The term came to have a global meaning during the Cold War, when the powers of Western society sought to coordinate an oppositon to the apparent militarist expansion of the Soviet Union. For much of the period between 1950 and 1991 anti-communism was one of the major components of the containment policy of the United States.
Today, many liberal anticommunist allege that there is a lack of individual freedom in Communist states, criticize the way in which the concept of democracy is interpretated by communists in a very different way than that of Western Liberal democracy, and criqitue the socialist economic programs proposed by communists.
Many communists rebut this criticism by saying that democracy is actually essential for a planned economy to prevent what many more left-winged communists call "state-capitalism", in which they say a Dictatorship would act just as oppressive to the workers as the corporations in Capitalism.
After the Russian October Revolution in 1917, critics of communism were inspired to resist communist ideology from a conservative point of view. With the advent of Stalinism in the 1920s, many liberal communists, Trotskyists, and social democrats opposed the Soviet Union for its alleged violations of human rights, thus anti-communism became common on both the Left and Right of the political spectrum.
Other people oppose communism due to contradictions or errors within the communist theory and gaps between communist theory and practice. Many anti-communists feel that the theory is less objectionable than its adherents' actions in power. Democratic socialists as George Orwell or Bertrand Russell and anarcho-socialist theorists such as Noam Chomsky see communism as a doctrine whose aims are noble in theory but which fails to attain them in practice.
Fascism and "Soviet" Communism are political systems that arose to prominence after World War I. Historians of the period between World War I and World War II such as E.H. Carr and Eric Hobsbawm point out that Liberal democracy was under serious stress in this period and seemed to be a doomed philosophy. The success of the Russian Revolution of 1917 resulted in a brief revolutionary wave across Europe, in Germany and Hungary in particular. The socialist movement worldwide split into separate social democratic and Leninist wings with the formation of the Third International prompting severe debates within social democratic parties resulting in supporters of the Russian Revolution splitting to form Communist Parties in most industrialised (and many non-industrialised) nations. The acceptance of the war by the social democratic parties gave the communist parties credibility with many people, as a result of them labelling it as being imperialist.
At the end of World War I there were attempted socialist uprisings or threats of socialist uprisings throughout Europe. Most notably in Germany where the Spartacist uprising in Germany led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919 failed. In Bavaria, Communists successfully overthrew the government and established the Munich Soviet Republic that lasted from 1918-1919. A short lived Soviet government was also established in Hungary under Béla Kun in 1919.
The Russian Revolution also inspired attempted revolutionary movements in Italy with a wave of factory occupations, a strike wave in Britain, the Winnipeg General Strike, the Seattle General Strike and other radical events.
Many historians view fascism as a response to these developments -- a movement that both tried to appeal to the Working class and divert them from Marxism and also appealed to capitalists as a bulwark against Bolshevism. Italian fascism founded and led by Benito Mussolini took power with the blessing of Italy's king after years of leftist unrest led many conservatives to fear that a communist revolution was inevitable. Throughout Europe numerous aristocrats and conservative intellecutals as well as capitalists and industrialists lent their support to fascist movements in their countries which arose in emulation of Italian fascism while 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.
However, certain anti-communist authors have disputed the view of fascism as a reaction against socialist revolutionary movements and instead stressed what they believed to be essential similarities between communism and fascism in both theory and practice. The noted Austrian School Economist Friedrich Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom, argued that various modern totalitarian movements, including fascism and communism, have common philosophical roots, both springing from the opposition to the Classical liberalism of the 19th century. Anti-communists arguing from these positions see it as far more than a coincidence that Benito Mussolini himself was an enthusiastic Marxist socialist and a prominent member of the Italian Socialist Party before the World War I, while many philosophical founders of fascism, such as Sergio Panunzio and Giovanni Gentile, came from a Marxist or syndicalist background.
With the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s it seemed that liberalism and the liberal form of capitalism was doomed and communist and fascist movements swelled. These movements were bitterly opposed to each other and fought each other frequently. The most notable example of this conflict was the Spanish Civil War, which became 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) who backed the Popular Front and were aided chiefly by the Soviet Union.
