Fearless?

Sunday 9 February 2025

Eskişehir, Türkiye

“The thing I fear most is fear.“

Michel de Montaigne, Essais

Above: French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592)

Picture him in a tunic, a linen or woolen garment that fell to his knees, dyed in earthy tones like brown, gray, or deep green, reflecting his philosophical practicality.

Over this, he might wear a himation, a heavier, draped cloak worn by men of intellectual stature, the fabric hanging loosely over his shoulder and fastening across his chest.

The style of his clothing, though simple, would reflect his status as a respected philosopher, a teacher of kings and scholars alike, without the ostentation that comes with power.

His sandals would be well-worn from years of walking the shaded colonnades of the Lyceum, perhaps softened by the dust of Athenian streets.

Aristotle, though a man of intellect, had no need of quills and inkpots as we might imagine them today.

Above: Bust of Greek polymath Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)

Papyrus scrolls or parchment — both common media for written communication at the time — would have been the vessel for his words.

He would likely have had a scribe at hand to assist in the final writing process, though he may have written his personal notes by hand.

His notes might have been inscribed in Greek script, probably in a clean, legible hand, though possibly more hurried or informal for personal use, like a series of bullet points to outline his lecture.

The stylus would have been used for cutting into the papyrus or wax tablets, creating marks that could be read later when the material was smoothed out or unfurled.

For transportation of these words from his abode to his academy, Aristotle would likely have rolled the scrolls and secured them with a piece of string or leather cord.

It was the most practical way to carry and protect delicate writing.

In his last days in Athens, he would have entrusted these scrolls to one of his students or perhaps to an assistant who would carry them from his study, through the streets, and into the lecture halls.

Aristotle, alone in his study, having already prepared the key points he wants to share with his students, moves to the large wooden desk where his scrolls and writing implements are arranged.

He draws his tunic sleeves back as he picks up a stylus and moves it across the surface of a wax tablet, writing his personal notes in careful, methodical strokes.

Perhaps there is a slight weariness in his movements; the years have passed quickly in Athens, and there are certain weighty thoughts on his mind as he prepares to depart.

He looks at the scrolls, one last time, knowing that once he leaves this city, his time as a teacher here will be over.

The Lyceum, with its philosophers and students, will soon be without its founder.

With a slow breath, he secures the scrolls, rolls them carefully, and tucks them beneath his arm.

His lecture will be simple, perhaps, as he often did, he reflects on the nature of knowledge, the pursuit of truth and the limitations of human understanding.

His students, gathered in the courtyard, await the philosopher’s wisdom.

They look at him with a sense of awe, perhaps even sadness.

There is, after all, an ending in the air.

The last words he speaks to them echo in the air like a final benediction.

Above: Site of Aristotle’s Lyceum, Athens, Greece

Aristotle knows what comes next:

The journey to Chalcis, a place of quiet contemplation for his final years.

Above: Chalcis, Greece today

But before that, there is the culmination of all his teachings, the last moment of his public life.

Perhaps he ends with a question, a challenge — a word on fear, or courage, or truth — as he passes the torch to his students.

Above: Bust of Aristotle

Aristotle was a pragmatist, a keen observer of the natural and human world.

Unlike his teacher Plato, who leaned into idealism, Aristotle was grounded, methodical, and analytical.

Above: Greek philosophers Plato (428 – 348 BC) and Aristotle, The School of Athens, Raphael (1509)

Aristotle collected data, studied systems, and sought practical wisdom.

He was not a revolutionary like Socrates but a man of intellect and diplomacy.

Above: Bust of Greek philosopher Socrates (470 – 399 BC)

If we imagine Aristotle advising Alexander, it might sound something like this:

• Fear is natural but must be mastered.

A great leader acknowledges fear but does not let it rule him.

• Fear can be used strategically.

Inspire awe in your enemies and loyalty in your men.

• A king must know what to fear.

Rashness is folly.

Wisdom lies in understanding true dangers.

• Do not fear death, but disgrace.

As Aristotle emphasized in Ethics, a noble life is one lived virtuously, and honor should outweigh fear of mortality.

Above: The Lyceum of Aristotle, Athens, Greece

Aristotle discusses fear primarily in The Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric.

He defines fear (phobos) as a kind of pain or disturbance caused by the expectation of impending evil.

“Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.“

Frances Moore Lappé, O Magazine, (May 2004)

Above: American writer Frances Moore Lappé

In Ethics, he explores it through the lens of courage, arguing that a truly virtuous person feels fear appropriately — not too much, not too little.

The coward fears everything, the rash person fears nothing, but the courageous individual fears rightly, facing necessary dangers with wisdom and resolve.

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.“

H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural horror in Literature (1927)

Above: American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890 – 1937)

In Rhetoric, Aristotle views fear as a tool of persuasion.

Fear, he suggests, arises when we perceive a threat that feels immediate and unavoidable.

It can be manipulated, particularly by leaders and orators, to sway the masses.

Aristotle would remind us that courage is the golden mean, balanced between recklessness and cowardice.

It is neither blind bravado nor trembling retreat, but the conscious choice to act despite fear’s grasp.

And Aristotle has known fear.

Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira, Chalcidice, about 55 km (34 miles) east of modern-day Thessaloniki. 

Above: Remains of the town wall of Stagira, Greece

He was the son of Nicomachus, the personal physician of King Amyntas of Macedon, and Phaestis, a woman with origins from Chalcis, Euboea. 

Above: Coinage of King Amyntas III of Macedonia (r. 393 – 388 / 387 – 370 BC)

Nicomachus was said to have belonged to the medical guild of Asclepiadae and was likely responsible for Aristotle’s early interest in biology and medicine.

Ancient tradition held that Aristotle’s family descended from the legendary physician Asclepius and his son Machaon.

Above: Asclepius, Greek god of medicine

Both of Aristotle’s parents died when he was still at a young age and Proxenus of Atarneus became his guardian.

Although little information about Aristotle’s childhood has survived, he probably spent some time in the Macedonian capital, making his first connections with the Macedonian monarchy.

The road to Athens was long.

The boy’s sandals crunched against the dusty earth, each step carrying him further from the home he had always known.

Stagira lay behind him, before him, the unknown.

The air was thick, humid, the scent of the Aegean carried in a breeze that offered little relief.

Young Aristotle, barely more than a youth, tightened his grip on the strap of his satchel.

What did a boy from the provinces have to offer the great halls of Plato’s Academy?

Would he prove himself worthy, or would he be dismissed, another nameless mind lost to time?

At the age of seventeen, Aristotle moved to Athens to continue his education at Plato’s Academy.

He became distinguished as a researcher and lecturer, earning for himself the nickname “mind of the school” by his tutor Plato.

In Athens, he probably experienced the Eleusinian Mysteries as he wrote when describing the sights one viewed at the Mysteries, “to experience is to learn“.

(The Eleusinian Mysteries were initiations held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at the Panhellenic Sanctuary of Eleusis in ancient Greece.

They are considered the “most famous of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece“.

Their basis was a Bronze Age agrarian cult, and there is some evidence that they were derived from the religious practices of the Mycenean period. 

The Mysteries represented the myth of the abduction of Persephone from her mother Demeter by the king of the underworld Hades, in a cycle with three phases:

• the descent (loss)
• the search
• the ascent, the main theme of Persephone and the reunion with her mother.

It was a major festival during the Hellenic era, and later spread to Rome.

Similar religious rites appear in the agricultural societies of the Near East and in Minoan Crete.

The rites, ceremonies, and beliefs were kept secret and consistently preserved from antiquity. 

For the initiated, the rebirth of Persephone symbolized the eternity of life which flows from generation to generation, and they believed that they would have a reward in the afterlife.

There are many paintings and pieces of pottery that depict various aspects of the Mysteries.

Since the Mysteries involved visions and conjuring of an afterlife, some scholars believe that the power and longevity of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a consistent set of rites, ceremonies and experiences that spanned two millennia, came from psychedelic drugs.

(I don’t subscribe to this point of view.) 

The name of the town, Eleusis, seems to be pre-Greek, a counterpart with Elysium and the goddess Eileithyia.)

Above: Votive plaque depicting elements of the Eleusinian Mysteries. National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Greece

Aristotle remained in Athens for nearly twenty years before leaving in 348 BC after Plato’s death. 

The traditional story about his departure records that he was disappointed with the Academy’s direction after control passed to Plato’s nephew Speusippus, although it is possible that the anti-Macedonian sentiments in Athens could have also influenced his decision. 

Above: Greek philosopher Speusippus (408 – 338 BC)

Aristotle left with Xenocrates to Assos in Asia Minor, where he was invited by his former fellow student Hermias of Atarneus (d. 340 BC).

Above: Bust of Greek philosopher Xenocrates (396 – 313 BC)

Aristotle stayed there for a few years and left around the time of Hermias’ death.

Above: Ruins of Assos, Behramkale, Türkiye

While at Assos, Aristotle and his colleague Theophrastus did extensive research in botany and marine biology, which they later continued at the near-by island of Lesbos. 

Above: Greek philosopher Theophrastus (371 – 287 BC)

Above: Map of the Greek island of Lesbos (1597)

During this time, Aristotle married Pythias, Hermias’s adoptive daughter and niece, and had a daughter whom they also named Pythias.

Above: Aristotle

Years later, he would face greater fear.

The summons had come – he was to instruct the son of Philip of Macedon.

Above: Bust of King Philip II of Macedon (382 – 336 BC)

A king’s son.

A conqueror in the making.

What was knowledge to a boy raised to rule?

Would he be shaping a mind — or merely feeding an ambition that would outgrow his own?

Above: Aristotle tutoring Prince Alexander of Macedon, Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1895)

In 343 BC, Aristotle was invited to Pella by Philip II of Macedon in order to become the tutor to his thirteen-year-old son Alexander – a choice perhaps influenced by the relationship of Aristotle’s family with the Macedonian dynasty.

Above: Ruins of ancient Pella, Greece

Aristotle taught Alexander at the private school of Mieza, in the gardens of the Nymphs, the royal estate near Pella.

Above: School of Aristotle in Mieza, Greece

Alexander’s education probably included a number of subjects, such as ethics and politics, as well as standard literary texts, like Euripides and Homer.

Above: Bust of Greek tragedian Euripides (480 – 406 BC)

Above: Bust of Greek poet Homer (8th century BC)

It is likely that during Aristotle’s time in the Macedonian court, other prominent nobles, like Ptolemy and Cassander, would have occasionally attended his lectures. 

Above: Bust of Greek King Ptolemy I Soter (367 – 282 BC)

Above: Coinage of King Cassander of Macedon (355 – 297 BC)

Aristotle encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest, and his own attitude towards Persia was strongly ethnocentric.

In one famous example, he counsels Alexander to be “a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians“. 

Alexander’s education under the guardianship of Aristotle likely lasted for only a few years, as at around the age of sixteen Alexander returned to Pella and was appointed regent of Macedon by his father Philip. 

Above: The Achaemenid Empire at its greatest territorial extent, under the rule of Darius the Great (522 – 486 BC)

During this time, Aristotle is said to have gifted Alexander an annotated copy of the Iliad, which reportedly became one of Alexander’s most prized possessions. 

Scholars speculate that two of Aristotle’s now lost works, On kingship and On behalf of the Colonies, were composed by the philosopher for the young prince. 

After Philip II’s assassination in 336 BC, Aristotle returned to Athens for the second and final time a year later.

Above: Assassination of King Philip II of Macedon (25 October 336 BC)

As a metic (permanent resident but not a citizen), Aristotle could not own property in Athens and thus rented a building known as the Lyceum (named after the sacred grove of Apollo Lykeios), in which he established his own school. 

The building included a gymnasium and a colonnade (peripatos), from which the school acquired the name Peripatetic. 

