James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York City and author of the new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism
His response has enormous implications for our own time:
We have to remember that in the 1950’s we had the background of McCarthyism. McCarthyism was viewed by the liberals as a great threat to everything they held dear, because they saw McCarthy as a very successful demogouge who is accusing liberals and New Dealers basically of being soft on Communism, and some of them indeed of being traitors. Liberals got it into their minds in the 1950’s that the great danger to the country came from something they called “the radical right.” This was a collection of anti-Communists like McCarthy, racial bigots in the south, and what they regarded as Christian fundamentalists who had radio programs which generally were anti-Communist, and what they (liberals) regarded as anti-modern or anti-progressive. They said that domestic communism was absolutley no threat to the country and that the radical right was demented or crazy for thinking so. Now along comes a Communist who assassinates the president. The liberals had great difficulty digesting this. Logically, in their minds, it should have been a far right person, someone from the radical right, a bigot maybe, an anti-Communist maybe, who did the deed. But it wasn’t. It was a Communist. Many were afraid, after the fact, that if a Communist or Communism were tagged with the crime that we would have a replay of the McCarthy movement of the early 1950’s. And therefore they sought to deflect blame away from Oswald and Communism and toward what they called this “climate of intolerance.”
“Christian fundamentalists who had radio programs.” Conservative talk radio in our own day has consistently and articulately warned of the threat from Islamofascism, not unlike those Christian fundamentalists with radio programs warning of the communist threat in the 1950s. And yet in the same way the leftists in 1950 and 1960 refused to take seriously the threats from communism, voices on the left today deflect the warnings of today’s conseravtive talk radio hosts regarding the threats America faces from Islamofascism as the mere rantings of ‘radicals’ while embracing Islam and its representatives in radical yet mainstream Muslim organizations like CAIR.
Is history repeating itself? As far as the left is concerned, the great danger this country faces is not from those who have actually murdered our citizens. No. The great danger America faces is conservatives using the medium of talk radio to inform Americans about the threat posed by Islamofascists. Hillary Clinton and Barbara Boxer want “a legislative fix” to the talk radio problem, while calling for policies that would mandate losing the war against a very real and present danger in Iraq.
It wasn’t a racial bigot on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963. And it wasn’t talk radio hosts who flew planes into our buildings on September 11, 2001. Yet, “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.” (Senator Trent Lott to the Washington Post). The more things change the more they stay the same.
Jeff
My view is somewhat different. I perceive this as a spiritual battle as most wars really are. This issue in the Middle East goes back centuries. The issue to me is the people and the land of Israel. More specifically, between God and Lucifer.
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
As for the original intent of this posting by Paul, we are indeed my brother being attacked by the left. They are trying to silence the conservative talk shows, along with the messages from todays pulpits. This is still, in my assessment, a spiritual battle, not over left and right, but rather between righteousness vrs unrighteousness.
For we (still) wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
To this individual, it has always been a battle between God and Satan, and will continue to be until the great casting into the lake of fire.
See ya Satan; So long!!!
Don,
I don’t question that there are radicals, like you said they are trained from youth, I happen to look at it more as brainwashing than training. That said, we seem to do too much broad brush painting with islam as if they all are trained to hate and I just don’t see that with Islamic people that I meet. If you think about Iraq, the concensis(sp?) seems to be that our troops are fighting all these islamic fundementalists. And that anyone who resists us are such people. Put the shoe on the other foot, lets say we are not a superpower and a powerful nation invades us on a faulty assumption(to be kind, I would say a lie) and takes out our leader, a leader that this country supported 20 years ago. Add to that the 12 or so previous years of ecomonic santions that this other country imposed on us. Don’t you think you would resist, I know I would. Put the shoe on the other foot when it comes to this foreign policy issues. I am only try to offer a different perspective to what we seem to hear on TV.
Saddam was our ally when they were fighting Iran in the 80’s, then our enemy when they signed a peace treaty with Iran. We invaded Iraq even though he said he would back down in 1991, we imposed sanctions on them until 2003 when we invaded. So many of us don’t know or forget history….
Jeff
I have several Persian friends who fled Afghanistan, and Iraq. They claim the Islamic fundamentalists hate the USA due to our support of Israel, and the fact that we are Christian in perception. Perhaps if they were to move here, they would see a different picture, (tongue in cheek). These people are trained from youth to hate all but adherents to Islam. It is hard to reason with that sort of thinking.
Islamist don’t hate America because of our way of life, they hate because of our foreign policies. They view us as a christian nation and I think that fuels some of their hatred toward christianity. We created that real and present danger back in the 80’s when we supported Saddam against IRAN and now that we have taken him out we created another real and present danger.
I know a few people from Iraq, they are christians and they have family still there, they tell how much worse it is over there since we invaded Iraq in 2003 under the lie of WMD’s.