Be careful what kind of anti-Communist you are
Conservative histrionics about 'Communism' are part of a broader anti-democratic turn
The contemporary reactionary right has Communism on the brain. Like Senator Joseph McCarthy before them they see the spectre of Marxism lurking in every school, college, university, workplace, newspaper or government agency.
Yet whereas Senator McCarthy pursued his paranoid anti-communist campaign during the height of the Cold War, today’s reactionaries solemnly warn disquieted audiences against the threat of Communism in a world where no significant Communist movement exists.
Indeed, Communism today is less a spectre than a phantasm. The Soviet Union is gone, Cuba and North Korea are poor and despondent places, and the membership of every Communist and Trotskyist party in the West combined is scarcely enough to fill a sports stadium. Communism today is characterised less by gunpowder and barricades and more by trestle tables, jargon-riddled newspapers that nobody reads and a dwindling band of grizzled and geriatric true believers. The only Communist Party in the world with any real clout is in China, where Communist leaders pay lip service to Marxism while facilitating the rise of a nouveau riche billionaire class.
But you don’t get that impression listening to prominent conservatives. The former president and likely Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump describes president Joe Biden as “controlled” by “Marxists, & Communists”; the conservative author Jordan Peterson regularly uses rhetoric about “post-modern neo-Marxists” and “cultural Marxists”; and in his latest book, Race Marxism, the right-wing critic James Lindsay claims that the purpose of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is to enact a “total Racial Bolshevik Revolution” and a “Dictatorship of the Antiracists” comparable to Mao’s China. The tech billionaire Elon Musk even blames “neo-Marxists” and “full-on Communism” for the estrangement of his daughter*.
Platforms such as YouTube and Musk’s own Twitter/X incentivise such histrionics, financially rewarding those who are able to cut through the din of the crowd with hyperbole. Yet in common with Senator McCarthy’s red scare, the contemporary panic on the right about reds under the bed isn’t about Communism per se, but is instead aimed at delegitimising social democracy by associating it with totalitarianism.
Peterson, whom David Brooks of The New York Times in 2018 called “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world”, took to Twitter/X in June 2023 to warn his followers about the outcome of the forthcoming 2024 British general election. “Don’t. Venezuela. The UK [sic],” Peterson tweeted, alongside an opinion poll showing the Labour Party leading the Conservatives by 18 percentage points. In February he tweeted again on a similar theme. “Venezuela awaits”, Peterson commented about Britain under a Labour government.
It’s possible that Peterson is simply ignorant of British politics. (He’s certainly ignorant on some of the other subjects he grandly pronounces on, including Marxism - despite having decked out large sections of his house in Soviet era posters). But surely nobody is that ignorant. Indeed, the British Labour Party recently purged much of the far-left, pro-Venezuela tendency from its ranks; it also suspended left-wing former leader Jeremy Corbyn. The party’s leader, Keir Starmer, is advocating a form of tepid Social Democracy that has far more in common with Tony Blair than Hugo Chavez.
It’s been argued that Peterson is using rhetoric like this because he’s suffering from some kind of derangement or break down following an addiction to benzodiazepines. But Peterson’s paranoid ramblings are unlikely an aberration and more likely his contribution to an advancing anti-democratic turn by the populist right. Indeed, Peterson is signalling to conservatives - who believe they are losing the culture war by democratic means - that he too is willing to throw dirt at the moderate left - and hopefully in the process discredit it as ‘Marxist’ and ‘revolutionary’. Contrast Peterson’s histrionic remarks about Britain turning into Venezuela with his tepid and vacillating criticism of Trump, a genuinely despotic and authoritarian figure who made bogus claims of election fraud and whose supporters launched a botched coup. This is not mental illness; this is politics.
The anti-democratic turn also works to explain why the conservative critic James Lindsay, who two years ago was whining incessantly about cancel culture, is today its loudest proponent. Antiracist activists, he writes in his latest book Race Marxism, “must be fired, forced to resign, voted out of office, sued, defunded, and limited in their ability to abuse power… by both law and institutional policy”.
