It’s worth noting that contrary to the mainstream narrative, Western anti-communism wasn’t a response to Soviet aggression. It didn’t originate during the McCarthy period, or even the First Red Scare, but in the late 19th century. According to Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality, as early as 1880, Ulysses S. Grant was lionized as an eternal foe of “communism, lawlessness, and disorder.” A decade and a half later, “The great Pullman strike outside Chicago in 1894 was greeted with shrieking headlines like ‘MOBS IN CONTROL OF CHICAGO’ and ‘CHICAGO FACES FAMINE’ and was dubbed the ‘Debs Rebellion.’ At about that time, to whip up public alarm about radical disorder, the New York Tribune ‘discovered’ and alerted the readers to ‘ANARCHIST PLOT TO BLOW UP THE CAPITAL.’”¹
It’s important to note something else, in addition to the fact that official anti-communism predates the first socialist state by several decades. Equally important is that the tropes we hear today existed in the 19th century, and reality has little-to-no bearing on how, why, or when these narratives are deployed. Propaganda doesn’t have a relationship to facts, its relationship is to its intended recipient.
After all, whatever came of the Chicago Famine of 1894 inflicted by America’s socialists?
In 1917, the October Revolution established a socialist state in the middle of the Eurasian continent, and wealthy exploiters, royalty, and racial chauvinists worldwide saw their worst nightmare realized. Fearing that they would meet the same fate as the slaveholders of St. Domingue and the Romanovs, the armies of 14 nations invaded Soviet Russia. The allied expeditionary forces fought alongside the “White Russian” armies, commanded by those elements of Tsarist society whom the newborn socialist republic had divested of their privileges. In an evocative illustration of the class forces arrayed against one another, British planes allied to White Russian forces airdropped anti-Semitic propaganda leaflets over Russian cities to agitate against the “Judeo-Bolshevik” menace.
In America, official anti-communism exploded during this period, as recounted in Robert Murray’s Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920:
Anti-Bolshevik testimony was played up in the columns of the nation’s newspapers and once again the reading public was fed on highly colored tales of free love, nationalization of women, bloody massacres, and brutal atrocities. Stories were circulated that the victims of the Bolshevik madmen customarily had been roasted to death in furnaces, scalded with live steam, torn to pieces on racks, or hacked to bits with axes. Newspaper editors never tired of referring to the Russian Reds as “assassins and madmen,” “human scum,” “crime-mad,” and “beasts.” Russia was a place, some said, where maniacs stalked raving through the streets, and the populace fought with dogs for carrion.²
Reactionary émigrés fleeing Soviet Russia, and later the Soviet Union, were usually the primary sources for this and later propaganda campaigns against the USSR. The first major wave of émigrés was the White Russians; one of the major sources of anti-Communist material in this early period was a virulently anti-Semitic, 12,000-word pamphlet titled “Crimes of the Bolsheviks,” published in Munich in 1926. One of the fables concocted by the pseudonymous author “Dr. Gregor,” in the section titled “Fiendish tortures devised by the Jewish Cheka,” alleged that Soviet torturers forced rats to eat through the bodies of helpless Christians. This story about rats was later borrowed for the grim conclusion of George Orwell’s 1984. From then until now, the primary sources for anti-Communist agit-prop are fascists, whose stories are filtered out to various target audiences through different salespeople.
Anti-communism is, if not an expression of fascism itself, proximate to fascism. Orwell provides a perfect example. This might sound shocking to someone who only knows Eric Blair as the patron saint of the permissible left, but as could be expected of a lifelong anti-communist, he was a man of retrograde attitudes. In his infamous “Orwell’s list,” in which he snitched on suspected communists, socialist, and various progressives, he noted everyone he suspected of being Jewish (Charlie Chaplin earned a “Jew?” in the margins of Orwell’s list). Next to Paul Robeson, the black communist who fought for social justice alongside progressives of all races his entire life, Orwell wrote “very antiwhite.” Orwell believed the contemporary neo-Nazis slogan that “anti-racist” is code for “anti-white.”
This could be expected because contrary to anti-communist nonsense about “totalitarianism,” it is the liberal capitalist ideology that resembles fascism. As early as the 1950s, the Martinican political philosopher Aimé Césaire observed that fascism was colonialism imported to Europe from the periphery. The Nazis admired European colonialism, American Jim Crow, and Western eugenics, and sought to constitute white supremacist rule in Germany and create settler-colonies in Eastern Europe. The same categories of racial exclusion that are expressed most nakedly in fascism are immanent to the liberal worldview: John Stuart Mill claimed that “Civilization is the direct converse of rudeness or barbarism. Whatever be the characteristics of what we call savage life, the contrary of these constitute civilization.” Edward Said similarly observed that “Underlying these categories is the rigidly binomial opposition of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs,’” with “their” savage world legitimizing “our” enlightened civilization.
