Foreign Policy

What happened to communism?

"For seventy years the specter of Communism haunted the West: it terrified those proverbial little old ladies in tennis shoes who thought the Russians were about to invade Duluth and conquer their virtue, it created entire careers for demagogic American politicians and neoconservative policy wonks who would have been otherwise unemployable – and it murdered millions in the process.
Then, all of a sudden, *poof* – it was gone!
What’s interesting is that no one predicted it – no one in a position to influence policy, that is. The CIA hadn’t the slightest hint that the mighty Soviet colossus was on its last legs. Right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, US officials were still solemnly invoking the Soviet “threat” as a justification for yet more military spending, and neoconservative polemicists were insisting Gorbachev’s overtures to the West were a ploy to lure us to sleep."

Communism collapsed under the weight of government.

"To my knowledge, only two writers predicted the Kremlin’s fall: in the first years of the Soviet “experiment,” Austrian free market economist Ludwig von Mises accurately foretold the failure of the socialist system on account of its inability to transmit price signals. Socialism, he maintained, could not last. On a less theoretical plane, and in the latter days of Soviet power, Russian dissident Andrei Amalrik wondered if the Soviet Union could last until 1984. His answer, in a 1969 book of that title, was that the Communist system was near the point of complete collapse."

And we're next.

"The death of Communism shows us how transitory our fears, both real and imagined, really are: a huge worldwide “conspiracy” with tentacles on every continent, all leading back to that World Capital of Evil, where the mighty lords of the Kremlin were perpetually plotting to bury us. It made for a dramatic narrative – and it was based on a complete falsehood. The falsehood being that what Louis Bromfield called the “worldwide psychopathic cult known as Communism” was anything other than a “ramshackle empire,” as he called it, a trumped up “threat” that hardly justified the US going to a war footing."

I doubt the 100 million killed by communists would have called it a trumped up threat.

"What happened to Communism is that a totalitarian ideology that should have been incinerated in the blast furnace of World War II was succored by the West until it could be credibly configured as an emerging “threat.” This was followed by a long “cold war” in the course of which we did more to aid the spread of Communist influence than we ever did to minimize it. It took a few decades before the nationalistic overlay that Stalinism contributed to Marxist “theory” wore off, and the ideological bankruptcy of what remained became all too apparent. Like a giant tree hollowed out to its very core by termites, the Soviet Union simply disintegrated."

No doubt US support for dictators did help the march and murder of communism.

"The other examples of countries where Communism in state power persists, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea, are all case studies of how the anti-communist crusade of the cold war era actually undermined the anti-communist cause. All three were the sites of US military action in wars of “liberation” which were supposed to “roll back” Communism: in all three cases, however, the result was the exact opposite.
The great irony is that, decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Communism still persists in those countries where we fought longest and hardest to eradicate it. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m almost sure of it…."

Nice finish.