I just caught Good Night, and Good Luck on TV and as much as it resonated back when it came out, it’s even more powerful now. Edward R. Murrow was an incredibly brave journalism professional that reported all during the London Blitz and later took on Senator McCarthy. During the McCarthy era he even changed what the national conversation was by exposing the hypocrisy and lies suffocating the country with fear.

Trump seems like the new McCarthy. Not only is it about fear, but the inability to be criticized, the personal attacks thrown at anyone daring to question him, and the complete inability to put anything in context on a national or international stage which seems to define both of their “reigns” so far. Have we really gone back to that isolationist fear-mongering stage?

In general I don’t often discuss politics, mostly because part of my family is staunch Republican so there are just areas where we have to agree to disagree. However, the rhetoric for a blanket fear and hatred of Muslims sounds more like going back to denigration of an entire group regardless of the people involved, and injuring far more innocent lives than those who would be active terrorists.

Yes, Communism (more like dictatorship, not the original philosophy) had its time and place in the Cold War as a threat. But more Russians and Chinese in that same period were imprisoned or killed by their own governments in their own countries than in any other countries elsewhere in the world. Any type of national paranoia as an ideology, leadership asking citizens to turn in other citizens for crimes that are as simple as attending a meeting somewhere, or reporting neighbors for real or imagined slights tends not to end well.

We were on a national, pointless witch hunt that luckily Murrow helped stop by allowing the public to see the actual footage of Congressional hearing failures, Constitution violations, and McCarthy’s ineptitude. In comparison to a totalitarian society, the people persecuted in the Communist countries weren’t nearly as lucky, since anything reported as anti-government was so severely repressed that those targeted didn’t even know they were on “the list” until they were kidnapped or arrested and most often killed. He would have been dead the night he made his first broadcast asking for answers.

I’m not saying that Trump would bring about a new order where we would be a country without due process or some sort of rationality, and hopefully our defense of the freedoms we hold under the Constitution and the government would win out. But the repetition of indiscriminate hatred and desire to penalize people for simply being a certain race or to restrict their freedoms due to a vague “danger” is what I never want to see. Many of those brought before Congress by McCarthy never recovered careers, some committed suicide, and it brought an awful toll to the nation that never should have been asked for, let alone paid.

I greatly respect Murrow for having the courage to call out that this is wrong, injurious to the nation, and will cause damage for many years for those arbitrarily caught up because it fed on a wrongly directed fear. To stand up and speak out against that took true conviction that this was a necessary step to prevent further damage. We need someone like that now who can gain the ear of the nation and make sure we don’t follow the same path of fear to regrettable consequences. After all, as the saying goes, those who don’t remember history are bound to repeat it.

This movie is a great reminder of one of our major mistakes in allowing fear and hatred to rule, and should be required viewing pre-election this year.

So Good Night, and Good Luck.