Why do americans hate communism

The Ohio legislature passed a law known as the Criminal Syndicalism Act, which allowed the state to prosecute people who used or advocated criminal activity or violence in order to obtain political change or to affect industrial conditions.

Ultimately, these violations led to a decrease in support for government actions. This overwhelming fear of communism returned at the end of World War II. This was an undeclared war between the Soviet Union and the United States.

It is called the Cold War because neither the Soviet Union nor the United States officially declared war on each other, although both sides clearly struggled to prevent the other side from spreading its economic and political systems around the globe.

In reality, the Cold War resulted from a failure to communicate between the two sides and preconceived notions that each side had of the other one. We see the obvious dangers. We recognize that we must retain our present military and economic advantage over the Communist bloc, an advantage which deters a hot war and which counters the Communist threat in the cold war.

In the fields of rocket technology and space exploration, we have risen to the challenge and we will keep the lead that we have gained. There is no question that the American people generally will support whatever programs our leaders initiate in these fields.

What we must realize is that this struggle probably will not be decided in the military, economic, or scientific areas, important as these are. The battle in which we are engaged is primarily one of ideas. The test is one not so much of arms but of faith. If we are to win a contest of ideas we must know their ideas as well as our own. Our knowledge must not be superficial.

We cannot be content with simply an intuition that communism is wrong. It is not enough to rest our case alone on the assertions, true as they are, that communism denies God, enslaves men, and destroys justice.

We must recognize that the appeal of the Communist idea is not to the masses, as the Communists would have us believe, but more often to an intelligent minority in newly developing countries who are trying to decide which system offers the best and surest road to progress.

We must cut through the exterior to the very heart of the Communist idea. We must come to understand the weaknesses of communism as a system - why after more than 40 years on trial it continues to disappoint so many aspirations, why it has failed in its promise of equality in abundance, why it has produced a whole library of disillusionment and a steady stream of men, women, and children seeking to escape its blight.

But we must also come to understand its strength - why it has so securely entrenched itself in the U. It is to find the answers to these questions that in this statement I want to discuss communism as an idea - its economic philosophy, its philosophy of law and politics, its philosophy of history. It will not be brief because nothing less than a knowledge in depth of the Communist idea is necessary if we are to deal with it effectively. In discussing the idea I will not offer programs to meet it.

I intend in a later statement to discuss the tactics and vulnerabilities of the Communist conspiracy and how we can best fashion a strategy for victory. I anticipate that some might understandably ask the question - why such a lengthy discussion of communism when everybody is against it already? If the free world is to win this struggle, we must have men and women who not only are against communism but who know why they are against it and who know what they are going to do about it.

Communism is a false idea, and the answer to a false idea is truth, not ignorance. One of the fundamentals of the Communist philosophy is a belief that societies pass inevitably through certain stages. Each of these stages is supposed to generate the necessity for its successor. Feudalism contained within its loins the seed of capitalism; capitalism was, in other words, to supplant feudalism.

Capitalism, in turn, moves inevitably toward a climax in which it will be supplanted by its appointed successor, communism. All of these things are matters of necessity and there is nothing men can do to change the inflexible sequence which history imposes. It is a part of this philosophy that, as society moves along its predestined way, each stage of development is dominated by a particular class.

Feudalism was dominated by the aristocracy; capitalism by something called the bourgeoisie; communism by the proletariat. During any particular stage of society's development the whole of human life within that society is run and rigged for the benefit of the dominant class; no one else counts for anything and the most he can expect is the leftover scraps. In the end, of course, with the final triumph of communism, classes will disappear - what was formerly the proletariat will expand so that it is the only class, and, since there are no longer any outsiders that it can dominate, there will in effect be no classes at all.

Now this theory of successive stages of development makes it clear that, if we are to understand communism, we must understand the Communist view of capitalism, for, according to Communist theory, capitalism contains within itself the germs of communism. The Communist notion of capitalism is that it is a market economy, an economy of "free trade, free selling and buying," to quote the manifesto again.

It follows from this that, since communism inevitably supplants and destroys capitalism, it cannot itself be anything like market economy. The fundamental belief of the Communist economic philosophy therefore is a negative one; namely, a belief that, whatever the economic system of mature communism may turn out to be, it cannot be a market economy; it cannot - in the words of the Communist Manifesto - be an economy based on "free trade, free selling and buying.

