Red-baiting
[7] A term commonly used in the United States, red-baiting in American history is most famously associated with McCarthyism, which originated in the two historic Red Scare periods.
[8] In 1960, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy had been officially briefed on some of the secret plans of the Eisenhower Administration for overthrowing Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba, but then publicly accused Vice President Nixon of doing nothing in that regard, knowing that his opponent was sworn to secrecy on that project and therefore would be left looking weak on Communism.
[26][27][28] The basis of the terruqueo began during the presidency of Fernando Belaúnde when Legislative Decree 46 broadly defined terrorism as "any form of glorification or defense of the political discourse of subversive organizations".
[29] Into the 1990s, authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori utilized terruqueos with the help of the National Intelligence Service to discredit those who opposed him, including dissenters from his own government, with political scientist Daniel Encinas saying that this would evolve into conservative politicians using the attack to target those opposed to Fujimori's neoliberal economic policies and that the right-wing used the terruqueo as a "strategy of manipulating the legacy of political violence".
[1] The United Nations warns that red-tagging is a "criminalizing discourse" that undermines the value of the work of human rights defenders and places them at risk of violence and various forms of harassment.
[36] Communism has generally been viewed with disfavor and particular distrust by large sectors of Philippine society ever since the country gained independence from the United States on 4 July 1946 through the Treaty of Manila.
[37] This predisposition makes red-tagging an effective fear appeal tool used by players in the political arena, given that it authorizes law-enforcement agencies and the military to act on the taggings.
[38] Red-tagging is almost never employed in foreign relations of the Philippines, including members of ruling communist parties, owing to the principle in international law of Westphalian sovereignty in another country's domestic affairs.
[nb 2] One of the notable exceptions to the nontagging of foreigners was United States citizen Brandon Lee, an ancestral-domain paralegal in the Cordillera Administrative Region.
[42] In the early 1950s, Liberal Party leaders like Robert Menzies red-baited Labor politicians and described them as insufficiently tough on the People's Republic of China.
In the post-war period of 1919–1921, the United States government employed it as a central tactic in dealing with labor radicals, anarchists, communists, socialists, and foreign agents.
[45] Red-baiting re-emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s during the period known as the Second Red Scare due to mounting Cold War tensions and the spread of communism abroad.
Conservative critics contend that revelations such as the Venona project decryptions and the FBI Silvermaster File at least mute if not outright refute the charge that red-baiting in general was unjustified.
[48] Liberal scholars contend that even if someone could prove that the United States government was infiltrated by Soviet spies, McCarthy was censured by the Senate because he was in fact reckless and politically opportunistic, and his red-baiting ruined the lives of countless innocent people.
[10] The United States government's measures in 2008 to address the subprime mortgage crisis such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program were not only criticized as corporate welfare but red-baited as a "gateway to socialism".
[52] Political activist and author Tim Wise says that the emergence of such red-baiting may have been motivated by, and given additional force by, racism towards President Barack Obama and fear that the progressive policies of his administration would erode white privilege in the United States.
[62] Frank Llewellyn, the national director of Democratic Socialists of America, commented that Republicans never really define what they mean by socialism, and are simply engaging in the politics of fear.
[64] In September 2009, Jones resigned his position in the Obama administration after a number of his past statements became fodder for conservative critics and Republican officials.
[64] Time credited Beck with leading conservatives' attack on Jones,[65] who characterized it as a "vicious smear campaign" and an effort to use "lies and distortions to distract and divide".
Jack F. Matlock Jr., The United States ambassador for the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, personally wrote the editor a letter upon reading the article, claiming it to be a "distortion of history".
Matlock claimed the sister-city relationship Sanders developed was actively encouraged by the United States government, further insinuating the article to be an instance of Red-Baiting.
[5] Those terms have also been used as an insult for several left-wing politicians in center-left socialist parties to describe them as farthest left and more extreme than they actually are in an effort to marginalize them.
[76] The 1994 federal election saw a "red socks" campaign used by the center-right, including the CDU/CSU and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), to scare off a possible red–red–green coalition alliance (SPD–PDS–The Greens).
[80] As The Left underperformed, a left-wing coalition was ruled out by just a few seats in the Bundestag,[81] and the German financial market rallied as a result, as such threat was eliminated.
