Why Is Communism Such a Joke in the US?

[Shodan]

@BrainGlutton

Nitpick: The French Communists also flip-flopped on Hitler according to the line from Moscow. All big-C Communists (i.e., Stalinist as opposed to Trotskyist) worldwide, all whose parties were Comintern members, did. (Orwell wrote a lot of insightful material about that.) Socialists were outside that whole mess and were always against Hitler. So were Trotskyists.

I didn’t know that - thanks.

How did the timing work in France? IIRC, Germany and the USSR signed the Ribbentropp-Molotov pact in 1939, before the USSR and Germany invaded Poland, and Hitler attacked France in 1940. He didn’t attack the Soviet Union until after he had conquered France.

I assume the Communists repudiated their support of or neutrality towards Hitler when he attacked France. And then they had the whole course of the war to rehabilitate themselves.

Regards,
Shodan

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

Indeed, the Communist repudiation of Hitler did much good for their cause. The Cambridge Five, for example, were motivated in large part by the desire to fight fascism, and believed Stalin offered them the best opportunity to do so.

[BrainGlutton]

@Shodan

I didn’t know that - thanks.

How did the timing work in France? IIRC, Germany and the USSR signed the Ribbentropp-Molotov pact in 1939, before the USSR and Germany invaded Poland, and Hitler attacked France in 1940. He didn’t attack the Soviet Union until after he had conquered France.

I assume the Communists repudiated their support of or neutrality towards Hitler when he attacked France. And then they had the whole course of the war to rehabilitate themselves.

Regards,
Shodan

Well, I have no cite, but I recall a history prof mentioning that when the Nazi officials took over in occupied France, they actually encountered French Communists showing up at their offices and asking, “What can I do for you?” Party discipline was just that strong.

[LonesomePolecat]

@BrainGlutton

:rolleyes: Nonsense. Of course they did. Not only was it just over the border, rather than a remote, theoretical thing like in America, but there were actual Communist movements in Western Europe in that period, some of them violent, and making the Symbionese Liberation Army look like the joke it was. Look up the Red Brigade and the Bader-Meinhof gang. Western Europe is where the whole thing got started; Marx was a German who spent some of his life in France and some of it in Belgium and the rest of it in Britain; it is where the Paris Commune had its brief existence and the Spanish Revolution was tried; and the tradition has never died out. It is preposterous to say the American people took Communism any “more seriously” just because they had to pay taxes to fund the American military establishment.

:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: The fact remains that without American military support, Western Europe would have had to take a much more realistic attitude about the danger from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. I am very much aware of all that history, thank you, but NATO has allowed Europeans to live in something of a bubble for decades. Nor was communism was a remote, theoretical thing to Americans with a nuclear Damoclean sword hanging over our heads for decades. And who said anything about taxes?

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

What on earth are you talking about? American military support meant very little to Western Europe. The NATO forces in West Germany would have been overrun in about thirty seconds if the Soviets had actually invaded.

[BrainGlutton]

@LonesomePolecat

:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: The fact remains that without American military support, Western Europe would have had to take a much more realistic attitude about the danger from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. I am very much aware of all that history, thank you, but NATO has allowed Europeans to live in something of a bubble for decades. Nor was communism was a remote, theoretical thing to Americans with a nuclear Damoclean sword hanging over our heads for decades. And who said anything about taxes?

I did, because taxes were the only thing about all this that Americans actually had to put up with. That and, at some periods, the draft, but draft-age men are always a minority.

:rolleyes: And of course “communism was a remote, theoretical thing to Americans with a nuclear Damoclean sword hanging over our heads for decades.” That kind of threat is remote and theoretical – and has nothing to do with the Communist threat at all; a Nazi Europe would have presented exactly the same threat.

:dubious: And how could the European attitude possibly have been any more “realistic” than it was? E.g., such Europeans who marched for a “nuclear freeze” were entirely in the right. They demanded it, not because they did not fear Communism, but because they quite rationally feared far more the prospect of yet another great-power war where their own countries would be the main battleground. At the same time, they also knew, quite correctly, that they had little to fear from Communism, except as it was expressed in local terrorism. They knew, far better than Americans knew, that the USSR was not really committed to westward expansion except in theory, and that from the Soviet POV the Warsaw Pact was not a revolutionary frontier but a defensive frontier (entirely understandable in light of Russian history, with invasions periodically coming from the West). Europeans knew a lot more about Communism than Americans did, and if their attitude was less obsessively a good-vs.-evil one, that is, rather, grounds to suspect the Americans of being “unrealistic”.

[TriPolar]

@BrainGlutton

There was a time when its political system as such was considered a threat – not only because it represented a Soviet-Bloc presence in the Western Hemisphere, but because Cuba was a source of revolutionary intervention in other countries, such as Bolivia and Angola.