It may be well at this point to digress for the purpose of recalling the curious fact that the literature of communism contains so many praises for the achievements of capitalism. The manifesto contains these words about the market economy of capitalism and its alleged overlords, the bourgeoisie:.

It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former migrations of nations and crusades.

Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

Marx and Engels could afford this praise for capitalism because they supposed it would everywhere be succeeded by communism, a stage of society whose glories would in turn dwarf all the achievements of capitalism. Communism would build on capitalism and bring a new economy that would make the capitalist world look like a poorhouse. Those who constituted the dominant class of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, would have performed their historic mission and would be dismissed from the scene - dismissed without thanks, of course, for after all they only accomplished what was foreordained by the forces of history, forces that were now to throw them into the discard like the husk of a sprouting seed.

One of the most startling gaps in the Communist theory is the lack of any clear notion of how a Communist economy would be organized. In the writings of the great founders of communism there is virtually nothing on this subject. This gap was not an oversight, but was in fact a necessary consequence of the general theory of communism. That theory taught, in effect, that as a society moves inevitably from one level of development to another, there is no way of knowing what the next stage will demand until in fact it has arrived.

Communism will supplant and destroy the market economy of capitalism. What will its own economy be like? That we cannot know until we are there and have a chance to see what the world looks like without any institution resembling an economic market. The manifesto, in fact, expresses a deep contempt for "utopian socialists" who propose "an organization of society specially contrived" by them, instead of waiting out the verdict of history and depending on the "spontaneous class organization of the proletariat.

Operating then, in this vacuum of guidance left behind by their prophets, how did the founders of the Soviet Union proceed to organize their new economy? The answer is that they applied as faithfully as they could the teachings of their masters. Since those teachings were essentially negative, their actions had to have the same quality. They started by attempting to root out from the Russian scene every vestige of the market principle, even discouraging the use of money, which they hoped soon to abolish altogether.

The production and distribution of goods were put under central direction, the theory being that the flow of goods would be directed by social need without reference to principles of profit and loss. This experiment began in and came to an abrupt end in March of It was a catastrophic failure. It brought with it administrative chaos and an almost inconceivable disorder in economic affairs, culminating in appalling shortages of the most elementary necessities.

Competent scholars estimate its cost in Russian lives at 5 million. The official Russian version of this experiment does not deny that it was an enormous failure. It attributes that failure to inexperience and to a mythical continuation of military operations, which had in fact almost wholly ceased. Meanwhile the Russian economy has been moving steadily toward the market principle.

The flow of labor is controlled by wages, so that the price of labor is itself largely set by market forces. The spread from top to bottom of industrial wages is in many cases wider than it is in this country. Managerial efficiency is promoted by substantial economic incentives in the form of bonuses and even more substantial perquisites of various kinds.

Enterprises are run on a profit and loss basis. Indeed, there are all the paraphernalia of an advanced commercial society, with lawyers, accountants, balance sheets, taxes of many kinds, direct and indirect, and finally even the pressures of a creeping inflation.

The allocation of resources in Russia probably now comes about as close to being controlled by the market principle as is possible where the government owns all the instruments of production. Russian economists speak learnedly of following the "Method of Balances. This impressive phrase stands for a very simple idea. It means that in directing production and establishing prices an effort is made to come out even, so that goods for which there is an insufficient demand will not pile up, while shortages will not develop in other fields where demand exceeds supply.

The "Method of Balances" turns out to be something a lot of us learned about in school as the law of supply and demand. All of this is not to say that the Russian economy has fully realized the market principle. There are two obstacles that block such a development. The first lies in the fact that there is a painful tension between what has to be done to run the economy efficiently and what ought to be happening according to orthodox theory.

The result is that the Russian economist has to be able to speak out of both sides of his mouth at the same time. He has to be prepared at all times for sudden shifts of the party line.

If today he is condemned as an "unprincipled revisionist" who apes capitalist methods, tomorrow he may be jerked from the scene for having fallen into a "sterile orthodoxy", not realizing that Marxism is a developing and creative science. The other obstacle to the realization of a free market lies in the simple fact that the government owns the whole of industry.

This means, for one thing, that the industrial units are huge, so that all of steel, or all of cosmetics, for example, is under a single direction. This naturally creates the economic condition known as oligopoly and the imperfectly functioning market which attends that condition.

