How Do You Say Red?

The Roots of Communist Discourse and Critique in America from the Red Scare to Present Day

As the second millennia rang its death knell, it seemed that the guns had halted. Across the lands
dominated by the Iron Curtain, the implementation of perestroika opened the floodgates of consumer
potential to the masses under Soviet rule. Before the change of the calendar to the year 2000, the very
existence of the Soviet Union, the Communist behemoth which contributed to a global ideological
standstill for more than sixty years, was quickly fading from public, political, and academic scrutiny. For
many, it was the final example to lay upon Karl Marx’s grave in London, inciting the fervor surrounding
indisputable proof of the absolute failure of socialism. The pitiful holdovers in Cuba and the hybrid of
China were of little to no consequence. The end of history had not come as Marx had foreseen, and the
proletariat’s numbers only grew in size and diversity as the world began its shift towards the west in
droves. Just as the dreams of fascist Italy had been easily perverted and transformed into the immoral
insanity that struck both Germany and Japan in the build-up and execution of World War II, the ideas of
Marx and the ideology of socialism and Communism became more than political anathema, a mere
stepping stone or obstacle standing in the way of the free global market. Instead, they became something
even less respected, to be tossed and spat by all people in instances unrelated to their original purpose and
meaning; they became a joke.

The idea of delegitimizing a political alternative or threat is nothing new, it is a simple fact of the political
sphere and those who engage in the practice of politics. However, addressing the manner in which we are
able to address political alternatives is worth delving further into, and it is the purpose of this inquiry to
take an indepth look at the ways in which the use of vernacular in the American political climate has
influenced the perception of the two major challenges to the mythology of America in the last century:
communism and fascism. Further, a marked difference exists between both the ways in which those
ideologies are addressed in the vernacular (despite similar core needs in the manner in which they are
addressed) and the time in which the vernacular we will examine was being used.

I. Scope of Meaning

It is no mistake that the vernacular of contemporary American society has developed skewed ideological
identities for that which it has vanquished in years past, it fits with the general theory of history which
states that “the victor writes the history books”. The tension that dominated the Cold War standoff
between the United States and the Soviet Union created an ideological animosity of an unparalleled scale.
The nuclear near-misses that were peppered throughout the two superpowers’ tumultuous histories only
served to exacerbate an already decaying peace. In America, this animosity was introduced into the world
of the everyday through the use of degrading vernacular that first seemed to exist even outside the conflict
itself but eventually served to widen the conflict as a whole, taking a political ideology and making it a
threat to every single aspect of American life. The proliferation of anti-Communist sentiment infiltrated
nearly every corner of popular culture. During the strongest days of the “Red Scare”, concluding with the
infamous confrontation between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy, an endless stream of
“informative” newsreels and films were created to instruct the public on how to deal with and confront the
Communist danger on American soil. The government produced films such as the 1956 Government
Documentary The Communist Blueprint for Conquest incited fear through “reenactments” of tactics
employed by Communists seeking to subvert the government and the American way of life. In 1951, I Was
A Communist For The FBI showed the story of a woman who posed as a Communist for the CIA. The film
went on to link union and civil rights movements directly to the “growing Communist menace”. In the
more fantastic films of science fiction, the implications of Communist activities or total nuclear war were
explored. Films such as The Day The Earth Stood Still were cautionary not only to America, but to the
U.S.S.R. in hopes of preventing a nuclear incident, yet the film maintained a sympathetic slant to the
activities of the Americans, as the alien spacecraft landed in America and the spaceman inside would form
a bond with a young, American boy. The legitimizing practices of these films, being shown not only in
theatres but also in schools alongside other films detailing lessons in history, anatomy and other subjects,
allowed the phrases that were created as insults to that political system, “commie”, “Red” or “pinko”,
among others, to also exist outside of the realm of being indecent and enter into the rhetoric of what it
was to be “American”. Combining the legitimacy of combatting Communism with the desire to ridicule it
became the status quo for the American public and became symbolic of the American attempt to unite
ideology and identity, that is being “American” with both “republican democracy” and “capitalist” in direct
opposition to the enforced identity of the Soviet behemoth: namely that every citizen, every Russian, of
the Soviet Union was a Communist in both ideology and economics without waver. The methodology of
this distinction is, in hindsight, glaringly obvious: the dehumanization of the Soviet Union and its citizens
was paramount to maintaining social and military morale concerning the tenuous standoff between the
two superpowers. It should come as no surprise that the maintenance of fear at the expense of the human
identities of Russian citizens was abused throughout the tenure of the Cold War, the most infamous case
being that of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the “Red Scare”.

