Return of American Anticommunism
At the end of the 20th century, six European authors contributed to a book titled The Black Book of Communism, which detailed the terror, crimes, and repression of communist regimes since 1917, the year that Lenin’s Bolsheviks established the first communist state in Russia. The book is a historical catalogue of horrors perpetrated by all communist regimes. There was no exception—every communist government has ruled by coercion and terror.
In the book’s foreword, Martin Malia noted that “the Communist record offers the most colossal case of political carnage in history.” Yet, communism has never suffered from the stigma associated with Nazism. Malia believes that one reason why this is so is that Nazis “never pretended to be virtuous. The Communists, by contrast, trumpeting their humanism, hoodwinked millions around the globe for decades, and so got away with murder on the ultimate scale.” Moreover, Nazism, Malia writes, “was a unique case,” whereas “Communism’s universalism permitted it to metastasize worldwide.”
Communism appealed (and in some cases still appeals) primarily to intellectuals who think themselves too smart to believe in God and a heavenly utopia...
Powers noted that anticommunism suffered as a result of “McCarthyism” in the 1950s, and he mostly blames what he describes as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s erratic and often unsubstantiated allegations of communist infiltration of the U.S. government. There is no question that the phenomenon known as “McCarthyism” harmed anticommunism in America. But James Burnham was closer to the truth when he explained that “McCarthyism” was primarily a weapon used by communists and liberals to discredit conservative anticommunists. McCarthy, to be sure, was at times erratic, but as M. Stanton Evans, Arthur Herman, Nicholas von Hoffman and others subsequently pointed out, McCarthy, if anything, underestimated the communist infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.
Writing in the Washington Post in 1996, von Hoffman concluded that “enough new information has come to light about the communists in the U.S. government that we may now say that point by point Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.” Herman, in his biography of McCarthy, similarly concluded that “the cause McCarthy made his own — anticommunism — has proved to be more valid and durable than the basic assumptions of his anti-anti-communist critics.” Evans in his book Blacklisted by History attempted a wholesale rehabilitation of McCarthy based on FBI files and Soviet archives.
In the end, the anticommunists of the 1940s and early 1950s were right: communist agents, communist sympathizers, agents of influence, and fellow travelers successfully infiltrated the Democratic administrations in the 1930s and 1940s.
