“WE WILL NOT WALK IN FEAR, ONE OF ANOTHER. WE WILL NOT BE DRIVEN BY FEAR INTO AN AGE OF UNREASON IF WE DIG DEEP IN OUR HISTORY AND OUR DOCTRINE, AND REMEMBER THAT WE ARE NOT FEARFUL MEN, NOT DESCENDED FROM MEN WHO FEARED TO WRITE, TO SPEAK, TO ASSOCIATE AND TO DEFEND CAUSES WHICH WERE FOR THE MOMENT UNPOPULAR.”

US broadcast journalist, Edward Murrow, spoke these words in the 1950s, protesting against the witchhunt of communists, alleged communists, and of anyone thought to evince anything resembling sympathy or support for ideas associated with communism, by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

McCarthy and his team were able to sow fear, paranoia, and a rigid adherence not to democracy or free speech but to intolerance of dissent and the questioning of the received truths that sustained America’s engagement with the rest of the world.

In 2017 we are witnessing the rebirth of McCarthyism across the West in response to Russia’s recovery from the demise of the Soviet Union and the failed attempt to turn the country into a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington via the imposition of free market economic shock treatment thereafter.