Furthermore, a realization of the market principle would require the managers of the various units of industry to act as if they were doing something they are not, that is, as if they were directing independent enterprises. Understandably there is a considerable reluctance to assume this fictitious role, since the manager's reward for an inconvenient independence may well be a trip to Siberia where he is likely nowadays, they say, to be made chief bookkeeper in a tiny power plant miles from the nearest town.

Meanwhile, a constant theme of complaint by Moscow against the managers is that they are too "cousinly" with one another and that they are too addicted to "back scratching. One of the most familiar refrains of Communist propaganda is that "capitalism is dying of its internal contradictions.

It constantly has to preach one way and act another. These inner tensions and perplexities help to explain the startling "shifts in the party line" that characterize all of the Communist countries. It is true that these shifts sometimes reflect the outcome of a subterranean personal power struggle within the party.

Citizens have little or no rights over their lives. The government dictates how individuals should lead their lives, go about their businesses, and handle their resources. It, in turn, corrupts the attitudes of individuals to work, and many have to participate in labors they do not like. In a communist system of government, the government determines the operations and production of goods and services. There is no issue of demand and supply to regulate the production of goods.

As a result, it often leads to overproduction and scarcity of goods in the market. The government determines the level of income the citizens get, regardless of how much input they put into their businesses. The interest of the government is in seeing that you meet your basic needs. Thus, it limits any form of extra income.

Communism limits the growth of entrepreneurs and constrains them to a particular level as the government deems fit. In a communist setting, the government finds it hard to accommodate foreigners because they come in with their ideologies and beliefs.

As a result, it leads to poor relations between nations, which, in turn, scare investors from investing their wealth in a communist system of government. America relies on values that seek to protect individual rights and liberty, while communism seems to be against this ideology. Thus, we answered the question of why does America hate communism. It is because it goes against the beliefs of America. It also seeks to impose a dictatorial type of government on the citizens.

Republicans and Democrats are strictly against communism as America runs primarily on a capitalistic economy. Was George W. Bush A Good President? Does The Popular Vote Matter? Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Why Does America Hate Communism? The question is: why does America hate communism? What is communism? In socialism, on the other hand, all individuals in the society share equally in all economic resources as given by the government The Rise Of Anti-Communism Anti-communism is an ideology which centers on the belief that communism is destructive.

This period saw the renewal of FBI spying, the adoption of loyalty oaths for teachers and a political litmus test for federal employees, and passage of the first peacetime sedition law since But as the war ended and the alliance frayed, a series of events fanned the banked embers of anti-Communism into flames. In the spring of , acting on orders from Moscow, US Communists reversed their policy of reconciliation with the West and adopted a militantly anti-capitalist stance.

Meanwhile, authorities in the United States and Canada uncovered evidence of Soviet espionage, evidence that suggested Americans had been involved in passing classified secrets.

Finally, Republicans and some conservative Democrats saw in anti-Communism a powerful campaign issue and a weapon that could be used to curb union and civil rights activism and New Deal policies. To fend off such attacks from the right—and to build domestic support for his Cold War foreign policy—President Truman in March issued an executive order creating a Federal Loyalty-Security Program.

In practice, people could lose their jobs for being on the wrong mailing list, owning suspect books or phonograph records, or associating with relatives or friends who were politically suspect. Those accused almost never learned the source of the allegations against them, and the criteria for dismissal were expanded in and again in Tens of thousands of federal employees—including disproportionate numbers of civil rights activists and gays—were fully investigated under the loyalty-security program, and some were dismissed between and By legitimizing the use of political litmus tests for employment, the federal loyalty-security program paved the way for the use of similar political tests by state and local governments and private employers.

Between the late s and the early s, school systems, universities, movie studios, social welfare agencies, ports, companies with defense contracts, and many other employers used background checks, loyalty oaths, and other means to weed out employees deemed politically undesirable.

In October of that year, the committee was catapulted back into the headlines after years in obscurity when it launched an investigation of communist influences in the film industry. HUAC summoned a dazzling array of actors, screenwriters, and directors to testify at public hearings, asking them about their own involvement with the party and pressing them to name others with Communist ties.

These blacklists persisted into the early s. Meanwhile, HUAC went on the road, holding hearings in cities across the US over the course of the next decade and investigating teachers, musicians, union organizers, and other groups.