I reopened the other day History of the Press in the United States, an interpretation of the History of Journalism, by E. Emery [1]. The date of the edition reveals a lot: the golden age of McCarthyism, a sordid campaign disguised as patriotism. Under the pretext of combating the “red threat”, right-wing extremists denounced, slandered, persecuted, unemployed and exiled suspects of activities harmful to national security. Those led to the scaffold of delusional public opinion had their trials annulled [2], laws that allowed them were declared unconstitutional [3]. On the stage where horror plays were staged in the name of “Christian and Western civilization” (with abundant propaganda throughout the world through Voice of America and Reader's Digest), the main role was played by a senator. But the poisonous spider was installed in a device that had appeared in the 30s of the 20th century with the excuse of fighting corruption. I'm talking about J. Edgar Hoover. It will not be the first time that the pretext of fighting corrupt customs allows the installation of regimes of terror and legal corruption. Brazilian Lava Jato has national and cosmopolitan antecedents.
It was up to Edward Roscoe Murrow to denounce the plea bargains imposed in the Senate and in police stations. Gradually, public opinion that applauded the campaign realizes the manipulation of the law, the arbitrary procedures of the American extreme right. The press mostly supported the “moralizing” Hoover and his talking doll, Joseph McCarthy. The hysteria against communism installs a regime in the United States that is inimical to the rule of law. Even today, the seed of McCarthyism is reborn in the Nazi ranks in the USA. Without forgetting the racist practice permeated in the minds of Americans in large numbers and the Nazis “imported” by the USA to improve American science and technology in war, espionage, propaganda.
Anti-communist hysteria was born before World War II. During the McCarthy period, there was only the harvest of a broad sowing of fear in the face of the popular movements that shook Russia. McCarthy revisits the age-old tradition of judges who engage in Crusades and use infamous methods in a palette of legal and moral abjections. In addition to Torquemada, let us remember the judges of the Special Sections of Justice in Vichy, in Nazi Germany itself and in the USSR during the Moscow trials. McCarthy was a judge and presided over trials in Wisconsin's 10th Judicial Circuit Court. Later he was the youngest senator in his state. In 1946 he reached the US Senate and shortly after, in 1950, he displayed a list of alleged members of the Communist Party in America plus a no less list of spies who would violate the Constitution (oops!) and National Security. There is no evidence of illegal procedures in his exercise as a judge. In addition, all those accused in the Witch Hunt who violated the extremist politician's convictions were the target of police investigations, invasion of privacy, brutality that violated all rights. “Here you have no rights.” The phrase is not original and was not invented by the Brazilian Federal Police in the cases of the rector of Santa Catarina and other defendants. Victims of Judge McCarthy's persecution, several people under investigation followed the path of suicide.
There are strong features: McCarthy's campaign was supported, in people or money, “by known fascists. This was just the beginning of the auxiliary role he played in the plot for the Nazi return. He later played a large part in removing dedicated people who opposed fascism from government.” [4] The wave of Nazis employed in the USA, in addition to those in Germany and the rest of Europe who were placed in strategic government positions or in important companies, helps to understand the “rebirth” of fascism in the world. It's in Brazil.
A fact in Germany, Italy, Vichy, the USSR and dictatorships is the cordon sanitaire that surrounded academics. Isolation did not just come from state, religious or police authorities. It emerged from colleagues who joined the status quo. Klemperer, a Jew married to an Aryan, did not go to the death camps, he stayed in the institution where he worked. As a cleaner. His peers and students passed by him as if he were invisible. During the McCarthy period something similar happened on US campuses. Competition was won by whistleblowers who offered names and services. In Vargas' Brazil and after 1964 the same thing happened. Just turn to the USP Black Book and other sources to testify to the shame brought by anonymous denunciations by colleagues against their peers.
