Anti-communism

Communism

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Related subjects

Anarchism

Anti-capitalism

Anti-communism

Communist state

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Democratic centralism

Dictatorship of the proletariat

History of communism

Left-wing politics

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Post-Communism

Eurocommunism

Titoism

Primitive communism

Socialism  Stalinism

Socialist economics

Anti-communism refers to opposition to communism, especially Marxism-Leninism. Marxism, and the forms of communism associated with it, rose to prominence in the twentieth century. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the growing popularity of the communist movement after the Soviet Union was established in 1917.

Monarchists, Christians, social-democrats, and pro-free market forces in Europe fought against the first wave of communist revolutions from 1917 to 1922. Fascism and Nazism were based in part on a violent brand of anti-communism, and they incited fear of a communist revolution in order to gain political power. Nationalists fought against communism in numerous civil wars across the globe. Classical Liberalism shaped much of the anti-communist foreign policy of the Western powers, and dominated anti-communist intellectual thought in the second half of the twentieth century. The human rights movement of the late twentieth century added a strong moral component to the anti-communist cause, exposing gross abuses of human rights in the communist world.

The country best known for being an opponent of communism is the United States, together with its long-time allies like the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Australia. Some wars and clashes betweens supporters and opponents of communism include the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the the so-called Cold War, which refers to the overall struggle between the communist world and the Free World. The 1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union was a major victory for the anti-communist cause, which generally view the U.S.S.R. as the heart of the communist threat.

The career of anti-communism

Since communists advocate social equality, they are theoretically opposed to monarchy, aristocracy, and other forms of hereditary privilege. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the communist movement was at odds with the traditional monarchies that ruled over much of the European continent. At the time, monarchists were the most prominent anti-communists, and many European monarchies outlawed the public expression of communist views.

However, after World War I several European monarchies were overthrown in a series of revolutions and military engagements. The most conservative European monarchy, the Russia empire, was replaced by the communist-run Soviet Union. The Russian Revolution inspired and actively supported a series of other communist revolutions across Europe in the years 1917-1922. The Soviet policy of ruthlessly repressing dissent and treating religious leaders as enemies of the state, meanwhile, shocked much of the world.

The 1920s and 30s saw the fading of traditionalist conservatism. The mantle of anti-communism was taken up by American-inspired Liberalism on the one hand and the rising fascist movements on the other. Communism remained largely a European phenomenon, so anti-communism was also concentrated in Europe. American anti-communist sentiments tended to follow their European counterparts. When communist groups and political parties began appearing elsewhere in the world, such as in the Republic of China in the late 1920s, their first opponents were usually either colonial authorities and/or local nationalist movements, ofter inspired by American democracy, but sometimes by fascism. Anti-communist dictatorships that were established in Europe in the late 1930s, such as the government of Francisco Franco in Spain, are considered to fall somewhere on the border between traditional conservatism and fascism.

During World War II, the liberal democracies set aside anti-communist in order to ally themselves with Stalin's Russia against Hitler, and non-governmental organizations opposed to communism suffered a setback. After World War II, the Soviet Union became a super-power, and communism became a more global phenomenon. Anti-communism became an integral part of the domestic and foreign policies of the United States and its NATO allies. As the reality of Stalin's tyranny became more apparent, liberal anti-communism gained increasing moral authority. Meanwhile, conservatism in the post-war era abandoned its monarchist and aristocratic associations, focusing instead on the preservation of the free market, private property, human rights, the legitimate interests of large corporations, and the defense of traditional values. This opposition became a cornerstone of American conservative thought in the 1940s and 50s. The rise of Communist China raised the specter of communism taking over Asia, and the policy of the Soviet Union and China to foster revolution throughout the world made the communist threat a very real one in many people's minds.

Winston Churchill warned the world that the a communist "Iron Curtain" had fallen in Eastern Europe, while the United States made anti-communism the top priority of its foreign policy. The U.S. and its allies in the United Nations joined to oppose communist aggression during the Korean War, when the Stalinist regime of Kim Il-sung invaded the South in an attempt to unify the country under communist rule. During this time, American conservatives sought to combat what they saw as a growing communist influence at home. This led to the adoption of a number of repressive domestic policies that are collectively known under the term "McCarthyism."

In the 60s, the U.S. attempted once again to stop the communist advance, this time in Vietnam. Unlike in Korea, where the U.S. effort was strongly supported by virtually all South Koreans—American forces found themselves mired in a less clear-cut situation. The U.S. ultimately withdrew from the conflict and allowed the communists to take over not only Vietnam, but Cambodia and Laos as well.

Throughout the Cold War, governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America turned to the United States for political and economic support. Some of these were liberal democracies, but others were authoritarian regimes, which—according to their critics—used the fear of communism as a means of legitimizing repression.

