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From The Atlantic Monthly April 2004 Letters to the Editor

The [House Un-American Activities Committee] and the leadership of the [Communist] Party mirrored each other. Both justified blacklisting, anti-Semitism, and physical and intellectual terrorism in the names of their "patriotic" causes. The committee hearings resembled nothing so much as the show trials in Stalin's Russia. Yes, Stalin's victims ended up dead, and the committee's ended up only unemployed—but are we to claim moral superiority because our evil was less virulent than theirs?

Well, yeah.