In 1985 my father went back to Hungary for the first time in 50 years. Not only did he feel he was being watched every moment of his time their, but every time he tried to talk to a local, he saw that someone immediately came up and talked to them as soon as he was out of earshot.
Now imagine your entire society feeling like that, every day, for 40 years.
Yeah, but it was surprising to pretty much everyone just how quickly it came apart. In the span of about 18 months, half of Europe went from being an empire effectively ruled from Moscow to IKEA-buying, Big Mac-eating, Gap-wearing, Chuck Norris-watching, money grubbing imperialists; there was virtually no support for Communist ideology at any level, even among the upper crust leftist intellectuals, and even moderate economic socialism held a waning view (although people being human, they still wanted stuff for free). Communism was held together with bailing wire and cheap Russian duct tape, the kind that peels away when the humidity gets above 70%. It turns out that instead of broadcasting about how great freedom is over Voice Of America and threatening nuclear retaliation we should have been bombing Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union with People magazine and Duran Duran videos.
Political revolutions have occurred before, and once mighty empires have fallen in history like clockwork, but never so rapidly and virtually without bloodshed. Even the Revolutions of 1848 were not so dramatic and lacking in destruction as the 1989-90 fall of the Iron Curtain. It was like charging at a dragon only to realize that it was actually made of papier-mâché; kind of embarrassing for everyone, really.
Stranger
Actually, it was more like being afraid of the giant dragon that was towering over your bed, and then discovering that the whole thing was made of Legos by your little brother. We didn’t tear down the wall. The Germans did. Once everybody realized that Gorby was serious about his repudiation of the Breznev Doctrine, everybody and their mother headed for the border.
Excellent summation, BTW.
Well, they would call up babysitters and ask if they had checked the children.
In addition to all of its strengths as an external threat, Communism was also an internal threat. It made no secret of the fact that part of its strategy was to plant loyal agents inside non-Communist countries who would work to subvert those countries from within. So Communism made people distrust the people around them.
We’re a country in which 99% of the people believe they’re better than average. We all figure that if everything gets divided up equally, we’ll be getting less.
Face facts–Communism had mass murder down pat.
Moved from IMHO to GD.
Communist!
Josip Broz ‘Tito’ managed not to kill many people; aside from a little bit of political suppression (largely over ethnic issues which later tore the nation apart in the post-Communist era) Yugoslavia was largely free of the kind of human rights abuses found behind the Iron Curtain. Of course, Yugoslavia withdrew from the Warsaw Pact early on, engaged in liberal economic and social relations with the West, and Tito rarely missed a chance to thumb his nose at the Russians.
Fascist pig!
Stranger
I think there’s been a lot of echoing the overt reasons for anti-Communism (some of which have a basis in reality), but there were certainly social dynamics that made many elements of US Society find anti-communism very convenient:
As Eisenhower warned, and Joe McCarthy proved, creating a bogeyman to be scared of is a great way of keeping political power and spending on the military.
And of course, one of the central foundations of Communism as a political movement is the undeniable fact that what’s good for the guy earning a paycheck is not always good for the guy who owns the factory, and vice versa.
In general, factory owners would prefer that point to be ignored and/or ridiculed, and so demonizing Communism as something that can’t even be discussed is something they’d like to bring about. In other words, anti-communism was a very convenient stance for those opposing unions and labor organizations, which had made significant gains in the 30’s and 40’s.
It’s a well known fact that moderators are Nazis. Communists have really ugly jackboots.
Der Trihs:
It was more than merely “officially atheist”, Communist regimes actively suppressed individual religious observance and expression, something that Americans, who treasure our right to worship whom we please as we please would very much fear. On top of that, the fact that the hammer (and sickle) fell more heavily on Jews than on adherents of other religions inevitably led to Nazi flashbacks, and if there was any greater epitome of evil than Communists during the cold war, it’s Nazis.
Ironically, though, trade unions were largely banned within Communist countries, until the rise of Solidarity.
I think he has a reasonable point. It wasn’t “oppressors of religion Commie reds”, after all, it was “atheist Commie reds”.
