The Lead Scare

McReef

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I enjoy history. I wouldn’t consider myself any sort of expert, I probably don’t even rank at “buff” level, but I do like to read, listen, and learn.

I will start off with a disclaimer here (that probably won’t save me any flames anyway). I hate a commie just as much as the next guy, so I want to nip that one in the bud up front.

I’ve recently been looking at some of the “red scare” anti-communist stuff, and the similarity and parallels to our 2A predicament kind of struck me a couple of times.

Same story, opposite side of the aisle, and yet, for the most part, the result is basically the same. The constitution (and by direct extension the people) get shit all over in the name of security. No need to dig too deep or explore the issue too much in order to find a “solution” to the “problem” it is clearly the pesky constitution, and its son-of-a-bitch amendments that are the culprit. Those old bastards had no idea what the future would hold, so how could they know what trouble our freedom would bring to the state one day?
 
Except for some bad guy pooping his pants while running away from a confrontation with me, what is the Lead Scare???

As far as Commie-nism being an excuse, you have to look at it in historical context. People were downright afraid in the 50's. Scared poopless. Does it excuse fake calls of commies? No. I'm definitely not in that camp. I'm a process-over-results guy. I'd rather go down swinging the right way than to cheat and win. (Except in a gun fight, of course.) But I can understand why leaders would fabricate information in order to push the country or whatever one way or another. They firmly believed we NEEDED to do this (whether it was control Hollywood or go to war in Korea) and felt this was necessary.

It's no different than any other red herring.
 
Given context, and the beliefs of the time, You can see how it happened, absolutely. Justified given context does not necessarily equate to justifiable under any context.

I am not really questioning what happened, just kind of observing parallels. Sure, there were bad actors back then, just as there are now, and these folks need to be dealt with. However, does anyone, looking back at it now, think that the Bolsheviks had any chance of overthrowing our government? It seems almost laughable. At the time, it was serious business though. The freedom of the world was at stake, or so they thought. For that, many Americans suffered grave violations of their constitutional rights.

Today, some truly do perceive you and I as a threat. Is this a justified fear? No, of course not, but many of these people are just as likely to be convinced to the contrary as folks were likely to be persuaded that there was no real credible internal threat to our way of life back then.

I recognized when I was pondering this, and before posting about it, that it is not really apples to apples. It just has some interesting parallels.

How the FBI kept lists of agitators, and the current defacto lists kept for gun owners...

How free speech was tolerated, until you said something that crossed some arbitrary undefined line, and how gun ownership is fine, until you add a “shoulder thing that goes up”...

Etc, etc...

How the net effect of all of this (then and now) is to nibble away at the rights of the average law abiding citizen, while having little to no effect towards thwarting the stated threat.
 
I guess I am in a bit of an inflammatory mood, I wouldn’t normally post something so open to interpretation. Probably best to stick to ‘liking’ posts and throwing out an occasional “F Maura”. I guess the die is cast...
 
Everything they were afraid of back then came true , so I'm not passing judgment.
You have some very open and some not so open communists holding elected office and it's a race to kill this country.
They should have started hanging the f*ckers and kept it up.
You younger guys will end up whispering to your grandchildren about what this country was like.
And hoping they don't turn you in for wrong think.
 
Everything they were afraid of back then came true , so I'm not passing judgment.
You have some very open and some not so open communists holding elected office and it's a race to kill this country.
They should have started hanging the f*ckers and kept it up.
You younger guys will end up whispering to your grandchildren about what this country was like.
And hoping they don't turn you in for wrong think.

History is not about passing judgement, it is about lessons learned. Again, and againer, I am no fan of socialist ideology. I did not intend for this to be about communists and what we should or should not have done. It is about what we did, and what we are doing/about to see done today.

As far as what we were afraid of coming true, some of the fundamental changes that took place in this country to combat that fear, could perhaps be argued to have been setting the stage for what is going on today. Our freedoms are not a pick and choose sort of thing, all of them together are what keeps us from going down the totalitarian road. Communism is not our worst enemy. A government not subject to the will of the people is, regardless of its stated ideology.
 
Stuff that is considered reasonable at one time is often, either because of new evidence or new attitudes, later considered to be unreasonable.

Our (and everyone else's) history is replete with this.

History should (though since most people get just a slice of history, from someone that has decided what slice should be served) inform the people of the present of what happened before, so that intelligent decisions about the future can be made, based on data. Unfortunately, what was reasonable before is now unthinkable, and therefore not taught....and when the same situation arises as back in the day, the tools (knowledge) of the past are no longer around to deal with it.

That's why every generation has a bunch of people with Che Guevara tee-shirts, and Stalin's "Statistics" are not mentioned.

People used to be responsible for the security of themselves, their family, and [continue up the food chain as far as you like] but now self-help is "discouraged." When there's a situation where the Government's officials can't help you.... Oh, you don't have the skills? Too bad.....
 
The anti-communism stuff was entirely justified. They are very dangerous, nasty people.

They are but as much as I approve of them being snuffed out theres a side danger of "salem witch trials" brand of bullshit killing or hurting uninvolved
parties. Some of the mcarthyism stuff was absurd, people got "put on a list" because of things as trivial as "oh that guy was seen talking to a commie once" or "is on list because friends with commie" etc. Not to mention that while on the whole, Pinochet was probably a "net good" for Chile in the long run, I have no doubt that a whole ton of relatively innocent people got swept up in that purge. Of course part of the problem is the "rest of the world" likely would have been more critical to what he did, if he did it systemically in a controlled manner that protected innocents. So he had to flush out the commies "in the black". Ugh.

