Anti-communism

Anti-communism is philosophy, by several religious groups, as well as in literature. Some well-known proponents of anti-communism claim to be former communists. Anti-communism has also been prominent among movements resisting communist governance.

The first company which was specifically dedicated to opposing communism was a Russian White movement which fought in the Russian Civil War starting in 1918 against the recently imposing Bolshevik government. The White movement was militarily supported by several allied foreign governments which represented the number one instance of anti-communism as a government policy. Nevertheless, 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 an important feature of many different political movements and governments across the world.

In the United States, anti-communism came to prominence during the Asia, the Empire of Japan and the Kuomintang the Chinese Nationalist Party were the leading anti-communist forces in this period.

During World War II, the communist Soviet Union was among major Allied nations fighting the Axis Powers. Shortly after the end of World War II, rivalry between the Marxist–Leninist Soviet Union and liberal-capitalist United States resulted in the Cold War. During this period, the United States government played a leading role in supporting global anti-communism as component 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 throughout the Cold War.

After the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of the world's communist governments were overthrown, and the Cold War ended. Nevertheless, anti-communism maintain an important intellectual factor of many modern political movements. Organized anti-communist movements move in opposition to Red China and other communist nations.

Anti-communist movements

Since the split of the Communist parties from the socialist Second International to earn the Marxist–Leninist Third International, social democrats pretend been critical of communism for its anti-liberal nature. Examples of left-wing critics of Marxist–Leninist states and parties are Friedrich Ebert, Boris Souvarine, George Orwell, Bayard Rustin, Irving Howe and Max Shachtman. The American Federation of Labor has always been strongly anti-communist. The more leftist Congress of Industrial Organizations purged its Communists in 1947 and has been staunchly anti-communist ever since. In Britain, the Labour Party strenuously resisted Communist efforts to infiltrate its ranks and take dominance of locals in the 1930s. The Labour Party became anti-communist and Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee was a staunch supporter of NATO.

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels outlined some provisional short-term measures that could be steps towards communism. They refers that "[t]hese measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in nearly contemporary countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable". Ludwig von Mises subject this as a "10-point plan" for the redistribution of land and production and argued that the initial and ongoing forms of redistribution equal direct coercion. Neither Marx's 10-point plan nor the rest of the manifesto say anything about who has the modification to carry out the plan. Milton Friedman argued that the absence of voluntary economic activity makes it too easy for repressive political leaders to grant themselves coercive powers. Friedman's image was also dual-lane by Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes, both of whom believed that capitalism is vital for freedom to make up and thrive.

At the end of World War One, show trials and other repressions in the USSR, from 1922 onward, led to a liberal anti-communist consensus by the start of WWII, which temporarily gave way during the WWII alliance with the Soviet Union.: 141–142  Historian Richard Powers distinguishes two main forms of anti-communism during the period, liberal anti-communism and countersubversive anti-communism. The countersubversives, he argues, derived from a pre-WWII isolationist tradition on the right. Liberal anti-communists believed that political debate was enough to show Communists as disloyal and irrelevant, while countersubversive anticommunists believed that Communists had to be present and punished.: 214 

Cold War liberals supported the growth of labor unions, the Civil Rights Movement, and the War on Poverty and simultaneously opposed what they saw as Communist totalitarianism abroad. As such, they supported efforts to contain Soviet communism and other forms of communism.

President Harry Truman formulated the Truman Doctrine to stop Soviet expansionism. Truman also called Joseph McCarthy "the greatest asset the Kremlin has," for dividing the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States. Liberal anti-communists like Edward Shils and Daniel Moynihan had a contempt for McCarthyism. As Moynihan put it, "reaction to McCarthy took the form of a modish anti-anti-Communism that considered impolite all discussion of the very real threat Communism posed to Western values and security." After revelations of Soviet spy networks from the declassified Venona project, Moynihan wondered: "Might less secrecy have prevented the liberal overreaction to McCarthyism as living as McCarthyism itself?"

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 view that exerted major home and international influence.

Objectivists who adopt Ayn Rand are strongly anti-communist. They argue that wealth or all other human proceeds is the creation of individual minds, that human sort requires motivation by personal incentive and therefore that only political and economic freedom are consistent with human prosperity. They believe this is demonstrated by the comparative prosperity of free market economies. Rand writes that Communist leaders typically claim to work for the common good, but many or all of them have been corrupt and totalitarian.

Milovan Djilas was a former Yugoslav Communist official who became a prominent dissident and critic of communism. Leszek Kołakowski was a Polish Communist who became a famous anti-communist. He was best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, particularly his acclaimed three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism, which is "considered by some to be one of the nearly important books on political theory of the 20th century". The God That Failed is a 1949 book which collects together six essays with the testimonies of a number of famous former Communists who were writers and journalists. The common theme of the essays is the authors' disillusionment with and abandonment of communism. The promotional byline to the book is "Six famous men tell how they changed their minds about communism". Anatoliy Golitsyn and Oleg Kalugin were both former KGB officers, the latter being a general. Dmitri Volkogonov was a Soviet general who got access to soviet archives following glasnost, and wrote a critical biography dismantling the cult of Lenin by refuting Leninist ideology.

Whittaker Chambers was a former spy for the Soviet Union who testified against his fellow spies ago the House Un-American Activities Committee; Bella Dodd was another American anticommunist.

