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  The New York Times’s Walter Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer (never withdrawn) for his dishonest reporting of Stalin’s famine-handiwork; the truth-telling Malcolm Muggeridge was blackballed.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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"Death Blow to Moral Chaos"

Nature it selfe cannot erre: and as men abound in copiousnesse of language; so they become more wise or more mad than ordinary.

                                                      Thomas Hobbes

The Communists in close rivalry with the Nazis for brutality and duplicity have been far superior to the Nazis in one crucial regard; the ability to cover up or rationalize their crimes and depredations.  In part this was due to the fact that Stalin with the help of the Western powers – Lend Lease, Studebaker trucks and a Western front – defeated Hitler.   Stalin won and winners usually get to write the script and exert control over the storyline.  In 1945 with the collapse of the Nazi regime, Auschwitz and Buchenwald became suddenly and spectacularly the horror story of the century. Upon the vanquished Germans fell the responsibility for the holocaust and the horrible collective guilt. “Genocide” entered the moral and legal vocabulary of the twentieth century, a neologism that met the need to underscore both the moral and physical magnitude of what the Germans had done to the European Jews.   Hitler was immediately and forever stamped with odium and all the appropriate markings of a sadistic monster.  Stalin’s mass murders, his Gulag, his Terror Famine in Ukraine, the forced deportations of entire peoples, and the Katyn Wood massacre he ordered, however, were ignored or lied about for decades.  Only much later long after Stalin was dead, did his atrocities begin to bear wide spread scrutiny and invite comparisons.  Those who attempted to bring the history of these comparable barbarities to light were attacked by the Left – by illustrious philosophers such as Jean Paul Sartre – as reactionaries and crypto-Fascists or dismissed as cranks. “An anti-Communist is a dog, I don’t change my views on this, I never shall” was Sartre’s response to those who might mention Stalin’s Hitler-like practices.  [Quoted from Hilton Kramer, “The Flowers on Sartre’s Grave”] And he never did.  Until he died in 1980 the bourgeoisie-loathing, café-lounging Paris scribbler exclusively reserved his admiration and support for the Gulag-humanitarians, first Stalin, then Mao and Castro.  

Also, the Communists, unlike the Nazis, were generously assisted in their efforts at self-sanitization by prestigious adulators from afar.   Off to Moscow they dutifully trekked for a peek at the promise land in the making and a friendly chat in the Kremlin with the yellow-eyed, pipe smoking man in the grey tunic. “Uncle Joe”, as he was to FDR had divined the blueprint.  Back they came deeply impressed – from FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace to George Bernard Shaw to H.G. Wells. Socialism, central economic planning and egalitarianism were in in place and successful: they seemed to be working pretty well for the Russians. 

When the bright sheen wore off of the USSR after a time there were new Communist utopias under construction to visit and to enthuse over – China, Cuba and North Vietnam.  Hewlett Johnson, the Dean of Canterbury made three trips to Mao’s China from 1952 to 1959.  Johnson was touring just when Mao was launching his forced collectivization of the Chinese peasantry in imitation of Stalin’s efforts in the 1930s.  His impressions were recorded in The Upsurge of China published in 1961 just at the time when Mao’s Great Leap Forward was plunging China into a horrific famine. With what he saw in China he could not have been more enthralled and could not have been more extravagant in his praise.  Communism, Chinese style, was the way of the future, morally far superior in its organization and operation. “The new socialism and communism in China,” enthused Johnson, “provides a new moral basis for society.  It has struck a death blow to a moral chaos that reigns in the existence of many sovereign states, each restricted by any moral law curtailing its absolute sovereignty.” [Hewlett Johnson, The Upsurge of China, New World Press, 1961, 366] “Death blow to a moral chaos” – one can only speculate on the mental moorings that would produce this metaphor.  The “death blow” that Mao’s new China was striking was not to whatever "moral chaos" the good Dean seemed to dredge out of his imagination, but to millions of its peasants, deliberately starved by the government.

 Worshipful clerics, journalists, professors and intellectuals have remained a staple of Communist apologetics throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.  A master at special pleading for Communist despots, quite late in the twentieth century when much of the world possessed a fairly firm grasp about how lethal Peoples’ Republics had been for their residents, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky sought in his After the Cataclysm to air brush out of consideration Pol Pot’s mass murder in Cambodia.  “In the first place, is it proper to attribute deaths from famine and disease to the Cambodian authorities?"  Chomsky has always been consistent in holding up the most rigorous standards of responsibility to his own government and delineating with exactitude their particular inequities, but for one of the most brutal dictatorships of modern times he prefers to be generous and forgiving.