Just how serious was the threat of Communism in America?

Great Debates
21

Actually, what is appalling is your knee-jerk reaction to seeing Bush and Stalin in the same sentence and assuming that I have made any comparison beyond the very specific (and quite accurate) comparison I made.

Bush has announced that we will not suffer anyone to challenge the U.S. ever again. Stalin made every effort to make sure that no one could challenge the Soviet Union, but no one has ever demonstrated any evidence that Stalin wanted conquer the world.

As I noted, his immediate efforts (e.g. Eastern Europe) were directly the result of creating buffer states between the Soviet Union and potential enemies.

The issues of Cuba, Angola, and Nicaragua were not a result of Stalin’s actions. They were part of the much larger (and much more complex) issue throughout the twentieth century, in which the colonial peoples of the world, in seeking to gain independence, found that the holders of colonial reins tended to be the republics of Western Europe (Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain*, Portugal*–and earlier Italy and Germany) or the “protection” racket enforced by the U.S., while the people who would support them to achieve independence were the Socialist states, with, in the later years, a set of ever-changing alliances based on the Great Game as played by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

The establishment of various Marxist political parties in Europe was a direct response to the earlier unregulated Capitalism combined with efforts to replace monarchies by republics. The U.S. avoided that problem by having a republic already in place and by co-opting many of the Marxist campaign issues through the efforts of the Progressive movement of 1890-1920 and the New Deal of FDR. Following WWII, countries in the U.S. sphere of influence tended to not go Marxist while countries in the Soviet sphere of influence did go Marxist. (And there is no question that the Soviets under Stalin simply murdered the opposition, while the U.S. allowed France and Italy to flirt with Marxism and turn away on their own. I do not claim that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were morally equivalent.)

Just like the United States if you want to make it simplistic. After all, if the U.S. had not propped up pre-Communist dicators throughout Central America and the Caribbean for so many years, there would not have been any reason for the opposition to turn to the Soviets for aid.
The Philipines makes an interesting study. The “al Qaida” elements that we are opposing, today, are the children of the “communists” that Marcos opposed (using U.S. aid to destroy democracy in that country for several years), and those “communists” were the grandchildren of the Muslim “extremists” that we were fighting between 1900 and 1920. Perhaps, if those people (who thought they were being liberated by the U.S. from Spain, only to be oppressed by the U.S. puppet governments) had been granted some sort of actual autonomy in 1903, we would not be having to fight them off under so many different labels for the ensuing 100 years.
If the U.S. had responded to Ho Chi Minh’s request for assistance by pressuring France to reconsider her colonial empire, rather than dismissing him and supporting France, he would not have turned to the Soviets for aid. As late as the post-WWII era, Ho was not committed to Marxism as a belief, only as a souce of support. President Eisenhower specifically told the French that they had to be sure to cast the struggle as a fight against communism, because the American people would not go along with supporting a colonial power suppressing an independence movement. Following which, of course, the U.S. brought in the ringer Diem brothers, violating the peace agreement, and giving the communists more ammunition to oppose the Western opppressors.

Once any independence movement brought in Soviet aid, of course, they brought in Communist propaganda and Soviet strings and a lot of those movements went to hell in a hand basket, regardless whether they won or lost. However, the notion that this was some monolithic movement that gobbled up countries left and right while the U.S. simply spoke up for freedom is historically false. The notion that it was all controlled from Moscow is equally absurd. As soon as Mao was secure, he (being the leader of another large competing nation) broke with the U.S.S.R. in the normal manner of large countries playing the Great Game. The Vietnamese, who had national conflicts with China, did turn to the U.S.S.R. Yugoslavia, with sufficient buffers between itself and the U.S.S.R., followed a somewhat independent course, following neither China nor the U.S.S.R.

22

You confuse “being controlled by” (which youassume without evidence) with “believing in the principles of.”

I knew you would be unable to accept this comparison. But that simply demonstrates the extreme bias of your position. Your claim that we were the “good guys” is historically bankrupt, (the best you can say is that we were smarter and less evil–hardly good).

