April 2022

...which we seem to be experiencing as a whole society, it might be useful to remember the great Red hunts of the 50's and Edward R. Murrows' commentary.--blj

EDWARD R MURROW EDITORIAL ON JOSEPH MCCARTHY (1954)
Closing a half-hour television report on Senator Joseph McCarthy in March 1954, American journalist Edward R Murrow delivered a stinging editorial about McCarthy’s tactics and their impact:

To imagine that we can switch the course of history along a different track by transforming the system through reforms or revolutions, to hope to find salvation in a defensive or offensive action against tyranny and militarism—all that is just day-dreaming. There is nothing on which to base even attempts. Marx’s assertion that the regime would produce its own gravediggers is cruelly contradicted every day, and one wonders, incidentally, how Marx could ever have believed that slavery could produce free men. Never yet in history has a regime of slavery fallen under the blows of the slaves.