10 ms·
Why I Wrote “The Crucible” (1996)
- mellosouls 6y agoBut by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors’ violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly Obviously the witches then (Communists) map directly to the equivalent (Far Right) now, and how appropriate this brilliant play is in nailing the hysteria and blinkered-ness of the more odious elements of the right-wing then, and the left-wing now; and the justified fear of those they seek to persecute. The parallel between the McCarthyites of the 50s and the Cancellers of today has been drawn before, and this play is still timely.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TT3351 6y agoCurious if you include right-wing personalities who try and get "progressives" or "liberals" fired from their jobs in the great group of Cancellers, you may be interested in the doctrine of the preferred first speaker.
- mellosouls 6y agoOh, there are undoubtedly bad actors on both sides, but I don't think there is reasonable doubt about where the vast majority of contemporary behaviour we are talking about - the pressure to obey the diktats of self-elected social arbiters at risk of career etc - comes from.
- zzzeek 6y agoAnytime one starts to type the words "bad actors on both sides" it's time to step back and try to be more honest with oneself. One of the "sides" here has been trying to "cancel" the votes of 80 million Americans to install a permanent autocratic government. If Rosanne losing her tv show is equally concerning to you as that, again, time to step back and think a little more.
- cultus 6y agoGreat comment. There's a pervasive lack of self-awareness among the right, manifesting as a pathological inability to empathize with individuals in other groups. Introspection can be painful at times, but it's necessary to be a morally full and content person.
- cambalache 6y agoIronic username
- throwaway9980 6y agoYes and what’s described in the comment is what I wanted after the 2016 election! I thought the electoral college should have selected someone else, I thought Trump should not have been sworn in to office, and I wanted him removed on the first day. I honestly believed it might happen because it seemed like the only sensible thing. This election fraud nonsense is payback. It’s awful that the right can’t see that this is terrible for everyone. It’s terrible that the left can’t admit that the same passions existed on their side after the 2016 election. I don’t want to argue about which side is worse. I’m not trying to highlight hypocrisy. I’m simply saying that the eye for an eye mentality has us all stuck. I’m hopeful that Biden does understand all of this. His demeanor throughout all of this inspires some hope. We need more people on both sides to follow his lead.
- konjin 6y agoTaking that to it's logical conclusion, who would you think the good actors were on the Eastern Front. The Nazis who had just started a genocide of millions or the Soviets, who had just finished their third genocide of millions? >Side? I am on nobody's side, because nobody is on my side, little orc.
- konjin 6y agoAnd if the communists of the 50s ever got in positions of power they would have opened gulags and murdered millions. The point is that we aught to trust our institutions to keep that from happening without acting like the people who we are supposedly saving society from.
- verylittlemeat 6y agoUnfortunately much like the hysteria of "communists" being lost on McCarthyites in the 50s the same is likely for the "far right" on the left now. They're literal Nazis, don'tcha know.
- lock-free 6y agoForgive me for not pitying the poor conservative, who has controlled the legislature for a decade, the White House for a term, and the Supreme Court for decades to come. McCarthyism has little bearing on current political realities other than a passing resemblance.
- TT3351 6y agoAs well as numerous institutional handicaps that will advantage them for decades (Senate, EC, etc)
- lehi 6y agoThis was DC yesterday: https://twitter.com/ShelbyTalcott/status/1337939112649748480 https://twitter.com/ShelbyTalcott/status/1337939112649748480 Don'tcha know.
- verylittlemeat 6y agoProud boys are literal nazis?
- jacobwilliamroy 6y agoNo not literal nazis. They're just fascist white supremacists. I don't understand why so many people dislike using "nazi" as a shorthand for "fascist white supremacists".
- verylittlemeat 6y agoI'm reading the wiki on them (admittedly not the best or most unbiased source) and I don't really buy that they're white supremacists since among other things their leader is afro-cuban. But fascistic sure, I could see that. Without playing the enlightened centrist card too strongly I don't see anything particularly more disturbing about the proud boys than I have from antifa. Of course antifa can't be accused of being fascistic since their name is literally "anti-fascism" and if you call yourself anti facist then obviously it is impossible to be a fascist.
