Anti-Communism

It is no longer news that our current administration thinks the Soviet Union is the source of all evil. For almost two years we have been told that the Russians are responsible for insurgencies in Central America, that they have built a military machine superior to ours, and more recently, that they are manipulating the peace movements in Europe and the U.S. to serve their goal of Soviet world domination.

The Reagan administration's anti-Soviet offensive has had its setbacks, such as when it failed to prove Soviet involvement in El Salvador and when the NATO allies recently defied its sanctions against the Soviet pipeline project, but these defeats have been relatively superficial. What is astonishing is the extent to which Reagan has won support for the unprecedented military buildup that is the keystone of his anti-Soviet policies. Most Democratic opposition to that buildup has not questioned the assumption that we need to counter an immediate Soviet danger. Instead, the Democrats think that we should do it at less expense.

While the Reagan administration's approach to the Cold War is certainly more single-minded (and clumsy) than that of most recent presidents, it differs more in style than substance. It was, after all, the liberal Democrats Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson who initiated the Cold War, escalated it to the brink of nuclear disaster, and devastated the land of Vietnam.

Hostility to the Soviet Union has been a factor in U.S. politics since the Russian revolution in 1917. And since World War II, the chief tenet of American political orthodoxy has been that the conflict between free-enterprise capitalism and totalitarian communism is the central fact of the political universe: all policies, domestic or foreign, must grow out of the first priority--opposing communism.

This anticommunist ideology has in effect become our state religion. It is the creed that unites liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, corporation heads and labor leaders. While there have certainly been differences of opinion, they have usually been about tactics and strategy, not the basic presupposition of an expansionist Soviet threat.

Since World War II the Soviet threat has been used to justify wars, covert interventions, domestic political repression, and numerous flirtations with nuclear war. It has been invoked for so long and for so many causes that it is sometimes difficult to remember how the Russians came to be our enemy or what this apparently inevitable conflict is supposed to be about.

The Cold War began in 1918, within months after the Russian revolution. After the Bolsheviks had seized power and withdrawn Russia from the war against Germany, they found themselves engaged in a protracted civil war against White Russian armies loyal to the tsar. As World War I ended, the White Russians were joined by interventionary forces from a number of the Allied nations including France, Great Britain, and the United States.

According to Winston Churchill, who was then Britain's minister of war, the invasion of Russia was intended to "strangle Bolshevism in its cradle." The Western intervention forced the Bolsheviks to spend the first years of their revolution building an army and served to reinforce their totalitarian tendencies. Most Americans are not aware that we once invaded Russia, but the Soviet people have never forgotten it.

After it became clear that the Soviet regime was there to stay, the U.S. refused it recognition and maintained a trade embargo. Widespread propaganda against the Soviets spread within the U.S., including false newspaper stories claiming that the Bolsheviks had forced the collectivization of sexual relationships.

At the same time, the federal government undertook a major effort to crush domestic communist, socialist, and other radical organizations. These attempts culminated in the infamous Palmer raids of 1920, when more than 4,000 radicals were arrested at left-wing offices and meeting halls. The anti-Red hysteria also turned against recent immigrants in the U.S. and helped feed the resurgence of Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1920s.

With the Great Depression and the rise of European fascism, hostility toward the Soviets waned. The U.S. finally recognized the government of the USSR in 1932, and the two nations were allies in World War II. But as that war drew to a close, the U.S. began angling to maximize its influence in the postwar world and minimize that of the Soviets. This desire influenced the timing of the atomic bombings of Japan. Part of the reason Hiroshima was bombed on August 6,1945, was that the Soviet Union was planning to enter the war against Japan on August 8. Truman hoped to end the war before the Russians entered it and cut them out of the division of power in the postwar Pacific.

After the war much anti-Soviet agitation in the U.S. focused on the Soviets' brutal imposition of communist governments in the eastern European countries they occupied. In Allied conferences near the end of the war, the United States agreed that the Soviets should be guaranteed friendly governments in eastern Europe as insurance against future invasions from Germany. The Soviets took this agreement to mean that the U.S. would tolerate their oppressive policies.