During the 1970s, communist revolutions in South America and Asia advanced in the wake of the U.S. failure in Vietnam. Meanwhile, dissidents in the Soviet Union added their voices to the anti-communist cause by exposing abuses of human rights such as the Gulag Archipelago. In 1980s, the conservative governments of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain followed a clearly anti-Soviet foreign policy that is credited as a major factor in the fall of the Soviet Union and the democratization of Eastern Europe and other countries.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, communism is no longer seen as a major force in world politics, and therefore most conservatives are far less concerned with anti-communism. However, both liberal and conservatives express concerns over human rights abuses in China, Cuba, and North Korea, an anti-communist groups continue to struggle against resurgent far-leftism in such nations as Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Special types of anti-communism

Religious anti-communism

Soviet communism followed Marx in teaching that religion was the "opiate of the masses" and actively sought to destroy religious institutions. The main target of communist "militant atheism" in the Soviet Union was usually the Russian Orthodox Church, but Catholics also were targeted. Thousands of priests and believers died when they resisted communist attempts to turn churches into "museums of atheism" or murdered priests deemed loyal to the Tsar or ideologically hostile to socialism. A similar pattern emerged in China, Tibet, North Korea, North Vietnam, and other communist stronghold, with Buddhists, Christians of various denominations, and others feeling the brunt of communist repression.

The Orthodox churches sometimes resisted the communists, but Orthodox leaders also were willing to compromise with the state, even to the degree of being suspected of working with the secret police to root out believers who were disloyal to Soviet policy. The relatively cooperative attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church resulted both from a desire retain at least some of its believers and protect its most sacred sites, but also from a long-standing attitude in the Orthodox tradition which held that the church and state should work in harmony with one another wherever possible. Nevertheless Orthodox believers often spoke out against communism, and in the west many Orthodox Christian were active in groups such as the Captive Nations Committee and other anti-communist movements.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has a strong history of anti-communism. Catholicism, for one thing, had its headquarters outside of the Soviet Empire, in Rome. Additionally, the papacy had a long tradition of confronting secular rulers it considered incompatible with the Catholic faith. In Hungary, Cardinal Mindzenty became an international symbol of opposition to communist oppression of the Church, and Catholic leaders in other communist nations often ran into problems with communist authorities. One of these, who later became Pope John Paul II, was harsh critic of communism. Earlier popes had shared this view as well. For example Pope Pius IX issued Papal encyclical called Quanta Cura in which he called "Communism and Socialism" a most fatal error

Protestants were often even more vocal in their opposition to communism. Without strong international associations, however, they lacked political leverage and were repressed by the communists in the most brutal manner. In the U.S., groups such as the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade rose up to alert Christians throughout the world to the suffering of Christians in the communist world.

Jews, too, faced repression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Orthodox Jews faced serious persecution not unlike that of the Christians, while secular Jews faced job discrimination and all Jews found it virtually impossible to leave the country. Jewish anti-communist in the west usually found expression in broader political movements such as social democracy and labor unions, but in the 1970s a large-scale campaign on behalf of Soviet Jewry found expression in Jewish synagogues.

Fascist anti-communism

Fascism and Soviet Communism both arose to prominence after World War I. At the end the war, socialist uprisings or the threat of them arose throughout Europe. In Germany, the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 failed, but in Bavaria, communists successfully overthrew the government and established the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which lasted for a few weeks in 1919. Similar short-lived Soviet republics emerged in other German states and a Soviet government was also briefly established in Hungary under Béla Kun in 1919. The Russian Revolution also inspired revolutionary movements in Italy, a wave of labor strikes in Britain, the Winnipeg General Strike in Canada, the Seattle General Strike in the U.S., and other radical events.

Fascism was in part a reaction against to these developments. Italian fascism, led by Benito Mussolini, took power in 1922 with the blessing of Italy's king after years of leftist unrest led many conservatives to fear that a communist revolution was a very real threat. Throughout Europe, numerous aristocrats and conservative intellectuals as well as capitalists and industrialists lent their support to fascist movements in their countries that arose in emulation of Italian fascism. Meanwhile in Germany, numerous right wing nationalist groups arose, particularly out of the post-war Freikorps, which were used to crush both the Spartacist uprising and the Munich Soviet.

During the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s, communist and fascist movements were bitterly and often violently opposed to each. The most notable example of this conflict was the Spanish Civil War, which became in part a proxy war between the fascist countries and their international supporters who backed Francisco Franco and the worldwide Communist movement (allied uneasily with anarchists and Trotskyists) which backed the Republican government and were aided chiefly by the Soviet Union.