Initially, the Soviet Union supported the idea of a coalition with the western powers against Nazi Germany as well as popular fronts in various countries against domestic fascism. This policy was largely unsuccessful due to the distrust shown by the western powers (especially Britain) towards the Soviet Union. 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 changed their policy and negotiated a non-aggression pact with Germany, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. The Soviets later argued that this was necessary to buy them time to prepare for an expected war with Germany. However, some critics question this claim, pointing out that along with a non-aggression clause, the pact also laid out extensive economic cooperation between the Soviets and Germans, in the form of the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement, providing Nazi Germany some of the materials it needed to build its war machine. This detail is used by the aforementioned critics to argue that Stalin expected the war to be waged solely between Germany and the Western Allies, with the Soviet Union keeping its neutrality while its two greatest enemies fought each other.
Whatever the case, it is clear that Stalin did not expect the Germans to attack until 1942, so he was taken by surprise when Nazi Germany 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.
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 the 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 Domino theory in which a communist takeover in any nation could not be tolerated because it would lead to a Chain reaction which would result in a triumph of world communism. There were fears that powerful nations like the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China were using their power to forcibly assimilate other countries into communist rule, in a new form of Imperialism. The Soviet Union's expansion into Central Europe after World War II was seen as evidence of this. These actions prompted many politicians to adopt a kind of pragmatic anti-Communism, opposing the ideology 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.
The United States government has usually motivated its anti-communism by citing the human rights record of some communist states, most notably the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, Maoist China, the short-lived Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia led by Pol Pot and North Korea.
Anti-communism became significantly muted after the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc communist regimes in Central Europe in 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. In the case of Cuba, the United States continues to maintain economic sanctions against the island in a policy which is sharply criticized outside of the United States, but which has substantial support in the US, particularly from the conservative wing of American politics.
Due to American trade interests in China, much of the United States foreign policy establishment does not regard China as communist in any meaningful sense. Nevertheless, there is some hostility toward China, particularly among conservative Congressional Republicans which can be regarded as remnants of anti-communism. North Korea remains staunchly Stalinist and economically isolationist, and tensions between the country and the US have heightened as the result of reports that it is stockpiling nuclear weapons.
Communist political parties and organizations were actively opposed by conservative governments in Eastern Europe after the failed communist revolutions around 1920, in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe, in Japan during World War II, in China by the Kuomintang in the 1920s and 1930s, in post-war Taiwan and South Korea, in Latin America by various right-wing military regimes (Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Dirty War in Argentina, civil war in El Salvador, etc), and in many other places and instances.
There was also some anti-communist Political repression in the United States, most notably in the Red Scare of the 1920s and the McCarthyist era after World War II. Communists and communist sympathizers often emphasize the persecution of their political movement by "reactionary" forces, which they feel is being downplayed by capitalist governments. Anti-communists respond to this by pointing out that communist governments have often used similar methods to deal with their political enemies, including fellow communists (indeed, the repression of fellow communists is often brought up as an argument for the idea that such governments were not actually communistic). Regarding this issue, the opinions of communists are divided: some of them support the actions of those communist governments on the grounds that they were necessary in order to deal with dangerous terrorists and criminals, while other communists agree that such actions cannot be justified and put in question the self-proclaimed communist nature of the governments willing to carry them out.
Little is known about anti-communist massacres after World War II, not least because of the efforts by the anti-communist regimes to cover up such events. Such a massacre happened on the island of Jeju (South Korea) in April 1948. The estimations about the number of victims range from 30.000 to 140.000. Another example is the 228 Incident in Taiwan in 1947, which until recently was considered a taboo subject even in private.
During the Cold War many authoritarian regimes, often supported by the US, used the fear of communism as a means of legitimizing repression or as an excuse to persecute its opponents. Augusto Pinochet's Chile, for example, is often cited by critics as an example of this, although others argue that the threat of communism to Chile was very real. The worst case was probably that of General Suharto in Indonesia who, using the excuse of foiling a failed Communist coup d'etat attempt, seized executive power and killed about 2 million people in his mass purges arresting more than 200,000 other people on merely being suspected of being involved with the coup. Most communists, alleged communists and so-called " enemies of the state" were sentenced to death (although some of the executions were delayed to 1990). The alleged or demonstrated complicity of the CIA with these regimes seriously discredited anticommunism and the pretense of the US to represent a "Free World" in the eyes of critics. Others, however, have argued that extreme measures were needed to prevent the spread of communism during the height of its expansion.
