Anti-communism
Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an intense rivalry.
As Moynihan put it, "reaction to McCarthy took the form of a modish anti anti-communism that considered impolite any discussion of the very real threat Communism posed to Western values and security."
"[17] Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who presided over postwar West Germany as a market liberal democracy, signaled that the Soviet Union was the "greatest threat to liberty", an idea that exerted major domestic and international influence.
Other anti-communists who were once Marxists include the writers Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, James Burnham, Morrie Ryskind, Frank Meyer, Will Herberg, Sidney Hook,[25] the contributors to the book The God That Failed: Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender Tajar Zavalani and Richard Wright.
[26] Anti-communists who were once socialists, liberals or social democrats include John Chamberlain,[27] Friedrich Hayek,[28] Raymond Moley,[29] Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Irving Kristol.
[34] In the United States, anti-communist fervor was at its highest during the late 1940s and early 1950s, when a Hollywood blacklist was established, the House Un-American Activities Committee held the televised Army–McCarthy hearings, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the John Birch Society was formed.
These included the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS in Spain; the Vichy regime and the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism (Wehrmacht Infantry Regiment 638) in France; and in South America movements such as the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance and Brazilian Integralism.
During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against Marxism–Leninism and Soviet control, Mindszenty was set free and after the failure of the movement he was forced to move to the United States' embassy in Budapest, where he lived until 1971 when the Vatican and the Marxist–Leninist government of Hungary arranged his way out to Austria.
[53] Gao gained acclaim for challenging the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by defending coal miners, migrant workers, political activists, and people persecuted for their religious beliefs, including Christians and Falun Gong adherents.
[73] According to reports which were released by the Vienna Radio Network on July 12, Gunther von Hagens, a famous German anatomist, recently held an exhibition of human bodies which provoked Falun Gong's allegations of live organ harvesting.
The virulent accusations made during the hearing had already been robustly refuted seven years before, not only by Chinese authorities but also by diplomats and journalists of several other countries who conducted their own conscientious investigations in China, including officers and staff of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and the U.S. Consulate-General in Shenyang".
[69][77] The Kilgour-Matas report found that "the source of 41,500 transplants for the six-year period 2000 to 2005 is unexplained" and concluded that "there has been and continues today to be large scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners".
According to contemporary CIA reports, supplies for the anti-Sandinista forces and their families came from a variety of sources in the US ranging from Moon's Unification Church to U.S. politicians, evangelical groups and former military officers.
[113] In the Muslim parts of the Soviet Union (Caucasus and Central Asia), the party-state suppressed Islamic worship, education, association, and pilgrimage institutions that were seen as obstacles to ideological and social change along communist lines.
[114] George Orwell, a democratic socialist, wrote two of the most widely read and influential anti-totalitarian novels, namely Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, both of which featured allusions to the Soviet Union under the rule of Joseph Stalin.
[131][132][133] Western governments colluded in the massacres, in particular the United States, which provided the Indonesian military weapons, money, equipment and lists containing the names of thousands of suspected communists.
[141][142][143] In June, Romanovsky Georgy Dmitrievich, who had been the chief authorized officer and military representative at the Allied command in the Far East,[144] discussed with a delegate of Semyonov's army, Syro-Boyarsky Alexander Vladimirovich and thereafter acquired the Delo Rossii gazette.
Islam was important in legitimizing his actions and garnering wider opposition to communism.For example, Mufti 'Abd al-'Aziz Bin Baz said communists were, "more disbelieving than the Jews and the Christians, for they were atheists that do not believe in God or the Last Day."
[156] Odlu Yurt and Azerbaycan, popular Azeri newspapers, frequently criticized the Soviet Union and outwardly professed their anti-communist perspective, drawing in a wide range of intellectuals from the surrounding area.
[162] On 4 December 1945, main printing press of the Tan newspaper, which had communist opinions and defended normalization of the relations between Turkey and Soviet Union, was raided and looted by Turanist and Islamist mobs, leaving several journalists wounded.
Leaders of the Workers' Party of Turkey, Behice Boran and Sadun Aren were arrested and many communist intellectuals such as Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, Mihri Belli and Doğan Avcıoğlu had to flee the country for their life safety.
Adenauer prioritized the struggle against the USSR over denazification policies, and put an end to the persecution of former Nazis, granting clemency to those who were not involved in abhorrent human rights abuses and even allowed some to hold governmental positions.
Following the overthrow of the Soviet government in Hungary, the lawyer Oscar Szollosy published a widely circulated newspaper article on "The Criminals of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" in which he identified Jewish "red, blood-stained knights of hate" as the main perpetrators as the driving force behind communism.
[229] Despite these groups' political differences, The Popular Front's electoral victory in 1936 spurred Catholic authoritarians, Carlists, monarchists, some military officers, and fascists to consolidate under the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS headed by the general and future dictator, Francisco Franco.
The ban on communist symbols did result in the removement of hundreds of statues, the replacement of millions of street signs and the renaming of populated places including some of Ukraine's biggest cities like Dnipro, Horishni Plavni and Kropyvnytskyi.
[239] Historian Richard Powers says: Pat Scanlan emerged in the 1920s as the leading spokesman for an especially pugnacious brand of militant Catholic anti-communism, that of Irish-Americans who, after suffering from 100 years of anti-Catholic prejudice in America, reacted to any criticism of the Church as a bigoted attack on their own hard-won status in American society. ...
The documents revealed a series of questions that agents would ask activists regarding their involvement in the FRSO and their international solidarity work that was related to their dealings with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
[261] In the 2018 Brazilian general election, the campaign of Jair Bolsonaro painted candidate Fernando Haddad, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the left-wing Worker's Party as communists, claiming they could turn Brazil into "a Venezuela".
[266] The Fatherland and Liberty Nationalist Front, a far-right paramilitary group with a marked anti-communist ideology, acted against the government of Salvador Allende through political violence, sabotage and terrorism.
[269] Some academics and pundits argue that anti-communist narratives have exaggerated the extent of political repression and censorship in states under communist rule or have drawn comparisons with what they see as atrocities that were perpetrated by capitalist countries, particularly during the Cold War.
