#mccarthyism cw

[woman-loving]

The “Homosexual Traitor” and US Anti-Gay Purges

Selection from The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, by Eric Cervini, 2020.

According to the Russians, Colonel Alfred Redl of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had slightly graying blond hair and a “greasy” outward appearance. He spoke “sugar-sweetly, softly.”

Beginning in 1901, Redl worked as a high official in Austria’s Evidenzbureau, where he single-handedly built its counterespionage program. He had more access to classified information than perhaps anyone else in the empire.

In Vienna, Redl’s homosexuality was an open secret. He often appeared at society events with his longtime “nephew,” and he maintained several other affairs. He had no reason to be fearful of exposure, since even the emperor’s brother enjoyed cross-dressing and the occasional army officer.

Redl closely guarded his work as a double agent, however. During his service in the Evidenzbureau, he offered Austrian war plans to the Italian military attaché in exchange for cash. An Italian intelligence officer later recalled it “required no effort” to recruit him. Redl simply mailed envelopes full of Austrian secrets and received thousands of krone in return.

He then began sending military plans to the Russians, too. Redl became fabulously wealthy, lavishing gifts on his lovers and driving two of the empire’s most expensive automobiles. For years, no one seemed to question how he afforded such extravagances on his government salary.

In May 1913, after Austrian counterintelligence officials intercepted a Russian letter containing six thousand krone, they staked out the Vienna post office to identify its recipient. They were appalled to discover Redl.

The army wanted to keep the matter quiet, since public knowledge of treachery at such a high level would have been a profound humiliation. After following him to his hotel, Redl’s own protégé handed him a pistol. Army officials always maintained that Redl voluntarily took his life.

News of the colonel leaked, fact became intertwined with fiction, and the myth of the homosexual traitor came into being. A Berlin newspaper described Redl’s “homosexual pleasure palace, filled with perversities.” The Austrian Army needed a scapegoat for the 1.3 million casualties in that first year of World War I, so it blamed Redl and the larger, more insidious “homosexual organization” that protected him within the military.

Three years later, when a young Allen Dulles, the future CIA director, arrived in Vienna to work at the U.S. embassy, he found everyone still whispering about the homosexual spy who had lost the First World War for the empire.

By the end of World War II, America had become a more open place for homosexuals, but they also confronted novel threats conjured by a political coalition that exploited the uncertainty of the new world order. In 1945, only months before President Roosevelt died, Republicans and Southern Democrats formed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In the 1946 midterm election, after Republicans pledged to “ferret out” threats to the “American way of life,” they won the first congressional majority in sixteen years.

In March 1947, President Truman established the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, and the government began investigating its employees to determine their loyalty. Three months later, the Democrat-controlled Senate Committee on Appropriations warned about “the extensive employment in highly classified positions of admitted homosexuals, who are historically known to be security risks.” The committee empowered the secretary of state with “absolute discretion” to purge employees, including homosexuals, who threatened national security.

In September 1949, America learned that the Soviet Union had detonated its first nuclear weapon. In October, eleven Communist leaders were convicted for advocating a violent revolution in America, and in December, China fell to the Communists.

On January 21, 1950, a jury convicted suspected spy Alger Hiss of perjury.

On February 3, authorities arrested physicist Klaus Fuchs for nuclear espionage.

And on February 9, Junior Senator Joe McCarthy stood before a women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, and announced, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

Nobody else had seen the list. When reporters caught him at an airport and demanded to see it, he offered to show them—then realized he had left it in his baggage. His number of alleged Communists soon changed from 205 to 57. “Rarely,” The Washington Post declared, “has a man in public life crawled and squirmed so abjectly.”

On the evening of February 20, McCarthy arrived on the Senate floor with an overstuffed briefcase that purportedly contained his list of Communist-linked security risks in the State Department. For six hours, he provided a warped summary of eighty-one cases, relying on unproven allegations from a three-year-old congressional investigation. “In short, the speech was a lie,” concluded historian Robert Griffith.

Two of the cases involved alleged homosexuals, who were “rather easy blackmail victims,” explained McCarthy. It was a shrewd maneuver: what editorial board or politician would dare argue that sexual deviants belonged in the federal government?

