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http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2017/12/28/liberals-getting-back-touch-authoritarian-roots/

“One of the unfortunate ironies of the manufactured ‘Russiagate’ controversy,” my colleague Sheldon Richman writes in his most recent column, is the perception of the FBI as a friend of liberty and justice.” He’s dead right about that, but just whom is he addressing?…

The neocons are no strangers to the art of the witch-hunt, but those few liberals bewildered by the takeover of their movement by swivel-eyed Menscheviks don’t know the history. Thanks to liberal Hollywood, we hear endless tales about the “persecution” suffered by Stalin’s henchmen at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When HUAC held hearings investigating Communist groups at San Francisco’s City Hall, the proceedings were mobbed by left-wing protesters and there was considerable sympathy for the accused. What hardly anyone remembers is that the initial push for establishing “subversion control,” and HUAC specifically, was the so-called Brown Scare, a campaign carried out by the far left, with the Communists in the  vanguard, asserting that an extensive pro-Nazi underground existed in America and had to be rooted out by government action.

HUAC was established in 1934  at the behest of Rep. Sam Dickstein (D-NY), who later became a New York state Supreme Court judge. He died in 1954, When the Soviet Union fell, and the KGB files were opened, documents proving Dickstein had been on the Soviet payroll for years were discovered. Dickstein used HUAC to smear Franklin Roosevelt’s enemies as fascists, and after Hitler invaded Russia he tried every means to link antiwar sentiment to Nazism. His Communist handlers code-named him “Crook” due to his unusual greed: he insisted on being paid the equivalent of over $20,000 per month for his services to “Uncle Joe” Stalin…

The first indictment was issued in 1942, naming a number of Congressmen, and the 900,000-member America First Committee, as well as known pro-German groups like the German-American Bund. It ended at the tail end of 1944 in a mistrial: when the New Deal judge died, the government declined to pursue the case.

This was just the most visible of the repressive measures that originated during the Brown Scare and bled over into the Red Scare: all that was required was a change in US foreign policy and a subsequent shift in American public opinion. Whereas the FBI infiltrated and reported on groups like the America First Committee, which opposed US entry into World War II, and tapped the phones of conservative leaders, such as publisher Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, when the winds shifted they used the same methods on their leftist targets. But just remember: the left started it, and revealed the repression while they held the whip.

So you’re surprised that our “liberals” are baring their teeth and hailing the endless investigations of Russian “subversion” by a very politicized FBI? Don’t be – they’re just reverting to their historical roots.

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I am not a number. I am a free man!-Number 6