-----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood
>Dace wrote:
>
>>Do you feel the anti-Communists of the 50s were engaged in a cynical
>>manipulation of public opinion? Were they selling
>>the American people on something they knew to be fraudulent, or did they
>>feel genuinely threatened, as if by an invasion of alien space pods?
>
>The ruling class was certainly threatened. It wasn't a paranoid
>fantasy, though there were plenty of fantastic paranoid moments
>involved.
>
>Doug
>
>
Here's William Blum's take on Cold War anti-communism, from his introduction
to Killing Hope:
"In 1918, the barons of American capital needed no reason for their war against communism other than the threat to their wealth and privilege... By the end of the Second World War, every American past the age of 40 had been subjected to some 25 years of anti-communist radiation, the average incubation period needed to produce a malignancy. Anti-communism had developed a life of its own, independent of its capitalist father. Increasingly, in the post-war period, middle-aged Washington policy makers and diplomats saw the world out there as one composed of "communists" and "anti-communists," whether of nations, movements or individuals. This comic-strip vision of the world, with American supermen fighting communist evil everywhere, had graduated from a cynical propaganda exercise to a moral imperative of US foreign policy."
This "moral imperative" is really a moral inversion. Here we have a fine illustration of Kant's "radical evil," which involves not just the commission of evil acts but an inversion of moral values to justify these acts. During the Cold War, our leaders claimed they were not overturning democracies all over the world, but rather were preventing communists from subverting them. This is something they believed absolutely. They exhibited no flexibility in this delusion, and their opinions never altered over time, right on through the 80s. Whether he meant it literally or not, Blum's medical terminology is right on target. This is clear-cut pathological thinking. The combination of delusion, inflexibility and persistence over time is what makes it pathological.
Aside from inversion of morality, Cold War anti-communism also displayed reversal of reality, another hallmark of pathological cognition. Here's how Yoshie expressed it:
>The ruling class don't even credit you with consciously adopting an
>anathematized discourse like Marxism; nor do they allow you to argue that
>you just _happen_ to have ended up with the same political position as
>Communists. It is neither rational decision nor sheer chance. They say
>that your "unconscious" has been infiltrated by the Enemy. Invasion of the
>Body Snatchers (1956)!
>
>***** Dr. Kaufman: A strange neurosis, evidently contagious, an epidemic
>mass hysteria. In two weeks, it spread all over town.
>
>Miles: What causes it?
>
>Dr. Kaufman: Worry about what's going on in the world probably.
>
>Miles (jokingly hoping they won't catch it, with the prophetic statement):
>I'd hate to wake up some morning and find out that you weren't you.
>
>That's Communism (or any other subversive ideology) seen from the point of
>view of the ruling class, and Americans were asked to adopt this point of
>view: to dissent is to be neurotic, losing your individuality to become the
>slave of a totalitarian ideology, all the while thinking that you are still
>"free."
The ruling class was undergoing exactly the same process that they believed was occuring to leftists. They were losing their capacity for independent thought, sacrificing their individuality to a mass-based mental disorder, all the while believing they were "free" and moreover that they were the defenders of "freedom" the world over. Unable to face the truth yet unconsciously aware of it, they concluded that this very process was happening to their enemies. Chomsky sums up the tendency towards reality reversal in Fateful Triangle:
"When you have absolutely no case at all, accuse your enemies of the crimes you carry out or support; to put it a shade more crudely, if you are caught with your hand in someone's pocket, cry "Thief!, Thief!" This may at least shift the terms of the debate. Thus when the U.S. attacks the peasant society of South Vietnam, debate rages over the profound question of whether it is wise and proper to *defend* South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression..."
Granted, Chomsky views this is cynical PR. But as Blum suggests, this kind of thing can quite easily take on "a life of its own" and become a widespread delusion. Cold War anti-communism was a paranoid delusion. It was a group-based delusion insofar as the vast majority of people who believed it were not paranoid in their day-to-day lives.
One of the chief characteristics of Paranoid Personality Disorder is suspcion towards friends. McCarthy wasn't just accusing radicals, he was accusing everyone. This was his downfall. His personal paranoia helped fuel a collective mania, but eventually he was just too over the top. Nonetheless, the collective disorder persisted until the fall of the Soviet Union. My dad, who ground into me a deep hatred and suspicion of communism when I was a kid, didn't relent until years after Yeltsin dissolved the USSR.
--Ted