Anti communism
Anti-communism is the political and ideological opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed after the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia and 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 movements occupying many different political positions, including conservatism, fascism, liberalism, nationalism, social democracy, and libertarianism. Anti-communism has also found expression in philosophy, in various religious groups, and in literature. Anti-communism has also been prominent among movements resisting communist rule.
The second organization specifically dedicated to opposing communism was the White Russian movement which fought in the Russian Civil War beginning in 1918 against the newly established Bolshevik government. The white movement was militarily supported by various allied foreign governments, which represented the first instance of anti-communism as government policy. However, the Red Army defeated the White movement and the Soviet Union was created in 1922. During the existence of the Soviet Union, anti-communism became a major feature of many different political movements and governments around the world.
In the United States, anti-communism rose to prominence during the First Red Scare of 1919-1920. During the 1920s and 1930s, conservatives, fascists, liberals, and social democrats promoted opposition to communism in Europe. Fascist governments emerged as the main opponents of communism in the 1930s. In 1936, the Anti-Comintern Pact, initially between Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan, was formed as an anti-communist alliance. In Asia, the Empire of Japan and the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party) were the main anti-communist forces in this period.
During World War II, the communist Soviet Union was one of the main Allied nations fighting against the Axis powers. Shortly after the end of World War II, the rivalry between the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union and the Liberal-capitalist America resulted in the Cold War. During this period, the United States government played a leading role in supporting global anti-communism as part of its containment policy. Military conflicts between communists and anti-communists occurred in various parts of the world, including during the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency, the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and Operation Condor. NATO was founded as an anti-communist military alliance in 1949 and continued through the Cold War.
Following the 1989 revolutions and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of the world's communist governments were overthrown and the Cold War ended. However, anti-communism remains an important intellectual element of many contemporary political movements. Organized anti-communist movements continue to oppose the People's Republic of China and other communist nations.
Conservative anti-communism
There have been numerous conflicts between communists and conservatives. Most communist revolutions have taken place in relatively conservative countries, and most governments overthrown by communists have been conservative governments. Anti-communist nationalism has generally appeared for three reasons: defense of traditional values, national identity, and social structures as part of the nationalists' program to preserve national power and prestige.
Since communists claim to aspire to extreme social equality, they are theoretically opposed to monarchy, aristocracy, and other forms of hereditary privilege. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the early communist movement confronted the traditional monarchies that ruled in most of the countries of Europe. By then, royalists were the most prominent anti-communists, and many European monarchies made public expression of communist ideas illegal. Advocacy for communism was illegal in the Russian Empire, the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the three most powerful monarchies in continental Europe before World War I. Until the end of the 19th century monarchists (except constitutionalists) believed that inequality in wealth and political rights formed part of the divine order.
During World War I, in most European monarchies, these ideas had been replaced by liberal and nationalist movements that believed that monarchs should be symbolic heads of the nation while real power would remain in the hands of elected governments. Europe's most conservative monarchy, the Russian Empire, was replaced by the communist Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Revolution inspired other communist revolutions throughout Europe from 1917 to 1922. Many of them, like the Spartacist Uprising in Germany, were put down by royalist military units.
The 1920s and 1930s saw the decline of traditional conservatism. The front line of anti-communism was taken by the then rising fascist movements on the one hand, and by the American-inspired liberal conservatives on the other. Communism remained a fundamentally European phenomenon, so anti-communism was also concentrated in Europe. When communist political parties and groups began to appear around the world, as in the Republic of China in the late 1920s, their opponents were generally the colonial authorities or local nationalist movements.
After World War II, communism became a global phenomenon, and anti-communism an integral part of the foreign and domestic policies of the United States and its NATO allies. Postwar conservatives abandoned their monarchical and aristocratic roots, focusing on the defense of the free market, private property, cooperation between different classes and the defense of traditional customs, values and social norms. For these conservatives, communism is dangerous because of its intention to abolish private property and its desire to destroy traditional cultural norms.