23

The threat of communism was nothing compared to the threat of capitalism, which set up tyrranical governments and committed atrocities in Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Indonesia, and Greece, and subverted democracy in Italy and France. Stalin may have been an expansionist, but he didn’t get very far. The US is expansionist and is in the process of sewing up the largest global empire ever.

24

I agree with the overall tone of your post, but these details about the Philippines are not completely accurate. The “communists” and the “muslim extremists” have no connection to each other. The US conquered the Philippines after buying it from Spain, killing about 300,000 Filipinos in the process. Christians in the North and Muslims in the south fought their separate battles, decapitating the marines and earning them the moniker “Leathernecks” for the leather neck guards they wore to fend off the bolos. The colonization proceeded more or less peacefully until WWII. The Hukbalahapon were Filipino guerillas who fought against the Japanese. After the Japanese were driven out, the Huks were surprised when they were rounded up and arrested instead of being greeted as friends. The US, always paranoid of any group having power other than the elites they select, could not tolerate the existence of the Huks, thus marginalizing them and turning them away from the US. The Huks, or NPA as they are now known have no real affiliation with communism, other than a desire for land reform. The Abu Sayyaf are a small group of Muslims from Mindanao who went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets with US weapons and training. They have returned to the Philippines and are wreaking havoc with the covert support of Arroyo’s government and the US military who need them to justify US intervention and US bases in the Philippines. It is Lansdale in Vietnam all over again. Actually Lansdale cut his teeth in the P.I., assassinating Huks. The purpose of the recent protest of Philippine military officers was to bring attention to the corruption in Arroyo’s government and her covert support of the Abu Sayyaf.

25

Roger_Mexico, your statements regarding the Huks is correct (athough it is typically referred to by U.S. sources as a defeated “communist” uprising). However, the Moros of Mindanao against whom the U.S. fought around 1900 are the great grandparents of the people from whom Abu Sayyaf arose and, while the Huk were centered in Luzon, their efforts to expand in the 1960s and 1970s found fertile ground among the Mindanao islanders.

It should be noted that the Huk did accept support from the Communist government of China and, with the renewed efforts of the 1960s and 1970s, the communists were prominent among the rebels. Of course, we then find ourselves with the chicken and egg question as to whether the communists “incited” the rebels or whether the rebels looked to the communists as their only supporters. (Given that the land “reforms” of the 20th century were first slanted to favor the colonial holders of the lands and that later reforms were specifically designed to remove them from the little land that they held, I tend toward the latter view, obviously.)

Certainly, the Muslims of Mindanao are in no way the only group of people to rebel against either colonization or corruption in the Phillipines.

26

On the other hand, I believe that the following statement is a fundamental misunderstanding of the actions of the U.S.:

The U.S. certainly does not want to own or rule an empire. We probably do not even want to control other countries. (Note how much free rein most of the U.S.-backed dictators were allowed to have throughout most of the last century, as long as they did not contradict larger U.S. policy.)

Rather, the U.S. simply wants absolute security (as did the Soviets), however, the U.S. recognizes the need for financial as well as military security better than the Soviets did. To this end, we fought proxy wars against the Soviets in the Great Game and we put as much pressure as we could on groups that we did not believe favored us enough. (We are also inconsistent, emotionally choosing to hang Cuba out to dry while “engaging” China.) The current administration seems to believe that we can bully the world into acting in the best interests of the U.S., but even they stop short (so far) at an actual miltary (or even financial) hegemony over the whole world.

27

I detest this stupid use of the word of the word communism. It doesnt mean “everything evil”.

28

How many of you have ever had contact with a communist ? There are barely if any communists in the US. I have contact all the time with people who term themselves communists (and many really “are”) and I say that most of them think that way due to over intellectualization. Commies here are not a practical minded people…

( Mind you that they all say the the Soviet Union was not communism… not in the “real” sense. Not being a leftist myself I think its word games only.)

Was the US ever more intelectually minded than Europe ? I think the answer is no. Not that its done any good to Europe thou mind you... but its just how things are. So thou it might have sounded mean or overdone... my statement holds true. Americans were and are more worried about business and working and sucess than the Europeans were. Communist ideas that have some effect over middle class university students in Europe and Brazil would barely register in America.

