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ANTI-COMMUNISM
387
thought capable of resisting revolutionary changes-lest the Communist
movement use the changes to seize power. In the West, anti-Com–
munism as a political system has entailed a constriction and rationaliza–
tion of politics in the pluralistic and democratic societies-with the
result that pluralism has been diminished and democracy has taken on
an increasingly formal content. In the less liberal sectors of the West,
and above all in the non-Western areas subject to Western political
domination or influence, the anti-Communist system attempted to con–
solidate all those forces which promised to maximize a repressive anti–
Communism. However, the
lacunae,
flaws, and contradictions of the
anti-Communist system appear to be undermining it at a rate which
cannot be overcome by the increasingly slipshod efforts to repair it. A
flexible anti-Communism, theoretically attractive, seems practically im–
possible. The disintegration of the anti-Communist ideology, confronted
with a situation which escapes definition (let alone control), must
continue.
Perhaps it
is
inaccurate to suggest that the situation escapes defini–
tion, more precise to assert that the available definitions won't fit. The
anti-Communist ideology provided the ideal justification for a system
whose fundaments were exceedingly material: the frenetic prosperity
of the West, the American nuclear panoply and Western arms general–
ly, the singular combination of the old and new elites exploiting those
parts of the world under Western political tutelage. The very gross–
ness of anti-Communism as a political system seems to have required
a surpassing spiritualization of its image of the enemy: Communism has
been depicted in terms almost exclusively ideological or psychological.
Communism as the systematic embodiment of political non-value,
Communists as either cynical manipulators of ideological catch-phrases
or blinded servitors of some absurd conception of historical process
and of an inhuman but highly simplified and self-confirming morality,
the Communist movements as a pseudo-fraternity and Communist
society as a pseudo-community-these are some of the emphases of the
ideology of anti-Communism. The propositions that Communism de–
pends upon the self-deception of the Communists and on their explicit
deception of others have been fused. What is now at issue is not the
validity of these judgments but the manner in which they have been
promulgated. These ideological attributes of Communism, and the
motives held attached to them, have been depicted as the essential
elements in the structure of Communism-sometimes as not only es–
sential, but as ahistoric and demonic tendencies manifested in history.
Constraint, compulsion, force and terror have been curiously under-