But in the years immediately after the war, Truman fell under the influence of rabid anticommunist advisers who convinced him to consider Soviet actions in eastern Europe evidence of their ambition to rule the world. He began a hypocritical policy of using the oppression of eastern Europe as fodder for Cold War propaganda while in practice doing little or nothing to alleviate it.

At the same time, the intellectual groundwork for the Cold War was being laid by George Kennan, later U.S. ambassador to the USSR. In an unsigned 1945 article in Foreign Affairs, Kennan claimed that the Soviet Union was inherently expansionist and that its expansionism was rooted in the Russian national character. He advocated an aggressive global policy of "containment" against the Soviet Union.

After the USSR exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949, an elite group of policy-makers convened to consider the implications of that event for the U.S. In a resulting paper, National Security Council document 68 (NSC 68), the U.S. leaders concluded that the Soviet Union was bent on a course of global aggression and that the Soviets could not be dealt with rationally or be expected to behave as other great powers. In NSC 68, Soviet expansionism was attributed to communist ideology rather than national character, but the result was the same: a view of Soviet actions and intentions that left no room for negotiation or coexistence.

It is said that Republican Senator Arthur Vandenburg once advised President Truman that if he hoped to win political support for his ambitious and expensive plans to police the world for free enterprise and democracy he would have to "scare the hell out of the American people." That is exactly what happened in the postwar years as a national hysteria was whipped up against omnipresent communism. The government instituted a peacetime draft for the first time in U.S. history and began testing the hydrogen bomb. Fallout shelters and civil defense drills became commonplace. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for supposedly helping the Russians get our atom bomb secrets, and countless other Americans suspected of Communist Party membership or leftist sympathies were fired from their jobs, blacklisted, and purged from labor unions.

The Red scare on the home front was matched by a policy of confrontation around the world as the U.S. entered the Korean war, began massive military aid to governments facing insurgencies, and undertook interventions in Iran, Lebanon, Guatemala, and other Third World hot spots. This period of confrontation reached its height with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, and the subsequent placement of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. This led to the crisis of October, 1962, when the world stood within a hairsbreadth of nuclear war.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s when the Cold War raged at its height in the U.S., the Soviet Union had little military capacity with which to threaten the U.S. It did not engage in any significant military action outside its eastern European preserve. And when the Soviets did send troops to suppress a popular rebellion in Hungary in 1956, the U.S. took no action on behalf of the Hungarians.

It should be clear from even this cursory look at history that conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union has never been inevitable. At each step in the Cold War, the U.S. was presented with a choice between very different but equally plausible interpretations of Soviet intentions, each of which would have led to very different responses. At every turn U.S. policy-makers have chosen to assume the very worst about their Soviet counterparts.

While the Reagan administration is again portraying the Soviets as threatening to overrun us, the USSR is in fact in a period of decline. It is bogged down in its own Vietnam in Afghanistan. The popular uprising in Poland refuses to go away. The Soviet economy is in a shambles, and the Russian people are increasingly restless.

As we saw this summer, the Soviets have lost practically all ability to influence events in the Middle East. While they are still active through the Cubans in Angola and Ethiopia, they have also been ejected from Egypt and Somalia and largely ignored by the Mugabe government of Zimbabwe. The Soviet system is not working and has lost any appeal it ever had around the world, and its aging leadership seems to have little idea what to do. They are hardly in a position to seriously challenge the U.S. in the global arena.

But despite any calculation of the real balance of military or political power, anticommunism in the U.S. has by now taken on its own momentum and often seems more like a bad habit than a logical approach to the world. But it would be a mistake to consider America's anti-Russian obsession as purely arational. Throughout the Cold War the anticommunist world-view has, and continues to, serve conveniently certain political and economic interests in our society. It could almost be said that if there were no Soviet threat we would have had to invent one.

