Chronicle, ACLU garble history

Are Americans this ignorant of history?

Here’s the Chronicle story:

Relic of the Red Scare about to vanish

After 72 years, it’s time to say goodbye to the California Subversive Organizations Registration Law.

Enacted in 1941 to require organizations to register with the state if their ultimate aim was the violent overthrow of the government — local, state or federal — the law is being repealed by AB1405, which breezed through the Legislature without a dissenting vote, was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown and takes effect in January.

Though it dates from the outset of World War II, the SORL reads like a product of the anti-Communist frenzy of the Cold War, drafted broadly enough to apply to thoughts as well as actions. It defines a subversive organization as one that “directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, or of this state or any political subdivision thereof, by force or violence; or is subject to foreign control” through financial subsidies or political influence. Any such group would have to notify the state of its location, officers and finances, or be subject to criminal prosecution.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the chief supporter of  the repeal measure, describes the 1941 law as “an unnecessary remnant of the McCarthy era (that) is inconsistent with constitutional protections of free speech, freedom of association and political affiliations.”

But how can it “read like a product of the anti-Communist frenzy of the Cold War” when it was written in 1941? And how can it be a “relic of the Red Scare” of the 1950s when the only instance of the law’s use cited in the article is against a pro-Nazi group during World War II? And the article notes that the ACLU defended the group’s right to its views.

The fact is, despite McCarthy, Nixon and others who abused civil rights, it’s mainly liberals who have done so. During World War I, it was President Woodrow Wilson who imprisoned antiwar socialist leader Eugene V. Debs for violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Even after the war ended, the cruel Wilson wouldn’t let Debs go. It took Warren G. Harding, a good, tax-cutting Republican (with somewhat lose personal morals) to free Debs in 1921.

The Espionage Act still is on the books and could be used against any critics of the government, at any time.

Franklin ‘Dictator’ Roosevelt

President Roosevelt persecuted his political opponents. Writes historian Ralph Raico:

Roosevelt, who always viewed any criticism of himself as a perversion of true democracy, was outraged. The president of the United States wrote a personal letter to a magazine editor declaring that [veteran journalist John T. Flynn] “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine, or national quarterly.”[7] Whether or not as a consequence of FDR’s spite, the New Republic dropped the column by Flynn it had been publishing since 1933, a sign things were changing in the circles of left-liberalism. In the years to come, FDR would use the FBI, the IRS, and other agencies to spy on, harass, and intimidate his critics.[8] This — and his lying, his constant lying — more than any putative mental affliction, explains the hatred that so many cherished for Franklin Roosevelt.

And it was FDR who threw more than 100,000 innocent, loyal Japanese-Americans into concentration camps during World War II.

Wiretapping MLK

Yesterday America celebrated the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” Also yesterday, the Washington Post reported:

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech inspired the world. It also galvanized the FBI into undertaking one of its biggest surveillance operations in history.

Initially approved in October 1963 by then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the FBI’s wiretap and clandestine microphone campaign against King lasted until his assassination in April 1968. It was initially justified to probe King’s suspected, unproven links to the Communist Party, morphing into a crusade to “neutralize” and discredit the civil rights leader.

President Lyndon Johnson, like the Kennedys still a paragon of liberalism, continued the MLK wiretaps after JFK was shot in 1963.

And although Republican President Bush set up the current regime of the NSA spying on everything everybody does, President Obama has embraced and extended it.

But Americans are so ignorant of history they only know biased snippets fed them by leftist teachers and others. It’s surprising we have any liberties left at all, but that soon might be changing — for the worse.