Men arrested in raids awaiting deportation hearings on Ellis Island, January 13, 1920 – Public Domain

The new era of Trump authoritarianism is being called by many a new McCarthyism, but that is not a good analogy. It’s looking worse than the McCarthy period. A more accurate analogy is the Red Scare years that followed World War I and the success of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.

That event, and the establishment of a communist state based upon the ideas of Cal Marx and Friedrich Engels, saw the US government under Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and his Attorney General A Mitchelll Palmer and his aide, a young DOJ lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover, begin in 1919 rounding up leftists and anarchist immigrants.

In a strategy that Trump and his gang of Constitution Wreckers are clearly following, Hoover with Palmer’s blessing started initially going after leftists who were immigrants, like noted anarchistEmma Goldman, a Lithuanian Jew who came to the US via Russia. Goldman was arrested ad charged with sedition based upon the argument that she was advocating opposition to conscription.

President Wilson also took an action that was particularly outrageous and surely caught the attention of Trump’s “brain trust,” namely having America’s most successful radical socialist, Eugene Debs, who in 1912 had won 900,000 votes (6.1% of votes cast) running for president on the Sodialist Party ticket, arrested for sedition (under a new law signed into effect by Wilson). Deb’s “crime” was making a campaign speech calling on people to oppose the US entering the European war known as WWI. That even if it were a crime, is vastly less criminal than many of the things Trump called on his supporters to do during his speeches during his two presidential campaigns.

Sentenced to ten........

© CounterPunch