Anti-Communism, a Call for the Return**

An Anti-Communist is a dog. I don’t change my views on this, I never will.

                                                                   Jean-Paul Sartre

One would have to beat the briar patches hard these days to chase an anti-Communist out of the brambles. Sartre would not now find himself pressed to change his views; no one would suggest otherwise.  Anti-communism has been out-of-vogue for many years and for many reasons. Volumes could be written to explain why, but one obvious reason is the steady Left-ward drift of American culture since the mid-twentieth century. The Kulturkampf of the 1960s pushed America to the Left, and turned anti-Communism into a retreat for closed-minded, parochial hicks who couldn’t grasp the intricacies of French Existentialism or appreciate the new Cuba of Fidel’s making.

Communism is the Left at full throttle, at its “best.”  Communists of the twentieth century in large portions of the world had complete power over tens of millions of people.  They did what they said they would do – throw out the Capitalist exploiters. They ruled for decades over fiefdoms of equality and plenty that no one was allowed to leave.  The non-Communist Left has not only evinced no sense of shame for the history of their high-achieving Leftists cousins – Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, even Fidel – but actively and enthusiastically sang their praises all the while they were erecting the gulags, torturing and murdering the opposition, and eviscerating their economies.  The New York Times’s Walter Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer (never withdrawn) for his dishonest reporting of Stalin’s famine-handiwork; the truth-telling Malcolm Muggeridge was blackballed.  The abundant evidence of their monstrous cruelties notwithstanding, our high-culture sophisticates still prefer to ignore, downplay or rationalize them.  They remain enamored with the bearded German prophet, decrying the rapacity of profit-seekers and defending Communism’s humanistic “idealism.”  It was just that the wrong people tried to implement it.  Yale University Press recently published Why Marx was Right by Terry Eagleton, a book of no less than 258 pages, classified by the Library of Congress as social science, not fiction or humor.  Eagleton is not an economist, philosopher, political scientist or historian, but as one might guess, an English Professor, a “Distinguished” one according to his official title from the University of Lancaster. This book, its publisher and its author, taken altogether are a perfect illustration of why the humanities has become completely irrelevant outside the walls of academe.

Another reason for anti-Communism's decline is the gradual but seemingly inevitable secularization of American society. Anti-communism moves those with an affinity for the transcendent:  communists abhor the notion, the possibility that human beings might be something more than complicated configurations of molecules, understandable given the millions of living souls they made into dead bodies. But secularism tilts away from the transcendent and is much more compatible with the materialist orientation of the contemporary Left and its disdain for traditional religion. 

One is struck by the profound change in the softening of attitude of the American people over the course of the last fifty years toward Communism.  One of the Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates proceeded with these comments from the standard bearers.

Senator John Kennedy: We set a very high standard for ourselves. The communists do not.  They set a low standard of materialism.  We preach in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, in the statements of our greatest leaders, we preach very high standards; and if we’re not going to be charged before the world with hypocrisy we have to meet those standards.

Vice-President Richard Nixon: Also as far as religion is concerned, I have seen Communism abroad. I see what it does. Communism is the enemy of all religions; and we who do believe in God must join together.

These words, forming part of the political conversation in America, near the end of 1960 must have resonated strongly with the American people. No main stream politician after 1970, with the exception of Ronald Reagan on a few occasions, would or could talk like this. Consider their striking contrast with the autobiographical musings of a current national politician:

President Barak Obama: To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets….  At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz [sic] Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated." [From, Dreams from my Father, 100-101]

Whatever one might think of Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, neocolonialism and Eurocentrism, it is indisputable that the Cold War-revulsion with communism in the West has disappeared.  Still, it is remarkable that such an angry and bitterly tinged confession of Communist infatuation expressed above by our President as a young man (never apparently regretted or retracted) would never be considered as a serious issue by the electorate.    

But there are many other things now to fear and reprobate besides our President’s youthful, Marxist dyspepsia.  Still, I think, it is worthwhile to reconsider our kinder-gentler posture toward an ideology that ravaged a good portion of the planet and its people during the twentieth century.