McCarthy would later recuse himself from hearings on the issue of homosexuals in the government. At forty-one, the senator was unmarried, and the issue raised questions about his own sexuality.

Other Republicans took the lead. A week after McCarthy’s Senate speech, his colleagues coerced Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy, a security official testifying in defense of his department, into making a startling admission. In only three years, he admitted, ninety-one homosexual employees had resigned upon investigations under Truman’s loyalty program.

And with that, as the New York Post referred to it, the “Panic on the Potomac” began. Conservative newspapers leapt upon the admission. Congress scheduled hearings. Homosexuality, observed a columnist on Meet the Press, became “a new type of political weapon” that could “wreck the Administration.” The chief of the Washington Vice Squad testified there were “3,750 perverts employed by government agencies.” Republican senator Kenneth Wherry alleged the Soviets were using a list of American homosexuals—originally compiled by Hitler—to blackmail federal employees for government secrets. Washington, he said, faced an “emergency condition.”

The Senate committee tasked with solving the homosexual problem, led by Democrat Clyde Hoey of North Carolina, began closed hearings in July. Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the director of the government’s new Central Intelligence Agency, testified first. He arrived with a thirty-eight-page statement, and ten of those pages chronicled a “classic” case, one “known all through intelligence circles,” an example that would leave “no doubt as to the fact that perversion presents a very definite security risk.”

Of all the intelligence available to the CIA, its director chose to rest his case against homosexuals on the forty-year-old story of Colonel Redl. In Hillenkoetter’s retelling, Redl had been an “honest” man who found himself in an imperial army with unforgiving policies against homosexuality. The Russians hired a young newsboy, who “became very intimate” with Redl. Next, they broke into the colonel’s room and caught him in an “act of perversion.” After threatening to expose him, the Russians gained copies of the Austrian war plans prior to the outbreak of violence.

And so a single urban legend, the telling of which was almost entirely, verifiably inaccurate (in fact, a 1907 Russian diplomatic cable had falsely labeled Redl “a lover of women”) became the primary piece of evidence that guided federal employment policy toward homosexuals for decades to come.

The CIA director then explained the “general theory as to why we should not employ homosexuals or other moral perverts in positions of trust.” He gave thirteen reasons to the senators.  

1.  Homosexuals experience emotions “as strong and in fact actually stronger” than heterosexual emotions.   2.  Homosexuals are susceptible “to domination by aggressive personalities.”   3.  Homosexuals have “psychopathic tendencies which affect the soundness of their judgment, physical cowardice, susceptibility to pressure, and general instability, thus making a pervert vulnerable in many ways.”   4.  Homosexuals “invariably express considerable concern” about concealing their condition.   5.  Homosexuals are “promiscuous” and often visit “various hangouts of his brethren,” marking “a definite similarity to other illegal groups such as criminals, smugglers, black-marketeers, dope addicts, and so forth.”   6.  Homosexuals with “outward characteristics of femininity—or lesbians with male characteristics—are often difficult to employ because of the effect on their co-workers, officials of other agencies, and the public in general.”   7.  Homosexuals who think they are discreet are, in reality, “actually quite indiscrete [sic]. They are too stupid to realize it, or else due to inflation of their ego or through not letting themselves realize the truth, they are usually the center of gossip, rumor, derision, and so forth.”   8.  Homosexuals who try “to drop the ‘gay’ life and go ‘straight’ … eventually revert to type.”   9.  Homosexuals are “extremely vulnerable to seduction by another pervert employed for that purpose by a foreign power.” 10.  Homosexuals are “extremely defiant in their attitude toward society,” which could lead to disloyalty. 11.  “Homosexuals usually seem to be extremely gullible.” 12.  Homosexuals, including “even the most brazen perverts,” are constantly suppressing their instincts, which causes “considerable tension.” 13.  Homosexuals employed by the government “lead to the concept of a ‘government within a government.’ That is so noteworthy. One pervert brings other perverts. They belong to the lodge, the fraternity. One pervert brings other perverts into an agency … and advance them usually in the interest of furthering the romance of the moment.”