Adolf Hitler, too, rose to power partly on the basis of his anti-communism, as well as his ideology of Aryan superiority and anti-semitism. Indeed, much of Hitler's anti-semitism focused on the alleged Jewish responsibility for the rise of communism. Initially, the Soviet Union supported the a coalition with the western powers against Nazi Germany as well as popular fronts in various countries against domestic fascism. The Munich Agreement between Germany, France, and Britain heightened Soviet fears that the western powers were endeavoring to force them to bear the brunt of a war against Nazism. The Soviets thus negotiated a non-aggression pact with Germany—the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, more commonly known as the Hitler-Stalin pact.

Stalin was taken by surprise when Nazi Germany broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, with Operation Barbarossa. Fascism and communism reverted to their relationship as lethal enemies, with the war—in the eyes of both sides—becoming one between their respective ideologies.

With the defeat of the Axis Powers, fascist anti-communism was dealt a death blow. However, fascist elements persisted in the world anti-communist movement, often to the dismay of its other components.

Anti-communism in the United States and Cold War

The first major manifestation of anti-communism in the United States occurred 1919–1920 in the First Red Scare led by Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer.

Following World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union, many of the objections to Communism took on an added urgency because of the stated Communist view that their ideology was universal. The fear of many anti-Communists within the United States was that Communism would triumph throughout the entire world and eventually be a direct threat to the government of the United States. This view led to the so-called "domino theory," in which a communist takeover in certain nations could not be tolerated because it could lead to a chain reaction which would result in a triumph of world communism. There were also fears, not unfounded, that powerful nations like the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China were using their power to create and support revolutions in various country, as well as to forcibly assimilate other countries into communist rule, as in the case of Eastern Europe, Tibet, South Korea, and South Vietnam. Many politicians adopted a pragmatic anti-communism, opposing the both the communist ideology and the growth of communist revolutions as a way of limiting the expansion of the Soviet Empire. The US policy of halting further communist expansion came to be known as "containment."

After the Cold War

The United States government justified its anti-communism by citing the human rights record of Communist states, notably the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, Maoist China, Cuba, North Vietnam, and North Korea, and the short-lived Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia led by Pol Pot. These states killed of millions of their own people in the course of ending capitalism and continued to suppress civil liberties of the surviving population.

Anti-communism became significantly muted after the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe between 1989 and 1991, and the fear of a worldwide Communist takeover is no longer a serious concern. Remnants of anti-communism remain, however, in United States foreign policy toward Cuba, mainland China, and North Korea. The conservative wing of the Republican Party opposes opposes trade normalization, while liberals in the Democratic Party sometimes favor imposing sanctions on China for its human rights violations and its treatment of Tibet.

Contemporary anti-communism

The central part of Karl Marx's communist theory is historical materialism, a methodology for studying history using a dialectical method which concludes that human society has grown or evolved through several historical stages. Due to the contradictions inherent in each stage, each inevitably evolves through violent revolution to the next stage overthrowing of the existing socioeconomic order. Using this method, Marxists conclude that capitalism will inevitably be followed by socialism and communism, just as feudalism was followed by capitalism.

Most anti-communists reject the entire concept of historical materialism. Some anti-communists question the validity of Marx's claim that the state will just wither away into a true communist society.

Many critics also see a key error in communist economic theory, which predicts that in capitalist societies, the bourgeoisie will accumulate ever-increasing capital and wealth, while the lower classes become more dependent on the ruling class for survival, selling their labor power for the most minimal of salaries. Anti-communists point to the overall rise in the average standard of living in the industrialized West as proof that contrary to Marx's prediction as, they assert, both the rich and poor have steadily gotten richer. There is still, however, communist attack of this objection. This is rooted in Lenin's "Imperialism - the Highest Stage of Capitalism," argued to be the conclusive chapter of the founding series of communist works set out by Marx.^{[citation needed]} His predictions correlated with Marx's in that the poorer would get poorer and the richer would get richer as capitalism would live on, however he predicted, in accordance with the early 20th century rise of imperialism, that the class struggle would move to an international basis. Many members of the modern Left assert that trends like this have indeed been seen in recent years, for example as Western economies develop and those of third world countries continue to decline as their citizens are continually exploited.

Another reply to this criticism is that the nations who most endorse capitalism today, such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, had a long history of bountiful natural resources, strategic geography, military victory, and technology long before many capitalist intricacies, giving them these benefits today. Similarly, they claim nations such as Russia, Vietnam, and Cuba had long histories of military defeats, brutal environments, strict dictatorships, and underdeveloped economies throughout their histories, making living conditions harsher even after socialist revolutions. Anti-capitalists, on the other hand, often argue that capitalism is now a global economical system, therefore affecting the whole world. Thus, it is necessary to see economic trends without national boundaries. They state for example that much of the commodities sold in the United States are produced or enhanced in one way or another, in a poorer country. And on an international scale, the division between the rich and poor has generally increased.