The anatomy of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s assault on the “communist threat” to America was made of a
basic principle: fear is its own justification. The instillment of fear which began after the final tumultuous
days of combat in Berlin was cemented into both the American contemporary consciousness of that
period and into the greater mythology of “Americanism” and “Americana” by the junior senator from
Wisconsin. The activities of the senator resulted in a fear of alternative political ideologies that, along with
the development of the Cold War, solidified America’s position as being volatile to any alternative political
ideology to the point where President Truman issued an executive order of loyalty in 1947 (Zinn 424).
Truman’s order, a reaction to the fears expounded on by McCarthy, were not only critical of organization
that were directly affiliated with communist organizations, but any political system deemed totalitarian or
in opposition to American ideals. “Sympathetic association” was made a crime of treasonous behavior
alongside active membership, instilling a chilling effect to any persons interested in the merits (and flaws)
of political alternatives (Zinn 424). For Senator McCarthy, the very nature of “communism”, no matter its
representation, was completely devoid of any shred of “Americanism”, continuing a black and white
dichotomy that was popular in America after Pearl Harbor until the end of the second World War. The
actions of President Roosevelt in denying the public (and the military personnel stationed at Pearl
Harbor) the knowledge of a Japanese attack on the naval base allowed the American entry into the war on
the side of the Allies virtually unchallenged by popular opinion (Zinn 402). The assertion that a black and
white dichotomy proved America was the polar opposite of Communist Russia is itself historically faulty,
as tenets of socialism were riddles throughout the New Deal, long before the Americans and the Russians
would first fight alongside each other before entrenching themselves in a bitter, decades-long
confrontation. Yet the very nature of the New Deal was itself never criticized as a socialist endeavor by the
senator, but rather deferred by its ability to allow the nature of “being American” to be maintained. The
unilateral threat posed by both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia shared a kinship in their ability to
exist on the opposite ends of the political spectrum (the Nazis being on the right, and the Communists on
the left) yet both systems were diametrically opposed, through the rhetoric of the senator and the
prevalence of the vernacular surrounding both ideologies, to all that was deemed “American” in the social
consciousness and the practice of historicity. This glaring contradiction is fundamental to the
understanding what the nature of fear is capable of doing in terms of affecting how a social group (or
groups) perceives alternative political ideologies without considering the relations, through shared means
of maintaining economic health and growth (the New Deal) or ensuring benefits for aged members of
society (Social Security) that moved beyond individual ideologies), that each ideology shares with others.

II. Overture: The Vernacular Sign in reference to political ideology

McCarthyism represents an aversion to an ideological concept that is dealt with aggressively in open
displays of power. In short, it is assaulted by all possible means without any attempts at obfuscation. The
fear exploited by the Senator was largely a verbal affair, using exaggerated figures and vicious oratory to
feed on the fears that had already become commonplace in the world of political discourse at both the
governmental and social level through the developing activities within the government to limit
involvement in and with alternative political groups. In a speech made in 1950, McCarthy stated: “We
know that the major aim of communism, as stated by its atheistic leaders more than 30 years ago, is to
create a Red China, thence a Red Asia, wash it with a Red Pacific—and then enslave America.” In many of
McCarthy’s public addresses, he would wield sheets of paper that he claimed to have on it names of known
Communists and subversives working within the State Department, yet the number of Communists on the
lists could, and often would, change daily (Zinn 422). The populace, feeding off the legitimization of a real,
viable and dangerous Communist threat, reacted through the delegitimization of Communism through
the use of insults. The combination of legitimization of the threat an deligitmization of the source had
come to be representative of how the public dealt with their larger fears about the outcome of the Cold
War. To address the growing fear through delegitimizing the threat was a means of identifying through
simplifying. It was an appeal to that which made the distinction between “Russian” and “American”
possible. That which represented “American-ness” was embodied by the representative, an elected figure
who not only spoke for people but spoke out to the people in a warning. The legitmization of the
Communist threat was made possible in part of the adherence of the public to the ideals of a liberal,
republican democracy. Their belief in the electoral system allowed the public to trust the senator’s
accusations even without proper investigation due to the nature of the American political process (Derrida
12). This presence of a definition in terms of what is “American” is, itself, an embodiment of what is
wished to be; that is that the social construct of America wishes its identity to be perfectly represented by
that which they have chosen to represent them. In this manner, the offices of elected officials are uniquely
qualified, in the eyes of the public’s general identity, to comment and make judgments on the fears
maintained and elevated by the use of wide-ranged vernacular.

We can then look at Senator McCarthy in terms of his representation, the signs that are used to present
him in both the era of the Red Scare and in contemporary terms today, as the evolution of the semiology
surrounding the Senator is as vital to the connection between his representation and the impact on
American social consciousness as the two eras which have passed judgment on his character. It is a
distinction as arbitrary as those whom the senator accused of betraying America with their alleged
communist beliefs. The rhetoric of the senator was, in and of itself, a fabrication based on unreliable
intelligence and the biases stemming from his own personal distaste for members of the entertainment
and academic communities. However, to fully examine the rhetoric, the larger impact of the senator’s
implications must take center stage. It was the approval, whether spoken or quiet, that allowed the
senator’s campaign of fear to reach such a fevered pitch. The exaggerations which characterized
McCarthy’s accusations became synonymous with the public’s understanding of McCarthy’s personality
and values.