Fascism and liberalism share a foundational class interest in maintaining capitalist enterprise, and from this springs the shared ideological view of a world divided between the enlightened and barbarians. In contrast, communism rejects all the ideological aspects of fascism, to the extent that it is an entirely opposed worldview. Here are how three observers characterized the differences between fascism and communism:
When speaking to several American journalists after the rise of the Nazi party, Germany’s Count Hugo von Lerchenfeld beamed that the Führer was a “prophet,” and characterized his agenda thusly:
Who is this man Adolf Hitler? The first and most important dogma in Hitler’s creed from the very beginning has been anti-Semitism… Like Mussolini he has unfolded the banner of nationalism. The spirit of the trenches, the spirit of unswerving fidelity to the Fatherland, must be revived in order to strengthen and unite the German people. Hitler looks upon Socialism and Internationalism as purely Jewish inventions.³
Fascism is based on extreme racial chauvinism—particularly against Jews (which it sees as the masterminds of Communism)—and the most vicious dictatorship of capital justified by a highly idealistic blood-and-soil mythos. In contrast, here is how journalist Edgar Snow discussed the Soviet perspective during World War Two:
It is true enough that Marxist ideology must reject the notion that the “German mind” exists as apart from class forces which shape it, or that the “German race” is biologically and congenitally incapable of human decency. It is also true that basic propaganda in Russia usually stressed the “anti-fascist” and “anti-Hitlerite” nature of the war, rather than the anti-German.
I remember seeing a big cartoon chart in a Soviet military school which showed the figures of a Red Army man and a Nazi soldier, side by side. There was little physical difference in the two figures. But above the Soviet fighter were slogans such as “racial equality,” “support of all freedom-loving nations,” “people’s ownership of production,” “international peace,” “highest development of the individual,” “international brotherhood,” to indicate the moral equipment which made him a good soldier. The top of the Nazi trooper’s skull was cut away, and inside it the contents were displayed: “false racial theories,” “ignorance,” “plunder of peace-loving peoples,” “Germany over all,” “reactionary Prusso-German militarist tyranny,” “moral filth,” and so on. You got from that cartoon the distinct impression that whoever drew it believed that if you emptied out the contents of that German skull and refilled it with the correct ideas, the man beneath it would not differ so much from the Soviet hero beside him.4
Describing the 1936 Constitution of the USSR, journalist Anna Louise Strong summarized the opposing worldviews of Hitler and Stalin: “its adoption was intended as a direct challenge to the theories and practice of Nazi fascism, which had risen to power in Berlin… While Hitler preached the view of ‘inferior and superior races,’ the Soviet Constitution made even the preaching of race privilege or inferiority a crime. Stalin directly challenged Hitler in what is perhaps the most sweeping statement ever made of equality: ‘Neither language nor color of skin nor cultural backwardness can justify national and racial inequality’.”5
“Paul Robeson at Peekskill,” by V. Poliakov, H. Shatz & T. Radoman, 1954. In 1949, Paul Robeson and other musicians put on a concert in Peekskill, NY, which was attacked by a crowd of fascist thugs shouting “We’re Hitler’s boys” and “Go back to Russia, nigger.” The police allowed the mob to attack the progressives and send 140 to the hospital—Robeson claimed “perhaps no single event in the postwar anti-fascist struggle has had the same impact and importance as the incident of Peekskill.” Robeson had visited the USSR and claimed that he felt like “a human being for the first time” in his life.
This was as much a rejection of liberal capitalist governance as it was Hitlerism: in 1936, black Americans were de facto disenfranchised by a series of measures including de jure Jim Crow (the United States had only relinquished direct military rule over the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Haiti in the last few years). Three-quarters of people governed by Paris lived under colonial rule; it was nearly 85% for British subjects. Indigenous people in the dominions of Canada and Australia were similarly barred from voting.
Anti-communists dismiss comments like Stalin’s 1934 reply to the US Jewish Agency as cant, but the Soviet commitment to anti-racism is confirmed by sources with no stake in defending the USSR, including explicitly anti-communist ones (it should be obvious that the following is not a claim that the USSR was “perfect,” nor that it was a “paradise,” nor that retrograde bigotries had been entirely eliminated).
A report published by the RAND Corporation in 1958 titled Smolensk Under Soviet Rule, and authored by Merle Fainsod (with the help of a young researcher named Zbigniew Brzezinski), claims that “Indifference toward the expression of anti-Semitic sentiments by worker Communists was singled out for special censure” by Soviet authorities. Smolensk also claims that between 1929-30, dozens of university students were expelled and one professor removed from his post for anti-social crimes including anti-Semitism. During one of the purges, a party functionary was reprimanded for failing to report that his wife had made bigoted comments against Jews.6
A survey conducted by Harvard University in 1950-1 among displaced Soviet WWII refugees asked subjects to describe differences between the country’s nationalities. The respondents claimed that there were no differences, except for the preferential treatment afforded to historically marginalized groups. According to the respondents:
There is no chauvinism. You can get ten years for it.
In the army, a soldier got seven years for calling a Jew ‘Zhid.’
All are alike. You cannot tell somebody that he is a Ukrainian and brag that you are a Russian or you would be arrested.
If you cussed out a member of a minority group, there was serious trouble.
Since Nazi-fascism was the most virulent form of white supremacy, which was invented and pioneered by West European colonists in North America, the USSR and Nazi Germany embodied two opposing systems. The capitalist West, which the Reich sought to replicate, shared Hitler’s goal of extinguishing the socialist system—a struggle that would both create the conditions for World War II and succeed that horrible conflict.
