Post-Communist Anti-Communism: America's New Ideological Frontiers

Abstract

In the eight years since Socialist Register devoted an entire issue to the phenomenon of anticommunism, the scarcely thinkable has happened. Anticommunism has won. No longer the ideology of one side in a global struggle, it now stands uncontested astride its fallen adversary. What are the implications of this turn of events? What happens when there is no longer a Communism to hate? The Cold War would be better called the 'Forty Years War,' since it was anything but cold for all the Caucasian fraction of its command structure, and also because its intensely ideological character suggests comparison with the Thirty Years War, last of the overtly religious bloodbaths to have wracked the Western world. The ideological fervour with which the Cold War was waged was a throwback to pre-Enlightenment days, even though the Western side, spearheaded by the United States, professed to be fighting for Enlightenment virtue against Eastern barbarism. This claim was very successfully advanced, to the extent that the terms 'democracy' and 'freedom' came to be automatically associated with 'capitalism' in the dichotomous thinking which characterised Cold War discourse.