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Anti-communism

Opposition to communism

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Through Ideology, Communism and Russia

The first organization which was specifically dedicated to opposing communism was the Russian White movement, which fought in the Russian Civil War starting in 1918 against the recently established Bolshevik government. The White movement was militarily supported by several allied foreign governments which represented the first instance of anti-communism as a government policy. Nevertheless, the Red Army defeated the White movement and the Soviet Union was created in 1922. During the existence of the Soviet Union, anti-communism became an important feature of many different political movements and governments across the world.

In the United States, anti-communism came to prominence during the First Red Scare of 1919–1920. During the 1920s and 1930s, opposition to communism in America and in Europe was promoted by conservatives, monarchists, fascists, liberals, and social democrats. Fascist governments rose to prominence as major opponents of communism in the 1930s. Liberals and social democrats in Germany formed the Iron Front to oppose communists, Nazi fascists, and revanchist conservative monarchists alike. In 1936, the Anti-Comintern Pact, initially between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, was formed as an anti-communist alliance. In Asia, Imperial Japan and the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) were the leading anti-communist forces in this period.

By 1945, the communist Soviet Union was among major Allied nations fighting against the Axis powers in World War II. Shortly after the end of the war, rivalry between the Marxist–Leninist Soviet Union and liberal capitalist United States resulted in the Cold War. During this period, the United States government played a leading role in supporting global anti-communism as part of its containment policy. Military conflicts between communists and anti-communists occurred in various parts of the world, including during the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the First Indochina War, the Malayan Emergency, the Vietnam War, the Soviet–Afghan War, and Operation Condor. NATO was founded as an anti-communist military alliance in 1949, and continued throughout the Cold War.

France-based le Cercle and, afterwards the Trilateral Commission contributed to anti-Communist movements.

After the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of the world's communist governments were overthrown, and the Cold War ended. Nevertheless, anti-communism remains an element of many contemporary political movements. Organized anti-communist movements remain in opposition to the People's Republic of China and other communist states.

Anti-communist movements

Left-wing anti-communism

Since the split of the Communist parties from the socialist Second International to form the Marxist–Leninist Third International, social democrats have been critical of Communism for its anti-liberal nature. Examples of left-wing critics of Marxist–Leninist states and parties are Friedrich Ebert, Boris Souvarine, George Orwell, Bayard Rustin, Irving Howe, and Max Shachtman. The American Federation of Labor was always strongly anti-communist. The more left-wing Congress of Industrial Organizations purged its communists in 1947 and was staunchly anti-communist afterwards. In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party strenuously resisted Communist efforts to infiltrate its ranks and take control of locals in the 1930s. The Labour Party became anti-communist and UK Prime Minister Clement Attlee was a staunch supporter of NATO.

Despite anarchist communism being an anarchist school of thought, there are also anarchists who oppose communism. Anti-communist anarchists include anarcho-primitivists and other green anarchists, who critique communism for its need of industrialisation and its authoritarianism.

Liberalism

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels outlined some provisional short-term measures that could be steps towards communism. They noted that "these measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable." Ludwig von Mises described this as a "10-point plan" for the redistribution of land and production and argued that the initial and ongoing forms of redistribution constitute direct coercion. Neither Marx's 10-point plan nor the rest of the manifesto say anything about who has the right to carry out the plan. Milton Friedman argued that the absence of voluntary economic activity makes it too easy for repressive political leaders to grant themselves coercive powers. Friedman's view was also shared by Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes, both of whom believed that capitalism is vital for freedom to survive and thrive. Ayn Rand was strongly anti-communist. She argued that Communist leaders typically claim to work for the common good, but many or all of them were corrupt and totalitarian.

At the end of World War I, liberal internationalists developed an early opposition to the Bolshevik regime, which they saw as betraying the war effort with peace with Germany, followed by annexed portions of the Soviet Union losing their self-determination. Later, knowledge of Stalinist show trials and other repressions in the USSR, from 1922 onward, led to a liberal anti-communist consensus by the start of WWII, which temporarily gave way during the WWII alliance with the Soviet Union. Historian Richard Powers distinguishes two main forms of anti-communism during the period, liberal anti-communism and countersubversive anti-communism. The countersubversives, he argues, derived from a pre-WWII isolationist tradition on the right. Liberal anti-communists believed that political debate was enough to show Communists as disloyal and irrelevant, while countersubversive anti-communists believed that Communists had to be exposed and punished.