Aristotle conducted courses and research at the school for the next twelve years.

Above: Aristotle’s Lyceum, Athens, Greece

Aristotle often lectured small groups of distinguished students and, along with some of them, such as Theophrastus, Eudemus, and Aristoxenus, Aristotle built a large library which included manuscripts, maps, and museum objects. 

Above: Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Strato of Lampsacus, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (1888)

Above: Greek philosopher Eudemos of Rhodes (370 – 300 BC)

Above: Image of Greek philosopher Aristoxenus (375 – 335 BC)

While in Athens, his wife Pythias died and Aristotle became involved with Herpyllis of Stagira.

They had a son whom Aristotle named after his father, Nicomachus. 

Above: Aristotle

This period in Athens, between 335 and 323 BC, is when Aristotle is believed to have composed many of his philosophical works. 

He wrote many dialogues, of which only fragments have survived.

Those works that have survived are in treatise form and were not, for the most part, intended for widespread publication.

They are generally thought to be lecture aids for his students.

His most important treatises include:

• Physics

• Metaphysics

• Nicomachean Ethics

• Politics

• On the Soul 

• Poetics.

Aristotle studied and made significant contributions to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, biology, botany, ethics, politics, agriculture, medicine, dance, and theatre.

Decades passed, and Alexander the boy had become a man, then a legend, then a shadow that darkened the lands he took by force.

Alexander was no longer his pupil but his past, and now the past had become dangerous.

Above: Mosaic of Alexander the Great (356 – 323 BC), Pompeii, Italy

In the 24th day of the Macedonian month Dios, 25 October 336 BC, while at Aegae attending the wedding of his daughter Cleopatra to Olympias’s brother, Alexander I of Epirus, Philip was assassinated by the captain of his bodyguards, Pausanias.

Above: Coinage of Alexander the Molossian King of Epeiros (370 – 331 BC)

As Pausanias tried to escape, he tripped over a vine and was killed by his pursuers, including two of Alexander’s companions, Perdiccas and Leonnatus.

Alexander was proclaimed King on the spot by the nobles and army at the age of 20.

Above: Alexander becomes ruler of Macedonia

Alexander began his reign by eliminating potential rivals to the throne.

He had his cousin, the former Amyntas IV, executed. 

He also had two Macedonian princes from the region of Lyncestis killed for having been involved in his father’s assassination, but spared a third, Alexander Lyncestes.

Olympias had Cleopatra Eurydice, and Europa, her daughter by Philip, burned alive.

When Alexander learned about this, he was furious.

Alexander also ordered the murder of Attalus, who was in command of the advance guard of the army in Asia Minor and Cleopatra’s uncle.

Attalus was at that time corresponding with Demosthenes, regarding the possibility of defecting to Athens.

Attalus also had severely insulted Alexander, and following Cleopatra’s murder, Alexander may have considered him too dangerous to be left alive.

Alexander spared Arrhidaeus, who was by all accounts mentally disabled, possibly as a result of poisoning by Olympias.

News of Philip’s death roused many states into revolt, including Thebes, Athens, Thessaly, and the Thracian tribes north of Macedon.

When news of the revolts reached Alexander, he responded quickly.

Though advised to use diplomacy, Alexander mustered 3,000 Macedonian cavalry and rode south towards Thessaly.

He found the Thessalian army occupying the pass between Mount Olympus and Mount Ossa, and ordered his men to ride over Mount Ossa.

Above: Mount Olympus, Olympus National Park, Greece

Above: Mount Ossa, Greece

When the Thessalians awoke the next day, they found Alexander in their rear and promptly surrendered, adding their cavalry to Alexander’s force.

He then continued south towards the Peloponnese.

Above: Peloponnese (blue)

Alexander stopped at Thermopylae where he was recognized as the leader of the Amphictyonic League before heading south to Corinth.

Athens sued for peace and Alexander pardoned the rebels.

Above: Ancient Corinth

The famous encounter between Alexander and Diogenes the Cynic (412 – 323 BC) occurred during Alexander’s stay in Corinth.

When Alexander asked Diogenes what he could do for him, the philosopher disdainfully asked Alexander to stand a little to the side, as he was blocking the sunlight. 

This reply apparently delighted Alexander who is reported to have said:

“But verily, if I were not Alexander, I would like to be Diogenes.“

At Corinth, Alexander took the title of Hegemon (“leader“) and, like Philip, was appointed commander for the coming war against Persia.

He also received news of a Thracian uprising.

Before crossing to Asia, Alexander wanted to safeguard his northern borders.

In the spring of 335 BC, he advanced to suppress several revolts.

Starting from Amphipolis, he travelled east into the country of the “independent Thracians“, and at Mount Haemus, the Macedonian army attacked and defeated the Thracian forces manning the heights. 

Above: Mount Haemus

The Macedonians marched into the country of the Triballi and defeated their army near the Lyginus River (a tributary of the Danube).

Alexander then marched for three days to the Danube, encountering the Getae tribe on the opposite shore.

Crossing the river at night, he surprised them and forced their army to retreat after the first cavalry skirmish.

News then reached Alexander that the Illyrian chieftain Cleitus and King Glaukias of the Taulantii were in open revolt against his authority.

Marching west into Illyria, Alexander defeated each in turn, forcing the two rulers to flee with their troops.

With these victories, he secured his northern frontier.

While Alexander campaigned north, the Thebans and Athenians rebelled once again.

Alexander immediately headed south. 

While the other cities again hesitated, Thebes decided to fight.

The Theban resistance was ineffective and Alexander razed the city and divided its territory between the other Boeotian cities.

The end of Thebes cowed Athens, leaving all of Greece temporarily at peace. 

Above: Alexander at the Sack of Thebes in 335 BC

Alexander then set out on his Asian campaign, leaving Antipater as regent.

He spent the rest of his years conducting a lengthy military campaign throughout Western Asia, Central Asia, parts of South Asia, and Egypt.

By the age of 30, he had created one of the largest empires in history, stretching from Greece to northwestern India.

He was undefeated in battle and is widely considered to be one of history’s greatest and most successful military commanders.

Due to the mutiny of his homesick troops, he eventually turned back at the Beas River and later died in 323 BC in Babylon, the city of Mesopotamia that he had planned to establish as his empire’s capital. 

Above: The death of Alexander, 11 June 323 BC

Alexander’s death left unexecuted an additional series of planned military and mercantile campaigns that would have begun with a Greek invasion of Arabia.

In the years following his death, a series of civil wars broke out across the Macedonian Empire, eventually leading to its disintegration at the hands of the Diadochi.

With his death marking the start of the Hellenistic period, Alexander’s legacy includes the cultural diffusion and syncretism that his conquests engendered, such as Greco-Buddhism and Hellenistic Judaism. 

He founded more than twenty cities, with the most prominent being the city of Alexandria in Egypt.

Alexander’s settlement of Greek colonists and the resulting spread of Greek culture led to the overwhelming dominance of Hellenistic civilization and influence as far east as the Indian subcontinent.

The Hellenistic period developed through the Roman Empire into modern Western culture.

The Greek language became the lingua franca of the region and was the predominant language of the Byzantine Empire until its collapse in the mid-15th century AD.

Alexander became legendary as a classical hero in the mould of Achilles, featuring prominently in the historical and mythical traditions of both Greek and non-Greek cultures.

Above: Achilles fighting against Memnon

His military achievements and unprecedented enduring successes in battle made him the measure against which many later military leaders would compare themselves, and his tactics remain a significant subject of study in military academies worldwide.

Legends of Alexander’s exploits coalesced into the 3rd century Alexander Romance which, in the premodern period, went through over one hundred recensions, translations, and derivations and was translated into almost every European vernacular and every language of the Islamic world.

After the Bible, it was the most popular form of European literature.

Above: Armenian illuminated manuscript of the 14th century

In the streets of Athens, resentment was festered.

The city had suffered under the heel of Macedonia, and Aristotle —once the tutor of the conqueror — was now an uncomfortable reminder of their subjugation.

He had seen it before.

He had watched what Athens did to Socrates.

He would not wait for the hemlock to be offered.

He would flee to his mother’s family estate in Chalcis, Euboea.

“I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.“

Above: The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David (1787)

Socrates (470 – 399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and as among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought.

An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon.

These accounts are written as dialogues, in which Socrates and his interlocutors examine a subject in the style of question and answer.

They gave rise to the Socratic dialogue literary genre.

Contradictory accounts of Socrates make a reconstruction of his philosophy nearly impossible, a situation known as the Socratic problem.

Socrates was a polarizing figure in Athenian society.

In 399 BC, he was accused of impiety and corrupting the youth.

After a trial that lasted a day, he was sentenced to death.

He spent his last day in prison, refusing offers to help him escape.

Above: Socrates

The Trial of Socrates (399 BC) was held to determine the philosopher’s guilt of two charges: 

• asebeia (impiety) against the pantheon of Athens
• corruption of the youth of the city-state.

The accusers cited two impious acts by Socrates:

• “failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges”
• “introducing new deities“.

The death sentence of Socrates was the legal consequence of asking politico-philosophic questions of his students, which resulted in the two accusations of moral corruption and impiety.

At trial, the majority of the dikasts (male-citizen jurors chosen by lot) voted to convict him of the two charges, then, consistent with common legal practice voted to determine his punishment and agreed to a sentence of death to be executed by Socrates’s drinking a poisonous beverage of hemlock.

At first glance, the philosopher Aristotle blends seamlessly in the teeming streets of Athens.

He is a man of average stature, with a build that would have been consistent with someone who spent more time in study than in physical exercise.

He does not possess the striking physical presence of his pupil Alexander the Great, but he has a quiet dignity that comes through in his intellectual prowess.

His posture is slightly hunched from years of sitting and writing, but still strong — a reminder that, despite his scholarly inclinations, he is still a product of his Macedonian heritage, so he maintains a modicum of physical health despite his intellectual life.

Aristotle’s movements are deliberate and measured.

While not the energetic stride of someone like his student Alexander, he moves with the calm, thoughtful pace of a man accustomed to both the quietude of study and the occasional public lecture.

When teaching, he paces slowly around the school, raising his hands occasionally to illustrate a point — his gestures broad but not extravagant, the gestures of a teacher who values clarity over spectacle.

Not an imposing figure, but someone whose aura of wisdom is felt more than seen, Aristotle commands respect without seeking it, his mind as his greatest presence.

His expression reflects a certain melancholy, knowing that his time is drawing to a close, yet also a quiet contentment that his life’s work has been accomplished.

In essence, Aristotle looks like the philosopher he is — someone whose exterior does not necessarily proclaim greatness, but whose spirit and ideas make him unforgettable to those who encounter him.

Above: Aristotle

The Lyceum, his own school in Athens, is also known as the Peripatetic School from the Greek peripatēin, meaning “to walk,” which reflects Aristotle’s teaching style — lecturing while walking with his students, likely under the shade of the colonnade or in an open courtyard.

The Lyceum is an open-air structure, a large rectangular courtyard surrounded by covered walkways, where both formal lectures and informal discussions take place.

In the center of the courtyard, under the soft light of late afternoon, there is a raised platform, where Aristotle could, if he wished, stand to address his students, although he is not the sort to make speeches from a grand podium.

Instead, he stands casually, near the stone steps on an elevated stone, a practical place for his walking discussions.

The space is open to the elements, with the distant hum of the Athenian city faintly audible in the background.

The scent of pines and the sea breeze from the nearby Aegean drift in, adding a sense of natural calm to the atmosphere.

Ancient stone pillars line the covered walkways, creating a sense of timelessness, while the sound of Aristotle’s voice can carry among the open spaces where great thinkers gather.

Above: Aristotle’s Lyceum

The Lyceum is alive with the gentle hum of conversation, but there is a hush now, a stillness that reflects the awareness that something important is about to happen.

