In my English class right now we are reading The Crucible by Arthur Miller.  Has anyone else ever read this play and what did you think of it.  To me it sounds like the girls, who are accusing people of witchcraft, are possesed.  Anyone else think this?

In my English class right now we are reading The Crucible by Arthur Miller.  Has anyone else ever read this play and what did you think of it.  To me it sounds like the girls, who are accusing people of witchcraft, are possesed.  Anyone else think this?

I was in public school, and we read that book 20 years ago too. I don't remember what grade, but if it was High School it would have been about 20 years ago for me.

Well, McCarthy gave peole plenty to attack.  It is a decent enough piece of drama.  

I don't think the girls in the actual events on which the play is based were possessed, although it is certaily possible.  I think it is more likely that their behavior consisted of some mixture of hysteria and faking.

Well, McCarthy gave peole plenty to attack.  It is a decent enough piece of drama.  

I don't think the girls in the actual events on which the play is based were possessed, although it is certaily possible.  I think it is more likely that their behavior consisted of some mixture of hysteria and faking.

Obviously you are either a liberal or closet Communist.

I read that play just a few years ago back in high school. Back then I was not "aware" as I am now and thought it was "good literature." Nowadays I know it is absolute garbage, used to make McCarthyism (there were actual Soviet spies by the way so McCarthy was right) look evil.

Where there communists in Hollywood or in government structures of a purely philosophical nature?  Undoubtedly.  Where there communists in either who were actively engaged in intelligence-gathering and espionage for the Soviet Union or one of its satellite republics?  Very probably.  The problem is that Joe McCarthy, in trying to remove the threat of the latter, ended up attacking both, and circuмvented the law to do it.

The regrettable truth, and it's one that forever prevents me from being American in anything other than name, is that the Constitution of the United States permits total intellectual freedom, of thought and word.  No matter how offensive it might be, the freedom of speech, and hence the freedom of thought, cannot lawfully be abridged in any particular by sitting government.  Oh, there are state or local ordinances, blue laws and the like, that govern vague notions of public decency, but those just go to show you that the entire notion of democracy is a lie and a swindle.  By our own permissions of "exceptions" to the law, which we happen to personally agree with, we have over the course of the 237 intervening years hollowed out the fruitful notion of governance through dispassionate application of law, and left it to rot.  It lays bear the truth that democracy is simply tyranny by creeping degrees and that we have been the authors of the very oppression under which we chafe.  To look at the United States and communist Russia as being opposites is to believe that your right and lefts arms are not both attached to your body; the two are both appendages to the same body of Godless, anti-Incarnation naturalism, that seek, futilely, civil order through other than Jesus Christ.

Under the notion of liberty in the US Constitution, false and damnable though it is, being a communist is not against the law.  However, being tried in a court of congressman, and in the court public opinion, rather than in a court of one's peers, usually without even the Constitutional requirement of having the charges known, is illegal.  If they had evidence that this person or that person were a communist infiltrator, that should have tried them formally in a court of their peers, or else surveilled them until they did.  That said, I don't completely blame Joe McCarthy for the events of the Red Scare any more than I completely blame Caiphas for the Crucifixion.  The whole people, in both cases, bear the stain of guilt.

And should it be any wonder, to any of us, that so much time and effort is be expended to conjure the ghost of McCarthy, washed clean with the baptism of sentimentalism and equivocation, for the modern day?  A day in which our every communication is monitored, every book borrowed or word applauded dumped into Bayesian metrics to find the Goats among the Sheep that don't toe the line and don't believe, with a Baptist's fevered certainty of Rapture, that the elected swine have our best interests at heart?  They want us to want the witch-hunt, and they use neoconservative shills like Beck and Coulter to put the spout the same old catch-22: "If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about."  Believe that at your own risk.  All godless governments seek to criminalize their citizens; the only way to oppress them with impunity is to make each and every one one of them believe that they're guilty of something.  Democracy is, after all, tyranny by creeping degrees, and your crime against the Devil that some of you seem to be defending is just a matter of timing and expediency.

The Constitution didn't give Communists the right to conspire against the US and infiltrate the government.

I've read a lot about McCarthy and his investigations, and while he might have had bad judgment about various people around him, he was showing the true extent of the rot inside the USA, and that's why he had to be politically destroyed.

A point that I dichotomized in my post.  But McCarthy was a symptom of the rot, already in its latter stages by that point.  The date of death was 1776, the start of decomposition was with the adoption of the Constitution in 1789, and everything since then has been the tumultuous process of putrefaction, a dead body trying to convince itself that it's still alive.

No, he wasn't, I'm talking about the unprecedented degree of infiltration.

You should be able to make distinctions.  There's a huge difference between the USA of the Anti-Masonic party, John Quincy Adams, and the the USA that shut down the National Bank, and the USA of Colonel House, Morgenthau's Sr. and Jr., Harry Dexter White, FDR, Dean Acheson, etc.  

They are different animals.  McCarthy was destroyed because he showed that the Communist menace was in some respects a creation of the USA.

That's a distinction without a difference.  Both expression of the United States are still founded on the same principles of human naturalism.  They are both unworthy and both deleterious to the Christian notions of freedom and governance.  You make the same argument that Novus Ordites make when promoting prophylactics: they're going to be engaging in mortal sin anyway so they might as well be safe.  Mortal sin, uncompounded, is still sufficient to damn a person.  Consequently, despite the one expression of the American government having fewer abuses of its naturalism, its essence and foundation are still in opposition to God.

I don't think you can compare a government to a corpse.

In case of the American government, and incidentally all other governments in power today, certainly I can, insofar as a corpse has the appearance of a man, but lacking the vitality and the immortal soul that animates it.  Likewise, the naturalist government may, and often does, bear those structures superficially that lend it the appearance, the accidents, of a just society but in reality this is just a veneer.

As Trads we should recognize that it's sometimes not possible to live in a society that recognizes the Social Reign of Christ the King.  That doesn't mean I'm suggesting to go out and vote Republican or say you love the Constitution and the Founding Fathers.

That just means recognizing that there can be good in a bad system, and that a system that is bad can get a lot worse.

There have been many different kinds of pagan nations, but certainly one cannot say they were all equally evil.

Joseph McCarthy was fighting for those who recognized the true extent of the Communist conspiracy, that the treason was part of the system, and that's why he was politically destroyed.