Let’s Bring Back HUAC - New English Review

By Daniel Mallock (October 2019)

New Planet, Konstantin Yuon, 1921

When a government is under threat, particularly a legitimate government of freedoms such as ours that exists in the United States, it becomes an essential responsibility of that government to defend itself. When the threat is external the circumstances are clear for all who care to look and to see. When the threat is largely internal and no uniforms worn but perhaps a party pin, the situation is far more complex but the threat just as real and the stakes equally existential.

When Lincoln was elected in 1860 the state of South Carolina immediately seceded, others of like mind and philosophy quickly followed. The secession crisis, though couched in legalistic panoply and covered with the facade of justification by its proponents, and characterized as supported by the citizenry in each seceding state the truth of the matter, rebellion and disunion, was difficult to avoid.

Lincoln saw his most important purpose as president to be saving the Union and the constitution from an armed rebellion. All of his decisions including the Emancipation Proclamation released following the Confederate withdrawal after the battle of Antietam (September, 1862) were heavily influenced by what Lincoln correctly saw as his essential duty to save the government and the country. Tyrannical governments never seem hesitant at saving themselves from threats, while democracies are slow-acting in doing so and fearful of overturning the open society and rule of law and due process that makes the government both not a tyranny and certainly a thing well worthy of saving. This was true for Lincoln just as it for the current president.

Whittaker Chambers was one of the most impressive accusers to sit before HUAC. He wrote his memoir, Witness, of having once been a true believer communist subversive agent who had realized the evil of communism and abandoned it. In abandoning it he become one of its great quiet enemies and actively took action to bring down the secret societies and networks of traitors and spies with which he once had been so closely associated in Washington and New York. One of his associates in this secret communist world of espionage was a high American official of the State Department, one Alger Hiss. Chambers’s book is an American classic and should be required reading in every high school and college in the United States. But it isn’t—so, the great lessons of character, courage, and the disturbing truth that enemies of the state are active among us (both hidden and in full view) have been lost and are now the stuff of legend and widely dismissed by the current versions of communist subversives as merely being the ruminations of paranoids. It is a book that is now just as pertinent and powerful as the day it was published many decades ago.

and in the schools, and self-hate, and the denial of political and historical realities large numbers of Americans are now actively engaged in revolutionism. This neo-Jacobin movement is powered by ignorance, self-hatred, utopianism, and hatred of their fellow Americans much in the way that many Southern nationalists hated their brethren of the northern states prior to the Civil War. That the Democrat political party should be the epicenter of this present day revolutionism should come as no surprise because the Confederate Revolution of 1861 was entirely due to Democrat politicians and their adherents, opposed ironically perhaps by the first Republican president in US history, Lincoln. That the Democrat party was the party to protect slavery and go to war over it and the Republican party the anti-slavery, abolition party is a fact now lost on too many Americans.

And what is the great crime of the leftist democrat utopian neo-Jacobin globalist communist revolutionaries? Their great crime is offering a totalitarian political ideology as a legitimate replacement for our democracy and open society because, they say, the United States has failed and always has.

How do we deploy the apparatuses of the government to protect itself and the country that it governs? How do we acknowledge the threat of this virulent contagion of communist utopian globalist fantasy thinking that views the United States as a failed state deserving replacement? How do we deploy the apparatuses of the government in such a way that revolutionists are exposed and held accountable? How do we protect the state from revolutionists, fraudulent fellow-traveler journalists, media types, and greedy hypocrite gazillionaire leftist geeks who use their platforms and technologies to undermine the country?

And what of HUAC? Do we need a new House Un-American Activities Committee? Can we avoid the McCarthy era abuse of the processes yet use the government to protect the government from revolutionary forces? There must be a way to do this in fairness and justice and bring before the American people those views and those cranks and those ideological enemies who hold such views that are inimical and hostile to the country. These revolutionist views must be exposed as the pathetic frauds that they are, and those who hold them prevented from doing harm.

Such as it was long ago so it is, most unfortunately, now: the seeds of utopian revolution come from the Democrat party. Yet, now, as then, the Democrat party continues apace unencumbered in our free democracy in which the freedom of speech and of association remains untouched and encouraged.

During this election cycle where tyranny and democracy and freedom are again at war, we ought to take Mr. Lincoln’s advice. While this author would never recommend anyone voting for a democrat candidate in any local, city, county, state, or national election the following Lincoln story is provided here as a public service for any reader who might be considering such a misbegotten course:

When one of the military telegraph operators known to Lincoln was said to be returning to Pennsylvania, Lincoln asked him if he was returning home to vote. Declaring to the president that this would be his first time voting and that he would be voting for the Democrat ticket, Lincoln, a Republican, said, “Be sure you vote for the right kind of Democrats.”

Ours is a time of crisis as the waves of history recede and expand before us and over us. We have seen this all before, and likely will again. Our country is no tyranny nor fascism regardless of fringe politicians and their acolytes saying that it is. It is so that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Is it time for a new HUAC? Only you can decide.

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Daniel Mallock is a historian of the Founding generation and of the Civil War and is the author of The New York Times Bestseller, Agony and Eloquence: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and a World of Revolution.

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