The testimony of subsequent intelligence officials echoed that of the CIA director, and the Hoey committee’s final report primarily drew from the testimony of its lead witness, sometimes verbatim. As the Hoey report concluded, homosexuals were ipso facto security risks. Colonel Redl remained its only example.

Hillenkoetter’s thirteen principles became official government doctrine. The government incorporated the Hoey report into its security manuals, forwarded it to embassies, and shared it with its foreign allies. “The notion that homosexuals threatened national security,” explains historian David Johnson, “received the imprimatur of the U.S. Congress and became accepted as official fact.” When the federal government needed to justify its homosexual purges, it simply pointed to the Hoey report.

Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952 with the help of the slogan “Let’s Clean House” and whispers that his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, had homosexual tendencies. Three months after his inauguration, Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which expanded the government’s purging authority—originally given to the State Department—to all federal agencies. Any employee who exhibited “criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct” had no place in the federal bureaucracy. With a Republican in the White House, the purges became less of a spectacle and more of a quiet, well-oiled machine. In Eisenhower’s 1954 State of the Union, he boasted of removing 2,200 security risks in only a year.

McCarthy’s downfall came later that year, but the purges remained alive, as did the rumors that always seemed to saturate America’s capital. After two Republican senators learned that the son of Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming, a Democrat, had been arrested in Lafayette Park, they gave Hunt a choice. He could withdraw from his 1954 reelection campaign or face the publicity of his son’s homosexual arrest. The Senate was virtually tied. If Hunt resigned, he risked shifting power to the Republicans.

On the morning of June 19, 1954, Senator Hunt, a straight victim of antigay political blackmail, entered his Capitol office and shot himself with a .22-caliber rifle.

[silver-and-ivory]

I think the antifa perspective on liberals is something like this:

Liberals think that they’re defending freedom of speech, but really they’re turning a completely blind eye to the way that mob violence has been perpetuated by white suprematicists and Nazis. Instead, they react without context or thought to antifas, who they see as having “started it”.

Nazis want to attack liberal democracy- why aren’t liberals upset about that? If they really cared about liberal democracy, they’re be more concerned about Nazis.

I wonder if a lot of this is simply a factual dispute.

For one, a lot of antifa rhetoric and theory seems to be talking from a perspective of belief in Nazi/fascist/etc. prominence. The fascists have already attacked e.g. queer bloggers. The fascists have already destroyed the sanctity of institutions. The fascists have already eroded the liberal order of nonviolence. And so on.

This, then, provides the foundations of response: which is that, instead of futilely upholding that which has already been destroyed, antifa seeks to respond in kind. Antifa is not a cause of the destruction of the liberal order, but instead a result.

As for the other side, a lot of liberal rhetoric assumes that Nazis/fascists/etc. aren’t very powerful at all, and instead antifa is Really Powerful. The fascists are basically weird Internet dudes who are almost all ironic who you’ll never ever meet, and the government will step in and protect you if you’re ever attacked violently, which you rarely are.

I don’t really like “privilege” as a memeplex. But I do see why the liberal perspective would come off as galling and perhaps as coming from a place of relative ease.

To be more charitable to the liberal position, I guess that I’d say that they (we) think that antifa often creates its own enemies- that for example Trump was accused of being a fascist, but that he actually isn’t; or accusations of libertarians being fascists; or so on and so forth, and that antifa feels more scared than it has to be.

Then again, Type I errors trade off for Type II errors. And in a world filled with threats it makes sense to model most things as threats.

And if liberals are so concerned about antifa, why don’t I try to stop the destruction of the liberal order at its source- with fascists? It seems not only wrong, but also counterproductive and directly harmful to minorities to try to stop antifa, when really fascists are the source of the issue.

My thought-out position here is that people live in really different circumstances, and they shouldn’t apply things they know about their life to other people’s lives. Maybe “fuck all fascists and I’m nailing their heads to the wall” is a reasonable and incredibly liberating thing to say for some people. And simultaneously for other people it erodes the safety they need.

I think there’s a compromise position here, where antifa recognizes that not all fascists are violent, and says “fuck all violent fascists and I’m nailing their heads to the wall”. That’s still somewhat worrying for me, but at least it nominally agrees that violence is the thing that gets violence in return, rather than subscribing to an ideology of fascism.

