Don’t forget the true cost of McCarthyism included the Vietnam war and all the deaths caused by Kissinger and Nixon in the 70s and all the squalid coups that suppressed democracy round the world.
Right now Ukraine is on the brink of a revolution because a huge fraction of the population fears Putin so much that they would rather risk a civil war than suffer any sort of customs union with Russia. And Putin’s mode of leadership is exactly what the HUAC people were all about: rule by fear and intimidation.
Now imagine the situation in Ukraine if the US was still operating the torture camps and secret prisons set up by Bush and Cheney. Those protesters would probably still fear Putin but would they be quite so willing to join our side?
In the end it was Pete Seger’s people who won the cold war. Reagan didn’t have anything to do with it. According to Margaret Thatcher, his successor wanted to prop the communist system up and stop it falling in East Germany.
It was the people of East Germany and of Poland and of the rest of Eastern Europe who defeated the communist system, not a bunch of Western politicians. People risked crossing the wall for Elvis Presley and a pair of blue jeans, not to listen to the speeches of Ronald Reagan. There wasn’t enough food in the East but there was never a shortage of pompous politicians ready to tell you how magnificent they were.