The students sit, perhaps nervously, as Aristotle enters the room.

He is not the commanding figure of youth, but his dignity and calm authority still fill the space.

He is a man at the end of his career, his face worn but still thoughtful, his hands perhaps a little more deliberate as he arranges his notes.

Above: Aristotle

He begins not with the grand theories or the sweeping abstractions that have defined his work but with a personal reflection — for Aristotle, the teacher is never separate from the teaching.

He acknowledges that this is his final lecture, a farewell not just to Athens, but to his legacy.

“I stand before you, my dear students, not as the towering figure of a philosopher unscathed by life, but as a man who has lived in constant struggle with the nature of fear — fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of insignificance.

I have spent my life seeking virtue, seeking knowledge, yet I have found that the greatest challenges we face are not external, but those within us.

Fear, the shadow that hangs over us, prevents us from realizing the fullness of our potential.

But it is only through facing fear that we grow, that we come to understand what it means to be truly human.“

Above: Aristotle

He leans forward slightly, the weight of his years and the importance of his words now clear in his voice.

“What is courage, if not the ability to confront fear?

It is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it.

We fear because we are human, but we are also human because we choose how to respond to that fear.

You must remember, the greatest tragedies of human history were not the wars or the deaths of kings, but the moments when men and women allowed their fears to shape their choices.

In my own life, I have feared many things: the fate of my work, the reactions of others, the judgments of history.

But what matters is not the fear itself, but what you do with it.”

Above: Aristotle teaching

He pauses, letting the weight of his words settle in the room.

“In the end, what we are remembered for is not our fear, but our courage to face the unknown, to challenge the accepted, to live according to our principles even when they cost us.

The pursuit of wisdom, of virtue, requires that we confront the very fears that might stifle us.

That is what I have tried to do with my life, and it is what I ask of you.

When fear comes, and it will, let it not be a chain that binds you, but a fire that drives you forward.“

Above: Aristotle

Aristotle, ever the teacher, turns to his students with a gentle smile.

“I leave you now with this:

My greatest wish is that you carry on the work we have begun here.

I do not ask for accolades or monuments, but that you question everything.

Let my legacy be that of a thinker who sought the truth — not the truth that is easy, or popular, or comfortable, but the one that arises from deep reflection and honest inquiry.

I may never know the impact of my work beyond this world, but that is not my concern.

It is for you to carry the torch of learning, to live courageously, to live with honor, and to pursue the path of wisdom, no matter where it leads.“

As Aristotle closes his final lecture, he looks to the horizon, knowing the future is uncertain.

Yet there is a peace within him, a clarity that his life has been a testament to something larger than himself.

“Fear is but a passing shadow.

What matters is how we stand in its presence.

We may not be remembered by all, but we can still live lives worth remembering.

Farewell, my students, and may you find the courage to face your own fears with honor and wisdom.“

Aristotle’s words are grounded in the understanding that fear is a part of life, but it does not have to dictate the shape of that life.

There is an acceptance that time is finite and that legacy is often less about grand accomplishments and more about the quiet courage to face life’s challenges, no matter how small or large they may seem.

In this way, Aristotle’s final words encourage us to not just think, but to act with courage, to carry the torch of philosophy and to use that wisdom to shape the world around them, just as we ourselves are shaped by his teachings.

“Where would be the merit if heroes were never afraid?“

Alphonse Daudet, Tartarin de Tarascon (1872)

Above: French writer Alphonse Daudet (1840 – 1897)

Aristotle died in Chalcis, Euboea of natural causes later that same year, having named his student Antipater as his chief executor and leaving a will in which he asked to be buried next to his wife.

Aristotle left his works to Theophrastus, his successor as the head of the Lyceum, who in turn passed them down to Neleus of Scepsis in Asia Minor.

There, the papers remained hidden for protection until they were purchased by the collector Apellicon.

In the meantime, many copies of Aristotle’s major works had already begun to circulate and be used in the Lyceum of Athens, Alexandria, and later in Rome.

Above: Aristotle

Fast forward through the centuries, past the crumbling columns of Greece, past empires that rose and fell like the tides — until we reach another room, another trial, where the accused do not drink poison, but they do lose something all the same.

A gavel cracks against wood.

The sound echoes through the halls of the United States Senate.

A different kind of philosopher is on trial now, not by name, but in spirit.

The thinkers, the writers, the teachers, the questioners.

Joe McCarthy leans forward, eyes gleaming with the thrill of the hunt.

“Are you now, or have you ever been…?”

Above: The House of Un-American Activities Commission

The question is not truly about communism.

It is about obedience.

About fear.

“Fear is real and there is nothing you can do about it except to keep functioning, keep your hands and legs and body moving, your mind focused on the task at hand.“

Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle

Above: American novelist Alvah Bessie (1904 – 1985)

The journalist watches, his hands cold despite the heat of the lamps.

Edward R. Murrow knows the risk.

He knows what happens when men of principle do not stand up to fear.

His voice, steady but smoldering with rage, fills the room:

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.“

Above: American journalist Edward Roscoe Murrow (1908 – 1965)

McCarthyism, also known as the Second Red Scare, was the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s.

After the mid-1950s, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had spearheaded the campaign, gradually lost his public popularity and credibility after several of his accusations were found to be false.

Above: US Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908 – 1957)

The US Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren made a series of rulings on civil and political rights that overturned several key laws and legislative directives, and helped bring an end to the Second Red Scare. 

Above: US Chief Justice Earl Warren (1891 – 1974)

Historians have suggested since the 1980s that as McCarthy’s involvement was less central than that of others, a different and more accurate term should be used instead that more accurately conveys the breadth of the phenomenon, and that the term McCarthyism is, in the modern day, outdated.

Ellen Schrecker has suggested that Hooverism, after FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover, is more appropriate.

Above: Federal Bureau of Investigations Head John Edgar Hoover (1895 – 1972)

What became known as the McCarthy era began before McCarthy’s rise to national fame.

Following the breakdown of the wartime East-West alliance with the Soviet Union, and with many remembering the First Red Scare, President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order in 1947 to screen federal employees for possible association with organizations deemed “totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive“, or advocating “to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means“.

Above: US President Harry S. Truman (1884 – 1972)

The following year, the Czechoslovak coup (February 1948) by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia heightened concern in the West about Communist parties seizing power and the possibility of subversion.

In 1949, a high-level State Department official was convicted of perjury in a case of espionage.

The Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb (29 August 1949).

Above: The first Soviet atomic bomb, RDS-1

The Korean War started the next year, significantly raising tensions and fears of impending Communist upheavals in the United States.

Above: Scene from the Korean War (1950 – 1953)

In a speech in February 1950, McCarthy claimed to have a list of members of the Communist Party USA working in the State Department, which attracted substantial press attention, and the term McCarthyism was published for the first time in late March of that year in The Christian Science Monitor, along with a political cartoon by Herblock in The Washington Post.

Above: Symbol of the Communist Party USA

The term has since taken on a broader meaning, describing the excesses of similar efforts to crack down on alleged “subversive” elements.

In the early 21st century, the term is used more generally to describe reckless and unsubstantiated accusations of treason and far-left extremism, along with demagogic personal attacks on the character and patriotism of political adversaries.

The primary targets for persecution were government employees, prominent figures in the entertainment industry, academics, left-wing politicians, and labor union activists.

Suspicions were often given credence despite inconclusive and questionable evidence, and the level of threat posed by a person’s real or supposed leftist associations and beliefs was often exaggerated.

Many people suffered loss of employment and the destruction of their careers and livelihoods as a result of the crackdowns on suspected communists, and some were outright imprisoned.

Most of these reprisals were initiated by trial verdicts that were later overturned, laws that were later struck down as unconstitutional, dismissals for reasons later declared illegal or actionable, and extra-judiciary procedures, such as informal blacklists by employers and public institutions, that would come into general disrepute, though by then many lives had been ruined.

The most notable examples of McCarthyism include the investigations of alleged communists that were conducted by Senator McCarthy, and the hearings conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Following the end of the Cold War (1947 – 1991), unearthed documents revealed substantial Soviet spy activity in the United States, though many of the agents were never properly identified by Senator McCarthy.

Above: NATO (blue) vs. the Warsaw Pact (red)

President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 9835 of 21 March 1947, required that all federal civil service employees be screened for “loyalty“.

The order said that one basis for determining disloyalty would be a finding of “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association” with any organization determined by the attorney general to be “totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive” or advocating or approving the forceful denial of constitutional rights to other persons or seeking “to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means“.

Above: Coat of arms of the United States of America

The historical period that came to be known as the McCarthy era began well before Joseph McCarthy’s own involvement in it.

Many factors contributed to McCarthyism, some of them with roots in the First Red Scare (1917 – 1920), inspired by communism’s emergence as a recognized political force and widespread social disruption in the United States related to unionizing and anarchist activities.

Above: “Step by Step” by Sidney Greene (1919)

Owing in part to its success in organizing labor unions and its early opposition to fascism, and offering an alternative to the ills of capitalism during the Great Depression, the Communist Party of the United States increased its membership through the 1930s, reaching a peak of about 75,000 members in 1940 – 1941. 

While the United States was engaged in World War II and allied with the Soviet Union, the issue of anti-communism was largely muted.

With the end of World War II, the Cold War began almost immediately, as the Soviet Union installed communist puppet régimes in areas it had occupied across Central and Eastern Europe.

Above: Flag of the Soviet Union (1922 – 1991)

In a March 1947 address to Congress, Truman enunciated a new foreign policy doctrine that committed the United States to opposing Soviet geopolitical expansion.

This doctrine came to be known as the Truman Doctrine.

It guided United States support for anti-communist forces in Greece and later in China and elsewhere.

The Truman Doctrine is an US foreign policy that pledges American support for democratic nations against authoritarian threats.

The doctrine originated with the primary goal of countering the growth of the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War.

Above: The political situation in Europe during the Cold War after 1948

It was announced to Congress by US President Harry S. Truman on 12 March 1947 and further developed on 4 July 1948, when he pledged to oppose the Communist rebellions in Greece and Soviet demands from Turkey.

Above: Scene from the Greek Civil War (1945 – 1949)

Above: The Turkish Straits crisis (1936 – 1946) was a Cold War-era territorial conflict between the Soviet Union and Turkey.

Turkey had remained officially neutral throughout most of the Second World War.

After the war ended, Turkey was pressured by the Soviet government to institute joint military control of passage through the Turkish Straits, which connected the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

When the Turkish government refused, tensions in the region rose, leading to a Soviet show of force and demands for territorial concessions along the Georgia – Turkey border.

This intimidation campaign was intended to preempt American influence or naval presence in the Black Sea, as well as to weaken Turkey’s government and pull it into the Soviet sphere of influence.

The Straits crisis was a catalyst, along with the Greek Civil War, for the creation of the Truman Doctrine.

At its climax, the dispute would motivate Turkey to turn to the United States for protection through NATO membership.

Above: Flag of Türkiye

More generally, the Truman Doctrine implied US support for other nations threatened by Moscow.

It led to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949.

Above: NATO flag

Historians often use Truman’s speech to Congress on 12 March 1947, to date the start of the Cold War.

Truman told Congress that:

“It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” 

Truman contended that because totalitarian regimes coerced free peoples, they automatically represented a threat to international peace and the national security of the United States.

Truman argued that if Greece and Turkey did not receive the aid, they would inevitably fall out of the United States’ sphere of influence and into the Communist Bloc, with grave consequences throughout the region.

The Truman Doctrine was informally extended to become the basis of American Cold War policy throughout Europe and around the world. 

It shifted US policy toward the Soviet Union from a wartime alliance to containment of Soviet expansion, as advocated by diplomat George F. Kennan.