Anti-communists respond to these claims by saying that they believe communist states are totalitarian by nature, and that in Marxist theory too much power is given to the state. They point out that several communist governments have existed, but none have been considered democracies. Anti-communists also question if a classless communist society can truly be achieved.
Some anti-communists, particularly those with Libertarian leanings, extend their criticisms well beyond Soviet-style communism, associating it with any state-run activity beyond the most minimal. People who support a Mixed economy where some services are supplied by government-run institutions, such as what takes place in social-democrat countries, resent the association with communism.
Some writers and historians object to anti-communists' comparisons of communism to fascism (under the blanket term "Totalitarianism", which they believe to be incorrect). They cite historical evidence, such as the fact that the Soviet Union fought against Adolf Hitler during World War II and said that fascism was the enemy of communism (a view that was shared by Hitler himself, who was one of the most virulent anti-communists of the time), while many anti-communists in occupied Europe took the side of Nazi Germany. Others, however, placed anti-fascism or national independence above their dislike of communism.
Yet another objection to anti-communism which became more widely advanced in the 1970s was that in pursuit of anti-communism, the United States was conducting a Foreign policy in which it supported people and governments that sometimes egregiously violated Human rights, which it saw as lesser evils than communism. In order to justify these actions, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick stated the Kirkpatrick Doctrine which argued there was a difference between totalitarian regimes and authoritarian regimes.
Many staunchly anti-communist regimes have been dictatorial and guilty of egregious human rights abuses, oppression, and sometimes Genocide. These may include Nazis, secular Middle Eastern dictatorships in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and the Sudan, right-wing military juntas in Latin America, the apartheid regime in South Africa, anticommunists regimes in the Far East as Suharto's Indonesia. Citing governments like these as evidence, communists claim that much Cold War policy was driven by simple anti-communism and a disregard for problems in nations ruled by anti-communist but undemocratic governments.
Various Western countries, the United States first and foremost, are also often accused of denial of political or labour rights, racism, oppression and violence, support for governments which presided over mass killings, torture and detention of political opponents, or engagement with regimes (usually on the basis of their shared anti-communism) which practised genocide or racial segregation. In Italy, the use of the Strategy of tension in the 1970's has been widely criticized.
Nevertheless, anti-communists generally believe such claims to be of an "and you are lynching negroes" variety. They argue that while capitalist governments may have some faults, Communist ones are worse. Many also state that they disapprove of some actions undertaken by anti-Communist leaders, the defeat of communism and Soviet influence during the Cold War was a top priority. Some also believe that it is easier for countries previously ruled by an authoritarian, anti-Communist government to transition into a democracy, while it is more difficult for a totalitarian Communist nation to do so.
The communists take the other side in claiming which government is more flawed, stating that while communist governments may have had some faults, capitalist ones are worse. They also claim that in some former Communist countries, conditions were better before its collapse. An example used in this argument is Russia, which has faced a bumpy transition to capitalism and has a 25% poverty rate.
Ironically, many anti-communists were too focused on the perceived challenges of communism to notice its internal problems, and few anti-communists were able to predict the fall of the Soviet Union even as late as the mid-1980s.
The persons listed are not classified by their own ideological positions from which they opposed communism, and clashes between their views were often no less severe than their opposition to communism. For example, neo-liberal thinkers like Friedrich Hayek harshly criticized socialists like George Orwell, and vice versa, despite their common opposition to communism. Most anti-communists in the 1930s and 1940s were also staunch opponents of fascism; however, during the Cold War, anti-communism did lead some people who had previously criticised fascism to support other anti-communist dictators.
