Christopher C. Kutz is C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor in International Law at UC Berkeley, where he is also the director of the Kadish Center for Morality, Law, and Public Affairs

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was a plaything of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his rabid anticommunist cohorts. In its final days, HUAC tried one more time to purge American society of the alleged red threat-this time with controversial hearings at San Francisco City Hall in May 1960. On Friday the thirteenth, a “riot” broke out when protesting students, principally from UC Berkeley, were attacked with fire hoses then dragged down the marble steps of the rotunda. To cover up this debacle, HUAC subpoenaed local news footage and issued the infamously distorted Operation Abolition, a forty-one-minute film claiming that the protest was fomented by “professional communist agitators.” Events are shown out of sequence, unfounded statements delivered, and counter arguments not represented. Nevertheless, this Congressional committee had the resources to distribute their film to a vast audience. So egregious was this deceptive document that the Northern California chapter of the ACLU appropriated the film and made Operation Correction (1960), an exposé of the misleading editorial techniques. (Operation Correction can be viewed online.) A decade later, yet another bit of right-wing propaganda circulated freely. This time it was The Riotmakers: The Technology of Social Demolition, which made the incendiary accusation that student activism was orchestrated by trained “Leninoids.” It claimed the Leftist movement in the United States had its roots not just in Lenin's Soviet Union, but in Hitler's Germany as well. Infiltrating our campuses, each provocateur was “a graduate engineer in social demolition.” This inflammatory film was given to BAM/PFA by the Berkeley Police Department.