The United States never had traditional conservatism in the 20th century. Therefore, the ideology called American conservatism does not share the monarchical legacy of its European counterparts. On the contrary, it is based on individualism and a vision of economic competition as beneficial to society, all accompanied by strong religious sentiments and the defense of the traditional family. American conservatives have always been opposed to communism, but this opposition only became a cornerstone of conservatism in the 1940s and 1950s. The United States made anti-communism its top foreign policy priority, and many American conservatives fought at home everything that seemed to them communist influence. This led to the adoption of a set of domestic policy measures known collectively as "McCarthyism."
During the Cold War, conservative governments in Asia, Africa, and Spanish America sought political and economic support from the United States. Some of these were authoritarian regimes that, according to their critics, used fear of communism as a means of legitimizing repression, the suppression of individual rights, and the abolition of democracy. Examples include South Korea under Syngman Rhee, the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek, South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem, Indonesia under General Suharto, Zaire under Mobutu Sese. Seko, Paraguay during that of Alfredo Stroessner and Chile during that of Augusto Pinochet
In the 1980s, the conservative governments of Ronald Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, and Brian Mulroney in Canada pursued a clearly anti-Soviet foreign policy that is considered by many to be [who? ] as the main cause of the fall of the Soviet Union and the arrival of capitalism in Eastern Europe and other revolutionary countries.
Fascist and National Socialist anti-communism
The alternative of his rule could have been a communist Italy that would have brought dangers and misfortunes to the Italian people and to Europe.Winston Churchill referring to Benito Mussolini (1951)
Fascism and communism are political systems that reached their peak after World War I. Historians of the period between World War I and World War II such as E. H. Carr or Eric Hobsbawm point out that liberal democracies were seriously under siege in this period and seemed to be a dying philosophy. The socialist movement split when the leaders of the Social Democratic parties supported the war, while supporters of the 1917 Russian Revolution formed Communist Parties in most industrialized (and many non-industrialized) countries.
After World War I and the Russian Revolution, there were socialist and Marxist uprisings or threats of socialist uprisings all over Europe; the most notable was in Germany, where the Spartacus Rising in January 1919 failed. In Bavaria, the communists overthrew the government and established the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which lasted a few weeks in 1919. A similarly short life was served by the Soviet republics that sprang up in other German states and the Soviet government established in Hungary by Béla Kun in 1919.
Many historians see fascism as a reaction against these movements. Italian fascism, founded and led by former socialist Benito Mussolini, seized power with the acquiescence of King Victor Emmanuel III after years of leftist revolts, and was supported by many conservatives who feared communist revolution was inevitable. Throughout Europe, numerous conservative aristocrats and intellectuals as well as capitalists and businessmen gave their support to fascist movements that in their respective countries arose modeled on Italian fascism. While in Germany, far-right nationalist groups appeared, particularly among the postwar Freikorps, which were used to crush both the Spartacist Uprising and the Bavarian Soviet Republic.
[Fascism is] the determined denial of that doctrine formed the basis of scientific or Marxist socialism.Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile. The Doctrine of Fascism (1932) p. 11
As far as political theories are concerned, Adolf Hitler described in his book My Struggle his aversion to what he believes are the twin evils of the world: Marxism and Judaism, and stated that his purpose was to eradicate them.
However, some anti-communist writers take issue with the idea that fascism was a reaction against revolutionary socialist movements and instead focus on what, to them, are essential similarities between the Communist State and the Fascist State, both in theory as in practice, being known as the theory of totalitarianism. The renowned Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek, author of The Path of Serfdom, argued that the various totalitarian movements, including fascism and communism, have common philosophical roots stemming from their opposition to the liberalism of the 19th century. Proponents of these theories see more than coincidence in the fact that Benito Mussolini himself was a Marxist and a member of the Italian Socialist Party before World War I, while some ideologues of fascism, such as Sergio Panunzio and Giovanni Gentile, had a Marxist or syndicalist past that they repudiated in their later writings. Even so, these authors recognize that the theory of both ideologies differs in what should be the basis of the ideal society (the communists emphasize the class struggle to achieve a classless society, while the fascists suggest a nationally directed class solidarity). by a corporate state). Hayek claims that as late as 1938, Hitler was saying that Marxism and National Socialism were practically the same thing.
