When Joseph Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev became the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1953, an odd thing happened. The Soviet Union began to change. In 1956, Khrushchev delivered a report called On the Personality Cult and its Consequences to the 20th Party Congress. He discussed the report in a secret speech which was delivered after midnight. The contents of the speech were eventually obtained by Israel, and through them, by legendary CIA officer Jesus James Angleton. Among the things divulged in the report was the fact that during the Great Purge of 1937-38, Stalin had over one and a half million people arrested and over 600,000 people executed. This information became widely known in the late 1950’s and led many communist sympathizers in the West to reconsider or disavow their position.
Communism in America, which had already been under tremendous pressure during the McCarthy Era in the first half of the decade, was finished after Khrushchev’s revelations. Thereafter, the only signs of communist sympathies in the country came from worked-up college students who fetishized Che Guevera or thought it was amusingly anti-Establishment to wave Mao’s Little Red Book around. Communism became synonymous with totalitarianism and mass murder.
That’s why there was so much consensus about trying to overthrow Castro and preventing communists from taking over Saigon.
I am aware that this is a shorthand and simplistic retelling of history, but I detail it because there was a certain irony in the fact this country became much more alarmed about the threat of communism at a point in history when it actually became much less threatening.
To be clear, communism even in a benevolent regime is hostile to liberty and is rightly opposed by all who support freedom of religion and freedom of choice as basic human rights. But there is a difference between institutional repression and mass murder. Likewise, the threat posed by Joseph Stalin was completely different from the threat posed by Leonid Brezhnev.
I bring this up because terrorism seems to have replaced communism as the raison d’être of the national security state. More specifically, Islam-inspired terrorism has replaced communism as the “great threat” that justifies absolutely ridiculous spending on national defense, homeland security, and intelligence operations.
It’s hard to say that the threat of terrorism has diminished in the same way as the threat of communism diminished when Khrushchev took over for Stalin. We are still experiencing periodic attempts to bring down civilian aircraft. And we do have to worry about crude radiological, or biological, or chemical attacks. I think the biggest lesson we need to learn from the Cold War is how our exaggerated fears made us stupid and caused us make mistakes both moronic and evil.
There was no excuse for killing a million Vietnamese. We failed to understand the schism between China and the Soviet Union or the anti-Chinese attitude of the Vietnamese people. Seeing all Communists as the same and all of them as part of a seamless conspiracy against the West caused us to freak out unnecessarily, to misallocate resources, to wage war where no war needed to be waged, to make enemies of people who might have been neutral, if not friendly towards us, and to side with dictators against socialist reformers who shared our esteem for human rights.
All of this is relevant today, as we listen to people conflate the religious nuts in charge of Iran with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. A failure to understand the differences in Iraq between the Sunnis and Shiites, the secular and the religious, the Kurds and the Arabs, led our government to make horrible decisions at the outset of the occupation of Iraq. When you see someone like Glenn Beck warning us about the Islamic world uniting under some new Caliphate, you are seeing the kind of Stupid that marred our victory in the Cold War. Islam is not nearly as threatening as our leaders want us to believe. It is not, and never has been, a united movement.
We care what happens in Egypt because we don’t want any disruption of shipping through the Suez Canal, and because we don’t want war between Egypt and Israel, and because we would like to have a friendly government there that is happy to do business with us and who will share intelligence with us on the threats we face. But we don’t face a threat like we faced from Joseph Stalin.
We should also recognize that our support for the repressive regime in Egypt was the reason that Al-Qaeda co-leader Ayman al-Zawahiri wanted to fly airplanes into the Pentagon, World Trade Center, and Congress.
In 1981, Zawahiri was arrested and imprisoned [Ed. note: and tortured] , along with dozens of other radicals, for collaborating in the assassination of Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat. Prison time only redoubled Zawahiri’s fervor. Not long after his release, he took over leadership of the terrorist organization Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which the United States believes helped to organize the August 7, 1998, bombings of U.S. Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. In 2001, according to widely accepted accounts, Zawahiri formally merged the Egyptian Islamic Jihad with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. The group is now officially named Qaeda al-Jihad.
