The Anti-Communist Impulse (Michael Parenti)

The Anti-Communist Impulse
The men pictured on the cover, from top-to-bottom and left-to-right, are John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Karl Mundt, Harry S. Truman, James Forrestal, and Joseph McCarthy
Author	Michael Parenti
Publisher	Random House
First published	1969
Type	Book
Source	https://archive.org/details/anticommunistimp0000mich/mode/2up

The Anti-Communist Impulse is a book by Michael Parenti, published in 1969 by Random House.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Elizabeth Coleman, Jane Clark Seitz, John J. Simon, Gladdin Schrock, and Philip West for their helpful criticisms and suggestions. Sydney and Carola Lea proved invaluable allies throughout much of this effort and I appreciate their support.

I am also indebted to the Louis Rabinowitz Foundation for a research grant which liberated me for a summer of writing.

The most gentle and helpful critic of all was my wife, Susan, to whom I pay a special tribute.

The book is dedicated to the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., because of his open mind and open heart

Introduction

Critical thought strives to define the irrational character of the established rationality. HERBERT MARCUSE

To see or to perish is ht every condition laid upon everything that makes up the universe... And this, in superior measure, is man's condition. TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

Thousands of volumes have been written about the very ideology, history, and evils of communism, but not much about anti-communism. Yet anti-communism is the most powerful political force in the world. Endowed with an imposing ideology, and a set of vivid images and sacred dogmas, it commands the psychic and material resources of the most potent industrial-military arsenal in the history of mankind. Its forces are deployed on every continent, its influence is felt in every major region, and it is capable of acts which—when ascribed to the communists—are considered violent and venal. Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has. If America has an ideology, or a national purpose, it is anti-communism. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been expended, and hundreds of thousands of lives have been sacrificed on its behalf. It is time we gave closer scrutiny to the anti-communist impulse, its mainstays and effects, its polemics and policies.

Some ideologies have no "manifesto" or "bible" containing an explicit statement of belief. Some are so deeply rooted in the polity, so widely and imperceptibly diffused in a nation's political culture as to be rarely exposed to national confrontation. The most powerful ideologies are not those which prevail against all challengers, but those which are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear more like "the nature of things." We are repeatedly advised to guard against the dogmas of the right and of the left, but not a word of warning is extended about the dogmas of the middle since they are seldom perceived as dogmas.

Men rarely interact indirectly with their material milieu: between a man and the "objective" world there looms the symbolic environment, a configuration of images, values, conditioned perceptions, expectations, and unspoken assumptions filtering and even predetermining experience, and thereby becoming the "reality" we experience. All men live in a symbolic environment, "moderates" as well as "immoderates," "solid" conservatives, "responsible" liberals and "flaming" radicals. Are we then faced with the unhappy conclusion that the search for political truth involves little more than choosing from among a variety of equally illusionary symbolic configurations? Since reality produces a congestion of stimuli, comprehensible only if reduced to manageable images which necessarily introduce an element of distortion, and since these images are derived from the ongoing cultural-ideological environment, then what could possibly be "real" and what "false"? As David Hume suggested, the problem of what constitutes "reality" in our images can never be resolved since our images can only be compared with other images and never with reality.

But Kenneth Boulding has noted that even if the problem remains epistemologically unresolved, common sense and the necessities of everyday life oblige us to make judgements and to act as if our images were true. When doing this, we find that, at least for some purposes, rational mechanisms have their use and there exists processes for the detection of error, so that even if "naked reality" constantly eludes us, we hopefully can arrive at a closer approximation of the truth.

If someone cries, "The Communists are taking over in Egypt!", instead of bemoaning the elusiveness of reality and concluding that one can't ever really know what is happening in Egypt or, for that matter, anywhere else, we can ask the speaker to specify whom he has in mind when he refers to the "communists," and what observable characteristics need one possess in order to qualify for that category. We can require some operational description of the political conditions represented by the expression "taking over." If the speaker is unwilling to respond on this level and prefers only to reiterate his contention, we might still prevail upon him to explain why a "communist take-over in Egypt" (whatever that means, and assuming it is occurring) is cause for alarm. The conjectures he offers can then be subjected to the same search for specificity, clarity, and evidence.

In speaking of "evidence" we acknowledge that the elimination of error is accompanied mainly by feedback. From our present images of the world we derive certain expectations (images of the future) which if not fulfilled result—or should result—in a readjustment of our images. In 1956 to 1957 after the Suez crisis, some political leaders, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, actually did believe that Egypt and most of the Arab world were succumbing to Soviet domination, a view that did not enjoy the feedback of subsequent events. Either their image of the future was incorrectly drawn from their image of the present or the image of the present was false all along; that much we can say.