As the Great Depression of the 1930s approached, it seemed that liberalism and liberal capitalism were doomed to disappear while the communist and fascist movements grew. These movements were fiercely opposed to each other and frequently clashed. The most notable example of these clashes was the Spanish Civil War, which became partly a proxy war between the fascist countries and their international supporters who supported Franco and the communist movement (mainly supported by the Soviet Union) which, allied with the anarchists and Trotskyists, supported the republican government.
Initially, the Soviet Union supported the idea of a coalition with Western powers against Nazi Germany, while encouraging the formation of popular fronts in various countries against local fascists. These policies met with little success due to the distrust of the Western powers (especially Great Britain) towards the Soviet Union. The Munich Pact between Germany, France, and Great Britain increased Soviet fears that the Western powers were trying to force them to bear the brunt of the fight against Nazism. The Soviets changed their policy and negotiated a non-aggression pact with Hitler's Germany, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in 1939. The Soviets later claimed that the pact was necessary to buy time to prepare for the planned war against Germany.. However, some critics doubt this claim, pointing out that along with the non-aggression clause, the pact also established a broad economic collaboration between the Soviet Union and Germany, in the form of the German-Soviet Trade Agreement, which supplied Germany with Nazi some of the materials needed to build their war machine. This collaboration agreement is recalled by the aforementioned critics to deduce that Stalin hoped that the war would be only between Germany and the Western allies, that is, that the Soviet Union would maintain its neutrality while its two great enemies destroyed each other.
In any case, it is clear that Stalin did not expect the Germans to attack until 1942, which is why he was surprised when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, with Operation Barbarossa. Fascism and communism became mortal enemies again.
Christian anti-communism
The Catholic Church has a long history of anti-communism. The 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church states: "The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modern times with 'communism' or 'socialism.' On the other hand, it has rejected in practice the abuse of 'capitalism', individualism and the absolute primacy of the law of the market over human work. The regulation of the economy by centralized planning alone perverts social ties at its base; its regulation solely by market law violates social justice, because 'there are numerous human needs that cannot be satisfied by the market'. It is necessary to promote a reasonable regulation of the market and economic initiatives, according to a fair hierarchy of values and with a view to the common good".
Pope John Paul II was a harsh critic of communism, and other popes shared this view; for example, Pope Pius IX published in 1846 the papal encyclical Qui pluribus where he condemned communism (and also liberalism), reaffirming his positions in the encyclical Quanta cura in the one that called "communism and socialism" the most fatal error. The successors of this last pontiff continued in the same line, publishing Pius XI the encyclical Divini Redemptoris (March 19, 1937) against said currents and arriving with Pius XII at a " hardening of Rome against communism. Thus, on July 1, 1949, the Holy Office published a decree declaring the excommunication ipso facto of Catholics from any country who supported this political doctrine.
During the Spanish Civil War, the Catholic Church opposed the popular front forces and decisively supported the rebels, describing the war as a "crusade."
Anarchist and leftist anti-communism
Although many anarchists (especially anarcho-communists) describe themselves as communists, all anarchists criticize authoritarian communism. Libertarian communists agree with other communists that capitalism is a tool of oppression, is unfair, and must be destroyed one way or another. Anarchists, however, go further to say that all centralized or coercive power (not just wealth) is harmful to the individual. Therefore, the concepts of dictatorship of the proletariat, state ownership of the means of production and other similar concepts of Marxist thought are anathema for anarchists, regardless of whether the state in question is democratic or not. However, many other anarchists have individualist criticisms of communism, often from individualist, anarcho-capitalist points of view or from currents such as Libertarianism, which is a sub-branch of Anarcho-capitalism that consists of a countercultural tendency of it, whose only The difference is that despite supporting the Market as a counterpart to the State and its services, their fight is not focused on it, even though it does include the replacement of the State by the Market, as in Anarcho-capitalism.