Deriving political manipulation from the general vernacular deposits that power into infinitesimal pockets
of influence (Foucault XX). Each and every individual who has been interpellated into the understanding
that the “us vs. them” dichotomy is a valid explanation for each worldview and understanding of their
relation to that view, this practice makes addressing a possible source of this aggression impossible to
identify and combat, which first privileges a notion of truth over the practices consistent with
McCarthyism. The repetition of vernacular associations, namely the correspondence between “commie”
and its exaggerated meaning, expands the scope of discussion concerning any number of measures
encompassed by an ideology. The identity of an ideology must then be addressed as existing only in that it
can be represented by signs, that is both the script and the spoken, and we must take into account how we
privilege both forms in relation to each other and the environment in which they are posited (Saussure
24). The idea of privilege concerning these forms must first address the necessity of identity, that is being
identified. For example, the claims of being a “commie” are encompassed into the meaning of
Communism in terms of vernacular expression, both written and spoken, but are examined differently
because of the sign’s varying legitimacy depending on where and how it is used. In terms of representing
portions (or, ideally) all that is “Communist”, the vernacular sign of “commie” exists only as a point that
delegitimizes the parent ideology (Communism) as a whole. Here the schism is formed that allows
exploitation in terms of vernacular usage of phrases such as “commie”, “red” and “pinko” in terms of their
ability to be associated beyond the ideological language from which they are derived. This exploitation
takes a distinct, yet multifaceted form.

Each subjective, descriptive sign concerning any ideology is derived from a quality of the ideology for
which it is intended. In terms of Communism, each colloquialism is “borrowed” from a quality of that
ideology and contorted in form and tone to slightly alter meaning and create a dual identity of concrete
ideological association with its parent concept as well as present a humorous or derisive ineffectual
appearance in both written and spoken forms. These contortions of the original, parent ideology broaden
the area of discourse surrounding an ideology by allowing altered versions of signs that are still applicable
to the parent to become players in the discourse surrounding that parent ideology. By presenting
“commie” in speech or script, a twofold discourse is opened. The relation of the vernacular sign
(“commie”) to its parent ideology (“communism”) is inherently clear, so the discourse of communism is
engaged by the use of the vernacular sign. Simultaneously, a discourse of play is opened at the same time.
The nature of the vernacular sign’s parody of the original, parent ideology, allows the vernacular sign to be
used outside of the scope of the parent. This practice creates an area of what can only be described as one-
sided commentary, for the terms used as vernacular are themselves considered only derivatives of the
parent, and thus at least partially representative of its qualities while maintaining their humorous and/or
derisive connotations. Further, an aura of impenetrability is sustained, allowing these terms protection
from critique as stand-alone ideologies separate from their parent due to their close proximity in terms of
discourse and usage. To return to our example, the sign of “commie” is inseparable from its parent
ideology, Communism, for without that foundation from which the vernacular sign is derived, there is no
clear pattern for its usage. Thus, the sign of “commie” cannot exist without its strong connection to the
sign of Communism. However, this need for association does not restrict the vernacular sign from
expanding its scope of meaning and usage beyond addressing its foundational, parent ideology. Rather,
the vernacular sign is susceptible to interpellation into unending forms of discourse, allowing for
unending variation and synthesis.

Placing the vernacular sign in a role of deference insinuates that there is a hierarchal understanding of
values concerning signs depending on the concept in question. This dependency acts independently of the
understanding of the arbitrary nature of any sound pattern’s correspondence to the concept in question
(in this case, a political ideology) and focuses rather on the relation between the sound pattern of what we
will call a parental sign, or the sign of an ideology (“communism”, “fascism”, “democracy”, etc.), and its
derivatives, the vernacular signs, where these vernacular signs are tied through sound pattern,
grammatical / alphabetical structure and/or connotation to create a relative bond between the parent and
vernacular signs in question (Saussure 67). Yet not only does the vernacular sign act in a deferential sense,
but also in an act of defiance. The creation of a vernacular sign already indicates that there is an aspect(s)
of an ideology that cannot be satisfied by their representations in language as is, but rather must be
treated to the demands of social expression. The vernacular sign is a signifier of a general dissatisfaction
not necessarily with the subject matter of what is to be represented, but rather the ways in which it is
currently available and acceptable to represent an ideology in question. By subduing a parent ideology
with the proliferation and legitimization of vernacular signs, the discourse of play and humorous critique
begins to subsume the parent ideology and the general understanding of what both the vernacular sign
and its parent ideology derived themselves from. In the case of communism, the practice of legitimating
the threat of communism while simultaneously encouraging humorous delegitimization allowed the
vernacular sign to engrain itself into the very fabric of what both were representing, a political system, and
subtlety change the way in which those signs addressed that system.

II. Delegitimization in Language as Precursor to the Vernacular Sign

To understand the differences between a core ideology and/or belief and how it is represented, we must
examine the ideology in terms of its relation to its development as a historical trend, one that does not
have a definitive birth date or place (Saussure 72). However, its inability to be located in a historical date
but only in an inheritance from generation to generation does not account for the manner in which a
concept is both located in the social consciousness and discussed as having an advent in terms of study.
These two distinctions are directly related to the development of the vernacular sign in relation to the
discourse surrounding political ideology, because they frame the discussion in terms of the evolution of
usage as opposed to the more rudimentary understanding of where these signs originally derived, which is
itself arbitrary (Saussure 67). In other words, the ideology as represented by its signs is an imperfect
relationship. The desire inherent in each sign is a striving which seeks to eliminate the distance between
what it is and what it is represented by. That is to say that communism, for example, is not the ideals,
policies, history and attitudes that make up that ideology, but rather the sign to which we affiliate those
ideas within the social sphere. The emphasis lies not in the actuality of a political ideology, but how that
ideology is addressed and disseminated within he social sphere. This places the sign “communism” in a
place where the ideology it represents exists with or without it (Saussure 66).