The new McCarthyism will inevitably feature heavily in Trump’s campaign for the White House next year. (If Trump wins it will also presumably act as a rationale for further attempts to subvert American democracy). This week, while Joe Biden was visiting striking car workers in Michigan, Trump took to his Truth Social platform to rant about the radical left. “Actually, Crooked Joe sold them down the river with his ridiculous all Electric Car Hoax,” wrote Trump. “This wasn’t Biden’s idea, he can’t put two sentences together. It was the idea of the Radical Left Fascists, Marxists, & Communists who control him and who, in so doing, are DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY!”.
If Communism represents the worst of all worlds - if it is really “destroying” the nation as Trump puts it - then by definition anything that can be done to stamp it out and preserve private property represents a tolerable price. From there it’s hardly a great leap forward (no pun intended) to embracing authoritarianism.
Right-wing social media channels are presently awash with talk of Communism. Konstantin Kisin, co-host of the popular Triggernometry podcast (which I have appeared on twice), solemnly concludes in a recent broadcast that Communism is “even worse than Fascism” - even in its Hitlerian strain - because it abolishes private property. “Fascism was almost as evil as Communism to be sure,” [says Kisin] “but it did not attempt to achieve its aims by stealing and redistributing private property, stealing your business or installing a new tyrannical hierarchy under the pretence or eradicating it.”
This seems rather thin gruel. There were certainly no property rights under the Nazis if you were Jewish (Kisin himself is Jewish). And while the goal of the Nazi regime may not have been the eradication of hierarchy, this is surely negated by the fact that it was willing to eradicate entire categories of people in the name of preserving it. It wasn’t for nothing that the German business class threw its lot in with Hitler - and the Führer duly repaid them in 1933 by smashing the trade unions.
Kisin’s argument draws heavily on the Black Book of Communism, an 800-page indictment of the crimes of Leninist governments published in Paris in 1997 and edited by Stephane Courtois, a respected French historian. “The fact is that Communist regimes committed crimes affecting about 100 million people, against some 25 million for Nazism,” writes Courtois.
Kisin was born in the Soviet Union and therefore his hostility to Communism is understandable. Since arriving in Britain aged 11 he will invariably have encountered the doctrine-dazzled left. Significant numbers of the progressive intelligentsia in Britain continue to reduce the real world to an intellectual fantasy - and show a resulting willingness to prostitute themselves in front of Communist dictatorships and reactionary third world movements. (‘We’re all Hizbullah now’, proclaimed the banners at a Stop the War Coalition march in 2006).
I remember my old politics professor in Nottingham having a rather tatty flag of the Soviet Union draped across the wall of his office. Academics are notoriously susceptible to the kind of mental warp that resulted in Sovietophilia, erecting dense walls of theory to insulate themselves against knowledge of Communist crimes. It’s unlikely that a flag of the Third Reich - or fascist Italy or Francoist Spain for that matter - would have been treated with the same leniency by campus authorities.
Peterson is correct when he says that there should be “no celebrating Lenin”. Soviet communism is not a story of a benevolent red Tsar betrayed by evil heirs. It was Lenin - long before Stalin consolidated his rule - who initiated the tendency to override economic difficulties with violence and compulsion. Molotov once described Lenin as “sterner” than Stalin while “rebuking Stalin for softness and liberalism”. By March 1918, less than six months after taking power, Lenin’s Bolsheviks had killed more of their political opponents than Tsarist Russia had over the entire preceding century.
Unfortunately the historical leniency afforded to Communist regimes remains stubbornly resistant to reality. At the Labour Party conference in Liverpool in a couple of weeks time a ‘Cuba Solidarity’ stall will take its place next to the kiosks set up by trade unions and campaign groups (independent trade unions are banned in Cuba). The books and pamphlets on display will contain not a single critical word about the Communist dictatorship that has ruled Cuba for the past 64 years, a gerontocracy that drives internal critics into exile or locks them up in its grim dungeons: Cuba holds over a thousand political prisoners, many of whom are routinely subjected to torture. The Cuba Solidarity Campaign will present this island prison to Labour Party delegates as a plucky Socialist paradise - to precisely zero consequences.