I propose that there are at least three good reasons to launch a militant anti-Communism for the twenty-first century.  First, for much of the latter half of the twentieth century, it has been difficult to know the extent and ferocity of the slaughter conducted by Communist regimes.  Because of the vast disparity between the promises and the performance, Communists became masterful at both hiding the enormity of their iniquities and pretending to be virtuous.  Recent access gained to archives that have long been inaccessible to outside researchers has confirmed what mid-twentieth century anti-Communists knew, that the Reds in China and Russia were shooting and starving their people by the millions.*   Those who were under them suffered deeply; those who were not rightly loathed and feared them.

In spite of a century of mass-murder with its extensive documentation the self-infatuated monsters responsible for it have never been fully execrated.  The tens of millions of their victims deserve the solemn acknowledgement of their innocence and suffering.  The perpetrators richly deserved to be remembered for all that they did and be showered forever with ignominy.  

The second reason is to demolish the phony, self-glorifying rhetoric of Communism’s “anti-Fascism.”  Stalin defeated Hitler only after he colluded and connived with him and then only after he collected the generous assistance from England and the U.S. – Lend-Lease, Studebaker trucks, and a second front.  As long as we allow the bogus argument to persist that Communists have courageously advanced the values that Hitler eschewed – equality, tolerance and world peace – they will continue to peddle the howler that they are the avatars of moral rectitude and human progress.

The third, and perhaps most important reason, is the persistence of communism.   Hitler is long dead and wholly execrated by the German people. Holocaust deniers in Germany and Austria are thrown in jail.  No one pays homage to dead Nazis. However, Mao and Lenin still molder away in their mausoleums and receive veneration.  Daniel Ortega was given a second chance in Nicaragua.  Communist governments, parties and movements abound, and in some places thrive. 

Anti-Communism is needed as a counterpoise to the ambitions of the twenty-first century Marxists and their friends. They never cease to believe that with the same political ideology that shaped and inspired Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, unlike them, they can make a peoples’ revolution that is a happy-time for all, a dream rather than a recurring nightmare – Socialism with a Human Face.   

*See:

Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine, Free Press, 1996,

Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, a Reassessment, Oxford, 2007,

Frank Dikotter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most

Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62, Walker & Co, 2010.   

**Dedicated to my friend, Mike Burton, who fought the communists in Vietnam.

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Stalinism & Anti-Fascism

The Government of the German Reich and The Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics desirous of strengthening the cause of peace between Germany and the U.S.S.R., and proceeding from the fundamental provisions of the Neutrality Agreement concluded in April, 1926 between Germany and the U.S.S.R., have reached the following Agreement:..
                      Text of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 1939

To grasp the amplitude of Communist dishonesty both past and present one must consider the complex relationship of Communism to Fascism.    One early and enduring aspect of Communist self-promotion was its draping itself with the mantle of anti-Fascism.  Since the late 1920s the Communists have strutted about the world as the ultimate anti-Fascists, and thus the Vanguard of the Morally Superior.  “Fascism” in this scenario represented everything that was wrong in the contemporary world, and Communists were, of course, “anti-Fascist.”

            The logic of Communism as anti-Fascism is very simple, but its application, because of the infinite elasticity of the premises, makes it highly flexible and able to lead to whatever conclusions are requisite in order to justify any change in principle, policy, or goal. The most elemental syllogism is the following: Fascism is evil; Communism is opposed to Fascism; therefore, Communism is good. An “anti-Fascist” is simply another term for a virtuous person, and the syllogism is scarcely less than tautological. The logic belies the reality of what always has been the crude tribal psychology of Communism, an antagonistic world neatly divided into legions of the very Good struggling against the very Evil. “Fascism,” however, for J.S. Stalin, Mr. anti-Fascist, was always a moving target, a label of excommunication for whoever happened to be in the way of current Soviet objectives.   