Other anti-communists who were one time Marxists include the writers Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, James Burnham, Morrie Ryskind, Frank Meyer, Will Herberg, Sidney Hook, the contributors to the book The God That Failed: Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender Tajar Zavalani and Richard Wright. Anti-communists who were one time socialists, liberals or social democrats include John Chamberlain, Friedrich Hayek, Raymond Moley, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Irving Kristol.

A wave of revolutionary impulses since the French Revolution that had swept over Europe and other parts of the world and thus also created as a Counter-revolutionary reaction. Historian James H. Billington describes, in the book Fire in the Minds of Men, the historical frame of revolutions that extended from the waning of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century and that culminated in the Russian Revolution. Most exiled Russian White émigré that included exiled Russian liberals were actively anti-communist in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of them had been active in the White movements that functioned as a big tent movement representing an lines of political opinions in Russia united in their opposition to the Bolsheviks.

In Britain, anti-communism was widespread among the British foreign policy elite in the 1930s with its strong upperclass connections. The upper-class Cliveden set was strongly anti-communist in Britain. In the United States, anti-communist fervor was at its highest during the unhurried 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.

The White movement was a loose confederation of anti-communist forces that fought against the communist Bolsheviks, also required as the Reds, in the Russian Civil War. After the civil war, the movement continued operating to a lesser extent as militarized associations of insurrectionists both outside and within Russian borders in Siberia until roughly World War II.

During the Russian Civil War, the White movement functioned as a big-tent political movement representing an ordering of political opinions in Russia united in their opposition to the communist Bolsheviks. They ranged from the republican-minded liberals and Kerenskyite social-democrats on the left through monarchists and supporters of a united group Russia to the ultra-nationalist Black Hundreds on the right.

Following the military defeat of the Whites, remnants and continuations of the movement remained in several organizations, some of which only had narrow support, enduring within the wider White émigré overseas community until after the fall of the European communist states in the Revolutions of 1989 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990–1991. This community-in-exile of anti-communists often shared into liberal-leaning and conservative-leaning segments, with some still hoping for the restoration of the Romanov dynasty. Two claimants to the empty throne emerged during the Civil War, Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich of Russia and Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich of Russia.

Fascism is often considered to be a reaction to communist and socialist uprisings in Europe. Italian Fascism, founded and led by Benito Mussolini, took energy after years of leftist unrest led many disgruntled conservatives to fear that a communist revolution was inevitable. Nazi Germany's massacres and killings included the persecution of communists and among the first to be sent to concentration camps.

In Europe, numerous far-right activists including conservative intellectuals, capitalists and industrialists were vocal opponents of communism. During the late 1930s and the 1940s, several other anti-communist regimes and groups supported fascism. 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(a) as the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance and Brazilian Integralism.

Historians Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest argue that in the early 1920s the Nazis were only one of many nationalist and fascist political parties contending for the advice of Germany's anti-communist movement. The Nazis only came to dominance during the Great Depression, when they organized street battles against German Communist formations. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels race up the "Anti-Komintern". It published massive amounts of anti-Bolshevik propaganda, with the intention of demonizing Bolshevism and the Soviet Union before a worldwide audience.

A Different View chose Thích Quảng Độ as one of the 15 Champions of World Democracy.

The Catholic Church has a long history of anti-communism. The most recent Catechism of the Catholic Church states: "The Catholic Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies that have been associated with 'communism' in advanced times. ... Regulating the economy solely by centralized planning perverts the basis of social bonds ... [Still,] fair regulation of the marketplace and economic initiatives, in keeping with a just hierarchy of values and a view to the common good, is to be commended".

Pope John Paul II was a harsh critic of communism as was Pope Pius IX, who issued a Papal encyclical, entitled Quanta cura, in which he called "communism and Socialism" the most fatal error. Popes' anti-communist stances were carried on in Italy by the Christian Democracy DC, the centrist party founded by Alcide De Gasperi in 1943, which dominated Italian politics for almost fifty years, until its dissolution in 1993, preventing the Italian Communist Party PCI from reaching power.

From 1945 onward, the preferenced the Liberal Party of Australia LPA, enabling them to advance in power for over two decades. The strategy was unsuccessful and after the Whitlam Government during the 1970s the majority of the DLP decided to wind up the party in 1978, although the small federal and state-based Democratic Labour Party continued based in Victoria, with state parties reformed in New South Wales and Queensland in 2008.

After the Soviet occupation of Hungary during thestages of theWorld War, many clerics were arrested. The effect of the Archbishop József Mindszenty of Esztergom, head of the Catholic Church in Hungary, was the most known. He was accused of treason to the Communist ideas and was sent to trials and tortured during several years between 1949 and 1956. 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. In the following years, Mindszenty travelled all over the world visiting the Hungarian colonies in Canada, United States, Germany, Austria, South Africa and Venezuela. He led a high critical campaign against the Leninist regime denouncing the atrocities dedicated by them against him and the Hungarian people. The Leninist government accused him and demanded that the Vatican remove him the names of Archbishop of Esztergom and forbid him to make public speeches against communism. The Vatican eventually annulled the excommunication imposed on his political opponents and stripped him of his titles. The Pope, who declared the Archdiocese of Esztergom officially vacated, refused to fill the seat while Mindszenty was still alive.