Most anti-communists reject the entire concept of historical materialism, or at least do not believe that socialism and communism must follow after capitalism. Some anti-communists question how and why the state is supposed to 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, claiming that this argument is equivalent to the statement that "the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer", 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. Communists reply that even during periods of great prosperity, the rich are get rich much faster than the poor, and posit that such periods of prosperity are historical abberations and will be wiped out by future crises of production.
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 undereveloped economies throughout their histories, making living conditions harsher even after socialist revolutions.
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 pointing 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. 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.
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 do not support or justify such repressive actions. In particular, Trotskyists 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 convienient excuse that can be evoked to avoid taking responsibilty (and thus a version of the No true Scotsman logical fallacy).
In other cases, such as the separated nations, West Germany and East Germany and North Korea and South Korea, the capitalist portion has advanced far ahead of its communist counterpart. In the case of East Germany, communists claim that they received the "raw end of the deal," since all the traditional industrial and commercial centers lay in the capitalist part of the country. In addition, in this case, the Soviet Union removed plant and other resources, claiming them as "reparations". Similar conditions distinguished North and South Korea, with the former suffering under an American-led bombing campaign between 1950 and 1952 that reduced every industrial center above the 38th parallel to uniform rubble, while the latter was spared devestation to the same extent. Also, the anti-communists cite the example of Czechoslovakia, which was among world's most developed industrial countries prior to World War II, but fell far behind the Western nations under the Communist rule.
The hallmark of some Communist economic policies, Collective farming, has sometimes been called economically inefficient and often disastrous, especially in the cases of the former Soviet Union, China, and North Korea.
In general, anti-communist economic criticism centers on the belief that communists ignore the realities of economic life and production in favor of their ideas about how things ought to be done. Anti-communists believe that this leads to economic disruption and poverty and generally see the examples of former Communist nations as supporting the veracity of their views.
The debates between Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx are well-known. While Bakunin's own philosophy owed much to Marx's critique of capitalism, their views diverged sharply over questions of how a post-capitalistic society should be organized. Bakunin saw the Marxist State as simply another form of oppression: "The question arises, if the proletariat is ruling, over whom will it rule? This means there will remain another proletariat which will be subordinated to this new domination, this new state." He loathed the idea of a vanguard party ruling the masses from above, quipping that "when the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called 'the People's Stick.'"
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Anarchists initially rejoiced over the 1917 revolution as an example of workers taking power for themselves, and indeed played a part in the revolution. It quickly became evident, however, that the communists and the anarchists had very different ideas regarding the kind of society they wanted to build there. Anarchist Emma Goldman went to Russia enthusiastic about the revolution, but left sorely disappointed, and began to write her book My Disillusionment in Russia. Anarchist Victor Serge, in response to the pro-Leninist sentiment in the global Left, said, "All right, I can see the broken eggs. Now where's this omelette of yours?"
Anarchists often cite the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion, in which the Red Army defeated an embryonic anarchist commune, as a specific example of the tyranny they perceived in the Bolshevik government. The Typhus epidemic, and subsequent crushing of Nestor Makhno's weakened black army in the Ukraine was also a specifically controversial action of the early Bolsheviks.
During the Spanish Civil War, a pro-Soviet Communist Party gained considerable influence due to the necessity of aid from the Soviet Union. Communists and liberals on the Republican side fought mainly against the Falange fascists, but also put some effort against the anarchist Spanish Revolution, ostensibly to bolster the anti-Fascist front (the anarchist response was, "The revolution and the war are inseperable"). The most dramatic action against the anarchists was in May of 1937, when Communist-led police forces attempted to take over a CNT-run telephone building in Barcelona. The telephone workers fought back, setting up barricades and surrounding the Communist "Lenin Barracks." Five days of street fighting in the Barcelona May Days ensued. The enmity between anarchists at communists reached a new high, and remained there.
Bitter feelings between anarchists and communists are apparent even today in revolutionary circles. Much conflict and arguing occurs as it did in the 19th century between Marx and Bakunin. However, in recent times, anarchists and communists often join in protest (at least for pragmatic purposes) on certain issues, such as the recent 2003 Invasion of Iraq.