To form an understanding of alternative political ideologies within the American vernacular, we must
recognize the way in which political alternatives to republican democracy are addressed in the post-Cold
War era: through the dual process of legitimization (by political authority figures) and delegitimization
(by the general public). The implosion of the Soviet Union was itself repeatedly distinguished as a
stunning victory for the United States. It is here that the politics of justification in terms of contending
with alternative political ideologies becomes evident and must be dealt with before we can progress
further.

Treating the development of a vernacular sign in terms of its impact on the meaning of its parent ideology
through the discussion of its relevance to the social consciousness surrounding that ideology suggests in
itself that there is a foundational concept, such as the parent ideology of “Communism” which, even as it
is not perfectly represented, is regarded as the iconic figure in all discussions of that concept. The myriad
levels and subsections of Marxist theory, separate from the attitudes, theories and writings of Lenin,
Stalin, Krushchev, Gorbechev, Yeltsin and the difference from those ideologies and the political, economic
and social realities of each communist government, are all embodied in the social consciousness as being
spawned from, or inherited from, the sign of “Communism”. The contemplation of this iconic ideology
from which all signs surrounding it can trace themselves to is problematic because of the assumption that
one sign is more capable of representing an ideology than others. In terms of pure semiology, the link
between the sign and the signified is an arbitrary connection in terms of its actual meaning, yet the signs
that are produced do have a connection to the ideology in so much that those signs are produced by the
social sphere (Saussure 72). However, that hierarchy makes itself known not in the manner in which signs
are assigned to what they signify, but rather the next step, namely the subject matter of the signs.

III. The Genealogy of the Subject: America and Nostalgia

The social expression of each sign is independent of the arbitrary nature of the relationship between the
sign and the signifier, exposing the hierarchical structure that is dependent both on the idea of authority
and the proliferation in social circles that is itself reliant on that authority. In the case of the “Red Scare”,
we can examine this hierarchy through direct example. As discussed earlier, the idea of the elected official
in the setting of a republican democracy places the individual in that role in a place of exaggerated
respect. Alongside the immediate recognition of being voted into an elected office, the official can exercise
what has been coined as “political capital”, which relates to an exaggerated form of respect, or even a
mandate, which affords that official increased levels of personal discretion over political, social and
economic issues without active dissent from one’s constituents. If exercised to an extreme, as in the
situation of Senator McCarthy, this capital can allow them to step outside their understood jurisdiction
into policy making in the whole of the public sphere.

The sensational claims of Senator McCarthy were not the initial cause of the development of terms such as
“commie”, “red” or “pinko”, nor where they responsible for spreading those terms from a small
community into the whole of the public sphere, where those vernacular terms were already understood in
their deference to their parent ideology. The presence of the senator and the campaign of the Red Scare
influenced the vernacular in terms of its legitimacy. Reiterating that there is a communist “threat” and/or
“plot” to attack America and subvert the values of “average Americans” places any attempts to assault that
threat into a legitimate light. This, however, does not implicate that the senator was addressing the
vernacular directly as a way of discussing the ideology to which he was so opposed. Instead, this is the
core of the politics of legitimization in relation to the spread of the vernacular sign in reference to its
parent ideology. The terminology itself is arbitrary, but requires a source of authority to begin to take an
impact on the ideology that spawned it. The way in which the rhetoric of that authority is interpellated by
the public as a source of authority is dependent on the social understanding of where authority is derived
from. As aforementioned, that authority is afforded in America through the political authority of the
republican democracy, reinforced in social spheres through its intimate connection to the birth and pride
of being “American”. The rights that came from the birth of America, despite the reality of those rights in
everyday application to each American citizen, allow those who have assumed positions of power within
the American government to subconsciously command the respect drawn from the phenomena of
American nationalist pride. This precedent capitalizes on a nostalgia that distances itself from the
categorized reality of the contemporary forms of those rights and privileges that are looked back on
fondly. The rhetoric of being “American” is then a matter not only of nostalgia, but the management of
distance from a historicized birth date and the contemporary political world. From this vantage point, we
can then only look at the disjuncture of alternative political theories, like communism, in the severity of
their contrast with the “American Identity”. Solving the matter of what constitutes the “American
Identity” itself would then seem to only be identified through those contrasts with what it is not
(“communism”, etc.) and it is in that manner, the distinguishing of what is through the revelation of what
something isn’t links the rhetoric of the Red Square with the fundamental precepts of semiology. It is here
where the senator exploits the idea of what is “American” by capitalizing on the social construct of those
values and responding to them by insisting that its binary opposite is encroaching on its shores. This
proposition forces a series of value judgments onto the general public, as they are confronted with
something that has been continuously repeated as a direct threat to their way of life. Independent of each
American’s understanding of what the American way of life constitutes, the senator’s accusations and
assertions as to what is patriotic allow the public to call on a idealized notion of American values, an easy
task due to the heavy propagandizing during the American involvement in World War II that remained
fresh in the public’s consciousness. With the public able to fill in many of the blanks untouched by the
senator’s anti-Communist rhetoric, they are able to support his assertions without building an entire,
coherent moral and political understanding of the conflict between American values and communism.
Further, the senator reinforces the idea that rhetoric can serve as an absolute truth in and of itself if its
signs coalesce not only with the popular social worldview, but more importantly the language which births
and sustains it.

