Humor-Deficient Charles Johnson Sides With #Occupy Movement vs. NYPD UPDATE: NYPD Investigates Occupier’s Twitter Death Threat Against Police
Posted on | March 18, 2012 | 72 Comments
Raised during the Cold War — when my uncles and cousins and neighbors were fighting the Viet Cong and the NVA, when American troops stood on guard against that doomsday moment when the Red Army decided to make a try for the Fulda Gap, when any blink of an eye might bring down a worldwide thermonuclear Armaggedon upon us — I developed a profound loathing of communism.
It was a highlight of my journalism career when the news came across the wire that former CPUSA chairman Gus Hall had died, and it was my honor to write his obituary, thus bringing good news to the world because, as every patriotic red-blooded American knows, the only good Commie is a dead Commie.
Has such a perspective become archaic or obsolete, merely because the Soviet Union collapsed into the ash-heap of history 20 years ago? Or, as I think, is it important to remember the deadly evil that Marx and Lenin unleashed upon mankind, and to stand eternally vigilant against any prospect of its recrudescence?
You may disagree with my belief that the Red Menace is still a specter that haunts us, and if you disagree, you probably don’t share my opinion that the Occupy movement represents a new iteration that menace. I understand this and so, when I denounce the Occupiers as “Commies,” it is both a serious indictment of their leftist worldview and a self-conscious jest, satirically invoking the old Cold War mentality toward beatniks and hippies and other such pinko Bolshevik sympathizers.
“They’re the kind of commie scum who give commie scum a bad name and my trademark ‘hypothetical atrocity’ rhetoric was intended to signify nothing other than my bottomless well of contempt for such people. Therefore if I were the commander of the NYPD riot squad, my orders would be to open fire and shoot to kill. We’d make Kent State look like a Sunday school picnic. The brutality would be something more on the scale of Guernica, complete with Predator drone airstrikes.”
– Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 8, 2011
If you don’t understand this, OK. But your lack of understanding is not my fault, and if I have to explain that I was friends with such refugees from Communism as the late Balint Vazonyi, if I have to remind you that Communist governments killed 100 million of their own citizens during the 20th century, if you don’t realize that Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were both guilty as hell — well, why do you blame me for your own ignorance? And speaking of ignorance . . .
Little Green Footballs has evidently attracted another fool:
This “Silvio Breckman” is a useless nobody with 41 followers on Twitter, who could be even more easily ignored than his idiotic hero.
Whether Breckman is evil or merely ignorant, I don’t know.
Whenever a left-winger calls me a “fascist,” it recalls to mind the Popular Front era of the 1930s, when the Comintern used front groups to build alliances with liberals in the West in solidarity against Mussolini and Hitler. The Popular Front instantly evaporated in 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signalled Stalin’s alliance with Hitler for the partition of Poland, with Stalin getting a green light for the conquest of the Baltic states as part of this hideous “compromise” among totalitarians. As soon as Stalin and Hitler reached that agreement, all the Reds who had been yelping about the fascist danger changed their tune overnight. Suddenly, the various Comintern “anti-fascist” front groups dissolved and reconstituted themselves as “peace” groups. And this Communist-led “peace” movement continued for 21 months.
While the Nazis conquered Poland, Holland, Belgium and France, while the Luftwaffe rained death on London — through all of this, Communist sympathizers in the United States denounced as “warmongers” any American who advocated or supported U.S. aid to Britain and other allies threatened by the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis. President Franklin Roosevelt and members of Congress who saw the need to aid the Allies and for America to increase its own military preparedness were excoriated by these left-wing “peace” groups.
Ah, but this “peace” movement ended in June 1941, when Hitler surprised Stalin by launching Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the U.S.S.R. Once more, Moscow’s American front groups were dissolved and reconstituted as part of an “anti-fascist” movement demanding U.S. entry into the war against Hitler and immediate military aid to the Soviets.
It was this trajectory of American leftist groups that exposed an important truth: The CPUSA and its various front groups were controlled by Moscow, and were thus subversive agents of a foreign government, rather than being genuinely independent democratic “progressives,” as they and their sympathizers had claimed.
This revelation shocked many liberals into a new understanding of what the CPUSA really was — a tool of Stalinist policy — and the Party’s membership collapsed along with whatever prestige it had previously enjoyed in the United States. When, in the wake of World War II, it was believed that Eastern Europe had been surrendered to Stalin at Yalta, and that Truman had betrayed our anti-Communist allies in China, the reaction of ordinary Americans was harsh and furious. Had we just fought a bloody, costly war against one totalitarian menace, only to deliver half the world into the grasp of another totalitarian menace?
Such was the understanding and sentiment which gave rise to the post-war American anti-Communist movement, which is nowadays ridiculed or denounced as a needless hysteria incited by demagogues. But there really was a Soviet threat, and there really were agents of espionage and subversion who secretly sought to advance the ideology, policy and interest of Moscow, and among those who took alarm at this danger was a former bleeding-heart liberal Democrat named Ronald Reagan.
How many times was Reagan called a “fascist”?
How many stars in the sky?
When Reagan became governor of California and cracked down on the “peace” protesters in Berkeley, he was demonized worse than any conservative nowadays can ever imagine. But Reagan well knew whose side the protesters were on, whether they knew it or not. (True fact: During the 1940s, the bleeding-heart Reagan had unwittingly joined at least two Communist front groups.) For all the scorn and mockery he endured, it was Ronald Reagan who was destined to enact the policies that ultimately brought about the end of the Soviet Union.
All this history I recite, so that Silvio Breckman and anyone else may know that I am not ignorant of how “fascist” has been used over the years to stigmatize the Left’s enemies. And I hope that everyone can see how, in this conflict between the NYPD and the Occupy movement, Silvio and his hero Charles Johnson have sided with the Occupiers.
If I sometimes crack wise about my contempt for “Commie scum,” my contempt for them is yet quite serious. What was true during the Cold War is still true: There are no good Communists this side of Hell.
UPDATE: The ex-Lizards at Diary of Daedalus always enjoy a laugh: Occupy Jazzy McBikeshorts!
UPDATE II: Charles Johnson loves him some Occupiers and, gee, those Occupiers sure hate cops, don’t they?
Police are investigating an apparent Occupy Wall St. protester’s online threat to kill cops.
Someone with the Twitter handle “smackema1” tweeted this message at 11:39 p.m. Saturday, following a clash at Zuccotti Park.: “we wont make a difference if we dont kill a cop or 2.”
The NYPD is seeking a subpoena to find out who’s behind the Twitter account, according to Paul Browne, the department’s top spokesman.
How long until Johnson starts selling “Free Mumia” T-shirts?

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