Cold War liberals supported the growth of labor unions, the Civil Rights Movement, and the war on poverty and simultaneously opposed what they saw as Communist totalitarianism abroad. As such, they supported efforts to contain Soviet communism and other forms of communism.

President Harry Truman formulated the Truman Doctrine to stop Soviet expansionism. Truman also called Joseph McCarthy "the greatest asset the Kremlin has," for dividing the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States. Liberal anti-communists like Edward Shils and Daniel Moynihan had a contempt for McCarthyism. As Moynihan put it, "reaction to McCarthy took the form of a modish anti anti-communism that considered impolite any discussion of the very real threat Communism posed to Western values and security." After revelations of Soviet spy networks from the declassified Venona project, Moynihan wondered: "Might less secrecy have prevented the liberal overreaction to McCarthyism as well as McCarthyism itself?"

Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who presided over postwar West Germany as a market liberal democracy, signaled that the Soviet Union was the "greatest threat to liberty", an idea that exerted major domestic and international influence.

After the fall of Gorbachev and the Soviet Union in 1991, the anti-communist movement grew rapidly.

In the early-1990s, many new anti-communist movements emerged in the former Soviet bloc as a result of failed elections and Boris Yeltsin's Palace Coup. When this seizure of power occurred, more than thirty electoral blocs set out to contest the election. Some of these anti-Stalinist groups were: Choice of Russia, the Civic Union for Stability, Justice & Progress, Constructive Ecological Movement, Russian Democratic Reform Movement, Dignity and Mercy, and Women of Russia. Even though these movements were not successful in contesting the election, they displayed how there was still a strong support of anti-communism after the collapse of the Soviet Union. All of these movements were all critical of the Stalinist policy of the USSR, and some left-wing parties and organizations within the movements called it an "unmitigated disaster for socialists."

Former communists

Milovan Djilas was a former Yugoslav communist official who became a prominent dissident and critic of communism. Ante Ciliga was a former Croatian communist, one of the earliest leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party and the main organizer of the Proština rebellion. After being imprisoned in a gulag during The Great purge, he became a fiery anti-communist and ideologue of the Croatian Ustaše movement. Leszek Kołakowski was a Polish communist who became a famous anti-communist. He was best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, especially his acclaimed three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism, which is "considered by some to be one of the most important books on political theory of the 20th century". The God That Failed is a 1949 book which collects together six essays with the testimonies of a number of famous former communists who were writers and journalists. The common theme of the essays is the authors' disillusionment with and abandonment of communism. The promotional byline to the book is "Six famous men tell how they changed their minds about communism." Anatoliy Golitsyn and Oleg Kalugin were both former KGB officers, the latter being a general. Dmitri Volkogonov was a Soviet general who got access to Soviet archives following glasnost, and wrote a critical biography dismantling the cult of Lenin by refuting Leninist ideology.

Whittaker Chambers was a former spy for the Soviet Union who testified against his fellow spies before the House Un-American Activities Committee; Bella Dodd was another American anti-communist.

Other anti-communists who were once Marxists include the writers Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, James Burnham, Morrie Ryskind, Frank Meyer, Will Herberg, Sidney Hook, the contributors to the book The God That Failed: Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Tajar Zavalani and Richard Wright. Anti-communists who were once socialists, liberals or social democrats include John Chamberlain, Friedrich Hayek, Raymond Moley, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Irving Kristol.

Counter-revolutionary movements

A wave of revolutionary impulses after the French Revolution swept over Europe and other parts of the world and thus also prompted a counter-revolutionary reaction. Historian James H. Billington describes, in the book Fire in the Minds of Men, the historical frame of revolutions that extended from the waning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century and that culminated in the Russian Revolution. Most exiled Russian White émigrés that included exiled Russian liberals were actively anti-communist in the 1920s and 1930s.

In the United Kingdom, anti-communism was widespread among the British foreign policy elite in the 1930s with its strong upper-class connections. The upper-class Cliveden set was strongly anti-communist in the UK. In the United States, anti-communist fervor was at its highest during the late-1940s and early-1950s, when a Hollywood blacklist was established, the House Un-American Activities Committee held the televised Army–McCarthy hearings, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the John Birch Society was formed.