But the problem is more complicated, for in international politics, as elsewhere, our perceptions and images are not merely reflections of the exterior world, they help create it and are a substantive part of it. As Stanley Hoffmann noted, "Reality is in considerable part the product of a conflict of wills, of a context of active perceptions competing for the privilege of defining reality." To the extent that any specific set of "active perceptions," such as those manufactured by the anti-communist mentality, are persuasive, they become a self-perpetuating force, to be treated not only as more or less distorted images but as creators and actual components of political reality.

This book is a critical examination of the kind of political reality which the anti-communist impulse has constructed; it is an inquiry into the imagery, theory, and practice of an American orthodoxy. In the chapters to follow I attempt to give an overview of the origins, the development, the cultural predispositions, and the domestic and overseas manifestations of American anti-communism. The larger portion of these pages is devoted to American anti-communism's international policies, the repercussions of which weigh most heavily on matters of war, peace, and human survival. My hope is that this book will help others entertain new images and new realities, of the kind that might bring us to a saner and less tragic political world.

To some readers, my efforts might appear "one-sided." But if it is true that "we need to hear all sides and not just one," then all the more reason why the evidence, ideas, and criticisms usually ignored or misread by the anti-communist ideologue deserve the extended coverage accorded them in this book. Moreover, unlike some Washington policymakers, I give serious critical attention to the arguments and interpretations of those who differ with me. That is my major purpose in writing this book.

It is not demanded of the reader that he accept my biases but that he reflect upon his own. How seldom we bother to explore in some critical fashion the fundamental preconceptions that shape our view of political life. How frequently, as if by instinct, we respond to certain cues and incantations. Our opinions shelter and support us; it is an excruciating effort to submit them to reappraisal. Yet if we are to maintain some pretense at being rational creatures we must risk the discomfiture that comes with questioning the unquestionable, and try to transcend our tendencies towards mental self-confinement.

Until a few years ago I was an anti-communist liberal who believed in the necessity of "maintaining our commitments against the forces of communism." Troublesome questions arose in my mind but these were usually vanquished by my deeply conditioned reactions to fearful images of "the cold-war struggle," and "communist aggression." Vietnam was for me, as for many other Americans, a crucible for my anti-communist beliefs. I began reading about the Vietnam war still convinced that "aggression" had to be stopped. The more I studied the problem, the more I found myself questioning not only our involvement in that conflict but also the whole train of attitudes and events that brought us to it. Eventually I found I could no longer consider myself an adherent of the anti-communism preached and practised by American liberals and conservatives. To be sure, it is still my conviction that communist rulers have shown themselves as adept as anyone in the arts of suppressing political dissent and exercising autocratic power; one need only think of the purge trials of the 1930s, Hungary of 1956, and Czechoslovakia of 1968. And let us agree at the onset that we despise and deplore labour camps, press censorship, oligarchic rule, and the exercise of any power that violates human dignity whether it be found in Spain, Portugal, Paraguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua, South Korea, Pakistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia (to name a few of the countries to whom we have given aid), or in South Africa, Rhodesia, the Soviet Union, China, Bulgaria, in Mississippi or Chicago. But if we really are against those uses of power which violate the human spirit, then it is not enough to say we are against communism, but that we are against injustice, exploitative privilege, and despotism wherever it may be found.

It is our very commitment to human freedom and dignity that should cause us to view American anti-communism with alarm. Most disturbing to me are the many things the anti-communist does in the name of "freedom." At home we have suffered patriotic hooliganism, collective self-delusion, the propagation of political orthodoxy, the imprisonment of dissenters, and the emergence of a gargantuan military establishment that devours the national treasure in the face of worsening domestic ills. Abroad, anti-communism has brought us armaments races, nuclear terror, the strengthening of oppressive autocracies, counter-revolutionary reactionism, the death and maiming of American boys, and the slaughter of far-off unoffending peoples.

Convinced that communism is the greatest menace ever to beset mankind, and reenforced in that belief by demonic stereotypes, moral double standards, and enormous military power. American anti-communists find license to commit any number of heinous actions in order to counter the "menace"; thereby they perpetrate greater human miseries and dangers than the ones they allegedly seek to eradicate and they become the very evil they profess to combat. To maintain this tragic self-delusion, anti-communists embrace a vision of the world that reduces all events to the same self-fulfilling interpretations and, by the nature of its premises, denies the existence of disconfirming evidence. The success of anti-communism is to be measured by the tortured reality it has done so much to create.

In this book I shall amplify on these statements and attempt to demonstrate their validity. it is somewhat difficult for me to admit that this study has led me to conclusions refuting much of the cold-war political science I had been teaching for over a dozen years. But a truth delayed is better than a truth betrayed; the reappraisal has been a sometimes painful but frequently liberating experience—of which this book is the visible product. The reader is invited to share in the experience.