One way to reduce the threat of terrorism is to facilitate a transition in Egypt to a government that doesn’t torture its dissidents. That’s a quite different strategy from Bush’s decision to use Egypt as our subcontractor for torture.
When the US Communists found out about Stalin what had be done to people in the USSR, they lost their sense of self superiority.
The name of Bush makes me sick. Perhaps some of the terrorists should have made in the USA stamp on them.
The Republicans who say torture is good really need to be shamed out of existence.
Excellent post.
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Anyone having trouble making comments today?
I can’t post a comment in Steven’s story and I don’t know why.
Comments functionality works for me. Good post.
Can you post in steve’s story?
I just tried without success. Too bad as it’s a worthy post.
Excellant post, BooMan. What the Republicans refuse to admit is that their collective stupidity really is costly and has terrible consequences. But, I guess this is what logic is all about and when one abandons reason for thoughtless emotion, then, one can easily access the whirlwind.
Republicans? I saw plenty of democrats voting for war. And our new police state.
Instead of “communism”, I do believe you mean “Soviet-style Communism” or Marxism-Leninism. The ideology of communism itself is not necessarily hostile to freedom of religion or freedom of choice. No more than democracy is hostile to science.
The appropriate response to this madness is to ask folks about Turkey, an Islamist democratic pluralistic regime.
We should remember that our toppling of Mohammed Mossadegh is the proximate reason that 35 years later the Iranian regime was toppled. It just so happened that the only place folks could meet and launch a mass movement in Reza Pahlavi’s Iran was in the mosques and the universities. In Egypt, this is the mosques, the churches, Facebook, and Twitter.
I don’t really agree. If by communism we mean Marxism, albeit not necessarily Marxist-Leninism, we still have an abridgment of economic and religious freedom, and a basically inevitable loss of liberty as it is natural for people to rebel against such restrictions.
Politics is about restrictions. It is natural for people to rebel against any restrictions; see Rand Paulism. The Bill of Rights restricts the religious freedom to have the state force all citizens to be proselytes. Contract law restricts economic choices. It’s a matter of what, when, how, how restricted, in what ways, and who decides.
The problem with “Marxism” is that Marx held multiple views over his writing life. And I wonder to what extent our views even of the Communist Manifesto are shaped by J. Edgar Hoover’s ghostwriter’s reading of Lenin’s reading of the Communist Manifesto. I’m sure some graduate student somewhere is working on the data for this thesis right now; it’s too tempting a topic in cultural studies. At any rate, Marx’s practical view of the world is pretty much limited to 19th century Victorian capitalism and any system that tries to return to 19th century Victorian capitalism. The extent to which he is relevant today has to do with the degree to which current global capitalism is like 19th century Victorian capitalism. His analysis of how increased investment in capital (plant, equipment, innovation) eventually reduces the demand and wages of labor, which in turn causes the collapse of capitalism reads very much like the collapse of asset bubbles. I suppose he was waiting for the collapse of the mother of all bubbles.
Small-c “communism” has its own issues, best exemplified by the difficulties that communal intentional communities face. Folks who were part of the commune movement of the early 1970s understand what those are. As some have survived, those difficulties are not insurmountable. And as most of the survivors have shown, survival does not depend on being turned into a cult in which freedoms are suspended in obedience to one or a few leaders.
Stalinism was the application of the Shock Doctrine to kick Russia into the twentieth century; shock doctrine strategies eventually fail badly. Sixty years of application of the shock doctrine in American capitalism have come to a similar but at this point less brutal failure. And it is an open question how long it will be before American corporations send folks to work camps, just to work. Before American corporations do not kill people, just starve them through unemployment. Because that concretely is what the phrase “race to the bottom” means.
Yep, the “War on Terror” was a brilliant rhetorical flourish for the military-industrial complex. An ideology might die, but it’s really hard to eliminate a tactic that can be used by people of various ideological stripes and agendas. There’s now no need for them to worry about actually eliminating the existential threat and having people clamor for a peace dividend.