The first impetus for anti-Soviet propaganda and military intervention was Western capitalists' fear of the spread of socialism. While the U.S. was certainly concerned about the Russian revolution's atheism and lack of democratic institutions, what really provoked fear and military response was the revolution's expropriation of property and redistribution of wealth.

Since 1917 the U.S. has participated in measures to turn back almost every attempt at socialist revolution anywhere in the world, as evidenced most recently in Nicaragua. Today almost all Third World insurgents and European and American leftists have long since ceased to consider the Soviet Union a worthy model of socialism and have come to fear its debilitating influence. But our government persists in claiming that the Soviet Union is the driving force behind every movement for radical social change in the world, though more often what is at stake is U.S. access to raw materials and markets rather than Soviet influence.

The Soviet threat has also been useful at home in papering over the flaws in our economic system. During World War II the U.S. pulled out of the Great Depression and built up the most productive industrial machine in the history of the world. After the war, with productive capacity much greater than possible consumer demand and with hundreds of thousands of veterans looking for work, a new depression seemed likely. Instead, from the late 1940s to the early 1970s most Americans enjoyed a period of almost uninterrupted prosperity.

Manipulation of the Soviet threat contributed to this in several ways. It established the justification for the continued maintenance of a large conscripted standing army and ever-increasing production of military hardware. It was used to sell a conservative Congress an expensive program to rebuild the capitalist economies of Europe ensuring a market for our goods. And by placing the specter of the Kremlin over the anticolonial tide in the Third World, the U.S. justified essentially antidemocratic and oppressive actions to protect its access to raw materials and cheap labor.

The most obvious impact of the anti-Soviet worldview on U.S. politics has been the smearing of movements for social change with the communist label. Domestic dissidents have repeatedly been charged with allegiance to Moscow or with playing into the hands of the communists by weakening our system and way of life. The effect of Red scare tactics on the course of American politics should not be underestimated. In the first two decades of this century the radical labor movement represented by Eugene Debs' Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union were winning mass support for a homegrown vision of a more just, egalitarian, and democratic society. But the Socialist Party and the IWW were crushed by the Palmer raids.

Again in the 1960s, the black freedom movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement, both led in large part by Martin Luther King, Jr., showed promise of growing into a mass movement to redistribute wealth and power. But as King's potential as a leader became obvious, he was subjected to a vendetta by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI's surveillance of King and infiltration of his movement were justified by Hoover's false claim that a close associate of King's was a Communist Party member. Hoover's campaign against the civil rights and antiwar movements eventually grew into Cointelpro, a massive program to infiltrate and disrupt movement organizations. Such government repression played a significant role in the splintering of the black, antiwar, and poor peoples' movements.

When one considers how crucial anticommunist ideology is for undergirding the political and economic status quo, it is not surprising that the worst label the U.S. establishment could think of to hang on the European disarmament movement was "neutralist." If large numbers of people in the West were to become neutral regarding the conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the inhibiting and immobilizing effects of anticommunism might be neutralized as well. It is clear that as long as U.S. politics is bound by the Cold War consensus, long-term steps toward peace will be impossible and steps toward a more just society very difficult. If the growing peace movement in the U.S. is to really contribute to peace it will need to step outside of that consensus and reject the fundamental premises of the anticommunist religion.

Such a course is particularly important for Christians. The anti-Soviet religion asks us to see the power of good and evil divided along East-West lines with all good on this side and all evil on the other. But we know that all systems are fallen and are under judgment and that our allegiance is not to either superpower but to the transnational body of Christ and to the victims of suffering and oppression of both East and West. The early Christians of the Roman empire were sometimes considered atheists because they did not believe in the gods of the imperial religion. Neutralism regarding the false theology and demonology of the Cold War may be the equivalent of non-belief in the state religion for Christians of the U.S. empire.

Rejecting the Cold War consensus could be costly in the short run. There would certainly be less establishment political support for a neutralist peace movement and neutralism could incite a new wave of repression. But in the long run, it may be the only approach that could break the cycle of the Cold War and open the way for a more peaceful and humane world for ourselves, the Russians, and all our neighbors.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.