Under McCarthy, Professor Nikolai N. Poppe, an “intelligence” official on behalf of Nazi Germany and the USSR, was brought to the USA in 1949 as an expert on Soviet issues. He went to work at the University of Washington and came across an unwanted competitor, Professor Owen Lattimore, an international relations specialist at Johns Hopkins University and an advisor to the State Department. Referred to as pro-communist, Lattimore attends witch hunt committees to “provide information” but is acquitted. The Senatorial Committee's report, contrary to what the extreme right expects, accuses McCarthy of “fraud and deceit...against the Senate” and of having “stopped to a new low in his gross disregard for the facts”. [5]
The inquisitor leaning against the wall is saved by Poppe's testimony. The latter complains: Lattimore was against coming to the USA after his adventures in the service of totalitarianism. In 1952, in an attempt by McCarthy and his ally Senator William Jenner, a spectacle was created in which an official, Louis Budenz, affirmed Lattimore's affiliation with the Communist Party. And Poppe takes the opportunity to insinuate that Lattimore's admiration for Stalin was clear. And Poppe accused him of copying URRS newspapers when writing analyzes for the North American government. Two birds in one fell swoop: Lattimore demoralized as a spy and researcher. Acquitted, because the “evidence”, as our Lava Jato prosecutors would say, was based on “convictions” and not on documented facts, Lattimore went to England where he began teaching at the University of Leeds. What about Poppe? When charged with his adventures as an honorary Nazi and assistant to the USSR, he states: “we (he and university collaborationists) were researchers and every nation does this in times of war”. He fulminates: “things don’t always follow a straight line (...) there are breaks, stops and zigzags”. How many Brazilian university students “survived” dictatorships by denouncing and attacking colleagues? How many will confess to deviating from the route when the current wave of power passes in Brasília, Washington, Budapest or Rome?
More ridiculous and damaging testimony against Lattimore is given by a former communist, Karl August Wittfogel. He says at the Witch Hunt Committee: when Lattimore edited the newspaper Pacific Affairs, in a conversation about the USSR, Lattimore would have given a “knowledgeable smile”. Lattimore replies that his facial contortion was not “a communist smile.” Wittfogel then accuses him of using the word “feudal”, proof of….communism. Lattimore retorts that Marxists did not own the patent on the word “feudal.” [6] Terrible ridicule and cause of physical or moral death for thousands. Something similar in the USSR of 1930, something very similar in the processes instituted during the 1964 dictatorship. Something that is announced every moment in the current Brazilian government.
After going through the misadventures of scientists in a witch-hunt atmosphere, I notice a point that has already been discussed a lot in research on the modern political order, but which can be traced back to the times of Greek democracy. I am referring to the perennial war between researchers and the dogmatism of the masses and demagogue politicians. São Paulo already distinguished, in the ethics of peoples, two types of society. At First Letter to the Corinthians, calls the Jews a semiotic people. The Greeks are called by him “zetetic people” [7] Curiosity is shared by the masses and researchers. The “many” in the Athenian square were curious but often believed in the fallacies of demagogues, miracle workers, etc. [8] There is still much to learn from Plato about the links between tyranny and popular dogmatism.
Allow me to quote an excerpt from my article published in Comciência Magazine: “The ruin of governments occurs because they do not know how to say who should command and who should be commanded, in their ignorance about what matters most in human affairs. What ignorance is targeted? The one that is based on the corrupted will that reverses the order of values. The perverse will loves the bad and the unjust, even though it knows that they are inferior to the beautiful and the good. Such disagreement between pity and pleasure, and reasonable opinion is supreme ignorance because it is typical of the popular mass, for the part of the soul subject to punishment and pleasure corresponds exactly, in the State, to the people and the masses.