Antifa refutations of the liberal position would ideally include things like “lmao fascists actually are??? already??? destroying our liberal democracy? and like antifas are literally just responding in kind to a taboo on violence that’s already been broken????? fuckng liberals”

Because that recognizes that, at least in principle, it would be nice to have a taboo on violence, which fascists are not only advocating against in ideology but which fascists are actively breaking. That’s a good, solid argument, and it’s not one I necessarily disagree with.

Note what I’ve specified here: I don’t think that ideology which hates liberal democracy is sufficient for retaliatory violence. Only the acting-out of that ideology is sufficient- actual, literal fascist violence.

Antifas should consider that Communism also has been formulated as inherently opposed to liberal democracy, as well as all of anarchism. Ideological threats to liberal democracy must not be met with bullets unless individual adherents or groups of adherents have already broken the violence taboo; and then the retaliation should be against those specific groups of adherents.

What I am still concerned about is that the weirdness of online spaces means that people who live in situations where there aren’t many fascists will end up feeling really scared of fascists. Or that sensationalistic claims - like “fascists took the White House” - will make people think they’re surrounded by violent fascists, whereas really America elected a (horrible, racist, xenophobic, murderous) president who is not a fascist.

Moreover, I’m really worried that the cure will be worse than the disease- that antifa doesn’t seem to recognize the force it’s unleashed.

What I see as the culmination of antifa is the establishment of masked vigilantes who are Defending Liberty and that kind of thing.

And that’s not necessarily bad! I’m onboard in principle with people stepping up to form their own policing organizations when the government abdicates or proves untrustworthy in its duty to serve and protect them.

But let’s be clear: this establishes a quasi-governmental police force. This means that they must be accountable to the people and they must have protections against violating people’s rights.

Like, the American criminal justice system is shit, because it’s racist. It would be even more shit if we didn’t have 1) the right to an attorney 2) jury trials of our peers 3) a code of laws that’s well-known with consistent penalties 4) (at least nominal) protections against unreasonable search and seizure 5) presumption of innocence, 6) the Miranda rights, 7) protections against self-incrimination, and 8) protections against cruel and unusual punishment. That’s clearly not enough because there are still abuses by the government; and these of course aren’t applied equally to everyone.

But the point here is that when you’re taking control of policing, it’s really important that you have structures in place that guarantee fair trials, good attorney representation, non-arbitrary penalties, and accountability to citizens.

Masked vigilante violence of the sort that Internet antifa seems to want doesn’t, as far as I can tell, have any of these restrictions.

Instead, some Internet antifas are very trigger happy with the fascist accusations. As I’ve explained before, these accusations spread not only from the accused person, but also to the accused person’s defenders. Do you see why this would worry me, in light of the right to attorney?

The obvious comparison here is McCarthyism. I want to be absolutely clear that I don’t think Communists are comparable to fascists, or that antifas are comparable to anti-Communists. That’s not the point. The point is the patterns.

McCarthy saw Communists everywhere, and all Communists were seen as equally bad. The presumption of innocence was ignored. People’s political and personal histories were investigated, and if they didn’t submit to investigation they were fired.

Spurious evidence led to more and more convictions. Anyone who tried to defend Communists was branded as a Communist as well. All measures, including illegal ones, were deemed acceptable to root out the Communist threat.

This is bad because not all Communists are violent, and because Communism ought to be a viable political ideology. Communists should be able to say what they want even if it is treasonous and even if it involves things like guillotining the bourgeois. (There are somewhat complicated laws surrounding that, but suffice it to say that you are allowed to advocate for people’s deaths as long as it isn’t direct incitement to violence.)

It is also bad because it means that even non-Communists could be accused of being Communists, and that would make them Indefensible. In fact, this structure makes Communists Indefensible, which is bad.

This obviously impedes fair trials and the right to attorney.

It is also bad because all actions, no matter how evil or illegal, were justified against suspected Communists. This is how America ended up with the My Lai massacre and committing evil acts towards Martin Luther King Jr. and the other civil rights activists. This is how the PATRIOT Act was passed.

