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Misperceptions of Communism
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11665 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
6,735 Words |
| Author
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Alan J. Levine
Alan J. Levine is a historian specializing in twentieth-
century international relations and the author of From the
Normandy Beaches to the Baltic Sea. |
It has become increasingly apparent in the last few years that announcements of the death of the Cold War in the early 1970s were premature. The Soviet Union's impressive military buildup, its interventions in Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, and other areas, and communist victories in a half dozen other countries, have shown that the problem of Soviet expansion remains. Soviet communism has not been a fashionable model for quite some time, and it has been further discredited by the brilliant works of Solzhenitsyn and others. Even the newer communist societies, which attracted admiration among the Western intelligentsia in the 1960s and 1970s - China, Cuba, and North Vietnam - has been embarrassed by the exodus of hordes of refugees and the revelations of Mao's successors. The Soviet-Chinese conflict and warfare between communist states in Indochina have shown that a world run by communists would not produce happiness. The horrors of Pol Pot's regime, and the subsequent Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, have merely helped to underscore the unpleasantness of communist regimes.
There seems, however, to be a remarkable reluctance to acknowledge these things or to recognize their implications. No doubt this is due partly to a willingness to give the other side the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps an even larger factor is the hatred many Westerners appear to feel for their own society. Even though no grounds exist for preferring communist regimes to those of the democratic West, many westerners cannot support their own civilization even as a "lesser evil." There is no arguing with such irrationality; but it may be useful to examine one of its manifestations, the "anti-anti-communist mythology" - a defense mechanism used primarily, but not only, by the Left against the realities of the world since 1917. Thanks to the influence of the West's ‘inverted patriots,' particularly in the mass media and the academic world, this mythology has gained a hold well beyond the ranks of the less thoughtful. The celebration of détente in the 1970s provided a favorable medium for is spread. The anti-anti-communist mythology was a strong element in the mind-set of policymakers during the Carter administration; Carter's famous speech denouncing our alleged "inordinate fear of Communism' showed its power. George McGovern in 1972 and John Anderson in 1980 were fairly pure exponents of the anti-anti-communist mythology. Such journals as the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and Harper's express it regularly. It dominates the thinking on foreign affairs of the left wing of the Democratic party; and it can frequently be found in the editorials of The New York
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