The ignorant mass does not wish to obey the magistrates and the laws [9]. The same occurs in individuals, if good principles are ineffective, as what is dissonant wins. No magistracy can be attributed to someone who suffers from such ignorance. One should, on the contrary, call the opposite character wise, and attribute the positions to him. The most beautiful and highest symphony consists of the highest knowledge shared by reasonable man. Anyone who lacks such science cannot be a savior of the State. Whoever is in charge must have titles to do so in large States, in small ones and in families. (...) The ruined rulers were struck by the evil that consists of aspiring to have more than the law allows. They praise the law in words, but they do not respect it in fact. This clash between speech and action is the most serious ignorance, considered, however, above all by the masses, as wisdom. Due to such dissonance, the beautiful norms of the constitution are corrupted. Fair measure is essential in politics, as in the body (food) or techniques (on ships, more sails than necessary), in the soul (excessive rights). Without it, everything is reversed, the abundance of meat leads to disease, the limitlessness leads to injustice. The soul of young people cannot bear the weight of power, so it becomes infected with the most serious disease, unreason.” [10]
The worst of Platonic politics can be denounced, following the example of what Karl Popper and others proclaimed. But it is not possible to hide his clear perception of a fertile source of tyranny: popular ignorance. We could speculate that the theory of “conscience coming from outside” moved by Lenin to present the party machine in the revolutionary process has distant origins in Platonic theses. [11] Over time, the distinction between the ignorant masses and wise statesmen or revolutionary leaders has integrated the work of political thought. [12] From Antiquity to the Renaissance, from this to the 19th century, the multitude was denied political sovereignty due to a lack of knowledge among the “popular”. Modern revolutions, from the Puritan in England to the North American and French and then, in the 20th century, the socialist ones, used two essential elements as presuppositions: knowledge spread to the greatest number of people possible and the dissemination of news. The press was strategic in both fields.
I return to Emery, who talks about the cultural change brought about by journalism. The printing press reduced the cost of education. With it, knowledge would no longer be the privilege of some sectors. The greater the number of readers, the lower the price to be spent on editions. “It’s not that reading automatically produces reflection – the stacks of contentless magazines on any newsstand today refute this argument – but it provokes people’s interest in the world around them. At the end of the Middle Ages, several trends broke the crust of ingrained customs and penetrated the “age of discussion”, which is progressive, as it is a reward for intelligence”.
Today the situation is more complex. A lot of information is distributed, without reflections following the same path. On the internet, instead of changes in custom, we see old and archaic morals return under the sign of primitive and obscurantist religion. The extreme edge of modernity is combined with dogmatism digested by the real or virtual masses. Another point highlighted by Emery: at the beginning of the modern press, the public lacked literary experience. “When people react to emotion more than reasoning, they often forget the safety of discipline.” The situation gets worse with the internet, TV, radio. The factory of fake news and emotional images seems to have buried the discipline of research and study once and for all. The figure that appeared on the smartphone is worth it, as was the case with the dick bottle and other icons of primary emotion that help win elections.
But another antagonistic fact to that indicated above gives a libertarian and democratic flavor to the press. “The printing machine has become an archive available to everyone. It offers a more responsible account of transactions, in contrast to word of mouth. After the invention of the printing press, the people could check the failures and achievements of their rulers more effectively. It can establish the responsibility of a public guideline.” The internet makes it possible to monitor governments. If information is shared by millions at the same time, it can help with greater control of public policies. But, on the contrary, instruments like Whatsapp retroact “mouth information” without verification and control. And then the ignorant virtual mass ensures the worst forms of public administration, the most vile political directions, the worst treatment between powers and citizenship.
I made a point of going through the totalitarian period and witch hunts, notorious and sad in the 20th century, to remember that the field of public life is still driven by the same ingredients that gave rise to the Torquemadas in the modern world. The persecution of “communism” today is combined with the false fight against corruption. The procedures of Brazilian judges and prosecutors resume practices worthy of McCarthy. Instead of judging, they persecute defendants, seen as adversaries according to their “convictions” and not according to the law. The venality and propaganda of the supposed moral champions becomes clear when their procedures are revealed by the press. The case Intercept it's proof. Without any exaggeration, since Lava Jato and Bolsonaro's election we have entered an era in Brazil that can have as patrons the names of McCarthy, Andreï Vychinski, Roland Freisler. That trinity has counterparts in our courts. Let's just hope that the press, by denouncing illegal procedures that border on fascism, mitigates the horror announced. From the looks of things and according to statements by the president and his ministers, soon Brazilian public universities, in addition to being suffocated by the cut in resources, will see their researchers tried in McCarthy-style courts on charges of smiling in a communist way. It's ridiculous, but unfortunately more than likely.