— Because this is what happened with terrorists as well. The threat terrorism posed against America was severely overestimated, nations that were accused of terrorism or terrorist collaboration were attacked; and anyone who was accused of terrorism could be detained and therefore tortured.

The police and surveillance state became larger and anyone who disagreed with Bush was labelled a terrorist sympathizer. All terrorists were seen as violent; they were preemptively attacked to Protect America.

Again, terrorists =/= fascists and Bush =/= antifa. Look at the patterns. The same dynamics apply to antifa. The same dynamics apply to any government.

Despite what you might think of rationalists, Eliezer Yudkowsky has written against the Bush administration’s views on and treatment of accused terrorists here:

Nonetheless, I did realize immediately that everyone everywhere would be saying how awful, how terrible this event was; and that no one would dare to be the voice of restraint, of proportionate response.  Initially, on 9/11, it was thought that six thousand people had died.  Any politician who'd said "6000 deaths is 1/8 the annual US casualties from automobile accidents," would have been asked to resign the same hour.

No, 9/11 wasn't a good day.  But if everyone gets brownie points for emphasizing how much it hurts, and no one dares urge restraint in how hard to hit back, then the reaction will be greater than the appropriate level, whatever the appropriate level may be.

This is the even darker mirror of the happy death spiral—the spiral of hate.  Anyone who attacks the Enemy is a patriot; and whoever tries to dissect even a single negative claim about the Enemy is a traitor.  But just as the vast majority of all complex statements are untrue, the vast majority of negative things you can say about anyone, even the worst person in the world, are untrue.

When the defense force contains thousands of aircraft and hundreds of thousands of heavily armed soldiers, one ought to consider that the immune system itself is capable of wreaking more damage than 19 guys and four nonmilitary airplanes.  The US spent billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers' lives shooting off its own foot more effectively than any terrorist group could dream.

If the USA had completely ignored the 9/11 attack—just shrugged and rebuilt the building—it would have been better than the real course of history.  But that wasn't a political option.  Even if anyone privately guessed that the immune response would be more damaging than the disease, American politicians had no career-preserving choice but to walk straight into al Qaeda's trap.  Whoever argues for a greater response is a patriot.  Whoever dissects a patriotic claim is a traitor.

This is why I make a point of trying to defend accused fascists: because I know that no one else will, and because if there’s no devil’s advocate how will we check our own power?

Right now might be a good time to note that McCarthyism also targeted fascists:

3. The Loyalty Review Board shall currently be furnished by the Department of Justice the name of each foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group or combination of persons which the Attorney General, after appropriate investigation and determination, designates as totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive, or as having adopted a policy of advocating or approving the commission of acts of force or violence to deny others their rights under the Constitution of the United States, or as seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means.

You might say that antifa isn’t nearly so powerful as the American government. And you’re right.

But if you don’t have checks on your power before you come into it- and that is the goal, right? Becoming powerful? - then when will you ever have them? If your movement doesn’t encode the idea “I might hurt someone innocent” -

or “I might go overboard fighting fascism and I don’t want to violate the civil liberties of fascists”

or “Not all fascists are inherently violent, and certainly not all accused fascists” 

or “People who defend accused fascists and doubt accusations of fascism aren’t necessarily my enemies”

— if you don’t have a movement that recognizes the damages it might be able to do, then all of a sudden you’ll find that it’s become powerful. And now you have a lot of people willing to accuse anyone of being a fascist, to slander the accused with all kinds of evil deeds, and then accusing anyone who defends the accused of being a fascist too.

I don’t want Internet antifa to be powerful, because I’m worried that it doesn’t recognize the very real harms that it could do. If Internet antifas seemed to recognize that their actions and ideology can hurt others, and they had plans for establishing limitations on their own power, then God, I would support antifa.

But I can’t in good conscience. Not right now.

[badass-at-fandoming]

Chapter 5 is bloody and awake!

