Anti-communism

Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communist beliefs, groups, and individuals. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an intense rivalry. Anti-communism has been an element of many movements and different political positions across the political spectrum, including anarchism, centrism, conservatism, fascism, liberalism, nationalism, social democracy, socialism, leftism, and libertarianism, as well as broad movements resisting communist governance. Anti-communism has also been expressed by several religious groups, and in art and literature.

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• The specific kind of anti-communism that took shape in these years was partly based on value judgements: the widespread belief in the United States that communism was simply a bad system, or morally repugnant even when effective. But it was also based on a number of assertions about the nature of Soviet-led international communism. There was a widespread belief that Stalin wanted to invade Western Europe. It became accepted as fact that the Soviets were pushing for revolution worldwide, and that whenever communists were present, even in small numbers, they probably had secret plans to overthrow the government. And it was considered gospel that anywhere communists were acting, they were doing so on the orders of the Soviet Union, part of a monolithic global conspiracy to destroy the West. Most of this was simply untrue. Much of the rest was greatly exaggerated.
  • Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, PublicAffairs, 2020. pp. 15-16

• While all these untoward events were taking place, amid a ceaseless chatter of well-meant platitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, a new and more terrible cause of quarrel than the imperialism of czars and kaisers became apparent in Europe. The Civil War in Russia ended in the absolute victory of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet armies which advanced to subjugate Poland were indeed repulsed in the Battle of Warsaw, but Germany and Italy nearly succumbed to Communist propaganda and designs. Hungary actually fell for a while under the control of the Communist dictator, Bela Kun. Although Marshal Foch wisely observed that “Bolshevism had never crossed the frontiers of victory,” the foundations of European civilisation trembled in the early post-war years. Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism. While Corporal Hitler was making himself useful to the German officer class in Munich by arousing soldiers and workers to fierce hatred of Jews and Communists, on whom he laid the blame of Germany’s defeat, another adventurer, Benito Mussolini, provided Italy with a new theme of government which, while it claimed to save the Italian people from Communism, raised himself to dictatorial power. As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into even more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction.
  • Winston Churchill, The Second World War Volume I: The Gathering Storm (1948), ISBN 0-395-41055-X, pp. 13-14

• The [Axis] occupation of Europe could now be reconfigured. Invasion of the Soviet Union was represented as a 'crusade for Europe'; the entire continent could unite in a 'European United Front against Bolshevism'. Just as the invasion of the European empires in Asia would allow the Japanese to recast their own imperialism in terms of East Asian 'Co-Prosperity', so now the Germans could portray the European Grossraumwirtschaft (literally, 'great space economy') as a German-led bulwark against Bolshevism. Collaborators in occupied Europe latched on to this new theme of propaganda with alacrity. On October 30, 1941, Marshal Pétain, the doddering figurehead of the Vichy regime, vowed that France would flourish 'within the framework of the constructive activity of a New European order'. Similar sentiments were expressed in Belgium, Finland and elsewhere. The Nazis' European rhetoric struck a chord with all those conservatives for whom German dominance seemed a lesser evil than Soviet Communism. Only as the war in the East turned from blitzkrieg to attrition, and the need supervened to wring every last penny out of the occupied West, did the emptiness of this rhetoric gradually manifest itself.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 440

• A larger effort along these line was launched by our group in March 1952 from a new platform suggestively named Society for Defence of Freedom in Asia (SDFA). ... It "placed anti-communism squarely on the map of political India"...
  It was perhaps the most painful experience of our lives to see the Prime Minister of a democratic country openly patronising the Chinese lobby led by the Communist Party of India, and angrily denouncing tried and tested patriots of a long standing in India's freedom movement. The communist press in India and abroad came out against the SDFA since its very inception...
  The Russian and Chinese embassies started sending memoranda to our External Affairs Ministry protesting that their countries were being systematically "blackened" by the SDFA...
  H.D. Malaviya, editor of the official Congress fortnightly AICC Economic Review, had started heaping abuses on us under the pretext of reviewing some of our publications...Prem Bhatia of The Statesman, another spokesman for Soviet Russia, Red China and Krishna Menon in those days, had also displayed malice towards our work in the columns of that important daily. ...
  In February 1955, I received an invitation to attend the forthcoming Conference of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League in Formosa. I sent the entire correspondence - including a very warm letter written to me personally by President Chiang Kai-shek - to our External Affairs Ministry, saying that I would accept the invitation only under advice from them...Meanwhile, I had applied for a passport ...But when I approached the Bureau after more than two months to find out the status of my case, they told me confidentially that my case was receiving attention from the Prime Minister himself.
  • About the anti-communist movement in the 1950s in India. S.R. Goel, Genesis and Growth of Nehruism (1993)

• Every political debate these days contains a lot about economic policies. So much so that sometimes I think people get a little tired of hearing about them. Naturally there is a cry that Government must put people before economics. Who could disagree? That is the very reason why we in our Party have constantly fought Marxism and Communism. Fought Marxism because of —its compulsory society —its nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. —its attempt to snuff out individual conscience. —the absence of the great voluntary societies which are so much a part of our way of life. —its denial of freedom to choose —its elevation of the values of the State above those of religion. Its denial of the right to educate children outside the state system. —its extinction of private property because property rights support human rights.
  • Margaret Thatcher, Speech to Conservative Women’s Conference (20 May 1981)

• There is a word very commonly used these days: "anti-communism." It's a very stupid word, badly put together. It makes it appear as though communism were something original, something basic, something fundamental. Therefore, it is taken as the point of departure, and anti-communism is defined in relation to communism. Here is why I say that this word was poorly selected, that it was put together by people who do not understand etymology: the primary, the eternal concept is humanity. And communism is anti-humanity. Whoever says "anti-communism" is saying, in effect, anti-anti-humanity. A poor construction. So we should say: that which is against communism is for humanity. Not to accept, to reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. It isn't being a member of a party.
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Speech in Washington D.C. (30 June 1975), published in Solzhenitsyn: The Voice of Freedom (1975), p. 30