IV. Uncle Joe: The Semiological Anatomy of Communism

So then we can return to the question of a hierarchy in terms of our discussions of core political
ideologies. The history that was still fresh during the time of McCarthyism was of the decade prior and the
Second World War, one that the Americans had long avoided getting involved with until the bombing of
Pearl Harbor swayed public opinion so much that isolationism in terms of military action (for it was
certainly not isolationist in terms of profiteering from wartime arms sales) was no longer an acceptable
policy. Thus, a threat that had become a thorn in the public’s side with the surprisingly, yet still small,
following that had been garnered in the German-American Bund, became a blistering rallying call that
infiltrated the public consciousness in record time: the Axis must be defeated. As the preparations for the
Normandy invasion began, the assault on the enemy had already begun at home, inundating both the
young and the old with a serious of sometimes conflicting exaltations and/or condemnations of nations,
peoples and political figures. This social schizophrenia is documented, in the case of Stalin, by Kriss
Ravetto: 

Josef Stalin has undergone a series of transformations: from the antidemocratic and antifascist
figurehead of Bolshevism or communism, perceived by Western countries as a vociferous international
threat to interfuse class politics into global politics, to a coconspirator in the parceling-up of Eastern
Europe, to “Uncle Joe”, a comrade in arms ... and finally to a fascist, a power-hungry expansionist, a
dictator, as well as a mass murderer. (32)

Ravetto attributes this to the dependency on history to be read in terms of “mobile alliances”, and that the
desire for simplification allows the exchange of identities to be centered around a figure, idea or
movement, if not all three. What is truly revolutionary about her observations is the understanding of the
perception of Stalin as a fascist, and as a leader of a fascist state. Stalin’s political and ideological
opposition to Hitler is well-documented, as is their short-lived peace treaty and their compliance in the
division of Poland, yet this proposition seems far from fantastic. The close association that Roosevelt
shared with socialist ideas in the formation of the New Deal does not bring the same accusations to his
presidency, and seems to infer that a total rejection of American ideals needs to be perceived for a political
system and/or figure to be lumped with one or more others. The linking of nazism, fascism and
communism into a total dogma of totalitarianism allowed for this link to become academically acceptable,
as the simplified connections between Hitler’s and Stalin’s policies of total control allowed an easily
swayed public to make the jump to likening the two mortal enemies as demonic ideological cohorts
(Derrida 98). In short, there is no lacking measure of historical evidence to show that while both
governments could be defined as “totalitarian” under the articles to which Hannah Arendt crystalized the
subject, there is little in terms of ideological cohesion between Stalin and Hitler and the ideologies they
represented while both men still lived (let us not confuse the men and ideology).

In reexamining the above quotation, we can see that the first identifications that the public sphere
attributed to their perception of Josef Stalin was one of dual identity. The notion of being a
Bolshevist/communist and simultaneously rejecting the major political movements in the rest of the
world do not appear to be mutually exclusive, yet in this particular case they serve two different ends in
the later (post-World War II, and even post-mortem) understanding of his character. The identity of being
a Bolshevik and/or a communist was, at the time of Stalin coming to power, dynamic to the shaping of his
personality in America. While McCarthy would give the Red Scare an enduring name, time and place,
anti-Communist sentiment had been fairly widespread in America since the late 1910’s and early 1920’s.
Stalin’s identity as a communist was never in question even after his signing of the peace treaty between
the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, nor was there a direct reason for the American public to challenge
such an alliance as much of the interest in the war was perceived from a spectator’s mindset. Even the
increasing presence of the Bund in the pages of American newspapers and on the lips of the public,
combined with the often ignored attempts by Jewish leaders to get the ongoing genocide of the Holocaust
to be recognized, did little to affect or alter the underlying perception of Stalin, his rule, or the country he
represented. The communists, therefore, were acting as communists could be expected.

It was the invasion of Soviet territory by the Reich that would become the first step to muddying the
waters in which the American public would perceive Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union. While not directly
invested in the war, the early military successes of the Reich were enough to cause more than a passing
anxiety to the American public. The Nazis had completely annihilated the French opposition in 45 days,
and for a time Britain itself was within inches of its own surrender. When Germany first invaded Russia,
its military successes continued on the newly christened Eastern Front just as it had in the West, the Nazi
Blitzkrieg seemed nigh invulnerable, but the sheer number of Russians would begin to slow the push until
the standstill was made at the city of Stalingrad. This war of attrition allowed a radical new understanding
of the Soviet Union, the troops who held the city and the leader who bore its name (Shirer 870).

