MPs must reject blackmail, assault on free will in parties

Atrocious things have often been done in the name of uprightness. The perpetrators have ranged from seemingly well-meaning individuals to devilish sociopaths and psychopaths. Dogmatic popes have muffled free-thinking and scientific progress and murdered innocent people. Demented political cranks have massacred millions. Acting in the name of public good, they have condemned society to awful grief, with the lesson that evil often disguises itself as virtue. The need to beware overzealous self-righteous characters is never far-fetched.

The politically pious, in particular, will perch themselves on holy rooftops to assault individual consciences. These often self-appointed prefects of virtue will victimise just about everyone whom they don’t like. They point a finger at you and you are dead meat. McCarthyism is the name that has been given to the act of condemning other people without bothering about concrete evidence. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (1947–1957) was an American patriot who defended his country from “the vermin of communism.” After the Russian Bolshevik Communist Revolution in 1917, the American capitalist class feared communism like the plague. While the Americans put their fear on the back-burner between 1939 and 1945 to join the Russians in the Alliance against Adolf Hitler’s Axis of Evil in World War II, the United States and the newly formed Soviet Union returned to mutual suspicion soon after the blasting of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to end the war. It was a terrible new dawn in America.