The McCarthy Affair; Point Four vs. Social Revolution

Abstract

The McCarthy affair makes you want to laugh, retch, cry, and fight all at the same time. It is ludicrous, disgusting, and ominous. Ludicrous because of the wildly exaggerated incongruity which lies at the heart of the Wisconsin Senator's charges. To imagine that a vast, elemental, epoch-making event like the Chinese Revolution could have been engineered-or its success assured-by a Soviet agent in the American State Department is the absolute limit, the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, of the "secret-agent theory of history."

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