- Fauntleroy 6y agoAh, Hacker News. The victim complex runs deep in this gaggle of nerds who have rarely, if ever, been exposed to real hardship or discrimination.
- konjin 6y agoAh, Hacker News. The self righteous complex runs deep in this gaggle of busy bodies who have rarely, if ever, seen real hardship or discrimination.
- mellosouls 6y agoAd-hominem attacks: the last refuge of those without actual arguments. I note also that you know nothing about me; that sort of insult is normally used by those without much actual life experience. This is because those who know the world is complicated and full of many types of people tend not to assume the background of those they disagree with, and certainly aren't normally arrogant enough to make claims about how hard life is on the other side, excepting perhaps, when they themselves are projecting somewhat.
- specialist 6y agoCancel Culture most resembles consumer boycotts, circa 80s and 90s. Both brands and influencers are targets of opportunity, have no real power. I'll be more impressed when critics target the aggregators, platforms.
- mellosouls 6y agoConsumer boycotts tend to target corporations rather than the lives and careers of individuals.
- specialist 6y agoWhy are they targeting the influencers and not the advertisers? Because that's the only target of opportunity. They'd target the advertisers, eg like the dump Rush campaigns of old, if they could.
- mellosouls 6y agoExcept they choose to destroy people they disagree with rather than countering their arguments; it's a completely different phenomenon, aptly described in its 50s McCarthyite form in The Crucible, which has little relevance to consumer boycotts then or now, but describes contemporary Cancel Culture perfectly.
- specialist 6y agoI agree. I'm explaining, not defending. How does the counter information strategy work? Anti Limbaugh people have tried fact checking, mocking, discrediting, etc. The only thing that seems to have tempered his show is attacking his advertisers. Imagine you really oppose Rachel Maddow or Alex Jones. How would you negate their influence? I don't know any popular new style influencers on the left. So let's say Ben Shapiro and Carlos Masa (because I have no better idea). How would you bounce them? The only angle of attack I can think of is a smear campaign. The only successful campaign I know of is Milo. My take is the Mercers got sick of his schtick. So maybe attacking patrons, which are a different kind of advertisers, works too.
- exo762 6y agoWitches are fantasy. Communists are real, and some of them were acting on orders from Stalin's USSR. It's not the same thing.
- Foober223 6y agoWell, witches are/were real. The magical powers part may be up for debate.
- dibujaron 6y agoHe specifically addresses this in the article.
- cultus 6y agoSo therefore it follows that blatant disregard for civil liberties is justified? I thought you guys were against "cancel culture."
- phaemon 6y ago...for he rails at Communism, when the land is almost lost in Capitalism; and would cry Fire! Fire! in Noah's flood.
- cmiles74 6y agoMany of them were also imaginary, as history has made clear.
- toiletfuneral 6y agoSorry the ‘33 business plot didn’t work out for you
- daenz 6y agoI don't think we're quite there yet, but it conjures up modern-day videos of people being accused of white supremacy and told that the evidence for it is the fact that they don't see it. I wish I was joking. This[0] was posted recently on one of my hyper-progressive acquaintances Instagram. Does it not have a similar level of paranoia as when people chased witches or communists? 0. https://i.imgur.com/0mzw6D8.png https://i.imgur.com/0mzw6D8.png
- GavinMcG 6y agoI think that's wrong in a way that's kind of subtle. It seems to equate the system being created by intentional minds with the system being an intentionally-created one. But intentional people can still be non-intentional participants in emergent phenomena. Tweaking it brings up an important point that's made in debates here on HN about privacy, censorship, etc., in relation to developer ethics. That is, if you are an intelligent and intentional participant in building something, and you're not thinking about second-order effects, the system you're building will still have them. The intention in making Facebook more "engaging" probably wasn't to have radicalizing isolated communities. But Facebook was intentionally developed toward more engagement, and that was the result. Ask people who worked on the project and they'll almost certainly tell you they had no intention of worsening the situation in Myanmar. But the system that led there was still intentionally created.