There are also strong anti-anarchist tendencies among Marxists, who have branded anarchism as anti-scientific, romantic or bourgeois regardless of whether they are market anarchists or collectivist-communist anarchists.
The debates in the First International between Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx are famous. While Bakunin's philosophy owed much to Marx's critique of capitalism, their ideas diverged on how post-capitalist society should be organized. Bakunin saw the Marxist State as simply another form of oppression: 'The question is that if the proletariat rules, over whom does it rule? This means that there will be another proletariat that will be subordinated to this new domination, to this new state." He hated the idea of a vanguard-party leading the masses from above, arguing "when the people are being hit with a stick, they are not happier if the stick is the 'Peoples Stick';. 4;.
Anarchists at first regarded the Bolshevik Revolution as an example of how workers can seize power on their own, and, in fact, took part in the revolution (see Anarchism in Russia). But it soon became apparent that the Bolsheviks and the anarchists had very different ideas about the type of society they wanted to build. The anarchist Emma Goldman, for example, deported from the United States to Russia in 1919, was at first enthusiastic about the Revolution, but she soon lost enthusiasm and began writing her book My Disillusionment with Russia. Perhaps the most famous Russian anarchist of the day, Peter Kropotkin, incisively criticized the emerging Bolshevik bureaucracy in letters he wrote to Lenin (who had once visited him at his home). In 1920 he wrote: '[a party dictatorship] is decidedly detrimental to the construction of a new socialist system. What is needed is local construction by local forces" and "Russia has become an Assembly Republic in name only" (referring to the dominance of the Bolshevik Party committees over the Soviets -councils- of peasants and workers).
Anarchists often cite the crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion, in which the Red Army struck back at an anarchist commune and defeated an uprising of disgruntled Soviet sailors with Bolshevik rule, as a specific example of the tyranny they saw in the Bolshevik government. The typhus epidemic and the subsequent crushing of the weakened "Black Army" Nestor Makhno's anarchist action in the Ukraine is also an action of the first Bolsheviks of sad memory for anarchists.
During the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Communist Party gained considerable influence through its political manipulation of aid received from the Soviet Union. The communists, together with the other parties of the Popular Front, fought against the insurgent army, the Spanish Falange and other minor groups, but they also fought against the Spanish Social Revolution of 1936 that their allies, the anarcho-communist workers, were carrying out, supposedly to reinforce the front. anti-fascist (the response of the anarchists, anti-Stalinists and Trotskyists was: "The revolution and the war are inseparable"). The most dramatic action against the anarchists occurred in May 1937, when communist-led police forces tried to take over the Barcelona Telefónica building that was occupied by the National Confederation of Labor. Telephone workers repelled the attack, erected barricades and surrounded the "Lenin Barracks" of the communists. This continued for five days of fighting in the so-called May Days of 1937.
Anti-communism in South America
During the 1970s, right-wing military juntas in South America implemented, under US influence, Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression that involved tens of thousands of political assassinations, illegal detentions, and torture of communist sympathizers.. The campaign was aimed at eradicating suspected communist and socialist influences in their respective countries and controlling opposition against the government, resulting in a large death toll. Participatory governments include Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay., with limited support from the United States.
Brazil
In Brazil's 2018 general election, Jair Bolsonaro's campaign painted candidate Fernando Haddad, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the left-wing Workers' Party as communists, claiming they could turn Brazil into "a Venezuela". The slogan "Our flag will never be red" It has been a symbol of anti-communism in Brazil, even being pronounced by Bolsonaro himself during his inauguration speech.
Anti-communism in Brazil is represented mainly by right-wing and far-right political parties such as Bolsonaro's Alliance for Brazil, the Social Liberal Party, the Social Christian Party, Patriota, the Brazilian Labor Renewal Party, Podemos, and the New Party.
