4 ms·
The FBI's practice of tracking "suspected communists" literally comes from the Red Scare. The McCarthyist era, which you seem to be calling "The Red Scare", is
by isityettime 5mo ago
The FBI's practice of tracking "suspected communists" literally comes from the Red Scare. The McCarthyist era, which you seem to be calling "The Red Scare", is known as "The Second Red Scare". The First Red Scare followed the October Revolution pretty much immediately, and is the condition under which the FBI started surveiling suspected communists in 1919.
When Qian was asked to testify against Sidney Weinbaum, it was during the Second Red Scare.
All of this is absolutely tied up with those moral panics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare
- LAC-Tech 5mo agoThere were a large number of actual, convicted communist spies at high levels in the 1940s and 50s. Soviet penetration was massive. The Manhattan Project, State Department, Intelligence Agencies... this was around the time the US had an arms embargo against the Republic of China while the USSR supplied the Chinese Communists with weapons captured from the Japanese in Manchuria. This revisionism that it was all just paranoid weirdo (McCarthy) harassing innocent people is a very common trope, but an a-historical one.