Above: American diplomat George Frost Kennan (1904 – 2005)

Although the Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley affairs had raised the issue of Soviet espionage in 1945, events in 1949 and 1950 sharply increased the sense of threat in the United States related to communism.

Above: Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko (1919 – 1982)

Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko was a cipher clerk for the Soviet embassy to Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, and a lieutenant of the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU).

He defected on 5 September 1945, three days after the end of World War II, with 109 documents on the USSR’s espionage activities in the West.

In response, Canada’s Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, called a royal commission to investigate espionage in Canada.

Above: Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874 – 1950)

Gouzenko exposed Soviet intelligence’s efforts to steal nuclear secrets as well as the technique of planting sleeper agents.

The “Gouzenko Affair” is often credited as a triggering event of the Cold War, with historian Jack Granatstein stating it was “the beginning of the Cold War for public opinion” and journalist Robert Fulford writing he was “absolutely certain the Cold War began in Ottawa“. 

Granville Hicks described Gouzenko’s actions as having “awakened the people of North America to the magnitude and the danger of Soviet espionage“.

Above: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Above: American spy Elizabeth Bentley (1908 – 1963)

Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was an American NKVD spymaster, who was recruited from within the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

She served the Soviet Union as the primary handler of multiple highly placed moles within both the United States Federal Government and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) from 1938 to 1945.

Above: Emblem of the OSS (1942 – 1945)

She defected by contacting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and debriefing about her espionage activities.

Bentley became widely known after testifying as a prosecution witness in a number of trials and before the United States Congress’ House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Bentley was subsequently paid by the FBI for both her assistance in counterespionage investigations and her testimony before Congressional subcommittees.

Bentley exposed two spy networks and ultimately accused more than 80 American citizens of both treason and espionage for a foreign power.

The Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb in 1949, earlier than many analysts had expected, raising the stakes in the Cold War.

Above: This chart from September 1949 shows the United States Weather Bureau’s prediction for where the Soviet Union first tested its atomic bomb in 1949.

That same year, Mao Zedong’s Communist army gained control of mainland China despite heavy American financial support of the opposing Kuomintang.

Above: Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976)

In 1950, the Korean War began, pitting US, UN, and South Korean forces against Communists from North Korea and China.

Above: Scene from the Korean War

During the following year, evidence of increased sophistication in Soviet Cold War espionage activities was found in the West.

In January 1950, Alger Hiss, a high-level State Department official, was convicted of perjury.

Hiss was in effect found guilty of espionage.

The statute of limitations had run out for that crime, but he was convicted of having perjured himself when he denied that charge in earlier testimony before the HUAC.

Above: US government official Alger Hiss (1904 – 1996)

Alger Hiss was an American government official accused in 1948 of having spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

The statute of limitations had expired for espionage, but he was convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950.

Before the trial, Hiss was involved in the establishment of the United Nations, both as a US State Department official and as a UN official.

In later life, he worked as a lecturer and author.

Above: Flag of the United Nations

On 3 August 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party USA member, testified under subpoena before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that Hiss had secretly been a Communist while in federal service.

Hiss categorically denied the charge and subsequently sued Chambers for libel.

During the pretrial discovery process of the libel case, Chambers produced new evidence allegedly indicating that he and Hiss had been involved in espionage.

A federal grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury.

After a mistrial due to a hung jury, Hiss was tried a second time, and in January 1950 he was found guilty and received two concurrent five-year sentences, of which he eventually served three and a half years.

Above: US writer/spy Whittaker Chambers (1901 – 1961)

Arguments about the case and the validity of the verdict took center stage in broader debates about the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States. 

Since Hiss’s conviction, statements by involved parties and newly exposed evidence have added to the dispute.

In the 1990s, two former senior Soviet military officers responsible for the Soviet Union’s military intelligence archives stated, following a search of those archives, that the “Russian intelligence service has no documents proving that Alger Hiss cooperated with our service somewhere or anywhere“, and that Hiss “never had any relationship with Soviet intelligence“. 

The 1995 Venona papers provided evidence for the theory that Hiss was a Soviet spy. 

(The Venona project was a US counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service and later absorbed by the National Security Agency (NSA), that ran from 1943 until 1980.

It was intended to decrypt messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. 

Initiated when the Soviet Union was an ally of the US, the program continued during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was considered an enemy.

During the 37-year duration of the Venona project, the Signal Intelligence Service decrypted and translated approximately 3,000 messages. 

The signals intelligence yield included discovery of the Cambridge Five espionage ring in the United Kingdom and also of Soviet espionage of the Manhattan Project in the US, Project Enormous.

Some of the espionage was undertaken to support the Soviet atomic bomb project. 

The Venona project remained secret for more than 15 years after it concluded.

Some of the decoded Soviet messages were not declassified and published by the US until 1995.)

Above: Codebreakers of the Venona Project

Author Anthony Summers argued in 2000 that since many relevant files continue to be unavailable, the Hiss controversy will continue to be debated, with political divisions marking belief in Hiss’s innocence or guilt. 

Hiss himself maintained his innocence until his death in 1996.

Above: Alger Hiss

In Britain, Klaus Fuchs confessed to committing espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union while working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the War. 

Above: German physicist/spy Klaus Fuchs (1911 – 1988)

Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who supplied information from the American, British, and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II.

While at the Los Alamos Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons and, later, early models of the hydrogen bomb.

After his conviction in 1950, he served nine years in prison in the United Kingdom, then migrated to East Germany where he resumed his career as a physicist and scientific leader.

Post Cold War declassified information states that the Russians freely acknowledged that Fuchs gave them the fission bomb.

Above: “Trinity“, the first nuclear test explosion (16 July 1945)

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested in 1950 in the United States on charges of stealing atomic bomb secrets for the Soviets, and were executed in 1953.

Above: American spies Ethel (1915 – 1953) and Julius Rosenberg (1918 – 1953)

Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg (née Greenglass) were an American married couple who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, including providing top secret information about American radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and nuclear weapon designs.

Convicted of espionage in 1951, they were executed by the federal government of the United States in 1953 using New York’s state execution chamber in Sing Sing in Ossining, New York, becoming the first American civilians to be executed for such charges and the first to be executed during peacetime. 

For decades, many people, including the Rosenbergs’ sons, have maintained that Ethel was innocent of spying and have sought an exoneration on her behalf from multiple US presidents.

Other forces encouraged the rise of McCarthyism.

The more conservative politicians in the United States had historically referred to progressive reforms, such as child labor laws and women’s suffrage, as “Communist” or “Red plots“, trying to raise fears against such changes.

They used similar terms during the 1930s and the Great Depression when opposing the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Many conservatives equated the New Deal with socialism or Communism, and thought the policies were evidence of too much influence by allegedly Communist policy makers in the Roosevelt administration. 

In general, the vaguely defined danger of “Communist influence” was a more common theme in the rhetoric of anti-communist politicians than was espionage or any other specific activity.

Above: US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945)

Senator McCarthy’s rise to power began on 9 February 1950.

A Democrat until 1944, McCarthy successfully ran for the US Senate in 1946 as a Republican.

After three largely undistinguished years in the Senate, McCarthy rose suddenly to national fame.

Above: Senator Joseph McCarthy

McCarthy’s involvement began publicly with a speech he made on Lincoln Day, 9 February 1950, to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia.

He brandished a piece of paper, which he claimed contained a list of known communists working for the State Department.

McCarthy is usually quoted as saying:

“I have here in my hand a list of 205 — a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.“

This speech resulted in a flood of press attention to McCarthy and helped establish his path to becoming one of the most recognized politicians in the United States.

Above: Wheeling, West Virginia, USA

The first recorded use of the term “McCarthyism” was in the Christian Science Monitor on 28 March 1950.

(“Their little spree with McCarthyism is no aid to consultation.”) 

The paper became one of the earliest and most consistent critics of the Senator. 

The next recorded use happened on the following day, in a political cartoon by Washington Post editorial cartoonist Herbert Block (Herblock).

The cartoon depicts four leading Republicans trying to push an elephant (the traditional symbol of the Republican Party) to stand on a platform atop a teetering stack of ten tar buckets, the topmost of which is labeled “McCarthyism“.

Block later wrote:

“Nothing was particularly ingenious about the term, which is simply used to represent a national affliction that can hardly be described in any other way.

If anyone has a prior claim on it, he is welcome to the word and to the junior senator from Wisconsin along with it.

I will also throw in a set of free dishes and a case of soap.“

A number of anti-Communist committees, panels, and “loyalty review boards” in federal, state, and local governments, as well as many private agencies, carried out investigations for small and large companies concerned about possible Communists in their work forces.

In Congress, the primary bodies that investigated Communist activities were the HUAC, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Between 1949 and 1954, a total of 109 investigations were carried out by these and other committees of Congress.

On 2 December 1954, the United States Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn McCarthy for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute“.

What happened between 9 February 1950 and 2 December 1954 was the rise and fall of Senator McCarthy.

McCarthyism was supported by a variety of groups, including the American Legion and various other anti-communist organizations.

One core element of support was a variety of militantly anti-communist women’s groups such as the American Public Relations Forum and the Minute Women of the U.S.A. 

These organized tens of thousands of housewives into study groups, letter-writing networks, and patriotic clubs that coordinated efforts to identify and eradicate what they saw as subversion.

Although right-wing radicals were the bedrock of support for McCarthyism, they were not alone.

A broad “coalition of the aggrieved” found McCarthyism attractive, or at least politically useful.

Common themes uniting the coalition were opposition to internationalism, particularly:

• the United Nations
• opposition to social welfare provisions, particularly the various programs established by the New Deal
• opposition to efforts to reduce inequalities in the social structure of the United States.

One focus of popular McCarthyism concerned the provision of public health services, particularly vaccination, mental health care services, and fluoridation, all of which were denounced by some to be communist plots to poison or brainwash the American people.

Such viewpoints led to collisions between McCarthyite radicals and supporters of public-health programs.

William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the influential conservative political magazine National Review, wrote a defense of McCarthy, McCarthy and his Enemies, in which he asserted that:

“McCarthyism is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.“

Above: US conservative William F. Buckley (1925 – 2008)

In addition, as Richard Rovere points out, many ordinary Americans became convinced that there must be “no smoke without fire” and lent their support to McCarthyism.

The Gallup poll found that at his peak in January 1954, 50% of the American public supported McCarthy, while 29% had an unfavorable opinion.

His support fell to 34% in June 1954.

Republicans tended to like what McCarthy was doing and Democrats did not, though McCarthy had significant support from traditional Democratic ethnic groups, especially Catholics, as well as many unskilled workers and small-business owners.

(McCarthy himself was a Catholic.)

He had very little support among union members and Jews.

Those who sought to justify McCarthyism did so largely through their characterization of Communism, and American Communists in particular.

Proponents of McCarthyism claimed that the CPUSA was so completely under Moscow’s control that any American Communist was a puppet of the Soviet intelligence services.

This view, if restricted to the Communist Party’s leadership is supported by recent documentation from the archives of the KGB as well as post-war decodes of wartime Soviet radio traffic from the Venona Project, showing that Moscow provided financial support to the CPUSA and had significant influence on CPUSA policies.

Above: Emblem of the KGB

J. Edgar Hoover commented in a 1950 speech:

“Communist members, body and soul, are the property of the Party.“

According to historian Richard G. Powers, McCarthy added “bogus specificity” to “sweeping accusations“, gaining support among “countersubversive anticommunists” on one hand, who sought to find and punish perceived communists.

On the other hand, “liberal anticommunists” believed that the Communist Party was “despicable and annoying” but ultimately politically irrelevant.

President Harry Truman, who pursued the anti-Soviet Truman Doctrine, called McCarthy “the greatest asset the Kremlin has” by “torpedoing the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States“.

