McCarthyism and the Red Scare

To me the history of McCarthyism and the Red Scare is in equal parts fascinating and frightening. One thing that makes it less frightening is reading about the history of that kind of political repression and the paranoia that often fueled it. The fear turned neighbors against neighbors and caused them to do awful things to each other. When self-appointed scolds in a nation founded on principles of equity and freedom gets too many in that nation to abandon those principles because of fear, paranoia and arrogant self centeredness that makes them believe only they or their “leaders” know the truth, it is dangerous. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”