The second critical event that would reshape the perception of Stalin and the Soviet Union came with the
bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entering of America into World War II. Entering into the alliance with
Britain and Russia, America found itself joining the world’s largest military conflagration with one of its
staunchest ideological opponents. To sell the war at home was, initially, an easy task as many Americans
desired retaliation after the attack at Pearl Harbor, but the decision to engage the German front with the
primary number of American forces did not coalesce with the public outcry. To foster support, not only
would the Nazi threat have to be intensified in the public’s worldview, but the “threat” of the Soviet Union
would have to be downplayed. The changing vernacular surrounding Stalin and the Communist presence
would, despite the about-face that allowed the persona of “Uncle Joe” to become acceptable within the
realm of American political discourse, finally become crystallized within a historical context after the
conclusion of World War II. The crash of the Iron Curtain boomed across the European landscape and
catapulted the war into decades of paranoia known as the Cold War, and once again a shift was needed in
the public’s perception of Stalin and the Soviet Union. The very nature of communism was, through the
usual means of news coverage and talking points, reinserted into the dialogue of unacceptable, anti-
American behavior. This reinsertion creates a traumatic effect in the American public’s understanding of
the “other” in terms of political ideologies (Derrida 98). The separation that had been emphasized
between American and Russian ideals in terms of their political beliefs (stressed as opposites) was set
aside for the war in the hopes of defeating the evil of “the third way”, yet this “third way” (in the form of
nazism/fascism) creates a paradox for both powers. Insisting that the communist way of life was directly
opposed American values after the end of the war stresses that both nazism/fascism and communism are
completely incompatible with American values, yet differences between the systems are glaringly obvious
in both ideological and historical terms (Derrida 109). With this development in mind, an important
transformation also begins to take place in the way that the American public addressed alternative
political ideologies, specifically communism. While the Soviet Union may have been directly, even
militarily opposed to the activities of Hitler, the Nazis and the larger fascist community, the growing
concern that became the Cold War necessitated more than a simple distrust for the Soviet Union. What
was needed was all-out hatred for the Communist cause, something that had been fostered in the Cold
War and now, in the aftermath of World War II, had a new opportunity to introduce a vernacular
connection between the governments of Hitler and Stalin.

V. The Many Hitlers

Hitler himself has come to resemble the very embodiment of evil, in essence, Hitler has become a
reference point for that embodiment, a measuring stick against which all others are measured in terms of
their capacity for evil. In this manner, the use of the word “Hitler” has become so loaded that the meaning
of the word has divided in two, where one Hitler discourse is dead and the other is alive. The dead
discourse of Hitler is the one of the history of Hitler, his birth, life and death and the policies that he and
the NSDAP shaped. This is a Hitler who’s representation is a fixed and closed discourse, the amount of
academic, historical and social interest in the character and history of the man has allowed the signs that
allude to his person to also become fixed. In this way, only certain signs are appropriate when describing
Hitler. We can see the critical backlash to the 2004 film Downfall (Der Untergang) as a sign of the anxiety
of drawing this dead discourse into question, refusing to lay flowers at the burial of the “dead Hitler”.
David Denby writes of the film and of Bruno Ganz, the actor who played Adolf Hitler, in the New York
Times:

As a piece of acting, Ganz’s work is not just astounding, it’s actually rather moving. But I have doubts
about the way his virtuosity has been put to use. By emphasizing the painfulness of Hitler’s defeat Ganz
has ... made the dictator into a plausible human being. Considered as biography, the achievement (if
that’s the right word) ... is to insist that the monster was not invariably monstrous—that he was kind to
his cook and his young female secretaries, loved his German shepherd, Blondi, and was surrounded by
loyal subordinates. We get the point: Hitler was not a supernatural being; he was common clay raised
to power by the desire of his followers. But is this observation a sufficient response to what Hitler
actually did?

The film followed the dictator in the last days of his life, holed up in the middle of Berlin in his specially
crafted Führerbunker. Denby, like many reacting to the film, draws on a critical question not only of the
film’s intentions, but the way in which we read “dead” history: “..is this observation a sufficient response
to what Hitler actually did?” The entire quotation calls into question the very idea that the film could
display objectivity to any particular event or person, but at the same time calls on a solid understanding of
“what really happened” to call into question the very nature of the “observation” that was Downfall. In this
duality we can observe that the discourse of Hitler, no matter its representation, has been read in the
social sphere as a dead discourse, and in the case of an event such as Downfall, a discourse that allows for
novelty to engage, but not change, its character and make-up. The “humanizing” of Hitler, if it can be said
that Hitler had to be “made” human in the film, is seen as detracting from the way in which Hitler is
correctly read by history. The “human” Hitler is threatening because Hitler embodies a sense of evil
without end, an actual abyss of the human spirit that no “real human being” could actually become. It is
an admission that Hitler himself, in the dead discourse of his person, is a caricature on which the
definition of “evil” depends.

The second discourse of Hitler is also engaged with this concept of “evil” and the dependency of that
concept on the character (caricature) of Hitler, it feeds off of the ability of Hitler to be in history and yet
representative of an ideal that crosses historical borders into the workings of historicity. Since the death of
Hitler and the debated justice of the Nuremberg Trials (where the idea of “crimes against humanity” in
that usage was first debuted), the Nazi regime and the man who spearheaded it have assumed a place of
unrivaled infamy in the vernacular of political discourse not just in America, but across the world. The evil
of the Nazis, somewhere underneath the glaring lights of the Nuremberg Trials, entered into the public
eye as the very epitome of decadence, the definitive monument to moral decay. With that in mind, leaders
become the symbols for the groups which they represent, just as the President of the United States is
indelibly linked to the health and image of those United States, so was the persona of Adolf Hitler
undeniably linked to the verdict that was passed not only on war criminals, but on the very regime itself.
While there is no argument that Hitler himself was the mastermind behind must of the foundational
concepts that turned Germany into a monolithic war machine capable of unimaginable evil, there is no
supernatural quality in the activities of Hitler or the persons under his regime. Each and every insidious
act that colors the history of the Holocaust, both recorded and hidden, was performed by human beings
against human beings, no matter the metaphors used in a recollection, and it is recollection which is at the
heart of the “living” Hitler.