Argentina
In 1961, the American Organization for the Safeguarding of Morality received the endorsement of Argentine President Arturo Frondizi, who saw the group as a positive development in the fight against communism. Conservative Catholic women became the foundation of the anti-communist sentiment of the nation, seeing themselves as protectors of youth against moral degeneracy. The ideas of the traditional family and anti-communism became increasingly linked in the minds of these women, especially as the Vatican increased its anti-communist message. In 1951, the "Mothers League" was created. This group of women aimed to counter the forces of liberalism and communism and to protect traditional social institutions which they felt were under attack by communism. This group functioned as a philanthropic organization and a sociopolitical watchdog. Colonel Rómulo Menéndez wrote in Círculo Mil itar, "the communists want to break up the family, through divorce, ideas about communication between its members and the rupture of the authority of the father". The Argentine Revolution of 1966-1970 brought to power General Juan Carlos Onganía. The Onganía regime followed policies oriented towards social planning on the basis that communism destroys traditional social institutions. This led the new government to change the governance structure of the universities from an egalitarian structure to one hierarchical, claiming that the government structures themselves imbued students with the message of communism. The new government also criminalized certain students and teachers and banned student federations.
Chili
The Chilean Committee for Cultural Freedom, an offshoot of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, actively opposed the Chilean Writers Society on the grounds that it harbored pro-Soviet and pro-communist sentiment. Cultural Freedom placed its members in different media organs and social institutions in Chile to advocate against communism. Carlos Baráibar, leader of the Chilean Committee for Cultural Freedom, frequently criticized the famous communist writer and president of the Chilean Society of Writers, Pablo Neruda. In 1947, Chilean President Gabriel González Videla undertook state action to distance Chile from communism. Internationally, Chile became hostile to communist countries. Domestically, the Communist Party was outlawed and the Communist union organizations were dismantled, forcing many communists, such as Pablo Neruda, to flee Chile. In 1959, the Chilean Committee for the Cultural Liberty succeeded in elections to the board of directors of the Chilean Writers Society, replacing Neruda and his group of communist sympathizers with Alejandro Magnet, a supporter of the centrist Christian Democrat party.
Anti-Communism in America
X Inter-American Conference
In March 1954, the Organization of American States (OAS) held the X Inter-American Conference in Caracas (Venezuela), in which the "Declaration of Caracas" where the "international communist movement" and it is considered a threat to sovereignty and a danger to peace: “The domination or control of the political institutions of any State of the American continent by the international communist movement, which extends the political system to this hemisphere of an extracontinental power, would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and political independence of the American States, endangering the peace of the continent, and would require the holding of a consultation meeting to consider the adoption of appropriate action in accordance with existing treaties ”. The anti-communist thesis of the declaration was the one drafted and proposed by the United States Secretary of State John Dulles (older brother of Allen Dulles, first civilian director of the CIA from 1953-1959); Argentina and Mexico abstained from voting on this declaration and Guatemala was the only vote against, considering that the declaration actually opened the possibility of United States intervention in the internal affairs of other countries; the diplomatic observer from Italy considered that the representatives of the United States were ill-prepared for the Conference, there were strong internal differences and contradictions, and the opposition of these three countries had managed to reduce the influence of the United States, even though in the end all but the three mentioned voted in favor of the United States proposal, since in the opinion of the Italian diplomat there was no strong leadership against the United States.
Expulsion of Cuba from the OAS
From January 22 to 31, 1962, in Punta del Este (Uruguay), at the request of Colombia on November 9, 1961 in which it requested "the convening of a Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Relations, in accordance with Article 6 of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, to consider the threats to peace and the political independence of the American States that may arise from the intervention of extracontinental powers aimed at breaking American solidarity"; the "VIII Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs" of members of the OAS, advisory body of the TIAR, where Cuba is expelled from the OAS, under the application of an anti-communist doctrine, in which it is considered that "communism is a danger to inter-American unity" and that "the principles of communism are incompatible with those of the Inter-American System”, that the American States are united in favor of the common objective of “counteracting the subversive action of international communism” and that the member states are told to “adopt the measures they deem appropriate to the effects of their individual or collective legitimate defense, and cooperate as necessary or convenient, in order to strengthen their capacity to counter threats or acts of aggression, subversion or other dangers to peace and security resulting from the intervention continued on this Continent of the Sino-Soviet powers”; in this final act they resolve:
- That the accession of any member of the Organization of American States to Marxism-Leninism is incompatible with the Inter-American System and the alignment of such government with the communist bloc breaks the unity and solidarity of the Hemisphere.
