Page 27 - Divided - Hotspot 2020
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Almost all humans have a self-serving bias, and our      The use of underhand tactics to establish an
tendency towards wishful thinking leads to a             atmosphere of terror is almost exclusively
distorted self-evaluation - in this case, an evaluation  associated with communism. However, their
of our capitalist system. Most often, hypocrisy stems    presence in the US federal government and secret
from insecurity, so perhaps it is the Western denial     services is demonstrative of the disturbing
of the limitations of free-market capitalism that led    similarities between the ruling of the US and Soviet
to a hypocritical adoption of many aspects of the        Russia during the Cold War. Indeed, even the
Soviet government. Arguably, the most uncanny            limited knowledge surrounding the darkest political
parallel between Stalinist Russia and Wilsonialist       and moral depths of the “Red Scare” movement,
America is hysteria over the perceived threat posed      indicating censored US media coverage, is a striking
by communists, known as the “Red Scare”, which           example of hypocrisy within the US leadership.
occurred in the US after WWII. The FBI, the House of
Un-American Activities Committee (the equivocally        So was it that US leaders during the Cold War were
sugar-coated parallel to the Soviet secret police        ignorant of their exploitation of communism for
force, the NKVD) and Republican Senator Joseph R.        economic benefit and their mirror-image recreation
McCarthy were responsible for the use of wiretaps,       of Soviet terror tactics, or was the possibility of a US
surveillance and infiltration which led to false         economic and political monopoly so desirable that
allegations and blacklist releases in various            politicians were willing to become a manifestation
industries. These barred suspected radicals from         of hypocrisy to achieve it?
employment, including federal employees, whose
loyalty to the government was closely analysed.
Membership in leftist groups dropped as it became
clear that such associations led to serious
consequences, and support for free speech and other
civil liberties was significantly eroded.

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