Should a communist takeover happen in the US it would have had to be extremely bloody to be sucessful since there would be very little ideological support for it.

29

The OP could just as well have asked the question “Was the US ever in danger of becoming one big, happy, egalitarian Kibbutz”?.

30

Are you referring to the infamous coup attempt of 1934 in which a cabal of industrialists were planning to take over the government, led by Smedley Butler, who blew the whistle on the whole operation? I was wondering if this is a hoax, or if it really happened.

http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/fdtcards/Butler.html

31

sqweels, I remember reading somewhere (sorry no cite) that the Soviets were not stupid enough to believe that they could take over the US by military means. In the 60’s it was plainly obvious that nuclear weapons meant that no side could win a war, so the Soviets turned to subversion. The idea was to basically try to convert the US through non-military means. The KGB’s involvement in the US began to dwarfe what the CIA was capable of defending against, and they did in fact pose quite a large threat as they had so many people on their payroles. It was only decades later that the US had turned the tide of the intelligence war against the KGB and had many of it’s own agents in the USSR.

32

revolutionarily, the first thing to provide is actual evidence that the Soviets, following the removals of Trotsky and Zinoviev and their associates before 1930, ever actually had a plan for world-wide revolution.

Noting that the two world powers, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S., spent enormous amounts of money and energy trying to be top dog is not the same as proving that the Soviets actually had an interest in conquering the world. As you can see in many discussions of current politics, there are people who believe that the U.S. is out to rule the world, today. I think that each view is simply simplistic overreaction to and projection upon the great powers.

Note that we have access to the Venona papers and the memoirs of people such as Alexander Feklisov to see the successes and failures of the Soviets in the U.S. On the other hand, the U.S. has not released any similar documents (except at the most superficial level) detailing U.S. successes and failures in the U.S.S.R. (Note, that I do not expect the U.S. to do so any time soon. The release of Soviet papers has followed the replacement of the U.S.S.R. by Russia and the U.S.S.R. can now be viewed as a historical entity to be examined. The U.S. is the “same” country it was and continues to maintain most of its secrets.)

33

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Roger_Mexico *
Are you referring to the infamous coup attempt of 1934…

[QUOTE]

hmm…probably something more recent… very recent… :slight_smile:

34

IMO, the American people do not want the country to be an imperial power. On the other hand, that doesn’t preclude certain members of the government from wanting such a thing, and taking moves to make it so.

Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction there? By allowing dictators to thrive as long as they don’t interfere with US foreign policy (or as long as they provide “value” to the US in various ways), isn’t that a control of sorts? “You can stay in place as the tin-plated dictator as long as you don’t cross these US policy lines/keep providing us with cheap oil/give us something that we want.” Granted, it isn’t direct control, as in the President of the United States calling up the Saud family and telling them what their policies for next year will be, but that still means we have some influence.

35

Perhaps. However, it is not the sort of imperial control that most people associate with empire building. Beyond that, the U.S. did not even enforce control in foreign relations. Indonesia and Phillipines each took steps to which the U.S. was opposed in terms of trade and on issues in the United Nations. As long as they maintained the narrow party line of “opposing communism” we did not interfere. Similarly, the U.S. has never compelled Saudi Arabia or Egypt or several other Middle East military clients to toe the party line on U.S. positions.

The U.S. does enjoy being the 800 lb. gorilla, (and has engaged in immoral support for various dictators), but the tendency to cast everything as black and white, for us or against us, supporting “communism” or opposing “communism” is the sort of binary thinking that I opposed in the post that triggered this thread.

The world is a large and complex place and reducing every action (and, especially, every motivation) to “good” and “evil” as if there were clear good guys and bad guys is counterproductive to understanding how the world works. (And a failure to understand differences in shade and color and texture is what led to the excesses of the anti-communist witch hunts and to the current situation in Iraq.)

(Your point about the desires of certain members of the U.S. government is noted.)

“For every complex problem, there is a simple solution–
and it is wrong.”
John Edward Emerich Acton

36

Revolutionary:

That’s pretty much what I thought, but there are still people who insists that Soviet-led Communists very nearly “took away our freedom” and that the last ounce of US military strength is what prevented that from happening.