Historian Landon R. Y. Storrs writes that the CPUSA’s “secretiveness, its authoritarian internal structure, and the loyalty of its leaders to the Kremlin were fundamental flaws that help explain why and how it was demonized.

On the other hand, most American Communists were idealists attracted by the party’s militance against various forms of social injustice.”

Furthermore, based on later declassified evidence:

“The paradoxical lesson from several decades of scholarship is that the same organization that inspired democratic idealists in the pursuit of social justice also was secretive, authoritarian and morally compromised by ties to the Stalin regime.“

Above: The Kremlin, Moscow, Russia

In the mid 20th century, this attitude was not confined to arch-conservatives.

In 1940, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ejected founding member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, saying that her membership in the Communist Party was enough to disqualify her as a civil libertarian.

In the government’s prosecutions of Communist Party members under the Smith Act, the prosecution case was based not on specific actions or statements by the defendants, but on the premise that a commitment to violent overthrow of the government was inherent in the doctrines of Marxism–Leninism.

Passages of the CPUSA constitution that specifically rejected revolutionary violence were dismissed as deliberate deception.

In addition, it was often claimed that the Party didn’t allow members to resign.

Thus someone who had been a member for a short time decades previously could be thought a current member.

Above: The hammer and sickle Communism symbol

Many of the hearings and trials of McCarthyism featured testimony by former Communist Party members such as Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz, and Whittaker Chambers, speaking as expert witnesses.

Various historians and pundits have discussed alleged Soviet-directed infiltration of the US government and the possible collaboration of high US government officials.

Above: American activist/writer Louis F. Budenz (1891 – 1972)

Louis Francis Budenz was an American activist and writer.

He began as a labor activist and became a member of the Communist Party USA.

In 1945, Budenz renounced Communism and became a vocal anti-Communist, appearing as an expert witness at governmental hearings and writing about his experiences.

Estimating the number of victims of McCarthy is difficult.

The number imprisoned is in the hundreds.

Some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs. 

In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.

For the vast majority, both the potential for them to do harm to the nation and the nature of their Communist affiliation were tenuous.

After the extremely damaging “Cambridge Five” spy scandal (Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross), suspected homosexuality was also a common cause for being targeted by McCarthyism.

Above: Coat of arms of the University of Cambridge, England

The Cambridge Five was a ring of spies in the UK that passed information to the Soviet Union during the Second World War and the Cold War and was active from the 1930s until at least the early 1950s.

None of the known members were ever prosecuted for spying.

The number and membership of the ring emerged slowly, from the 1950s onwards.

The general public first became aware of the conspiracy in 1951 after the sudden flight of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess to the Soviet Union.

Above: British diplomat/spy Donald Maclean (1913 –1983)

Above: Guy Burgess (1911 – 1963)

Suspicion immediately fell on Kim Philby, who eventually fled to the Soviet Union in 1963.

Above: British spy Kim Philby (1912 – 1988) on Soviet stamp

Following Philby’s flight, British intelligence obtained confessions from Anthony Blunt and then John Cairncross, who have come to be seen as the last two of a group of five.

Their involvement was kept secret for many years.

Above: British art historian/spy Anthony Blunt (1907 – 1983)

Above: British civil servant/spy John Cairncross (1913 – 1995)

The group were recruited by the NKVD during their education at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s, but the exact timing is debated.

Blunt claimed they were not recruited as agents until after they had graduated.

A Fellow of Trinity College, Blunt was several years older than Burgess, Maclean and Philby.

He acted as a talent spotter and recruiter.

The five were convinced that the Marxism – Leninism of Soviet Communism was the best available political system and the best defence against Fascism.

All pursued successful careers in branches of the British government.

They passed large amounts of intelligence to the Soviets, so much so that the KGB became suspicious that at least some of it was false.

Perhaps as important as the specific state secrets was the demoralising effect to the British establishment of their slow unmasking and the mistrust in British security this caused in the United States.

Many others have also been accused of membership in the Cambridge ring.

Above: Flag of the United Kingdom

The hunt for “sexual perverts“, who were presumed to be subversive by nature, resulted in over 5,000 federal workers being fired, and thousands were harassed and denied employment. 

Many have termed this aspect of McCarthyism the “lavender scare“.

Homosexuality was classified as a psychiatric disorder in the 1950s. 

However, in the context of the highly politicized Cold War environment, homosexuality became framed as a dangerous, contagious social disease that posed a potential threat to state security. 

As the family was believed to be the cornerstone of American strength and integrity, the description of homosexuals as “sexual perverts” meant that they were both unable to function within a family unit and presented the potential to poison the social body.

This era also witnessed the establishment of widely spread FBI surveillance intended to identify homosexual government employees.

The McCarthy hearings and according “sexual pervert” investigations can be seen to have been driven by a desire to identify individuals whose ability to function as loyal citizens had been compromised. 

McCarthy began his campaign by drawing upon the ways in which he embodied traditional American values to become the self-appointed vanguard of social morality.

In the film industry, more than 300 actors, authors and directors were denied work in the US through the unofficial Hollywood blacklist.

Blacklists were at work throughout the entertainment industry, in universities and schools at all levels, in the legal profession, and in many other fields.

Above: Members of the Hollywood Ten and their families in 1950, protesting the impending incarceration of the Ten

The first systematic Hollywood blacklist was instituted on 15 November 1947, the day after ten left-wing screenwriters and directors were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

The ten men — Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo — had been subpoenaed by the committee in late September to testify about their Communist affiliations and associates. 

The contempt citation included a criminal charge that led to a highly publicized trial and conviction, with a maximum of one year in jail in addition to a $1,000 fine ($12,700 today).

The Congressional action prompted a group of studio executives, acting under the aegis of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, to suspend without pay these ten film artists – “The Hollywood Ten” – and to pledge that “thereafter no Communists or other subversives would ‘knowingly’ be employed in Hollywood“. 

The blacklist eventually expanded beyond ten into the hundreds.

On 22 June 1950, a pamphlet-style book entitled Red Channels was published.

Focused on the field of broadcasting, it identified 151 entertainment industry professionals as “Red Fascists and their sympathizers” who had infiltrated radio and television. 

It was not long before those named, along with a host of other artists, were barred from employment in the entertainment field.

Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television was an anti-Communist document published in the United States at the start of the 1950s.

Issued by the right-wing journal Counterattack, the pamphlet-style book names 151 actors, writers, musicians, broadcast journalists, and others in the context of purported Communist manipulation of the entertainment industry.

Some of the 151 were already being denied employment because of their political beliefs, history, or association with suspected subversives. 

Red Channels effectively placed the rest on a blacklist.

A port-security program initiated by the Coast Guard shortly after the start of the Korean War required a review of every maritime worker who loaded or worked aboard any American ship, regardless of cargo or destination.

As with other loyalty-security reviews of McCarthyism, the identities of any accusers and even the nature of any accusations were typically kept secret from the accused.

Nearly 3,000 seamen and longshoremen lost their jobs due to this program alone.

The nation was by no means united behind the policies and activities that have come to be associated with McCarthyism.

The critics of various aspects of McCarthyism included many figures not generally noted for their liberalism.

In his overridden veto of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, President Truman wrote:

“In a free country, we punish men for the crimes they commit, but never for the opinions they have.“

Truman also unsuccessfully vetoed the Taft–Hartley Act, which among other provisions denied trade unions National Labor Relations Board protection unless union leaders signed affidavits swearing they were not and had never been Communists.

In 1953, after he left office, Truman criticized the contemporary Eisenhower administration:

It is now evident that the present Administration has fully embraced, for political advantage, McCarthyism.

I am not referring to the Senator from Wisconsin.

He is only important in that his name has taken on the dictionary meaning of the word.

It is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of the due process law.

It is the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism or security.

It is the rise to power of the demagogue who lives on untruth.

It is the spreading of fear and the destruction of faith in every level of society.”

On 1 June 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican, delivered a speech to the Senate she called a “Declaration of Conscience“.

In a clear attack upon McCarthyism, she called for an end to “character assassinations” and named “some of the basic principles of Americanism:

• the right to criticize
• the right to hold unpopular beliefs
• the right to protest
• the right of independent thought“.

She said:

“Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America.”

She decried “cancerous tentacles of ‘know nothing, suspect everything’ attitudes“. 

Above: US Senator Margaret Chase Smith (1897 – 1995)

Six other Republican senators — Wayne Morse, Irving M. Ives, Charles W. Tobey, Edward John Thye, George Aiken, and Robert C. Hendrickson — joined Smith in condemning the tactics of McCarthyism.

Above: Logo of the US Republican Party – the Grand Old Party

Elmer Davis, one of the most highly respected news reporters and commentators of the 1940s and 1950s, often spoke out against what he saw as the excesses of McCarthyism.

On one occasion he warned that many local anti-communist movements constituted a “general attack not only on schools and colleges and libraries, on teachers and textbooks, but on all people who think and write – in short, on the freedom of the mind“.

Above: American writer Elmer Davis (1890 – 1958)

In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision in Adler v. Board of Education, thus approving a law that allowed state loyalty review boards to fire teachers deemed “subversive“.

In his dissenting opinion, Justice William O. Douglas wrote:

“The present law proceeds on a principle repugnant to our society — guilt by association.

What happens under this law is typical of what happens in a police state.

Teachers are under constant surveillance.

Their pasts are combed for signs of disloyalty.

Their utterances are watched for clues to dangerous thoughts.“

One of the most influential opponents of McCarthyism was the famed CBS newscaster and analyst Edward R. Murrow.

Murrow had known fear before his famous See It Now episode that began the decline of the Senator.

Above: Edward R. Murrow

Murrow gained his first glimpse of fame during the March 1938 Anschluss, in which Adolf Hitler engineered the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.

Above: Deutschland (Germany) and Österreich (Austria) before the Anschluss (“Union“) of 12 March 1938

While Murrow was in Poland arranging a broadcast of children’s choruses, he got word from William L. Shirer of the annexation — and the fact that Shirer could not get the story out through Austrian state radio facilities.

Murrow immediately sent Shirer to London. 

Shirer flew from Vienna to Berlin, then Amsterdam, and finally to London, where he delivered an uncensored eyewitness account of the Anschluss.

Murrow then chartered the only transportation available, a 23-passenger plane, to fly from Warsaw to Vienna so he could take over for Shirer.

Above: American writer William L. Shirer (1904 – 1993)

At the request of CBS management in New York, Murrow and Shirer put together a European News Roundup of reaction to the Anschluss, which brought correspondents from various European cities together for a single broadcast.

Murrow reported live from Vienna, in the first on-the-scene news report of his career:

“This is Edward Murrow speaking from Vienna.

It’s now nearly 2:30 in the morning, and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived.“

Above: German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945)

The broadcast was considered revolutionary at the time.

Featuring multipoint, live reports transmitted by shortwave in the days before modern technology (and without each of the parties necessarily being able to hear one another), it came off almost flawlessly.

The special became the basis for World News Roundup —broadcasting’s oldest news series, which still runs each weekday morning and evening on the CBS Radio Network.

In September 1938, Murrow and Shirer were regular participants in CBS’s coverage of the crisis over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, which Hitler coveted for Germany and eventually won in the Munich Agreement.

Above: Adolf Hitler at Prague Castle, Czech Republic – 15 March 1939

Above: From left to right: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1869 – 1940), French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier (1884 – 1970), German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini (1883 – 1945) and Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano (1903 – 1944) pictured before signing the Munich Agreement (30 September 1938)

Their incisive reporting heightened the American appetite for radio news, with listeners regularly waiting for Murrow’s shortwave broadcasts, introduced by analyst H. V. Kaltenborn in New York saying:

“Calling Ed Murrow … come in Ed Murrow.”