- konjin 6y agoWho says that the system of grifting that anti-racism has become wasn't designed? I was in Boston in the 00s when the prototype was being created and it was used best by international students who happened to be brown or black, and usually the children or grand children of war criminals. The one case that still stands out was an ex of mine whose grandfather murdered thousands of Chinese in Indonesia. She has been playing the minority card to get exposure in NY for a decade now, crying about how horrible Trump was. While living on literal blood money. The other was Obama. The child of an African from the wrong side of Africa and a white woman, raised by his rich white grandparents, he is somehow treated as though he is black american. To misquote Bill Clinton: I am blacker than him. At least there weren't mass graves in his closet until he became president.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoThe thing that strikes me about this piece, is the tremendous research and hard work involved. My father worked for the CIA in the "red scare" days. It was an...interesting...time.
- lostlogin 6y agoHave you anything you can share about it?
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoThis is his bio, on my site: http://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm http://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm
- commandertso 6y agoYour father had a hell of a life and looks like he made the most of it. Thank you for sharing this.
- cultus 6y agoI'm kind of surprised that an apparently large segment of HN thinks McCarthyism was a good thing.
- lostlogin 6y agoWhat makes you think that HN readers agree with McCarthyism?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jacobwilliamroy 6y agoWell cultus did get downvoted. So there's that.
- the_only_law 6y agoScroll down
- virissimo 6y agoI read "The Crucible" in a high school English class and it significantly affected my political outlook, but having learned more of the history of that era (much of it not public knowledge when I first read it and certainly not when it was written) it's no longer clear to me that it still works as allegory. From the article: "McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had “lost China” and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that." Well, as the Venona project cables declassified in 1995 show, the State Department didn't just contain intellectuals that were pro-Soviet: it contained actual Soviet agents in contact with the USSR. This was by no means restricted to the State Department, but also included the Treasury, OSS (pre-CIA), and even the White House. See here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110514040131/http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/commissions/secrecy/pdf/12hist1.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20110514040131/http://www.access.... In addition, it is now known that the CIA ran an operation, at the request of Allen Dulles, to feed McCarthy false information about who in the government were Soviet spies with the deliberate purpose of discrediting him: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48603/did-the-cia-feed-false-information-to-mccarthy-to-discredit-his-true-claims-that https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48603/did-the-c.... Maybe this calls for a remake of "The Crucible", not as tragedy, but as supernatural horror.
- schoen 6y agoIn the past I've thought that the trouble with "McCarthyism" was its lack of respect for freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, as well as some of the dynamics of "moral panic". That doesn't mean that McCarthy was literally personally wrong about all of his claims, and as you point out, some of them have subsequently been vindicated. It also doesn't mean that the anti-Communist or anti-Soviet cause was unimportant. I guess this raises a big question for me: what does liberalism look like in a cold war (or a hot war)? The illiberalism of the cold war as well as other things that were done to prosecute it (including the exaltation of espionage and the seemingly irreversible boom in spy agencies and the classified world) are deeply upsetting to me even though they responded to a real and, I would agree, grave threat.
- spodek 6y agoThe threat of communism is different than environmental destruction, but for those looking for historical precedent to illuminate today's problems, I recommend Bury The Chains by Adam Hochschild. It's on British abolitionism, especially Thomas Clarkson, also William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Their actions and success seem inspiringly relevant to our times. Here's a podcast on the connections: https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episodes/422-adam-hochschild-part-1-abolition https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo....
- mnd999 6y agoInteresting, but as per the guidelines, politics is offropic and this should be removed.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TT3351 6y agoIt seems from some of the comments that some of HN thinks it's ok for the federal or state government to treat Americans who are communists or socialists differently from those who are not. I hope this is a minority view.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/BXp0u https://archive.is/BXp0u