We also have things like the first amendment- that are worth protecting, that essentially protects your right to espouse commie bullshit if you want, of course there's always a limit- for example, the bullshit Antifa does, because violence, can be met with violence without creating an infringement.

-Mike
 
Communism is not our worst enemy.

Yes, but by and large most shit government these days is globalist/communist/socialist (or all three) in its design goals. Most shitty mc shit governments are authoritarian-left, not authoritarian-right or nationalist, it's not that those don't exist, but it's pretty fair to state that commies win the "who can be the worst vs time" game. Most shit government is usually some derivative of communism, or communism with training wheels on. I do think there are risks from authoritarian-right influences as well, but they are not nearly as acute, imminent, and massively omnipresent as the stuff from the far left.

Also look at the body counts- over the last 100 years commies have smoked more
innocent people that pretty much every other political or religious ideology, I don't think it's even close. In the last century commies have made muslims, auth-right, etc look like a bunch of amateur hour chumps in terms of net damage to humanity.

A government not subject to the will of the people is, regardless of its stated ideology.

The problem is the meanings of those words CHANGE depending on the ideology! A commie can use the term "will of the people" and it will mean one thing (a borg like collective ideal) and a constitutional republic uses that term and it means something entirely different.

Basically, all government that does not respect and hold the "curse of the individual" as being superior to just about f***ing everything is a garbage government. The further away a government is from that ideal the worse it usually is.


-Mike
 
History is not about passing judgement, it is about lessons learned. Again, and againer, I am no fan of socialist ideology. I did not intend for this to be about communists and what we should or should not have done. It is about what we did, and what we are doing/about to see done today.

As far as what we were afraid of coming true, some of the fundamental changes that took place in this country to combat that fear, could perhaps be argued to have been setting the stage for what is going on today. Our freedoms are not a pick and choose sort of thing, all of them together are what keeps us from going down the totalitarian road. Communism is not our worst enemy. A government not subject to the will of the people is, regardless of its stated ideology.

I agree that lessons should be learned.
There are people right here on this board that can tell you what they would do if the opportunity ever happened for a do over in the countries they left.
We unfortunately as a nation haven't learned jack from the mistakes of others and are headed down the path towards the same thing.
Communism , Socialism or whatever name they call it by is totalitarian rule.
There will be no constitution or freedom once they take control.
It's not theory when you have nuts in office who will go on national TV and say that his plan is to violate the constitutional rights of millions of American citizens and if they resist to use nukes on them. And the prick hasn't been tried and hung.
We are way further down the road than most would like to admit.
 
Yes, but by and large most shit government these days is globalist/communist/socialist (or all three) in its design goals. Most shitty mc shit governments are authoritarian-left, not authoritarian-right or nationalist, it's not that those don't exist, but it's pretty fair to state that commies win the "who can be the worst vs time" game. Most shit government is usually some derivative of communism, or communism with training wheels on. I do think there are risks from authoritarian-right influences as well, but they are not nearly as acute, imminent, and massively omnipresent as the stuff from the far left.

Also look at the body counts- over the last 100 years commies have smoked more
innocent people that pretty much every other political or religious ideology, I don't think it's even close. In the last century commies have made muslims, auth-right, etc look like a bunch of amateur hour chumps in terms of net damage to humanity.



The problem is the meanings of those words CHANGE depending on the ideology! A commie can use the term "will of the people" and it will mean one thing (a borg like collective ideal) and a constitutional republic uses that term and it means something entirely different.

Basically, all government that does not respect and hold the "curse of the individual" as being superior to just about f***ing everything is a garbage government. The further away a government is from that ideal the worse it usually is.


-Mike

Pretty much all spot on, no argument from me on any of that.

It is just a function of current climate whether it is the left or the right that is selling these days. The problem is, regardless of the packaging, it is still the same box of sh!t they are selling. If you allow yourself to get too caught up in the labels you tend to miss what’s in that box your signing for.

Ask 100% of people, and they will tell you, 80% of people are morons. Kind of works against the whole “subject to the will of the people” thing. Who wants a bunch of morons calling the shots... wait... isn’t that what’s going on? Now I am confused..,

For the time being, at least I am able to bitch about this stuff, and try to talk sense into folks who have an open mind without any serious repercussions. Who knows though, maybe I am being overconfident with that statement.

Precious few people knew at the time (or to this day) of the plans to round up “reds” right here in our country and send them to internment camps, or, how little was required to reserve you a bunk there. Have a couple black friends? Think maybe our constitutional rights were important, and spoke of it a little too strongly or to the wrong person about it? Yup, you’re on the list.

Hell, I know a couple people myself who, if they knew I owned killy things, and read my posts here might look at me quite a bit different.
 
Except for some bad guy pooping his pants while running away from a confrontation with me, what is the Lead Scare???

As far as Commie-nism being an excuse, you have to look at it in historical context. People were downright afraid in the 50's. Scared poopless. Does it excuse fake calls of commies? No. I'm definitely not in that camp. I'm a process-over-results guy. I'd rather go down swinging the right way than to cheat and win. (Except in a gun fight, of course.) But I can understand why leaders would fabricate information in order to push the country or whatever one way or another. They firmly believed we NEEDED to do this (whether it was control Hollywood or go to war in Korea) and felt this was necessary.

It's no different than any other red herring.

I am not in favor of any arm of government "pushing the country one way or another", on issues. The think like I think type of government is not healthy, or safe for a free society. That's what's being done now with gun control. Look how that's tearing us apart. Can't own a AR in Boston and it's near impossible to own any firearm in NYC. Ca. Can't even buy shipped ammo. First they push the country in a direction, then that direction becomes law.
 
Everybody feels they need to “change things for the better”. What would be “better” is if they just left shit alone.
 
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