White movement in Russia

The White movement was one of the main factions in the Russian Civil War that fought against the communist Bolsheviks, also known as the Reds, and against the pro-independence nationalist movements of the former Russian Empire and other factions. After the civil war, the movement continued operating to a lesser extent as militarized associations of insurrectionists both outside and within Russian borders in Siberia until roughly World War II. During World War II, some of the former White commanders attempted to continue the struggle by the means of collaboration with Nazi Germany.

Generally, the movement was unified on an authoritarian-right platform around the figure of the naval officer Alexander Kolchak who held the title of the Supreme Ruler of Russia and headed the military dictatorship of the Whites; although the White movement included a variety of political opinions in Russia opposed to the Bolsheviks, from the republican-minded liberals through monarchists to the ultra-nationalist Black Hundreds, and did not have a universally-accepted leader or doctrine, the main force behind the movement were the conservative officers, and the resulting movement shared many traits with widespread right-wing counter-revolutionary movements of the time, namely nationalism, racism, distrust of liberal and democratic politics, clericalism, contempt for the common man and dislike of industrial civilization. It generally defended the order of pre-revolutionary Imperial Russia, although the ideal of the movement was a mythical "Holy Russia", what was a mark of its religious understanding of the world; it sought the restoration of imperial state borders and denied the right to self-determination. The movement is associated with pogroms and antisemitism, due to the fact that a disproportionate number of leaders of the Revolution self-identified as Jewish.

Following the military defeat of the Whites, remnants and continuations of the movement remained in several organizations, some of which only had narrow support, enduring within the wider White émigré overseas community until after the fall of the European communist states in the Revolutions of 1989 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990–1991. This community-in-exile of anti-communists often divided into liberal-leaning and conservative-leaning segments, with some still hoping for the restoration of the Romanov dynasty. Two claimants to the empty throne emerged during the Civil War, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich of Russia and Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich of Russia.

Fascism

Fascism is often considered to be a reaction to communist and socialist uprisings in Europe. Italian Fascism, founded and led by Benito Mussolini, took power after years of leftist unrest led many disgruntled conservatives to fear that a communist revolution was inevitable. Nazi Germany's massacres and killings included the persecution of communists and among the first to be sent to concentration camps.

In Europe, numerous right and far-right activists including conservative intellectuals, capitalists and industrialists were vocal opponents of communism. During the late 1930s and the 1940s, several other anti-communist regimes and groups supported fascism. These included the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS in Spain; the Vichy regime and the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism (Wehrmacht Infantry Regiment 638) in France; and in South America movements such as the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance and Brazilian Integralism.

Nazism

Historians Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest argue that in the early 1920s the Nazis were only one of many nationalist and fascist political parties contending for the leadership of Germany's anti-communist movement. The Nazis only came to dominance during the Great Depression, when they organized street battles against German Communist formations. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels set up the "Anti-Komintern". It published massive amounts of anti-Bolshevik propaganda, with the goal of demonizing Bolshevism and the Soviet Union before a worldwide audience.

In 1936, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact. Italy joined as a signatory in 1937 and other countries in or affiliated with the Axis powers such as Finland and Spain joined in 1941. In the first article of the treaty, Germany and Japan agreed to share information about Comintern activities and to plan their operations against such activities jointly. In the second article, the two parties opened the possibility of extending the pact to other countries "whose domestic peace is endangered by the disruptive activities of the Communist International". Such invitations to third parties would be undertaken jointly and after the expressed consent by both parties.

Communists were among the first people targeted by the Nazis, with Dachau concentration camp when it first opened being for the holding of communists, leading socialists and other "enemies of the state" in 1933. Among the motivations for the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of the Jewish people, was the belief shared both by the Nazis and by the German army that Jews were responsible for Communism ("Bolshevism"), which they perceived as a threat to the "Western Civilization"; thus, extermination of the Jewry, the alleged racial root of Communism, was justified as a part of anti-Communist struggle. The understanding of "Bolshevism" as a Jewish conspiracy originated in the interwar period, during which the right-wing propaganda spread antisemitism through the so-called "Stab-in-the-back myth" which blamed the Jews for the defeat of Germany in World War I and for the 1918 Revolution. The identification of "Bolshevism" with the Jewry became generally accepted in Nazi Germany, and during World War II, the extermination of the Jews as a war against communism and Nazi mass killings were justified even by the army commanders who did not share the ideology of Nazism. More to it, the Jewry was identified with the anti-Fascist partisan movements in the occupied territories, and the extermination of the Jews was justified as measures of counterinsurgency and self-defense against an armed enemy.

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