In the years between 1928 and 1935, the Soviets were anticipating the world-wide collapse of capitalism. Their most successful and serious ideological rivals at that time were the non-Communist Left, especially the reform-oriented Social Democrats, who had become a power and legitimate political force in Germany.  Stalin promptly expanded the category of “Fascist” so as to make the Social Democrats appropriate objects of execration and abuse. They were now identified, “unmasked” as it were, as “Social Fascists.”  How could this be? They were Socialists, good Marxist-Leftists of sorts who like their Communist brethren scorned the pursuit of profit and thoroughly loathed the capitalists. Nevertheless they had fallen in with the Fascists, that is, the capitalists, simply by participating with them in bourgeois politics.  They competed in elections, played by parliamentary rules and eschewed violent revolution. Lenin had especially despised them for this.  His preference and practice was to kill the opposition rather than have to compete with them for voter approval.  Worst of all for Stalin, they had been politically successful in Germany, and at that time he perceived them to be his most serious competition for power and thus their assigned membership in the class of evil. 

            Stalin’s “Social Fascist” demonization of the Social Democrat Marxists in Germany turned into the perfect gift for Hitler. It fractured his major opposition on the Left and greatly assisted his consolidation of power.  But once Hitler finished the strangling of the Weimar Republic and quickly turned his Third Reich into the most menacing and formidable military force in the world, Stalin suddenly realized that he now actually needed those Fascist German Social Democrats as allies on the Left. So, in 1935, “Social Fascism” fell out of the Stalinist lexicon and the Comintern made one of its most notorious about-faces and embraced the former “Social Fascists” in an anti-Fascist alliance that became known as the “Popular Front.”  And so the Social Democrats went from being Fascist to Anti-Fascist after a few chin-strokes by the General Secretary and a consultation with his retinue of yes-men, the Politburo – Stalin was nothing if not flexible.  The former collaborators with, and enablers of, capitalism – itself a fascist enterprise – were now embraced in the Party of the Good.

            Thus, Stalin’s most successful and enduring contribution to the ideology that ruled such a large part of the globe was make it the moral counterpoise to Fascism.   The Soviet Union proudly presented itself to the world as the bulwark of anti-Fascism.  Fascism was a rapacious, anti-egalitarian, political force driven by crude theories of national and racial superiority, put into practice by moral cretins. Whereas Fascists were inherently chauvinistic, imperialistic, and aligned to a narrow self-interest of class or race, Stalinism presented itself as a modern, progressive force that promised emancipation from all the traditional bondages and relationships of inequality.  Its goodness was comprehensive and ever expansive.  Women would be equal to men.  Racial bigotry and discrimination would fall away.  Social and economic and cultural differences that set people apart and put them in opposition would finally and irrevocably disappear.

Soviet Communism projected itself to the entire world as the showcase of modern humanism, a wave that pushed reluctant people everywhere toward universal equality and progress which of course was the basis of its broad appeal. Stalin discovered that the mantle of anti-Fascism was an ideal strategy that could be continuously used to associate Bolshevism with these aspirational qualities and endow the Soviet Union with a broad and sweeping moral superiority such that to be opposed to them was to align oneself with the brutal forces of reaction. To be an anti-Communist was to be a Fascist.  Though this moral dichotomy presented by Stalin and his successors had no place in reality, it was highly successful as propaganda. The anti-Communist as Fascist became a rote canard firmly and permanently embedded in the daily discourse of the Left where it continues to this day. This false imagery was certainly not impaired by the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunals where the Soviets, the newly victorious anti-Fascists, sat in judgment over the vanquished, genocidal Nazis.

The Left still cannot resist the Fascist smear.  George W. Bush throughout his eight years as President was routinely denounced as a Fascist, Hitler Redux, etc. The term, “Fascist,” however now seems used less as an insult (what does it really mean, anyway?) but more as a part of a self-referential ritual of moral affirmation. Calling someone a “Fascist” announces and affirms to the world the speaker’s moral and intellectual superiority, compassion and identification with the highest aspirations of humanity. Its use further assures that others know that he is no member of the knuckle dragging lumpenproletariat.