- That the current Government of Cuba, which has officially been identified as a Marxist-Leninist government, is incompatible with the principles of the Inter-American System. Mexico and Ecuador submitted objections to the expulsion of Cuba on the grounds that they did not comply with the rules of procedure of the OAS and that to expel it they should first modify the rules of procedure but by majority the expulsion of Cuba was determined.
Anti-Communist Flag for Cuba
On July 1st, a group of Cubans led by Ovidio Escalona, exiled in Sweden, provoked a controversy on social networks by supporting the creation and dissemination of a flag they call "Cuban Anti-Castro and Anti-Communist".
The “4-star” flag is made up of two horizontal stripes of the same size, white at the top and navy blue at the bottom. On the edge closest to the mast is a red equilateral triangle containing a 5-pointed white star in its center and three yellow five-pointed stars each, located near the vertices of the triangle.
The anti-communist flag was presented through a manifesto on July 25, 2020 on the page of Ovidio Pavel Escalona Damas
Anti-Communism in the United States and the Cold War
The first major displays of anti-communism in the United States took place between 1919 and 1920, during the tenure of Alexander Mitchell Palmer as United States Attorney General, who was one of the first to use the expression "Danger Red".
After World War II and with the rise of the Soviet Union, many of the objections to communism gained strength because of the communists' declaration that their ideology was universal. The fears of many anti-communists in the United States that Communism could triumph throughout the world and even become a direct threat to the United States government. This point of view led to the elaboration of the Domino Theory, according to which the seizure of power by the communists in any nation could not be tolerated because it would produce a chain reaction that would lead to the seizure of power by the communists in the world. whole. There were fears that powerful nations like the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China were using their power to forcefully install communist regimes in other countries. The expansion of the Soviet Union into Central Europe after World War II was seen as evidence of this. These actions led many politicians to adopt a kind of pragmatic anti-communism, opposing this ideology as a way of limiting the expansion of the Soviet Union's area of influence, called the Soviet empire by its detractors. The US policy of halting any further communist expansion was known as containment.
The US government used to justify its anti-communism by citing the lack of respect for human rights in communist states, such as the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia led by Pol Pot, and North Korea, because these states killed millions of their own citizens and suppressed public liberties for the surviving population.
Anti-communism changed significantly after the fall of the Soviet Union and the communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc in 1989-1991, as fear of a communist takeover of the world all but disappeared. Some anti-communism remains in US foreign policy toward Cuba, China, and North Korea. In the case of Cuba, the United States continues to maintain economic sanctions against the island's regime in a policy that has more detractors than supporters abroad, but which has substantial support in the United States, particularly among voters of Cuban origin., among which there are many exiles living in Florida who oppose any normalization with the Cuban government.