That’s all over and done with now. Castro is no threat to anyone beyond his own shores. The Zapatista rebels in Mexico don’t even bother to call themselves Marxists – if their rebellion had started 20 or even 10 years earlier they would have, but the name has lost its power to conjure. Whatever Chavez means by “Bolivarian,” it ain’t as scary and implies no claim to universality – means nothing outside South America, really.

Uh, right. Are you disagreeing with something? Obviously Cuba was once considered a Communist threat, intent on spreading Soviet backed Communism throughout Latin America, and posing a launch pad for a Soviet assault on the US. But the OP is about why Communism is a joke now.

[BrainGlutton]

@TriPolar

Uh, right. Are you disagreeing with something?

No, expanding.

[Claverhouse]

@Shodan

How did the timing work in France? IIRC, Germany and the USSR signed the Ribbentropp-Molotov pact in 1939, before the USSR and Germany invaded Poland, and Hitler attacked France in 1940. He didn’t attack the Soviet Union until after he had conquered France.

I assume the Communists repudiated their support of or neutrality towards Hitler when he attacked France. And then they had the whole course of the war to rehabilitate themselves.

Substitute ‘when he attacked the USSR’.
Individual communists were thrown out of their party, or sanctioned, for dissenting with the Pact, and others who conformed promoted in their place. Until the moment that orders came to reverse course — after some days, since even top members were dithering, including Stalin, as to whether the attack was real — when they were reinstated if lucky, and those promoted carried on their jobs since the official line was that a/ the Pact had only been tactical, and b/ the Party was, and always had been, the only real enemy of naziism.

The non-communist allies against naziism were compelled by the exigencies of war to pretend that soviet communism had not committed as hideous atrocities, in the name of Humanity, as the nazis and that they had not, even at that time, a vaster body-count. So amidst the massive amounts of necessary hypocrisy wafting about in the '30s and '40s, individual communists cannot be blamed for conforming to the pretence imposed by party discipline.

[Voyager]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

What on earth are you talking about? American military support meant very little to Western Europe. The NATO forces in West Germany would have been overrun in about thirty seconds if the Soviets had actually invaded.

They weren’t there to stop the Red Hordes, they were there as a trigger. If this had happened, it clearly would start World War III. Also, if there was a buildup on the other side there would have been a buildup on ours also.

[Voyager]

@TriPolar

We were primarily worried about the Soviet Union. When that collapsed, the fear was gone. We don’t even identify China, N Korea, Vietnam, or Cuba as Communist countries anymore.

Communism was pretty much a joke in the US even before the Soviet Union collapsed. In the US - not as an external adversary. The intellectual dalliance with Communism as a serious alternative pretty much vanished when Stalin signed the pact with Hitler, except for the spies and nuts like Lillian Hellman. Prosperity in the '50s made the appeal much less, and the fate of Joe McCarthy made fear of internal Communism a joke also. Since no one liked it, and no one was worried about internal threats, it became a joke. It helped that the rabid anti-Communists were pretty much a joke also.

[saoirse]

@BrainGlutton

Well, I have no cite, but I recall a history prof mentioning that when the Nazi officials took over in occupied France, they actually encountered French Communists showing up at their offices and asking, “What can I do for you?” Party discipline was just that strong.

I have to doubt this without some evidence for it. Either the communists did not show up and offer their assistance to the Nazis, or else party discipline was not that strong. Stalin had no interest in helping Hitler conquer or pacify France. Hitler’s invasion was not a surprise; its timing was. Stalin expected to have another two years.

[BrainGlutton]

@BrainGlutton

Nitpick: The French Communists also flip-flopped on Hitler according to the line from Moscow. All big-C Communists (i.e., Stalinist as opposed to Trotskyist) worldwide, all whose parties were Comintern members, did. (Orwell wrote a lot of insightful material about that.)

E.g., from “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1942):

I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish civil war. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.

In the present war we are in the curious situation that our ‘atrocity campaign’ was done largely before the war started, and done mostly by the Left, the people who normally pride themselves on their incredulity. In the same period the Right, the atrocity-mongers of 1914-18, were gazing at Nazi Germany and flatly refusing to see any evil in it. Then as soon as war broke out it was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating horror stories, while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting whether the Gestapo really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the Russo-German Pact. It was partly because before the war the Left had wrongly believed that Britain and Germany would never fight and were therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British simultaneously; partly also because official war-propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy. Part of the price we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-17 was the exaggerated pro-German reaction which followed. During the years 1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing circles if you suggested that Germany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war. In all the denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I ever once heard the question, ‘What would have happened if Germany had won?’ even mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it. Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention to them.

