Word: mccarthyism
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...radio or talks public affairs with his friends does not need to be told how all-pervasive the McCarthy topic has become. McCarthy-in-Europe may be more surprising. There, Senator Joseph McCarthy is the second-best known of living Americans and regarded by many as the most powerful. McCarthyism has cost the U.S. billions spent to promote international cooperation and trust and to advance U.S. leadership...
With the British, especially, McCarthyism is an obsession-& delightful, self-flattering obsession that salves the bruised British ego with the balm of moral supertority to the upstart Americans. The more McCarthyism can be exaggerated in its evil or its power, the more it fascinates the British...
...former Prime Minister can indulge himself by wondering out loud whether McCarthy or Eisenhower is the more powerful. The anti-American New Statesman & Nation finds in McCarthyism the thickest stick it ever brandished. Hardly anyone in Britain laughs when the New Statesman says: "The Hitler-McCarthy analogy is disturbingly apt." It goes on with a typical distortion of McCarthy's power, finding him in alliance with "powerful interests in contemporary America," including "a substantial part of American Roman Catholicism" and "many American industrialists." The New Statesman smugly concludes: "It is anti-Communism that binds these social forces together...
...other end of the spectrum of British opinion stands a passage in the Queen's coronation speech (composed presumably by the greatest living ghostwriter, Sir Winston), which plays to British emotions on McCarthyism by heavily emphasizing British liberties. Said the Queen: "There has . . . sprung from our island home a theme of social and political thought which constitutes our message to the world . . . Parliamentary institutions with their free speech and respect for the rights of minorities and the inspiration of a broad tolerance in thought and its expression -all this we conceive to be a precious part...
...before McCarthy's power, bears only a specter's relation to reality. But it is the specter that flashes instantly to the British mind (and less vividly to the French and German) when America is mentioned. Americans can recognize the runaway inflation in the European myth of McCarthyism. But the myth itself was first pumped up in the U.S., and in the U.S. today McCarthyism is more myth than man-but not the less dangerous for that. The reputation of power, even an originally false reputation, begets power...