Maybe not you, but many people are really nervous (if not just scared) about the islamists taking over the world.
Despite the actual threat just not being on the same scale.
Yeah, but was it because they were (supposed to be) atheist, as Der Trihs naturally claims, or was it because they were Communist, and being atheist was just another brick in the wall?
Every sing one? Even, say, Kerela in India. And I suppose the socialist-ish systems in Scandinavia don’t count for whatever reason. IMHO authoritarianism has mass murder down pat, and that can exist in any kind of economic system.
With respect, the view you posit was almost a cliche thirty years ago (Earnest idealistic college freshman: “Communism’s great, man, it’s just that no one’s ever really practiced it right!”). If a particular ideology proves incapable of being implemented “right” or even close to “right” even one time, then you might begin suspect that it is the ideology (and not just the implementers) that is at fault.
And the ideology was faulty. “Everyone works together and everyone shares everything” works pretty well in an extended family (but inevitably, there’s a deadbeat brother in law, but you just agree to tolerate him). It might work in a small village, to some extent, or a religious commune of people with exactly the same beliefs. Even then, there always seems to be some friction.
To make the leap from these small groups (where, crucially, everyone knows each other and supports basically a common goal) to expecting me to help out strangers, or get on board with a plan that is going to cost me but benefit some guy six time zones away, or that forces me to be “generous” (remember, families and villages are based on elective affinities), is a big gamble and one that immediately revealed flaws in the theory. Hume said that sympathy is a limited commodity. It is not human nature (probably for very good Darwinian reasons) to sacrifice in aid of abstract concepts such as “the state” or “the proletariat” or “the five year plan,” or even “Ivan who lives 350 km away.”
So the fact that people were willing to kill to advance a theory that could never work was scary. Crazy people are scary and there is something crazy about believing that you can fundamentally change human nature. The Cold War was the origin of the phrase “human nature has no history.” The commies thought it did. (Paradoxically, while they thought human nature could evolve, they had a distinctly romantic and unrealistic view of a worker’s paradise that would play out as some sort of low-tech agrarian-industrial utopia, just as we in the West were figuring out ways that technology and free markets could free us from farm and factory labor).
Next thing is that communist doctrine was replete with references to violence, to the need to force the dictatorship of the proletariat upon a reluctant bourgeois establishment. It envisioned (correctly) that no society would spontaneously or democratically decide to adopt the radical doctrines of property redistribution, so generally it contemplated a bloody (but ultimately salutary) overthrow of the established order. If a couple of million kulaks or the like had to be liquidated to make this happen – well, omelette, eggs, etc. By the 1950s there were enough examples of what the bloodbaths actually looked like (and again, there’s the pesky fact that no nation ever actually managed to go red without lots and lots and lots of blood being spilled) that people had plenty of fodder for their worst fears about what would happen if communism spread to the West. Maybe it would be even worse – the reds managed to contrive reasons to kill millions of enemies of the people in relatively backward, poor countries like Russia and Korea. Imagine the frenzy of gulag-building and shots in the back of the head that one could reasonably anticipate if the great proletarian horde got their hooks into the true capitalist exploiter classes in decadent, wealthy America and Western Europe.
Finally “communism” as a doctrine was explicitly expansionist. At least until recently, American or British democracy was not explicitly founded on the principle that democracy had to be forced on everyone else at gun-point. The U.S. could have Congress, Italy could have some sort of Parliament, Morocco could have a king, and the West was okay with that. Or, Hell, Saddam could preach Baath doctrine but there was never any danger that he’d start trying to convert/subvert other governments to the Baath way, or the dominos would begin falling and we’d confront a Baath insurgency in our own polity. But commie doctrine could never really be okay with anywhere else not being commie, because it was the One True System. When someone is breathing down your neck telling you that the overthrow of your way of life is inevitable and that your life is going to change dramatically and (to your view) for the worse, you tend to get nervous. People fear change, and the one thing communism predicted and required was massive change in social, political, and economic orders.
Look back on the prevalance of Christianity in the national culture of the 50s and 60s. Even Jews, though tolerated, couldn’t join most country clubs. Atheism was meant to be derogatory, meant to be an accusation.