Meticulously studied and recorded, the history of Nazi Germany has become a simple model taught to
children in history classes as a cautionary tale, one in which America shares little to no blame. With the
emergence of Holocaust studies decades after the end of the war, the full range of the “evil” to which many
Nazis were put to their death in Nuremberg (and in the case of Eichmann, Jerusalem) became apparent,
the condemnations became, if possible, even more justified than they had been before. Even in the face of
persistent anti-Semitism, the magnitude and the manner in which the extermination of nearly six million
Jews, alongside gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners and others deemed “unfit” set it apart from any
other historical event. It allowed Nazi Germany, which had heretofore been an unfortunate side effect of
economic policy in the aftermath of World War I, to become completely and totally “unprecedented”, and
if its actions and presence became so, as did the evil which it represented. Nazi Germany, and therefore
Adolf Hitler, then became an evil that the world “had never seen”. The process of reading the history of
Hitler and Nazi Germany thus became one of remembering what had happened through those who had
been victimized by that regime. Those victims, in this case, were largely Jews, and their discontent was
itself crystallized into the workings of the Adolf Eichmann trial, where the reporting Hannah Arendt
would remark that the Jews were claiming a rightful justice and striking back against the history which
had claimed so many Jews silently. The concept of a group of persons, easily identified and separated
from the masses of humanity, could be systematically transported and slaughtered without any large
organized protest was, prior to the Holocaust, an unimaginable event, and one that still plagues Holocaust
studies and its literature to this day (indeed, many of its most famous authors struggle with how to even
represent their own experiences without trivializing or closing the discourse of the whole event). That
anxiety, of suffering on such a scale without any assistance for an extended period of time, was brought to
the world’s judgment during the Eichmann trial, even as the proceedings were in an Israeli court. The
bloody details of that event were put on trial alongside and in conjunction with Eichmann, and the world
learned that such the mechanized pogrom that was the Holocaust could happen to another people beyond
Jews. With the smoldering intensity of the Cold War captivating the attention of many Americans, the
thought of a Communist America would appear to be a very scary one indeed, as it would be the
Americans who, directly opposed to Communism in rhetoric (if not ideology), would face the brunt of
Soviet aggression and, potentially, massacre.

After the Holocaust itself entered into the realm of being a “dead” discourse, one whose boundaries could
occasionally be played with but remained ultimately static, the rhetoric of “never again” stayed with it, it is
a concept that remains popular even today. The idea of ensuring that the Holocaust will “never again
happen” is in itself a recognition of a fear that there are forces in the world that are both capable and eager
to undergo such a similar activity as that of the mechanized, industrialized killing machine perfected by
the Nazis at the silent behest of Hitler. The rhetoric of “never again” pervades every discussion of the
genocide that was the Holocaust, and it continues with each later incident which bears the word, rather
officially or in social debate, “genocide”. The idea of preventing any organization from engaging in a
similar activity was thus entered into the rhetoric of American opposition to communist enterprises both
in the Soviet Union and at home. Having linked the enterprises of the Soviet Union to the absolute evil of
the Soviet Union, it was also easy to link the actual crimes of the Nazis to the potential repeat of the
Holocaust by the Soviet Union (the mass killings of Stalin’s era would only serve to re-enforce the notion
that another Holocaust would be the product of communism as an irreversible side effect of totalitarian
governing).
In the years since the Holocaust, a number of international instances have come about which have utilized
the terminology and vernacular of the Nazi massacre. Each incident, from Rwanda to Darfur, is
dependent on the terminology of “genocide” a word that itself was created to address the full scale and
purpose of the Nazi-led Holocaust. Thus, “genocide” is loaded with the rhetoric and politics of the
Holocaust, and is not a simple descriptor of a certain kind of mass murder, but rather a hearse, carrying
the bodies of each incident from one point in history to the next, letting them be displayed for a
connection forged by the public’s need to recall an event rather than be faced with the challenge of
defining a new historical event. The continuing use of the word “Holocaust” as a descriptor of other
genocides after the Nazi massacre allows those who use the word to present an easily understood concept
to a “living” discourse. The maintenance of “never again” is embodied by the continued infusion of the
activities of Hitler and the Nazi Regime into the actions of those persons and groups which commit
atrocities that warrant the creation of a binary model of good vs. evil. The Rwandan genocide that was
largely ignored by the international community serves as a striking example of the same political
classification that was evident in the handling of knowledge of the Holocaust by the international
community, of which the Allies had ample knowledge to act (Zinn 400). This same practice continues with
Hitler as well, as numerous dictators since the death of the man that was Hitler have been referred to him
in name. The most notable is the preservation of the blurry semiological and rhetorical mug shot of Josef
Stalin.

