You can read McCarthy's notes from that visit here. He doesn't really write about the deaths but about daily life under occupation and what he sees as its counter-productive effects.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Thank you for the material. He had a nice writing style, quite readable. Anyway, I understand that he could have some experience, where he lost hope and support for USSR and the Warsaw Pact Countries, but going to the opposite ideological side is hard to imagine, since he was not young that time, I think. Anyway, such ideological U turn seems not so rare to me, and I experienced one myself.
I agree. And his writing in that one letter is so brief that while it does portray what was maybe an important moment in the evolution of his views towards the USSR, it really doesn't give much insight into his political thinking overall.
I understand leaving behind something you were inculcated into growing up, especially the dominant culture wherever you are. We all pick things up as kids that we drop as soon as we really think them through.
But I really don't understand that kind of hard swing to the right later in life, especially for private citizens.
It is important to recognise that this ideological U-turn did not happen in a vacuum, it was embedded the larger context of the history of popular US sentiment during the Cold War. From the fact that in his notes he explicitely selects the quote "Lenin awake" from the protest signs, it follows that at the time he still was a communist, just not a supporter of the Soviet intervention. His gradual shift towards republicanism coincides with the end of the big mass movements about civil rights and Vietnam in the 1970s, the beginning of the Reagan era, and the time when the Soviet economy began showing its first obvious signs of deterioration about a decade before the collapse. It came at a point in time where millions of other US-Americans and Europeans made a similar shift.
His gradual shift towards republicanism coincides with the end of the big mass movements about civil rights and Vietnam in the 1970s, the beginning of the Reagan era, and the time when the Soviet economy began showing its first obvious signs of deterioration about a decade before the collapse.
That seems probable. Additional conjecture is that, since we are attracted by unknown ideas, new for us, it additionally helped McCarthy to follow this right-wing trend of that sad era.