Speech by President John F. Kennedy
In 1962, the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, said in a speech at the West Point Military Academy: “Subversion is another type of war, new in its intensity although of ancient origin (...) When we must counter this type of war, we are forced to employ a new strategy, a different military force, which requires a new and different military preparation and training", with which the United States commits to disseminate in its troops and in the allied military forces their "new strategy", focused on the "counterinsurgent" element, from which the idea of the "internal enemy" (anti-communism, anti-sovietism) and a new Doctrine called National Security; Other elements of the counterinsurgency strategy are psychological operations (or psychological warfare), whose foundation is the use of threat and terror "to achieve civil cooperation or at least to dismantle and reverse the support given to the insurgency& #34;
"Ronald Reagan" (1980-1989)
Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter (1977 - 1981) in the 1980 elections, who was trying to be re-elected, both had differences regarding foreign policy with the USSR and the defense of human rights, that is why relations with Latin America they change profoundly: "It goes from a policy of coexistence with communism to a direct confrontation". (...) during the Carter presidency he had a foreign policy based on containing the USSR, Carter signed the agreement of the SALT II and continues with the policy of rapprochement with China initiated by Nixon, decreases the military budget and the presence of troops and weapons of South Korea. Carter withdrew support from the US-backed Somoza regime in Nicaragua and criticized the de facto government of Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay and Augusto Pinochet in Chile. In short, Reagan once again strengthens the anti-communist discourse of yesteryear, points directly to the USSR as his enemy, which he calls the Evil Empire and the enemy of all of America, criticizes the previous administration for considering that it weakened the position of the United States by applying human rights as absolute, and condemn and distance themselves from strategic allies in America who violated those rights, for this reason Reagan considers human rights as something relative, which should be respected by his enemies but not by his allies. Reagan is the first president to rely on the Sante Fé Documents, using them as a program to follow during his government, taking low-risk or low-intensity measures to combat communism, covert operations that avoided direct relations with the United States, the promotion of a "cult" towards the American way of life to counteract Soviet influence and the training in American territory of the soldiers of the allied armies of the American continent, where they would learn not only to admire the United States but also to defend it with torture, cruelty and barbarism in their respective countries. Reagan invades the island of Grenada in northern Venezuela to prevent them from building an airport that the USSR and Cuba could use to refuel their planes, invades Panama to take control of the canal and the two seas, legitimizing himself in the OAS, promotes a mercenary strategy, paramilitaries, or counterinsurgent armed groups, to liquidate under operations all vestiges of communism in America, reflected in Nicaragua with the creation of the "contras" first to prevent the rise of the FSLN and then to try to overthrow it. Reagan appointed as his ambassador to Colombia Lewis Tambs, one of the writers of the SantaFe I document, and also a member of the World Anti-Communist League.
Liberal or democratic anti-communism
The governments of the real socialism of the XX century, with a communist orientation, were strongly criticized by European liberals, because they they were accused of being totalitarian. Democratic movements against self-proclaimed communist governments occurred in various parts of the world in the 1980s of the XX century. the changes produced in the USSR under the government of Mikhail Gorbachev, some of them in:
- People ' s Republic of China
- Poland
- Eastern Germany
- Czechoslovakia
- Hungary
- Bulgaria
- Romania
Contemporary anti-communism
Numerous conservative think tanks, as well as conservative media outlets, have continued to make some of the classic arguments for anti-communism, based on economic failures and human rights violations that occurred in regimes whose official ideology was communism. However, some traditional points initially promoted by European communist movements such as broad public education and state protection of low-income people have been widely adopted in high-income capitalist countries. For this reason, contemporary anti-communism is more focused on other aspects such as the desirability of a public industrial sector or to what extent income redistribution is appropriate.
Theoretical objections to communism
One of the central ideas of Marxism is the so-called historical materialism, a methodology for the study of history that maintains that in human societies material factors and technology have shaped their development. Thus the traditional Marxist account divides human history into a series of periods or phases, in terms of the predominant mode of production in each period. The transition from one phase to the next would include the breakdown of the existing socioeconomic order associated with the old mode of production. This idea was introduced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx reworked it to formulate his reflections. Relying on materialist reasoning of the same type that was used to explain the transition from feudalism to modern capitalism, orthodox Marxism found objective reasons to predict the exhaustion of the capitalist economic system, and to suggest that this system could be succeeded by a socialist-type system.. Lastly, certain Marxist currents assume that socialism could be followed by communism, which Karl Marx claimed could not be improved because it would not have internal contradictions.
