Question

Identify the factors that produced the anticommunist witch hunt after World War II. List some of its most important short- and long-term consequences.

Answer 1

There were quite a few. Some of those included the deteriorating relationship between the former Allies (particularly the Western Allies and the Soviet Union), the spread of communist control over Eastern Europe, and publicized trials of communist sympathizers and spies such as Ethen and Julius Rosenberg. All of these created an air of paranoia that the Soviets were everywhere and sought to spread communism across the globe. Senator McCarthys role on Capitol Hill in highly public hearings to unmask communist sympathizers fueled this second Red Scare with political witch hunts, creating what we refer to today as McCarthyism. Being called a red or a communist became a grave insult and over the next fifty or so years after WW2, East and West were locked in a geopolitical game of brinksmanship called the Cold War. During that time, if you were in the West such as in the US, propaganda and fear made it easy to view the Soviets as the boogeyman that we had to defend ourselves against at any cost while they were busy doing the same about us.