theater for partisan advantage. I can see their point.
Yes, there really were Soviet agents in the US Government. I’m not sure McCarthy caught a single one of them.
Likewise, the Sex Trafficking hysteria mostly obscures the real indentured servitude and exploitation that actually exists. Most of it is not in the field of sex work.
I’m not sure McCarthy did either, but the mythos is such that if he did find even one he was wrong, well, because he has to be. McCarthy would have a field day in Great Britain in the 50s.
I’m not really comfortable with “right-wing historians” nor “left-wing historians”, as both imply judgement of veracity by their affiliation not their words.
“To this day, the only people that I can find that were “harmed” were people who were actually later proved to be communists.” Yeah, that’s true, sort of, from what I’ve read (Ed Asner was for example, and suffered for it). But the problem is that brush was so wide I doubt you’ve followed everyone that was hurt by just the allegation. That’s the problem with witch hunts.
I found the “talking trash. Drunks in bars…” funny as I immediately thought of the Beer Hall Putsch. It wasn’t talking trash in the 20s and 30s, and if it weren’t for the Purges, the Show Trials, of the mid-30s even Hook would have likely stayed a Communist much longer than he did. Hook wrote as much that watching those trials was the end for him as no human being would be so abject over “betraying” an ideology. Others in the West bought it hook-line-and-sinker. The CP had the same power over too many as did the Fascists and the NSGWP. Diminishing it into french-cuts and trash talk is ahistorical.
“So you’re incorrect in attempting to paint these guys as “buffoons” – they were far from it.” Yeah they did make the largest Hydrogen bombs, the TU-95, had a rocket close to the Saturn in power, and ICBMS that had more throw weight than ours. The Soviets were, however, lousy at ball bearings, and IIRC, needle bearings. Think accuracy.
Totalitarian regimes eventually stifle innovation because it takes more than military expenditures to innovate.
GrimGhost,
About the only good argument you’ve given is the damage it did to the first 8 amendments of the Constitution as well the 14th. And I agree wholeheartedly that an allegation, whatever the subject, should be treated as only that, an allegation. Never a fact, as the Duke Lacrosse boys know so well.
““those evil Commies” couldn’t even manage hauling food from their own collective farms to Moscow”. I assume that’s a veiled reference to the Ukraine? That was moot by about 1933. Yet they not only managed to fight the brunt of the Nazis, but built planes, tanks, and arms equal to the West. You mistake failure in one area as meaning failure in all. The political arm and military arm of the CCCP got the money, the civilian economy didn’t
CPUSA didn’t wear french-cuts. They wore normal clothes and did often hide their allegiance to the USSR. The Soviet CP had control over the international movement until fractures began with Mao and Tito, Hoxha after Stalin, but the the Soviet CP still held the sway through the 50s.
I have to go because my daughter has been tardy on homework. But really, GG, stealing the most guarded secret of the 20th Century meant nothing? You can diminish things only so far until you go into absurdity.
“People change their minds.” Like Whittaker and Hook, who were attacked by the left for most of their lives after. It’s really funny with Hook, who self-identified as a Deweyian (sp) and a Social Democrat. So I do agree with you, in the Latin way of sinister.
“A man joins the Communist Party in the 1920s or 1930s, when it was trendy.” which I assume is like being trendy when joining the Fascists (it actually was also trendy in the 20’s given the meaning of the Roman fasces). The Dictatorship of the Proletariat was established by Lenin as a matter of principle, because European workers ignored internationalism in WWI for nationalism and he died in January of 1924, so that dictatorship concept was well established before ’24. It really is trendy to embrace dictatorship.
I’ll agree that the USA went overboard in the 1950′, but I must assume that you agree the British should have looked more closely in the 1950’s and early 60’s. Not every trendy thinker gave up that trend.
I’m with you on McCarthy. Hey, he was a politician and all pols are swine but he was correct about the Communists and Socialists.
In fact, I’m still a bit conflicted on what exactly we should DO about “collectivists” and “communists”. I’m a libertarian minded person – so I kind of think everyone should follow his own belief system. However, the “belief system” of communists includes the tearing down of democratic institutions and installing “one party rule” – and we’ve seen how well it worked out in many nations overseas.
That’s why I believe in an armed society I think. Having good, scary and well functioning assault weaponry means I can allow the guy next door to me to hold any opinion he wants – and I can just blow his fuckin’ head off if he tries to force me to comply with his belief system.
Whatever, Joe McCarthy LOST that battle as the U.S. government is now more overrun with Marxists than it ever was. Complete idiots like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro are actually CELEBRATED by many sitting Congressmen in Washington, DC. When Hugo Chavez kicked the bucket – it was a great day for me but it quickly turned into a nauseating one once I saw how the Lame Stream Media kissed the guy’s dead ass.
I think what some are missing here though – is that when Maggie “links” the McCarthy affair to human trafficking … she’s actually (maybe unintentionally) highlighting the fact that McCarthy had more of a case against communists than human trafficking scaremeisters have on human trafficking. I’m no fan of Joe McCarthy – but when he’s put in the same lineup with these human trafficking liars – he looks pretty sexy.
OK, I don’t go with everything you wrote but any adulation of Castro and Chavez leaves me with how many times do we repeat history before we see who they actually are. I just read an article on how Chavez, while distributing money to the poor for votes (I threw that in), has destroyed the Venezuelan petroleum industry.
If individuals involved in espionage lost their liberty and livelihood, that’s justice of a fashion.
But it wasn’t espionage they were accused of. It was being a member of a fringe political group.
self proclaimed members of a fringe political group (libertarians) supporting McCarthy style witch hunt seems off.
There is clear evidence that some libertarians are involved with domestic terrorism, others are pedophiles, some are rapists, others tax evaders.
Clearly we must publicly find are question all members of this fringe political group. If even one child is saved and our values and way of life preserved, history will judge us well.
Good luck with that.
Even some feminists are now criticizing the idea that “good girls” don’t desire sex and hence any instance of sex taking place outside marriage must be a case of exploitation (in a book published by Harvard Univ. Press). http://www.amazon.com/Dilemmas-Desire-Teenage-Girls-Sexuality/product-reviews/0674018567/ref=cm_cr_dp_synop?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending#RNI72J7YI3TYZ
I knew that 40 years ago. Glad they are catching up.
Thank you for that link. Looks like an interesting book.
Have you ever looked up “Escort Services” in a small town? I was bored one night in a motel in some small town and flipped through the very thin edition of the Yellow Pages. Escort Services do exactly that, they provide an escort, usually for oversized loads or other problematic truck loads.
Sixty years from now, there will be some blog, or message board, or virtual world, or whatever it is that they have sixty years from now, and there will be people there saying, “Nick Kristof and Melissa Farley were right! They’ve been unfairly vilified!!”