Above: US radio commentator Hans von Kaltenborn (1878 – 1965)

During the following year, leading up to the outbreak of World War II, Murrow continued to be based in London.

William Shirer’s reporting from Berlin brought him national acclaim and a commentator’s position with CBS News upon his return to the United States in December 1940.

Shirer would describe his Berlin experiences in his best-selling 1941 book Berlin Diary.

When the war broke out in September 1939, Murrow stayed in London, and later provided live radio broadcasts during the height of the Blitz in London After Dark.

These live, shortwave broadcasts relayed on CBS electrified radio audiences as news programming never had:

Previous war coverage had mostly been provided by newspaper reports, along with newsreels seen in movie theaters.

Earlier radio news programs had simply featured an announcer in a studio reading wire service reports.

Murrow’s reports, especially during the Blitz, began with what became his signature opening, “This is London,” delivered with his vocal emphasis on the word this, followed by the hint of a pause before the rest of the phrase.

Murrow achieved celebrity status as a result of his war reports.

Above: German Luftwaffe Heinkel He 111 bomber flying over Wapping and the Isle of Dogs in the East End of London at the start of the Luftwaffe’s evening raids of 7 September 1940

They led to Murrow’s second famous catchphrase, at the end of 1940, with every night’s German bombing raid, Londoners who might not necessarily see each other the next morning often closed their conversations with “good night, and good luck“.

The future British monarch, Princess Elizabeth, said as much to the Western world in a live radio address at the end of the year, when she said:

“Good night, and good luck to you all.”

Above: British Queen Elizabeth II (1926 – 2022)

So, at the end of one 1940 broadcast, Murrow ended his segment with:

“Good night, and good luck.” 

When Murrow returned to the U.S. in 1941, CBS hosted a dinner in his honor on 2 December at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

1,100 guests attended the dinner, which the network broadcast. 

Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a welcome-back telegram, which was read at the dinner.

Above: Waldorf – Astoria Hotel, New York City, New York, USA

Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish gave an encomium that commented on the power and intimacy of Murrow’s wartime dispatches: 

“You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it.

You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew that the dead were our dead, were mankind’s dead.

You have destroyed the superstition that what is done beyond 3,000 miles of water is not really done at all.“

Above: American writer Archibald MacLeish (1892 – 1982)

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred less than a week after this speech.

The US entered the war as a combatant on the Allied side.

Above: Photograph taken from a Japanese plane during the torpedo attack on ships moored on both sides of Ford Island shortly after the beginning of the Pearl Harbor attack, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

(7 December 1941)

Murrow flew on 25 Allied combat missions in Europe during the war, providing additional reports from the planes as they droned on over Europe (recorded for delayed broadcast).

Murrow’s skill at improvising vivid descriptions of what was going on around or below him, derived in part from his college training in speech, aided the effectiveness of his radio broadcasts.

As hostilities expanded, Murrow expanded CBS News in London into what Harrison Salisbury described as “the finest news staff anybody had ever put together in Europe“.

The result was a group of reporters acclaimed for their intellect and descriptive power.

Above: American journalist Harrison Salisbury (1908 – 1993)

On 12 April 1945, Murrow and Bill Shadel were the first reporters at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.

He met emaciated survivors, children with identification tattoos, and “bodies stacked up like cordwood” in the crematorium.

In his report three days later, Murrow said:

I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald.

I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it.

For most of it I have no words….

If I’ve offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry.”

Above: Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Weimar, Germany

See It Now focused on a number of controversial issues in the 1950s, but it is best remembered as the show that criticized McCarthyism and the Red Scare, contributing, if not leading, to the political downfall of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

McCarthy had previously commended Murrow for his fairness in reporting.

On June 15, 1953, Murrow hosted The Ford 50th Anniversary Show, broadcast simultaneously on NBC and CBS and seen by 60 million viewers.

The broadcast closed with Murrow’s commentary covering a variety of topics, including the danger of nuclear war against the backdrop of a mushroom cloud.

Murrow also offered indirect criticism of McCarthyism, saying:

“Nations have lost their freedom while preparing to defend it, and if we in this country confuse dissent with disloyalty, we deny the right to be wrong.” 

On 20 October 1953, Murrow’s show See It Now aired an episode about the dismissal of Milo Radulovich, a former reserve Air Force lieutenant who was accused of associating with Communists.

The show was strongly critical of the Air Force’s methods, which included presenting evidence in a sealed envelope that Radulovich and his attorney were not allowed to open.

Above: US Air Force Lieutenant Milo Radulovich (1926 – 2007)

On 9 March 1954, See It Now aired another episode on the issue of McCarthyism, this one attacking Joseph McCarthy himself.

Titled “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy“, it used footage of McCarthy speeches to portray him as dishonest, reckless, and abusive toward witnesses and prominent Americans.

Murrow used excerpts from McCarthy’s own speeches and proclamations to criticize the senator and point out episodes where he had contradicted himself.

In his conclusion, Murrow said of McCarthy:

No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful.

It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly.

His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.

We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

We will not walk in fear, one of another.

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve.

We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.

There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities.

As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age.

We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies.

And whose fault is that?

Not really his.

He didn’t create this situation of fear:

He merely exploited it—and rather successfully. 

Cassius was right: 

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.“

Murrow offered McCarthy the chance to respond to the criticism with a full half-hour on See It Now.

McCarthy accepted the invitation and appeared on 6 April 1954.

In his response, McCarthy rejected Murrow’s criticism and accused him of being a Communist sympathizer.

[McCarthy also accused Murrow of being a member of the Industrial Workers of the World which Murrow denied.]

Above: Industrial Workers of the World logo

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is an international labor union founded in Chicago in 1905.

Its ideology combines general unionism with industrial unionism, as it is a general union, subdivided between the various industries which employ its members.

The philosophy and tactics of the IWW are described as “revolutionary industrial unionism“, with ties to socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist labor movements.

McCarthy also made an appeal to the public by attacking his detractors, stating:

Ordinarily, I would not take time out from the important work at hand to answer Murrow.

However, in this case I feel justified in doing so because Murrow is a symbol, a leader, and the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual Communists and traitors.”

Ultimately, McCarthy’s rebuttal served only to further decrease his already fading popularity.

Above: Senator McCarthy

In the program following McCarthy’s appearance, Murrow commented that the senator had “made no reference to any statements of fact that we made“.

The broadcast contributed to a nationwide backlash against McCarthy and is seen as a turning point in the history of television.

It provoked tens of thousands of letters, telegrams, and phone calls to CBS headquarters, running 15 to 1 in favor.

This broadcast has been cited as a key episode in bringing about the end of McCarthyism.

Above: Edward R. Murrow

In April 1954, McCarthy was also under attack in the Army – McCarthy hearings.

These hearings were televised live on the new American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network, allowing the public to view first-hand McCarthy’s interrogation of individuals and his controversial tactics.

In one exchange, McCarthy reminded the attorney for the Army, Joseph Welch, that he had an employee in his law firm who had belonged to an organization that had been accused of Communist sympathies.

In an exchange that reflected the increasingly negative public opinion of McCarthy, Welch rebuked the Senator:

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?

At long last, have you left no sense of decency?“

Above: American attorney Joseph N. Welch (1890 – 1960)

With the highly publicized Army – McCarthy hearings of 1954, and following the suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester C. Hunt that same year, McCarthy’s support and popularity faded.

Above: US Senator Lester C. Hunt (1892 – 1954)

An outspoken opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign, Hunt challenged McCarthy and his senatorial allies by championing a proposed law restricting Congressional immunity and allowing individuals to sue members of Congress for slanderous statements.

In June 1953, Hunt’s son was arrested in Washington DC, on charges of soliciting sex from an undercover male police officer (homosexual acts were prohibited by law at the time).

Some Republican senators, including McCarthy, threatened Hunt with prosecution of his son and wide publication of the event unless he abandoned plans to run for re-election and resigned immediately, which Hunt refused to do.

His son was convicted and fined on 6 October 1953.

On 15 April 1954, Hunt announced his intention to run for re-election.

He changed his mind, however, after McCarthy renewed the threat to use his son’s arrest against him.

On 19 June 1954, Hunt died by suicide in his Senate office.

His death dealt a serious blow to McCarthy’s image and was one of the factors that led to his censure by the Senate later in 1954.

Above: US Senator Lester C. Hunt

On 2 December 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy by a vote of 67 – 22, making him one of the few senators ever to be disciplined in this fashion.

He continued to rail against communism and socialism until his death at the age of 48 at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, on 2 May 1957, though doctors had not previously reported him to be seriously ill. 

His death certificate listed the cause of death as “Hepatitis, acute, cause unknown“, which some biographers say was caused or exacerbated by alcoholism.

Above: Tombstone of Joseph McCarthy, St. Mary’s Parish Church, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA

The 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck by George Clooney starred David Strathairn as broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow and contained archival footage of McCarthy.

On 25 Oct 1958, at a gathering entitled ‘A Salute to Edward R Murrow‘, Ed Murrow delivers a speech where he mentions Senator McCarthy among others.

Above: Murrow (David Strathairn) waits to speak as he is introduced by CBS News Director Sig Michaelson (Jeff Daniels), 5 October 1958, Good Night, and Good Luck, 2005

The film then reverts to 14 October 1953, in the CBS Studios, with on-screen titles explaining that McCarthy has claimed that there are over 200 Communists in the US government.

Fred Friendly (George Clooney) and the news team discuss the latest news stories for the forthcoming episodes, and Murrow declares that he wants to go after the American military, who have tried and convicted a member of the Air Force, Milo Radulovich, because his sister and father have been accused of being communist sympathizers.

Murrow mentions that the charges against Radulovich were in a sealed envelope and that nobody saw them, suggesting that they investigate the story to see if it is worth covering.

Above: Milo Radulovich

Five days later Friendly, Murrow, and Mickelson watch footage of CBS correspondent Joseph Wershba interviewing Milo Radulovich.

Mickelson criticizes the report as being unbalanced and accuses the reporter of editorializing.

Above: Joseph Wershba (Robert Dowdney Jr.), Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

Military men come to Friendly’s office, attempting to persuade him not to broadcast the story, but CBS goes ahead and the segment features on Murrow’s show See It Now.

The focus of the news team shifts to going after McCarthy himself.

In one clip, McCarthy accuses a man who was provided with an attorney by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1932 of being a Communist.

During the segment on McCarthy, Murrow personally invites the Senator on the show to defend the claims made about his corrupt influence.

As the story continues, Murrow challenges McCarthy’s questioning techniques, and the untruths he espouses in his hearings.

Murrow notes that the ACLU is not on the list that McCarthy claims it to be, and that it has in fact been commended by several US presidents.

Shirley reads out mostly favorable reports from the newspaper, but one journalist, O’Brien, accuses Hollenbeck, a CBS journalist, of being a “pinko“, meaning a communist sympathizer.

Above: Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise), Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

Don Hollenbeck (1905 – 1954) was a CBS newscaster, commentator, and associate of Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly.

He was the writer and producer of CBS Views the Press, a Peabody Award-winning radio show that critiqued powerful print journalists.

Hollenbeck was also a frequent critic of McCarthyism and was subject to a smear campaign for his supposed Communist leanings.

Hollenbeck was at one time employed by the newspaper PM.

Founded in 1940 by department store magnate Marshall Field III and published in New York, PM was a left-leaning newspaper.

Above: US businessman Marshall Field III (1893 – 1956)

It garnered accusations of being sympathetic to Communism even though it was critical of the Soviet Union for the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (Nazi – Soviet pact) and of the American Communist Party for supporting it.

