[WikiEN-l] User:LanceMurdoch

Wed Jan 14 21:44:03 UTC 2004

On 01/14/04  at 02:41 PM, "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> said:

> His edits to [[Red Scare]], as well as his comments to me about it, make
> it seem like:

> A. Communists did nothing wrong.

Under the section "Reactions to the Red Scare" in the paragraph:

> Though many of the more outré accusations of the McCarthy
> period&mdash;such as the claim that President [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]]
> was a communist&mdash;now seem laughable, the opening of Soviet
> historical archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union has
> provided evidence for less grandiose accusations, such as the claim by
> [[Whittaker Chambers]] that [[Alger Hiss]] worked for Soviet
> intelligence. Similarly, reports of mass murders committed by communist
> states including the Soviet Union under [[Josef Stalin]], China under
> [[Mao Zedong]], and Cambodia under the [[Khmer Rouge]]&mdash;once
> dismissed as anti-communist [[propaganda]]&mdash;are now
> well-documented in the historical record.

Lance removed the last sentence (Similarly  --> historical record), which
I am assuming is an edit Ed finds controversial. I think after due
consideration that Lance /may be/ right: that this doesn't belong here
because it is a bit of subtle editorializing suggesting that perhaps the
anti-communists /weren't/ "paranoid" after all; moreover, Khmer Rouge were
much later the Red Scares. I am guessing that what LM thinks is that
central issues of the Red Scare were "infilitration" of the government and
the labor movement and so forth and not atrocities in distant lands and to
use these matters after the fact to justify the Red Scares may be a subtle
bit of POV. I think he has a point.

> B. Anti-communism of the 1950s was "hysterical".

The phrase is in question "Red Scare hysteria".  I did a Google search
("red scare" + "hysteria") and found more than 2,600 hits for this phrase,
including a reference to a book entitled "Red Scare: A Study in National
Hysteria, 1919-1920" which looks reasonably serious. I think there is a
good case for stating it in the article as a "hysteria" whether or not we
personally agree; it is clearly an established usage. On the Talk page,
Mirv agreed, and mentioned other titles which refer to the "hysteria" of
the time.

In conclusion, I think his edits are ok but I think he needs to justify
them on the Talk page. I'll leave a note on his Talk page.

Ed, satisfied?

V.