Most anti-communists reject the concept of historical materialism, or at least do not believe that the emergence of socialism and communism are inexorable after an eventual evolution of industrial capitalism. Some anti-communists question Karl Marx's idea that the state will only disappear in a truly communist society.[citation needed]
Other anti-communist critics do not believe, as certain reflections within Marxist economic theory suggest, that in capitalist societies, the bourgeoisie will accumulate an ever increasing amount of capital and goods, while the lower classes will become more and more more dependent on the ruling classes, remaining under their protection by having no choice but to sell their workforce for miserable wages. Anti-communists, arguing that this hypothesis is equivalent to the phrase "the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer", point to the general increase in the standard of living in the industrialized countries of the West as proof of this. that, contrary to what Karl Marx predicted, both the rich and the poor are constantly getting richer. There is, however, a communist attack on this objection. An anticipated argument is based on Lenin's book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In this book Lenin predicted, in view of the rise of imperialism at the beginning of the XX century, that the class struggle would acquire a international dimension, producing an international division of labor in which the richest countries and the poorest countries would direct their production towards different sectors. Many members of the modern Left claim that this trend has been confirmed in recent years, and while Western economies develop, those of third world countries are comparatively poorer with a widening gap.
On the other hand, the anti-communist criticism does not take into account the social measures that were introduced after the Second World War, with the introduction of social democracy and the Keynesian model, which alleviated the growing inequality produced by the capitalist system. In fact, after the abandonment of Keynesianism and the resurgence of the liberal, or "neoliberal" model, economic inequality between the population of the same country has skyrocketed again, which can be seen reflected in practically all the countries that embraced this model.
Communists also allege that the industrialized West profits immensely from the exploitation of the Third World through globalization, that the gap between rich and poor capitalist countries (sometimes called the North-South gap) has increased a lot in the last hundred years, and that there are many more poor capitalist countries than the rich ones.
The anti-communists' response to this argument is to point to some examples of low-income countries that have managed to lift themselves out of poverty in recent decades with capitalist systems, especially the so-called Asian dragons, India, and even theoretically communist China (although whether these systems were examples of liberal capitalism, state capitalism having played an important role, is arguable). Anti-communists also cite numerous examples of communist regimes in the Third World that failed to achieve either development or economic growth, such as the Mengistu Haile Mariam regime in Ethiopia or the North Korean government. Some communists, like the Trotkyists, although they agree that imperialism harmed those countries, also say that Ethiopia and North Korea were never communist, that they were only Stalinist, that is, that they have been governed by a handful of bureaucrats who said act in the interest of the people but actually betrayed it, becoming more oppressive to its working classes.
Anti-communism as a pretext
Occasionally taking advantage of currents of public opinion favorable to anti-communism, such as those that existed during the cold war in the United States, the excuse of an alleged communist aggression or a communist danger has been used as a pretext for warlike interventions, particularly by various United States governments. In this regard the "communist threat" was unfoundedly used to justify:
- The State coup in Guatemala of 1954 against Jacobo Arbenz, who did not belong to the Communist Party, but whose policy affected the United Fruit Company partner, owned by people linked to CIA leaders like Allen Dulles.
- It has been argued that the support of the United States to various European dictatorships such as General Francisco Franco (Spain), António de Oliveira Salazar (Portugal) or the Dictatorship of the Colonels (Greece) was due to the anti-communist facet these regimes that allowed them to survive long periods, especially in the first two cases, in the middle of the democracies.
- La Invasion of Granada 1983, against Maurice Bishop. Ronald Reagan insisted that Bishop's government posed a real threat to the United States and a public opinion sector became credible despite the insignificant military and economic potential of Grenada, a small state located in the Caribbean.
- Financial and military support for counters (1981-1990) a group of U.S.-funded Nicaraguan insurgents that led to attacks against Nicaragua's Sandinista government security forces.
- The creation of the Anti-Communist Alliance Argentina in Argentina during the last government Juan Domingo Perón e Isabel Perón, driven by Minister López Rega.
Literature
- Torben Gülstorff: Warming Up a Cooling War: An Introductory Guide on the CIAS and Other Globally Operating Anti-communist Networks at the Beginning of the Cold War Decade of Stop (Cold War International History Project Working Paper Series #75), Washington 2015.
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