Looking back, I can think of no better way to describe June 9, 1954 than as a demonic day of creation.
On this day 61 years ago, the simplest, most enduring Big Lie about Sen. Joseph McCarthy was created on the floor of the US Senate. It began in a question that still quavers disembodied:
“Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
The speaker, later seen brushing tears away, was US Army counsel Joseph Welch (above left). The loss of “decency” Welch decried allegedly came about when Sen. McCarthy supposedly exposed a young lawyer in Welch’s Boston firm named Frederick G. Fisher as a past member of the National Lawyers Guild, which Attorney General Herbert Brownell had in 1953 described as the “legal mouthpiece” of the Communist Party in the United States.
I say “allegedly” and “supposedly” because the person who had already exposed Fisher as a former member of a Communist front organization was Welch himself.
On April 15, 1954, nearly two months before the “no decency” exchange, Welch himself told the New York Times that Fisher had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild, and for that reason Welch (the US Army counsel, after all) had relieved Fisher of his job as his Washington assistant and replaced him with another.
The New York Times story, which ran on April 16, 1954, even featured Fisher’s picture.
Summing up in Blacklisted by History, M. Stanton Evans wrote: “It thus develops that Welch himself had already done the very thing for which he so fervently denounced McCarthy.”
This hard, cold fact, however, doesn’t fit the fake narrative of the court historians, who, regardless of the facts, continued to perpetuate the lie that Welch stopped McCarthy in his Red-baiting tracks by revealing the truth about the senator’s lack of “decency,” and his “cruelty” and “recklessness” before America’s eyes.
A little more of Welch’s peroration:
… Little did I dream that you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad … I fear that he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you…[Y]our forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me …
Never mind it was all a fraud, a ham’s ham’s performance. The very inconvenient fact that Welch himself publicly outed “the lad” nearly two months McCarthy brought the matter up had to be eliminated from our understanding of the event.
And so it has been.
On this anniversary day 61 years later, the Fake Narrative lives.
I have already seen fakery-commemorating tweets from the New York Times Archives (@NYTArchives) — which has forgotten all about its own earlier story — History.com (@HISTORY), LexisNexis (@LexisNexis), and, most egregious of all, the U.S. Senate Historical Office (@SenateHistory), which bills itself as “the institutional memory of the Senate.”
The US Senate, however, institutionally remembers the same fake narrative of omission as the rest. “Have no left no sense of decency?” remains unexplained, unexposed — a dog whistle for anti-anti-Communism that shrills down through the decades.
Interestingly enough, The Zinn Ed Project (@ZinnEdProject), named for uber-Left-wing historian Howard Zinn, takes a similar approach. There is little if any space to find between the Zinn fake narrative of McCarthy and the conventional fake narrative of McCarthy.
The real lesson of June 9, 2015? How thoroughly the Left has co-opted our historical perspective, including our grip on reality.
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