The newspaper published work by:

• Ernest Hemingway 

Above: American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961)

• Erskine Caldwell

Above: American writer Erskine Caldwell (1903 – 1987)

• Weegee 

Above: US photographer Arthur Fellig (aka Weegee)(1899 – 1968)

• Margaret Bourke-White

Above: US photographer Margaret Bourke-White (1904 – 1971)

• Dr. Seuss

Above: US author/cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss)(1904 – 1991)

• Crockett Johnson 

Above: US cartoonist David Johnson Leisk (aka Crockett Johnson)(1906 – 1975)

• Walt Kelly

Above: American cartoonist Walt Kelly (1913 – 1973)

PM accepted no advertising, and dedicated itself to preventing “the little guy from being pushed around“. 

It ended up becoming a target for anti-communists, and went out of business in 1948.

Because of this affiliation, Hollenbeck was a target for columnist Jack O’Brian (1914 – 2000), a Joseph McCarthy supporter whose attacks appeared in the New York Journal-American (1937 – 1966) and other newspapers in the Hearst chain.

Hollenbeck died by suicide in 1954 after a tumultuous personal and professional life.

Above: Don Hollenbeck

The team is informed that the Air Force has reinstated the wrongfully terminated Radulovich.

McCarthy appears on the show on 6 April 1954, and addresses the camera directly without interruption, accusing Murrow of being a Communist, something that Murrow suspected would happen.

Above: Senator Joseph McCarthy

In the proceeding show, Murrow gives his response, where he unequivocally denies the accusation that he was a member of the Communist party and highlights that anyone who criticizes or opposes Senator McCarthy’s methods is accused of being a Communist.

From this point on, the tide turns on McCarthy and he himself is investigated, due to charges the Army has made against him and his Operation.

John Aaron later announces this in the newsroom, but the celebration is cut short when a phone call to Friendly informs the news team that Hollenbeck has committed suicide by gassing himself.

Footage is shown of the Army-McCarthy hearings, where a lawyer questions McCarthy’s sense of decency.

Above: Army – McCarthy hearings

Shortly after, CBS chief executive Paley speaks with Murrow and Friendly in his office and tells them they have lost one of their major sponsors, and as a result, he will only give them five more one-hour episodes and also move their slot from Tuesday night to Sunday afternoon.

Paley speaks to Friendly privately and informs him that he needs to fire some people.

Above: Fred Friendly (George Clooney), William Paley (Frank Langella) and Murrow, Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

At the same time, Mickelson calls Wershba and Shirley to his office.

He tells them that he knows that Wershba and Shirley are secretly married, due to CBS forbidding colleagues being married together, and with layoffs coming, he asks one of them to be one of the layoffs to save face.

Wershba volunteers to be let go.

Above: Wershba and Shirley (Patricia Clarkson), Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)

Murrow finishes his speech from the opening scene, extolling the importance of ideas and information, and that television’s potential of informing and enlightening its audience shouldn’t be discounted, else it will become “merely wires and lights in a box“.

Murrow concludes his speech with his iconic catchphrase “Good night, and good luck“.

“There are two ways of coping with fear:

One is to diminish the external danger.

The other is to cultivate Stoic endurance.

The latter can be reinforced, except where immediate action is necessary, by turning our thoughts away from the cause of fear.

The conquest of fear is of very great importance.

Fear is in itself degrading.

It easily becomes an obsession.

It produces hate of that which is feared and it leads headlong to excesses of cruelty.

Nothing has so beneficent an effect on human beings as security.

Fear, at present, overshadows the world.

If matters are to improve, the first and essential step is to find a way of diminishing fear.“

Bertrand Russell, Nobel Lecture: What Desires Are Politically Important? (11 December 1950)

Above: British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)

In the mid and late 1950s, the attitudes and institutions of McCarthyism slowly weakened.

Changing public sentiments heavily contributed to the decline of McCarthyism.

Above: Senator Joseph McCartney

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.

You are able to say to yourself:

“I lived through this horror.

I can take the next thing that comes along.”

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.“

Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living (1960)

Above: US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962)

I am reminded of one of television’s best monologues from the 2012 – 2014 series The Newsroom:

Will: It’s not the greatest country in the world, professor.

That’s my answer.

Moderator: You’re saying…

Will: Yes.

Moderator: Let’s talk about…

Will: [to Lewis] And with a straight face, you’re gonna tell students that America’s so star-spangled awesome, that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom?

Canada has freedom, Japan has freedom, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom.

So 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom.

Moderator: All right…

Will: And yeah, you, sorority girl.

Just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there’s some things you should know, and one of them is, there’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world.

We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force, and number 4 in exports.

We lead the world in only three categories:

• number of incarcerated citizens per capita
• number of adults who believe angels are real
• defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined – 25 of whom are allies.

Now, none of this is the fault of a 20 year old college student.

But you, nonetheless, are without a doubt a member of the worst, period, generation, period, ever, period, so when you ask, “What makes us the greatest country in the world?” I dunno know what the f… you’re talking about!

Yosemite? 

[Pause] 

It sure used to be.

We stood up for what was right.

We fought for moral reasons, we passed laws, struck down laws for moral reasons, we waged wars on poverty, not poor people.

We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors.

We put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest.

We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and we cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy.

We reached for the stars, acted like men.

We aspired to intelligence, we didn’t belittle it, it didn’t make us feel inferior.

We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in our last election, and we didn’t [sighs] we didn’t scare so easy.

We were able to be all these things, and to do all these things, because we were informed.

By great men, men who were revered.

First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.

America is not the greatest country in the world anymore. 

[to the moderator] Enough?”

Above: Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), The Newsroom

“Be not afraid of life.

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.“

William James, in “Is Life Worth Living?” The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897).

Above: American philosopher William James (1842 – 1910)

Fear is one of the most powerful tools of control.

It clouds judgment, fuels division, and keeps individuals and societies in a state of heightened anxiety.

Cognitive biases make us overestimate threats when we are constantly exposed to fearful stimuli — whether from sensationalized news, social media, or political rhetoric.

Perhaps this is why Rolf Dobelli recommends that a happier, calmer and wiser life is more possible when we stop reading the news so avidly as it destroys our peace of mind.

Fear narrows focus, making people more susceptible to extremism and less likely to question authority.

It thrives on uncertainty, pushing people toward reaction rather than reason.

Breaking free requires awareness, critical thinking and conscious resistance.

“Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of us.

To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear.

To build a world of justice, we must be just.

And how can we fight for liberty if we are not free in our own minds?

How can we ask others to sacrifice if we are not ready to do so?…

Only in true surrender to the interest of all can we reach that strength and independence, that unity of purpose, that equity of judgment which are necessary if we are to measure up to our duty to the future, as men of a generation to whom the chance was given to build in time a world of peace.“

Dag Hammarskjöld

Above: UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld (1905 – 1961)

Fear thrives where critical thinking is absent.

Both Aristotle and Murrow understood this — one through philosophy, the other through journalism.

Aristotle championed logos (reason) as a means to cut through emotion-driven narratives, while Murrow exposed how unchecked fear could erode democracy.

Fear is ancient, primal. Aristotle called it “a kind of pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future.”

It is not the present suffering that haunts us, but the specter of what might be — loss, failure, exile, insignificance, powerlessness.

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. 

Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.“

Marie Curie, as quoted in Our Precarious Habitat (1973)

Above: French chemist/physicist Marie Curie (1867 – 1934)

How do we resist fear today?

Who benefits from our fear?

Challenge the intent behind messages that incite panic.

Let us ask — not just what we fear, but who benefits from that fear.

Who wields it?

Who thrives in its wake?

And most of all, what is on the other side of fear, waiting for those bold enough to cross?

Perhaps it is not just courage that defeats fear but understanding.

“Fear is the most pointless emotion ever.

Something bad will either happen or it won’t.

Do everything you can to avoid it, sure, but after that, well, fear only punishes you for living in an imperfect universe.“

Sean Williams, All the Wrong Places

Above: Australian author Sean Williams

“Cui bono?” (“Who benefits?) — is a razor that slices through deception, exposing the hands that pull the strings of fear.

Though often attributed to Cincinnatus, the phrase finds its origins with the Roman statesman Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla, a jurist known for his relentless pursuit of justice.

Above: Roman dictator Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (519 – 430 BC)

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a Roman patrician, statesman, and military leader of the early Roman Republic who became a famous model of Roman virtue — particularly civic virtue — by the time of the late Republic.

Modern historians question some particulars of the story of Cincinnatus that was recounted in Livy‘s History of Rome and elsewhere, but it is usually accepted that Cincinnatus was a historical figure who served as suffect consul in 460 BC and as dictator in 458 BC and (possibly) again in 439 BC.

Above: Roman historian Titus Livius (aka Livy)(59 BC – AD 17)

The most famous story related to Cincinnatus occurs after his retirement from public service to a simple life of farming.

As Roman forces struggled to defeat the Aequi, Cincinnatus was summoned from his plough to assume complete control over the state.

After achieving a swift victory in 16 days, Cincinnatus relinquished power and its privileges, returning to labor on his farm. 

Cincinnatus’s success and his immediate resignation of near-absolute authority at the end of the crisis (traditionally dated to 458 BC) has often been cited as a model of selfless leadership, civic virtue, and service to the greater good.

Above: Cincinnatus

The story has also been seen as an exemplar of agrarian virtues like humility, modesty, and hard work. 

Cincinnatus was an opponent of the rights of the plebeians (the common citizens).

His son, Caeso Quinctius, caused the plebeians to fall into poverty when he violently opposed their desire to have a written code of equally enforced laws.

Above: Cincinnatus Leaves the Plough to Dictate Laws to Rome, Juan Antonio Ribera (1806)

Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla was a Roman politician.

He served as consul in 127 BC and censor at the following lustrum in 125 BC.

His first recorded office was that of tribune of the plebs in 137 BC. 

He was renowned for severity as a iudex (judge) and gained fame for formulating the question “Cui bono?” (“Who benefits?“) as a principle of criminal investigation. 

Cicero later popularized it, applying it to the intrigues of Roman politics.

And how fitting that it resurfaces here, in the labyrinth of fear we navigate.

Above: Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BC)

“Take the so-called politics of fear — the constant reference to risks, from hoodies on the street corner to international terrorism.

Whatever the truth of these risks and the best ways of dealing with them, the politics of fear plays on an assumption that people cannot bear the uncertainties associated with them.

Politics then becomes a question of who can better deliver an illusion of control.“

Mark Vernon

Who benefited from the Red Scare?

From the trial of Socrates?

Who benefits from fear today?

To ask cui bono is to break the spell, to see beyond the illusion of fear to the architects behind it.

It is, in essence, the first act of rebellion.

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.

Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave.

It is merely a loose application of the word.

Consider the flea! — incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.“

Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson

Above: US writer Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain)(1835 – 1910)

Seek Truth:

Diversify sources, verify claims and resist echo chambers.

Above: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes

“Fear is the product of ignorance, and in its initial stages it is not the product of wrong thinking.

It is basically instinctual, and is found dominating in the non-mental animal kingdom, as well as in the human kingdom…

But in the human, its power is increased potently through the powers of the mind, and through memory of past pain and grievance, and through anticipation of those we foresee, the power of fear is enormously aggravated by the thoughtform we ourselves have built of our own individual fears and phobias.

This thoughtform grows in power as we pay attention to it, for “energy follows thought”, till we become dominated by it.“

Alice Bailey, The Way of the Disciple

Above: English writer Alice Bailey (1880 – 1949)

Engage in Civil Discourse:

Fear isolates.

Dialogue builds understanding.

“Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly.

Men feared witches and burnt women.

It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.“

Louis Brandeis 

Above: American litigator Louis Brandeis (1856 – 1941)

Here are some contemporary examples of individuals and groups resisting fear-driven narratives:

• Countering Fear-Based Messaging:

Organizations like The Opportunity Agenda have conducted research to identify narratives that counter fear-based messaging and encourage embracing diversity as a foundational value.