Bonpensiero Bloodlines Remix by MissingTriforce

Chapter 5: The Mansion of Ghosts

Fandom: Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines

Pairing: M/F, M/M, F/F, Cuthbert Beckett/Original Malkavian Characters, Cuthbert Beckett/Mercurio

Rating: Explicit - Graphic Depictions of Violence

Fic Tags: Stealth Crossover, Alternate Universe - Buffy The Vampire Slayer Fusion, Canon Rewrite, Behind the Scenes, Canon Typical Violence, Mental Health Issues, Vampire Politics, Malkavian Madness, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Polyamory, Kissing, Vampire Sex, Cuddling & Snuggling

Chapter CW: Blood, Gore, Injuries, Death Threats, Weapons

Summary: After decades away, Beckett is invited to Los Angeles, by a formal, crisp letter from Prince Sebastian LaCroix and his Seneschal Enzo Bonpensiero. They want him to examine this Anarkaran sarcophagus that has the global Kindred community both terrified and enthralled. Beckett’s as eager to debunk Gehenna rumblings as he is to re-visit old contacts and investigate new lines of Thin-Blooded inquiry. And maybe, even, go romancing.

Part 5 of A Kinder Universe series

Want to go back to the start? The universe becomes kinder here.

Want to know more about the Bonpensieros? Watch our adventures here. A new video about McCarthyism and the Baali is up!

Want to read more of my work? Check out Moonrise, my queer werewolf game! Reads like Hozier x Vampire: the Masquerade with lesbians, bi folks, pansexual enbies, and aro lesbian Scarlet Pimpernel. No, really.

[sweetandsavageautistic]

(CW: Eugenics, but in the form of a true joke):

The Twitter tag #EndAutismNow is the resurgence of McCarthyism.

[pretz3l-log1c]

Also I never posted about it but I watched Justice League New Frontier last week (for free on CW Seed) and I highly recommend NOT watching it. I mean the JL characters dealing with McCarthyism was interesting and it had an old sci fi film flavor to it but, it was so slooooooow. Most movies you don't really feel time passing as you watch but man, minutes crawled with that movie. And it had a good plot. Why was it so agonizingly boring to watch?

[silver-and-ivory]

Really, conservatives are going to be discriminated against like communists used to? Good thing for them they control the presidency, congress, the supreme court (soon), most state legislatures, the military, most police forces, most wealth ...

Hi, anon!

I think there was a miscommunication somewhere; and it makes sense that there was information loss because my thoughts weren’t fully explained.

Let’s look back at what I wrote:

I think maybe conservative/anti-SJism/etc. is proceeding towards a similar position in liberal spaces and communities that Communism once had.

This is phrased fairly unclearly, and I understand why my message was not understood.

But to clarify:

(Sidenote: I meant when I said “conservative/anti-SJism/etc.” is not necessarily just Bible-toting homophobes, just as the category“Communist” wasn’t limited to hardcore Stalinists — though I do believe that both should be protected and have free speech to the same degree that everyone else does.

I am referring also to sj’s treatment of e.g. me, an extremely socially-liberal trans nonwhite with basically leftist politics. I have been accused of being privileged and therefore not experiencing any real oppression, and told that I don’t have to deal with microaggressions. This all for saying that it isn’t funny to joke about murdering all straight people, or that white people writing rap music wasn’t appropriative all the time.)

With the quoted statement above, I meant to say that some aspects of how Communists were treated post-WWII feel eerily similar to the way conservative/general anti-sj/sj-critical people have been treated in colleges or activist/leftist type areas (such as my school). For example, Communist speakers were not allowed to speak on campus, some lost their teaching jobs, etc., etc., and I see this process repeating today with regards to people who are not sj in liberal spaces.

Of course, this is not equivalent in degree to discrimination against Communists, as you are correct to note. But it does seem relevant to what kind of norms I want to create in my own life and my own spaces.

I was surprised to realize that I had an immediate reaction to Communists being purged from colleges and activist groups. I do not like the idea of someone being shouted down and guilt-tripped and personally attacked, even if they believe that e.g. Stalin’s Holodomor never happened.

I think I want to establish some kind of meta-structure to decide what kind of ideological policing is not objectionable to me and how it would be done, and to somehow square this with competing access needs and things like safe spaces. But I’m not there yet; and I hope that knowledge of McCarthyism’s evils and so on could lend value to my theory.

Thank you for asking, and I like very much that people who disagree with me read my posts!