Communists also argue that the industrialized West profits immensely from the exploitation of the Third World through globalization, that the gap between rich and poor capitalist countries (sometimes called the North-South Gap) has widened greatly over the past hundred years, and that poor capitalist countries vastly outnumber the rich ones. The standard anti-communist reply to the latter argument is to point out the examples of former Third World countries that have successfully escaped out of poverty in the recent decades under the capitalist system, most notably the Asian Tigers, India and even nominally Communist China itself. Anti-communists also cite numerous examples of Third World Communist regimes that failed to achieve development and economic growth and in many cases led their peoples into an even worse misery, for example the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia or the North Korean totalitarian government. Supporters of Mengistu or Kim typically attribute the shortcomings in their societies to "imperialist" Western meddling. Other communists, such as the Trotskyists, while agreeing that imperialism harmed these countries, also say that Ethiopia and North Korea were never communist—they were Stalinist, meaning that they were ruled by a clique of bureaucrats who claimed to be acting in the popular interest but actually betrayed it, being more oppressive to its working class.

Many refer to both communism and fascism as totalitarianism, seeing similarity between the actions of communist and fascist governments. It should also be noted that many modern left-attributed communists, particularly anarcho-communists, use these similarities, and actual sayings from Marx himself, to argue that those self-proclaimed communist regimes were not actually following any sort of communism at all. One such quote by Marx to support this simply says, "Democracy is the road to socialism."

Anti-communists also object to the actual practices of communist governments in contrast to the stated promises of communism, questioning whether or not they are truly able to be called "communist." For example, the view of "human nature" usually expounded by anti-communist Objectivists is that while an egalitarian society could be looked at as ideal, it is virtually impossible to achieve. They state that it is human nature to be motivated by personal incentive, and point out that while several communist leaders have claimed to be working for the common good, many or all of them have been corrupt and totalitarian. Communists retaliate that "human nature" essentially doesn't exist, since human beings are extremely adaptable with inbred logic and have shown themselves to be able to live in a wide variety of social organizations, some similar to communism, throughout history.

Anticommunist historians

One of the most influential anti-communist historians was Robert Conquest, a former Stalinist and British Intelligence officer. He argued in his works that Communism was responsible for tens of millions of deaths during the 20th century.

Communist parties (sometimes combined with left socialist parties as workers' parties) which have come to power have likewise tended to be rigidly intolerant of political opposition. Most Communist countries have shown no signs of advancing from Marx's "socialist" stage of economy to an ideal "communist" stage. Rather, Communist governments have been accused of creating a new ruling class (called by Russians the Nomenklatura), with powers and privileges far greater than those previously enjoyed by the upper classes in the pre-revolutionary regimes.

It should be noted, however, that many communists have been virulent critics of the policies carried out by Stalin's Soviet Union and other nations who followed the same model. They refer to these nations as Stalinist rather than communist, and sometimes call them deformed workers states. The anti-communists reply that the repression in the early years of the Bolshevik regime, while not as extreme as that during Stalin's reign, was still severe by any reasonable standards, citing the examples such as Felix Dzerzhinsky's secret police, which eliminated numerous political opponents by extrajudicial executions, and the brutal crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion and Tambov rebellion. According to them, Trotsky could hardly claim any moral high ground, having been one of the top-ranking Bolshevik leaders during these events. Trotsky was later to claim (unconvincingly) that the Kronstadt rebels were early harbingers of the bureaucratisation which he associated with Stalinism.

Anti-communists will likewise argue that the contemporary communist/Marxist claim that any communist regime that perpetuated human rights abuses was not a "true" communist state is merely a convenient excuse that can be evoked to avoid taking responsibility.

See also

This entry is related to, but not included in the Political ideologies series or one of its sub-series. Other related articles can be found at the Politics Portal.

• American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia
• Anti-fascism
• Anti-Stalinist left
• Capitalism
• Category:Anti-communists
• Category:Soviet dissidents
• Cold War
• Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia
• Criticisms of communism
• Criticisms of Communist party rule
• Evil empire
• House Unamerican Activities Committee
• Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism
• National Alliance of Russian Solidarists
• National Committee for a Free Europe
• Nationalist Movement
• Operation Condor
• Operation Gladio
• Radio Free Europe
• Second Red Scare
• Reagan Doctrine
• Stay-behind
• Strategy of tension
• Truman Doctrine
• Western propaganda
• World Anti-Communist League
• Iron Man#Origins (anti-Communist comic book superhero)

External links

• Anti-Communist Action
• The Chilean Anti-Communist League
• Industrial Workers of the World: The IWW Shattered – an excerpt from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States
• Hirata Tetsuo and John W. Dower, "Japan's Red Purge: Lessons from a Saga of Suppression of Free Speech and Thought"

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