Their recommendations include emphasizing the strength found in diversity and highlighting shared values of respect and dignity.

• Challenging Fear Narratives:

Individuals, such as Crystal Paine, have discussed the importance of rebelling against fear narratives by choosing hope, living fully in the present, and fostering meaningful conversations.

In her podcast, she emphasizes the need to rise above fear-mongering and engage in productive dialogue.

Above: Crystal Paine

• Promoting Solidarity over Fear:

Research by the Migration Policy Institute highlights efforts to shift public narratives from fear to solidarity regarding refugees and asylum seekers.

They discuss policies and interventions aimed at countering negative perceptions and promoting social cohesion

These are ordinary people who have looked at the world and who, like Mark Twain challenged:

“When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — ‘No, you move.’“

Above: Mark Twain

“We will not walk in fear, one of another….

We are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”

Ed Murrow

Above: Ed Murrow

Fear is a universal human experience, but its intensity and influence vary depending on cultural, political and historical contexts.

Some countries have become particularly vulnerable to fear-driven narratives, often due to factors like economic instability, political polarization, media sensationalism, or external threats.

“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance….

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want… everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium.

It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.“

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Above: FDR Memorial Wall, Washington DC, USA

Here are a few examples:

United States – Fear-driven politics are deeply embedded in American society, from post-9/11 terrorism anxieties to divisive culture wars and economic fears.

Political campaigns often leverage fear — of immigrants, crime, or government overreach — to mobilize voters.

The media, both mainstream and social, amplifies these fears, making it difficult for nuanced discussions to take hold.

Above: Flag of the United States of America

“I saw the white of fear in America’s eyes.

We don’t fear the way we should fear.

Our sense of danger should be at the height of our abuse.“

Giannina Braschi, “United States of Banana“

Above: Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi

Russia – The Russian government has long used fear as a tool to maintain control.

State propaganda portrays the West as an existential threat, justifying repression and military aggression.

Citizens are kept in a state of heightened alert, making resistance to state narratives more difficult.

Above: Flag of Russia

“The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires, so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him “better“.“

Friedrich Nietzsche, Geneology of Morals

Above: German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

China – Fear is institutionalized through mass surveillance, censorship, and the suppression of dissent.

The government fosters fear of foreign influence while cracking down on internal resistance, reinforcing the idea that stability can only be maintained through strict control.

Above: Flag of China

“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.“

John F. Kennedy

Above: US President John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963)

North Korea – Perhaps the most extreme case, North Korea’s entire system is built on fear — of the state, of external enemies, and of internal betrayal.

The regime uses fear to ensure loyalty and obedience, keeping its citizens isolated from alternative perspectives.

Above: Flag of North Korea

“It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.“

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1954)

Above: American writer Eric Hoffer (1902 – 1983)

India – Rising religious and ethnic tensions have been exacerbated by fear-based narratives, particularly around nationalism and identity politics.

Social media amplifies fear of “the other“, leading to communal violence and political polarization.

Above: Flag of India

“They are the driven crowds that makes the army of the authoritarian overlord.

They are the stuffing of conservatism …

Mediocrity is their god.

They fear the stranger, they fear the new idea.

They are afraid to live, and scared to die.“

Donald Ewen Cameron as quoted by Harvey Weinstein in Father, Son and CIA

Above: Scottish psychologist Donald Ewan Cameron (1901 – 1967)

Brazil – Crime, corruption, and economic instability have made fear a dominant theme in Brazilian politics.

Politicians often campaign on promises of cracking down on crime and “restoring order”, sometimes at the cost of civil liberties.

Above: Flag of Brazil

“Fear is the foundation of most governments.“

John Adams, Thoughts on Government (1776)

Above: US President John Adams (1735 – 1826)

Yes, fear is universal, but it manifests differently.

Some countries actively resist fear through strong institutions, free press, and public discourse.

In places like Scandinavia, Canada, and New Zealand, fear-mongering is less effective because of higher trust in government, social safety nets, and a culture of dialogue rather than division.

However, no country is immune — fear can take hold wherever uncertainty and insecurity exist.

“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.“

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment 

Above: Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881)

Türkiye is a complex case — it is neither entirely ruled by fear nor entirely free from it.

The country has a rich history of resilience and vibrant public discourse, but fear does play a significant role in its political and social climate.

Above: (in green) Türkiye

“Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.“

Henry David Thoreau, Journal (September 7, 1851)

Above: American writer Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)

Political Fear & Repression

The Turkish government has cracked down on opposition voices, particularly after the 2016 coup attempt.

Journalists, academics, and activists have been jailed, and media outlets critical of the government have been shut down.

This has created a climate where people are cautious about expressing dissenting views, especially on social media.

Above: 15 July 2016 coup attempt tank, Ankara, Türkiye

“From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved.

It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.“

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Above: Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 – 1527)

Fear of Instability

Given Türkiye’s history of military coups, economic crises, and regional conflicts, many citizens prioritize stability over radical change.

This often leads to an acceptance of strong leadership, even at the cost of democratic freedoms.

“Quite an experience, to live in fear, isn’t it?

That’s what it is to be a slave.“

Blade Runner (1982), Hampton Fancher and David Peoples

Fear of Terrorism & Conflict

Due to its geopolitical position, Türkiye has been affected by terrorism, conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and tensions with Kurdish separatist groups.

These fears have been used politically to justify military operations and domestic crackdowns.

“The best political weapon is the weapon of terror.

Cruelty commands respect.

Men may hate us.

But, we don’t ask for their love – only for their fear.“

Heinrich Himmler

Above: German commander Heinrich Himmler

Economic Fear

Inflation and currency devaluation have made economic concerns a major source of anxiety.

Many people fear unemployment, rising living costs, and economic instability, which impacts daily life and long-term planning.

Above: Turkish liras

“Fear, imposed from the top down- from shareholder to senior executive, senior executive to executive, and so on down the chain right to the maximally squeezed Manpower temp- is the dominant trope in the corporate culture.

One of the simplest ways to instill this fear is to make employees acutely aware that their jobs are never safe.“

Mark Ames, Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion

Above: American journalist Mark Ames

Areas where fear is resisted in Türkiye:

Resilient Civil Society

Despite challenges, Türkiye has a strong culture of activism.

From Gezi Park protests to women’s rights movements, many people continue to resist fear-based narratives and fight for freedoms.

Above: Gezi Park protests, Istanbul, Türkiye, 28 May – 20 August 2013

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.

The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.“

Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (1995)

Above: South African President Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013)

A Dynamic Media & Artistic Scene

While mainstream media is largely government-controlled, independent journalists, authors, filmmakers, and social media personalities continue to challenge official narratives and expose truths.

Above: Some Turkish newspapers

Everyday Defiance

Even in a climate where people are wary of speaking openly, private conversations, humor, and small acts of defiance show that fear does not fully control the public psyche.

Turks are known for their political satire, resilience, and ability to discuss sensitive topics in coded ways.

Türkiye experiences both fear and defiance — some sectors of society are deeply affected by fear-based governance, while others push back in creative and courageous ways.

Fear may shape parts of public life, but it does not define Türkiye entirely.

“I must say a word about fear.

It is life’s only true opponent.

Only fear can defeat life.“

Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Above: Canadian writer Yann Martel

Morrow knew what happens when men of principle do not stand up to fear.

Edward R. Murrow’s battle against McCarthyism was a stand against fear-based manipulation — something that remains deeply relevant.

Today’s media, much like in his time, can be a tool for truth or a weapon of division.

The cycle of outrage, misinformation, and fearmongering keeps societies polarized and uncertain.

Murrow’s call for journalistic integrity reminds us that resisting fear requires courage, critical thinking and truth-seeking.

His legacy challenges us to hold power accountable and reject narratives designed to control us through fear.

Edward R. Murrow’s legacy of confronting fear-based narratives in media is profoundly relevant today.

Above: Edward Murrow

A contemporary parallel can be seen in the efforts of local non-profit newsrooms in California, such as Mission Local and Fresnoland, which are actively combating misinformation that incites fear among immigrant communities.

Following immigration raids in Kern County, these outlets have proactively provided accurate information and resources to dispel rumors and reduce panic.

Their commitment to truth and public service mirrors Murrow’s dedication to journalistic integrity during the McCarthy era.

Additionally, the current media landscape faces challenges reminiscent of Murrow’s time, with concerns over press freedom and the role of journalism in holding power accountable.

The anticipation of a second Trump term has heightened fears among journalists about potential threats to press freedom, echoing the adversarial climate Murrow navigated.

These examples underscore the enduring importance of Murrow’s principles in today’s media environment, highlighting the need for courage and integrity in journalism to confront and dispel fear-driven narratives.

“Anything which is accomplished through making other people afraid is wrong.

Anything which deprives other people of their dignity is wrong.“

Alexander D. Shimkin

Above: US war correspondent Alex Shimkin (1944 – 1972)

Aristotle would have understood.

Aristotle, ever the advocate of balance, saw fear not as an enemy but as a force to be tempered.

Courage, he argued, lies between cowardice — where fear paralyzes action — and recklessness — where fear is ignored entirely.

“Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy.

If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely.

Fear makes you always, always hold something back.“

Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

Above: American writer Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982)

True wisdom (phronesis) demands that we recognize fear but not let it govern us.

Were he alive today, Aristotle would caution against fear-driven media and politics, where hysteria often supplants rational discourse.

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.“

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756)

Above: Irish philosopher Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797)

Aristotle would remind us that the antidote to fear is reasoned reflection, moral fortitude, and civic courage — choosing deliberation over reaction, action over passivity.

Aristotle’s eudaimonia — a life of purpose, reason, and virtue —stands in direct opposition to a life ruled by fear.

Fear narrows our world, keeping us reactive, divided, and uncertain.

But true fulfillment lies in embracing reason over hysteria, community over isolation, and courage over submission.

“I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer. 

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.“

Frank Herbert, Dune

Above: American writer Frank Herbert (1920 – 1986)

To resist fear is not merely to survive — it is to flourish.

It means thinking critically, questioning those who profit from our anxiety, and choosing resilience.

When we reject fear’s tyranny, we reclaim our ability to live fully, thoughtfully, and freely.

“He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.“

Aristotle

Fear shrinks our world, keeping us in a state of reaction — divided, uncertain, and easily manipulated.

But Aristotle’s eudaimonia offers another way:

A life driven by reason, virtue and meaningful action.

True flourishing comes not from mere survival but from embracing wisdom over hysteria, connection over isolation, and courage over submission.

To resist fear is to reclaim our ability to live fully and freely.

It demands that we think critically, stand firm in truth and build resilience.

In doing so, we not only defy fear but rise beyond it.

Above: The Scream, Edvard Munch (1893)

“Mankind must not go back to hiding in fear. 

No one else will protect us.

We must stand up for ourselves.

While the rest of mankind dwells in the light, we must stand in the darkness to fight, so that others may live in a sane and normal world.“

SCP Foundation

Murrow feared a nation surrendering its soul to hysteria.

Aristotle feared the fate of Socrates repeating itself.

And I, my dear readers, fear the vagrancies of an unjust system, the uncertainty of stepping into the unknown.

Yet fear, once named, loses its shadows.

To see it clearly is to strip it of its power.

“Nothing is terrible except fear itself.“

Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum

Above: Englisher philosopher Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626)

And now, my dear reader, the question turns to you.

What is it that you fear?

The tyranny of governments?

The judgment of men?

The quiet, creeping terror that your dreams may never take flight?

The fear that the life you wish to live will always be dictated by others?

And if so — will you, like Aristotle, like Murrow, like those who came before you — find the courage to stand?

“The past is written, but the future is left for us to write, and we have powerful tools:

Openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity.

All they have is secrecy and fear.

And fear is the great destroyer.“

Michael Chabon, Star Trek: Picard