[1] - In the original: The Press and America (New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1954).
[2] - Yates v. United States (1957) and Watkins v. United States (1957), in Albert Fried: McCarthyism, The Great American Red Scare, a documentary History (Oxford University Press, 1997).
[3] - Fried, op. cit. P. 124.
[4] – Glen Yeadon & John: The Nazi Hydra in America, suppressed History of a Century, Progressive Ed, 2008.
[5] - See Christopher Simpson: Blowback, the first full account of America's Recruitment of Nazis, and its disastrous effect on our domestic and foreign policy, New York, Weindenfeld & Nicholson, 1988. p. 120 et seq.
[6] - James Cotton: Asian Frontier Nationalism. Owen Lattimore and the American Policy Debate. (Manchester, University Press, 1989). The Wikipedia entry is of reasonable help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Lattimore#cite_note-29, of interest, given the return to the authoritarian past in the world and in Brazil: James Cotton, Crossing Borders in the Asia-Pacific. Essays on the Domestic-Foreign Policy Divide, Nova Science, NY, 2002.
[7] - σημεῖα αἰτοῦσιν καὶ ἕλληνες σοφίαν ζητοῦσι ν : Quoniam et Judæi signa petunt, et Græci sapientiam quærunt (II Corinthians, 22). “Where is the sapient? Where the grammarian? Where is the time inquirer? Time disputer is spelled as zetetés I'm aionos: συζητητὴς τοῦ αἰῶνος. The term combines “syn” (joined to) and zeteo (to seek, seek). O Syntheses It’s what he’s looking for among other people, in philosophy. συζητ-ητής , οῦ, ὁ, A. joint inquirer: disputant, See HG Liddell. R. Scott. The Greek-English Lexicon. revised and augmented CF. Roberto Romano, “Zetética e Dogmática”, https://forumdiderot.blogspot.com/2018/02/zetetica-e-dogmatica-roberto-romano.html
[8] - “Curiosity is the passion to know the hidden and the hidden. But no one hides the good they have. Sometimes we attribute to ourselves a good that we don't have. The curious person, in his desire to know what is wrong among others, is taken by the passion of evil, the sister of envy and slander. Because envy is sadness caused by other people's contentment and evil is joy due to your unhappiness. Both are born from a cruel passion, badness.” Plutarch, Of curiosity, 6. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1986. If we compare Plutarch's excerpt to the overwhelming majority of what circulates on today's “social networks”, especially in election times, we will see that in fact there is nothing new under the Sol. Plutarch opposes the terrible curiosity to that used in science. The latter, he recommends, can be a remedy against the baser side of the curious. The same impulse occurs in the Enlightenment, which recommended science and the arts as derivatives of the animalistic sense of curiosity.
[9] - Morrow, Glenn. Plato and the rule of law. In: Vlastos, Gregory. Plato, a collection of critical essays, ethics, politics, and philosophy of art and religion. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978.p. 148.
[10] - Roberto Romano: “Noise and Harmony, the masses challenge the owners of the State” http://www.comciencia.br/comciencia/handler.php?section=8&edicao=91&id=1119
[11] - M. Dommanger: Les grands socialistes et l éducation, from Platon to Lenin (Paris, Armand Colin, 1970).And also F. Challaye: The formation of socialism, from Platon to Lenin, Paris, PUF, 1938. For a didactic exposition of Leninist thought regarding the party and consciousness coming from outside, see “Marxisme et Conscience de Classe”, in http://www.leftcom.org/fr/articles/2002-02-01/marxisme-et-conscience-de-classe
[12] - Svi Yavetz: La plebe et le prince. Foule et Vie Politique sous le Haut-Empire Romain, Paris, Maspero, 1997.