And “The Prevention of Literature” (1946):

Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent–for they were not of great importance in England–against Fascists. Today one has to defend it against Communists and “fellow-travelers”. One ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of the small English Communist Party, but there can be no question about the poisonous effect of the Russian MYTHOS on English intellectual life. Because of it known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written. Let me give just one instance out of the hundreds that could be cited. When Germany collapsed, it was found that very large numbers of Soviet Russians–mostly, no doubt, from non-political motives–had changed sides and were fighting for the Germans. Also, a small but not negligible portion of the Russian prisoners and displaced persons refused to go back to the U.S.S.R., and some of them, at least, were repatriated against their will. These facts, known to many journalists on the spot, went almost unmentioned in the British press, while at the same time Russophile publicists in England continued to justify the purges and deportations of 1936-38 by claiming that the U.S.S.R. “had no quislings”. The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U.S.S.R.–sympathetic, that is, in the way the Russians themselves would want him to be–does have to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on important issues. I have before me what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin, but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. What could be the attitude of even the most intellectually scrupulous Communist towards such a pamphlet? At best, the obscurantist attitude of saying that it is an undesirable document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it were decided to issue a garbled version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained faithful to his party could protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this have been committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen, but that, even when they are known about, they provoke no reaction from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell the truth would be “inopportune” or would “play into the hands of” somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books.

The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an underground legend to the effect that although the Russian government is obliged now to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly recording the true facts and will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that this is not the case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal historian who believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.

Here we see the roots of the “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” theme developed in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

As with everything else Orwell wrote, all this must be measured against the fact that he remained an avowed socialist to the end of his life; totalitarianism was his target, and he regarded it as inimical rather than indispensable to socialism.

[TriPolar]

@Voyager

Communism was pretty much a joke in the US even before the Soviet Union collapsed. In the US - not as an external adversary. The intellectual dalliance with Communism as a serious alternative pretty much vanished when Stalin signed the pact with Hitler, except for the spies and nuts like Lillian Hellman. Prosperity in the '50s made the appeal much less, and the fate of Joe McCarthy made fear of internal Communism a joke also. Since no one liked it, and no one was worried about internal threats, it became a joke. It helped that the rabid anti-Communists were pretty much a joke also.

I wish that was the case. The Soviet Union would have collapsed much sooner if we had directed billions of dollars into productive economy instead of spending it on military growth which never produced anything.

This discussion is prompting me to start a thread on one of my favorite related subjects, which I shan’t mention here lest I draw the wrath of the overlords.

[BrainGlutton]

@TriPolar

I wish that was the case. The Soviet Union would have collapsed much sooner if we had directed billions of dollars into productive economy instead of spending it on military growth which never produced anything.

Didn’t the USSR collapse because U.S. military hyperspending obliged them to try to keep pace? Which, I believe, was conscious U.S. strategy from the start of the Cold War.

[TriPolar]

@BrainGlutton

Didn’t the USSR collapse because U.S. military hyperspending obliged them to try to keep pace? Which, I believe, was conscious U.S. strategy from the start of the Cold War.

That is basically correct. They were hyperspending, and we were too. The difference is that we could better afford it. However, that is not the whole story. Please be patient and wait for my thread. I’ll post later today if possible. I just want a little time to form a coherent argument instead of my typical half vast posts.

[Voyager]

@TriPolar

I wish that was the case. The Soviet Union would have collapsed much sooner if we had directed billions of dollars into productive economy instead of spending it on military growth which never produced anything.

This discussion is prompting me to start a thread on one of my favorite related subjects, which I shan’t mention here lest I draw the wrath of the overlords.

Internal Communism was a joke, not external Communism. Just about everyone equal to or to the left of William F. Buckley thought the John Birch Society was a joke because they were afraid of things no one else put any importance on. The only thing dopier than Gus Hall (leader of CP-USA) was someone scared of Gus Hall.
The Communists in the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons and missiles. The Communists in the USA hardly had a working telephone.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@BrainGlutton

Didn’t the USSR collapse because U.S. military hyperspending obliged them to try to keep pace? Which, I believe, was conscious U.S. strategy from the start of the Cold War.

Well, not really. Spending to keep up with US military spending did ultimately bankrupt the USSR, but they weren’t “obligated to keep pace”.

[LonesomePolecat]

@BrainGlutton

Didn’t the USSR collapse because U.S. military hyperspending obliged them to try to keep pace? Which, I believe, was conscious U.S. strategy from the start of the Cold War.

It may have accelerated the collapse, but it wasn’t the basic cause. The real problem was that command economies just don’t work.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

That’s not quite true. Command economies do not work in the sense that they do not result in the efficient use of resources. However, efficiency is not the be-all and end-all of economics. Our economy is extremely efficient, but huge fractions are devoted to fairly pointless activities - campaign advertising, string cheese, rebooting bad horror flick franchises, Hello Kitty iPhone covers, and so on.