But there is a vast gulf of vagueness as to what would be required to “convert” the vast majority of Americans into supporting a scrapping of the Constitution and the installation of a communist dictatorship in Washington. Spies were good at gathering intelligence to be used back home to influence Cold War military posturing and gamesmanship, but not very good at influencing politics (apart from provking a backlash).

I think that the Soviets saw a lot of opportuity to expand communism into the Third World, but the prospect of communizing the US remained on the periphery of their thinking. Khruschev’s “we will bury you” remark was an expression of a believed-in pie-in-the-sky eventuality rather than a direct threat. In the meantime they resorted to a WWII Axis-style strategy of “make it too costly for them and they’ll go home” in the overseas department, which as actually had some success in Vietnam and its aftermath.

37

Communism is too big a concept to even answer the question. If I were to break it down into pieces I could at least be somewhat convinced of my guesses.

Threat level 1-10

  1. Soviet espionage: the dangers were pretty great. I’d give it an 8 or above. Obviously the threat was much greater when the Rosenbergs, Aldrich Ames, and John Walker were working for the Soviets versus one day after their arrests, thus it’s really impossible to settle on one number. With Walker at the height of his espionage the threat was a 9+.

  2. Other Communist bloc agents espionage. The Bulgarians and East Germans certainly were quite a threat. Again, pretty high, a 7 or above, varying all the time.

  3. Domestic Communists. Except insofar as these overlap with categories one and two, I would place the threat much, much lower. Maybe a 1 or a 2. Communism doesn’t seem to take off in wealthy nations with a free exchange of ideas. In fact, I would argue that trying to suppress domestic political Communism made us just like the Communists.

  4. Actual all out war with the Communist bloc involving nuclear weapons. Really, even looking at the Cold War through rose-colored glasses, I’d have to rate it a 9. 10 being actual nuclear war. There have been so many close calls made public that it should make your blood run cold. Stalin was a real threat. No amount of historical sugar glazing can change that fact unless there exists a real memory hole.

During the Walker days there were some pretty heady discussions about the feasibility of a decaptiation strike on the US by some in the Soviet high command in the 1980s.

OTOH, somewhere in the Pentagon there is sure to be some junior officer cooking up all kinds of scary war plans which look really bad if you remove the term “contingency.” And, of course, the Soviets never launched the first strike, meaning cooler heads previled consistently for over 50 years. Therefore, in hindsight, it’s easy to argue the threat was insignificant.

If you would like to know how hot and dangerous the Cold War really was read By Any Means Necessary, by William E. Burrows. Unfortunately, as the interest in the Cold War wanes, the actual facts are coming to light that allow us to analyze what went on.

[/aside]

  1. McCarthy. To the extent he never even sniffed a one or a two, and badgered quite a few people in category three, I’d rate him as a threat to our liberty. But, unlike the prevailing view in academia, I’d rate his threat as pretty small also. I’d call it a 3 because he had some power to abuse, unlike many domestic Communists.
38

Again,peopletoday make light odf the US communist party-it turns out that the party was funded and controlled direct from Moscow. The fact that it was incompetent (pretty much) doesn’t mean much-it was fully prepared for the day when it wouldturn power over to its russian masters.
Strangely, many of the US Communists could not bring themseleves to believe anything bad about Stalin’s regime…for example when it came out (in 1944), that the Red Army had murdered 110,000 polish army prisoners (in the Katyn Forest in Poland), Earl browder told his people that the report was Nazi propaganda. Browder himslef could never believe that stalin had over 20 million Russians deported to prison camps(or murdered).

39

Is there an actual successful Communist state? I mean, even though there were 80+ years to try and perfect the theology, did the USSR actually ever achieve it?
I only ask this from the original definition of Communism I could find.

Communism:
n.
An economic system characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members.

Seems that even in Stalin’s era, they never got rid of the gov’t influence.

40

The fact that it was totally ineffective means that there was never going to be a day when it would have the opportunity to “turn power over to its Russian masters.” (Had the Soviets found a way to conquer the U.S., it would not have been through the CPUSA and the CPUSA leadership would have been brushed aside as incompetent.)