Before letting an understandable revulsion to this double standard curdle into something else, it’s worth asking - as Tony Judt did in his review of the Black Book for The New York Times - whether it’s really ‘Communism’ that links and explains the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot et al. As Judt puts it, “The Cambodia massacres have more in common with the horrors of Rwanda and Bosnia than with Stalin’s secretive, paranoid, targeted purges.”
War is inevitably downstream from Fascist rule: the Nazis saw war as a route to national rejuvenation. Consequently, the true number of victims of Fascist murder are frequently undercounted when comparisons are made to the victims of Communism. Nazism was not only morally responsible for the six million Jewish victims who perished in the gas chambers. In starting the Second World War Hitlerism is arguably responsible for the 60 million who died in the resulting conflict; or it is at least as responsible for those deaths as Communism is for the deaths produced by its man-made famines. But the totting up of the respective bodycounts gets rather sordid and academic at this point. What’s clear is that Communism and Fascism are both capable of plunging humanity into the abyss.
Robert Conquest, esteemed historian of the Soviet terror, once said that he “feels” that the Nazi Holocaust was “worse” than the crimes of Stalinism. By this he meant that there was a moral difference - albeit slight - between regimes that kill human beings in the pursuit of an unattainable objective and regimes for which killing is an end in itself.
It follows on from this distinction that there can be no honourable dissident Fascist tradition comparable to that which exists on the Left. It was after all the revolutionary Marxist Victor Serge who first used the word ‘totalitarianism’ to describe the Soviet Union. Who is the Fascist equivalent of Victor Serge, Orwell, CLR James or Boris Souvarine? Or Bertrand Russell for that matter?
I wouldn’t expect Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk or James Lindsay to know who Victor Serge was. Their ignorance of the dissident left tradition - of which Orwell, whose work they are keen to bowdlerise, was its closest British analogue: a democratic Socialist who fought for a Trotskyist group in Spain and took a Fascist bullet in the neck for his troubles - is to be expected. But it is precisely by flattening out distinctions between orthodox Communism and the anti-Stalinist left that Peterson and Co are able seek to make crass and erroneous equivalences between Fascism and Socialism.
I was recently in South America where anti-Communism has to grapple with its own grisly past. Operation Condor, a clandestine United States foreign policy objective aimed at preventing Latin American countries from going red, is estimated to have caused the deaths of more than 60,000 people. Encompassing Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay and Brazil, Operation Condor’s aim was the eradication of ‘Communists’ and ‘terrorists’. In Argentina alone human rights groups estimate that nearly 30,000 people were ‘disappeared’ by the American-backed junta of Jorge Videla in collaboration with the Catholic Church.
“The military first threw our children into the river alive, their feet trapped inside a bucket of cement,” said Hebe de Bonafini, director of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group representing families of the victims of the dictatorship. “But the corpses began to wash ashore, so they decided to start dumping them in the open ocean.”
And so began the death flights: thousands of Argentinians would perish this way, sedated and shoved - unconscious but alive - out of planes flying over the Atlantic Ocean. Babies were stolen from parents that had been murdered or detained by the military regime. Victims of the regime reported seeing swastikas and pictures of Hitler on the walls of their torture chambers.
US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger granted $50,000,000 in security assistance to the junta. “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly,” Kissinger told Argentina’s foreign minister. To this day one has to put up with the nauseating sight of Kissinger being feted by the North American elite and treated like a celebrity wherever he goes.
The lofty warnings about authoritarianism emanating from the new McCarthyists might be easier to stomach had they ever shown a drop of pity for the global victims of hysterical anti-Communism. Always be mindful of what kind of anti-Communist you actually want to be, and which historical tradition you wish to be associated with.
Trotskyist devil
A few years ago after reading Court of the Red Tsar and Robert Conquest ‘The Great Terror’ I went through a phase reading and listening to everything I could on Stalin and The Terror, this included looking for lectures on Youtube, which became incredibly frustrating that while looking for serious discussions/lectures about this topic my YouTube algorithm decided that my ‘You might like’ section and overall feed just filled with Jordan Petersen nonsense, even when I blocked them or deleted them from my feed it still showed more and more of his ludicrous rants, was the first time I started to believe that both YouTube radicalises ppl by pushing them to the fringe and that they do it deliberately