Anti-communism

Anti-communism or anticommunism is a term for any ideology or movement which opposes the spread of communism. Before the Second World War, anti-communism was often associated with anti-Semitism, but after the events of the Holocaust, this became patently unviable, and a new form of anti-communism was formulated based on a new opposition between liberal individualism and totalitarian collectivism. Starting in the 1940s, the United States used its covert and overt influence to spread this ideology throughout the world, suppressing opposing media organizations, political parties, and even academics in favor of anti-communist groups and even left-wing anti-communists such as postmodernists and anarchists. Modern anti-communists tend to sound strikingly alike regardless of ideological persuasion, indicating the lasting influence of this propaganda blitz, and modern academia shows similar degeneration even in the wake of the fall of the Eastern Bloc and subsequent revelations from the Soviet archives.

Jewish Bolshevism

Main article: Jewish Bolshevism

Jewish Bolshevism was the predominant anti-communist theory from the turn of the 20th century until at least the 1950s, including among Russian, American, and German anti-communist movements such as the Whites and the Nazis.

McCarthyism

McCarthyism or the Second Red Scare comprised a peak of "red-baiting" in American politics during the 1940s and '50s. Politicians such as Richard Nixon and Senator Joseph McCarthy began the scare by accusing the Truman administration of being infiltrated with communists and collaborators, although the communist hysteria had roots in the conservative opposition to the progressive policies of FDR. Highly publicized events such as the trial and execution of suspected Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were exploited by the American media and elites in order to effectively saturate American public opinion with anti-communist talking points. Senator McCarthy developed major political influence for himself by accusing progressively larger and more prominent figures of communist sympathies, often in combination with virulent homophobic attacks, but his influence quickly waned after the nationally televised 1954 Army hearings. However, even contemporary criticism of Joseph McCarthy's own policies almost always targeted his allegations and "witch hunts" against innocent people rather than questioning his right, in a liberal society, to attack citizens on the basis of political persuasion in the first place.

McCarthyism at its height could be analyzed as a form of moral panic or "culture war", a phenomenon which has largely defined American reactionism to the present day. McCarthyist action included blacklisting perceived communists from several industries and banning certain books, including, in one instance, the Robin Hood legend: "There is a Communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood. They want to stress it because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor. That’s the Communist line." The FBI investigated even vaguely anti-capitalist films such as 1946's It's a Wonderful Life. But most of all, the US government and conservative labor organizers collaborated to root out communists, socialists, and "fellow travelers" from the American labor movement.

The impact of McCarthyism on American labor was devastating. In the early 20th century, radical leftists had been widely acknowledged as the most effective and motivated organizers in the labor movement. Anti-communist organizer John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers hired communist organizers only to purge them once they had won the campaign, infamously stating, "Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?" Perhaps more important than their exceptional skill, communists had also contributed to the development of an ideological radicalism and a sense of class consciousness among the workers. The McCarthyist elimination of communist "influence" in the unions they themselves had helped to build could thus be considered responsible for the later weaknesses of the working class during the era of embedded liberalism: by the 1960s, red-baiting and union purging led to an atmosphere of accommodation that had denatured the ideological character of the American labor movement into "a fight without ideologies, without red flags, without May Day parades." This would eventually allow for the rise of neoliberalism once disillusionment with radical unionism and the ideologically neutered force of "Big Labor" had set in during the 1970s.

See also

• Fascism
• Totalitarianism