When I was a kid the U.S. had just won WWII, defeating the dreaded Germans and Japs, but instead of enjoying the victory we plunged right into an ongoing series of conflicts that has never gone away. That's what the Japanese were called then. There was a war on, and it took decades before the Japanese became people in the minds of at least one kid.
One of these conflicts was the Cold War. Uncle Joe Stalin, our wartime ally after Hitler invaded in violation of a newly signed treaty, was revealed to be the wholesale killer he really was. Mao Tse-Tung drove our money-besotted ally, Chiang Kai-shek. from the Mainland of China to Formosa, or Taiwan. Tailgunner Joe McCarthy spoke for a lot of Americans when he demanded to know "who lost China," as though it were a pocket-knife to lose. "I have a list," he thundered, of Communists in the State Department. Heads rolled. Congress warmed up the House Un-American Activities Committee, which itself was the prime example. It subpenae'd name-figures from Hollywood to name names, meaning to reveal who it was they met with in the '30s when they were in college or starting out writing or appearing in movies, demanding to know whether they had ever been Communists (aka Reds, Commies, or their "fellow-travelers." Pinkos for short.) People went to jail. Commies were blacklisted from writing for Hollywood and the radio or the newfangled invention, B&W television. You didn't sign petitions. Red fronts. You didn't join organizations. Commie fronts. You didn't read certain books or subscribe to certain newspapers. You didn't want your name to wind up in police files in the Red Squad. You didn't want the FBI going around asking questions of your neighbors. If you asked your high school history teacher about Communism he became defensive. You could be fired as a public school teacher for Commie tendencies. You couldn't know too much about it other than that it was bad. When you asked a college comparative economics professor what about getting a Communist down from the U.N. to tell us what it was like from his point of view, it was a bad idea.
Today in the War on Terrorism, the FBI is going around asking questions of students who read the wrong books. [THIS REPORT IS NOW REPORTED TO BE A HOAX PERPETRATED FOR STRANGE REASONS BY A COLLEGE STUDENT. SEE THIS.] We never seem to learn that this is a bad idea. I guess that's the lesson of history, that people, when afraid, do the same things that their parents and grandparents did when they were afraid.
Here's the modern version of an old story.
And here's former senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota who negotiated the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) which Congress passed the week of 9-11-01, writing in the Washington Post, explaining that Congress never contemplated, much less authorized the president to bug us at home to fight Al Qaeda and the terrorists. Pres. Bush is using the AUMF as his fig-leaf to cover the apparent constitutional violations of the massive data mining (wholesale bugging w/o search warrant) campaign that has half the country in an uproar. The other half is trying to figure out how they can do that and get away with it.