Monday, February 16, 2004

History in the Repeating

"Ben Johnson's lead feature on today's frontpagemag.com was made possible as the result of a new project we have been working on for almost a year and which will be ready for launch later this spring. The project is a massive database on the left to be called followthenetwork.org. The research that went into Ben's article was the work of many hands engaged in putting together this database, but in the immediate case Mike Bauer's more than others. - David Horowitz from Front Page Magazine.

Got this from a guy at Democratic Underground who got it from Rocky Mountain Progressive Network.

It's a website entitled "Follow the Network." Apparently it's not done yet, but the idea is pretty straightforward. It's to keep track of Communists, er, liberals. And the connections between the groups. I love the graphic on the first page relating back, as it does, to the red scare of the 1920s (the one we don't remember as much). In those days they had complicated Spider webs showing the connections of individuals to organizations to show the creeping red menace.

It's also helpful to remember that, in both Red Scares, the private sector did more than it's share of the "witch hunting." There were organizations set up to both clear people and provide lists of known communists and communist organizations. So if this data base gets set up in earnest, well, your local employer can, anonymously, punch a name into a computer and find out if an individual has been a member of a liberal group. Of course such a network wouldn't be used for wrong purposes; but do you really want that Green Party member working in a bank?

Of course, they might just focus on intimidating big name liberals. I'm not sure that's much better. I mean if they can get the big name liberals to back down, well, what hope do grass roots liberals have? None, which is presumably the point.

I'll have more to say on this subject in a bit, I'd imagine.

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