VI. Connected Threats: Communism as Nazism in the Red Scare

It was not advantageous in American political rhetoric to link Josef Stalin to Adolf Hitler and to fascism
until Hitler himself, along with the Nazi Regime he represented as its figurehead and most identifiable
sign, had become a living, recurring symptom of historicity known as the “embodiment of evil”. Hitler and
Nazi Germany were placed in a special place within the public’s consciousness, as both a cautioning and
identifying sign. The activities of the Nazis, linked to the practice of fascism as a whole, allowed for the
American public, following the conclusion of the Second World War, to call on the Nazi example whenever
they needed to reference or compare an event in terms of its “evil”. The rise of the Iron Curtain, its
symbolism in the construction and consternation surrounding the Berlin Wall, allowed the continuation
of an important good vs. evil dynamic which had been employed in the propaganda tactics of the Allies
during the fighting of World War II. The communists, now occupying the role of the evil which opposed
the American way of life, represented by the Allies’ rapid movements to democratize and make capitalist
the areas under their jurisdiction. Acting in direct opposition to the victorious Allies, the “morally
bankrupt” communist party, headed by the once again reviled Josef Stalin, had easily slid into the role of
direct opposition that worked down predetermined borders of state jurisdiction. The rise of the
superpowers coincided with the establishment of the East and West border understandings that would
come to dominate political geography until the Soviet Union’s collapse. This important distinction links to
the idea that history needs to work within easily defined parameters for a large level of social acceptance
of the events recorded. The transformation of Stalin and the Soviet Union from evil to good to evil in all of
its simplicity shows a social complicity in participating in these binary models of good vs. evil, one that
coincides with a public anxiety at not being a part of what is deemed “evil”. However, the re-vilification of
communism did not return to a “previous level” of distrust and dislike by the American people. Stalin and
the Soviet Union began to find themselves addressed in a manner that betrayed their role in the dead
discourse of history and found Stalin adopting the monicker of the man he had been both allied with and
fought against (Ravetto 24). Thus, when Stalin, as representative of the Soviet Union, was reinserted into
the American public’s consciousness as a foe directly opposed to the American way of life, he carried with
him a new understanding in terms of his moral culpability. Where his morality had previously been an
irrelevant question, linking Stalin’s evil as second only to Hitler’s allowed the American public to not only
be opposed to his political system (communism), but to come to conclusions about the moral implications
of living under that system.

The linking of the Soviet Union and the phenomena of nazism and fascism is itself dependent on a social
construction on what is evil paired with the desire for both current events and history to be easy to recall.
The return of Stalin and the Soviet Union to their traditional place of being opposed to the American way
of life placed them at the mercy of vernacular signs designed to accentuate and cement the difference
between the morally upstanding United States and their opponents in the Soviet Union. The public is
made to criticize and trivialize the workings of the Soviet Union through the use and development of
vernacular signs that detract from the Soviet Union and it’s leader’s legitimacy as an alternative to
American republican democracy and capitalist economy. As Hitler and the Nazis were also understood as
standing in direct opposition to the workings of the American “way of life”, the binary model on which the
American propaganda machine depended had no choice but to link the wartime opponents (the Nazis)
with the post-war, Cold War opponents (the Communists). However, the revolutionary nature of the evil
that was ascribed to the Nazi party did not allow a direct parallel between the evil that the Nazis
represented and the Communists were made to represent after the end of fighting in World War II. The
link between nazism and communism is therefore made into a hierarchy of evil, that the need for each
event/system to be read in a way that it recalls another, previous event that is understood as absolute by
the general public. Each event in history performed by the Soviet Union is thus cast in direct comparison
with, but does not perfectly relate to, the evil that was embodied by Hitler and the Nazis. The cruelty and
antidemocratic activities of Stalin became, therefore, reminiscent of Hitler and the Nazis, allowing the
quality of fascism to be attributed to the foundational representative of the communist worldview on the
worldstage and in the eyes of American public opinion. It is here, alongside Hannah Arendt’s assertion
that totalitarian governments are united in state-sponsored anti-Semitism, that a link between the
policies of fascism and communism find a link in the eyes of the American public. Without Hitler and the
Nazis as the foundation, the whole of the critique of Stalin and the Soviet Union would become clumsy
and without direction. The maintenance of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust as the bottom of the abyss
of the human spirit is, for better or worse, the measuring stick for all others.
The policies of Senator McCarthy did not capitalize on the millions and millions of Russians that met their
end under the regime of Stalin and the Bolsheviks, the knowledge of Stalin’s own killing fields, both of
German POW’s and the innumerable Russians that he butchered, was still guarded within the walls of the
Kremlin and hidden from the larger discourses of the history of World War II and the Soviet Union.
However, the actual, historical facts of the Soviet Union and it’s leader’s beliefs and policies were never at
the heart of the Red Scare and the Senator’s desire to scare the American public and whip them into an
anti-Communist fervor that, in truth, did not serve to protect the public so much from the communist
threat as it did to undermine the American political process and the proper judicial protection of
American civil liberties (Zinn 426). The intention of the Soviet Union or of the Junior Senator from
Wisconsin were not the considerations of the Red Scare, but rather the recollection of a fear that had
already been expressed within American social circles (the anti-Communist sentiment that had taken root
at the turn of the century) paired with the recollection and insertion of a historical precedent (the
boundless evil of Hitler and Nazi Germany) into the discourse of another totalitarian government, namely
the Soviet Union (Zinn 427).

McCarthyism exploited the “typical” fear of the other which colors the political rhetoric of “Americanism”,
centering the pride in one’s country and values as central to participating in the American experience. As
McCarthy himself represented a long-standing tradition within that American experience, that of being an
elected official, there was no reason to question that the actions he took against an other, one that easily
operated in the social subconscious as under the guise of being tied to the very epitome of evil (nazism).
The paranoia that had characterized early anti-Communist sentiment was then tied to a moral
understanding, that the opposition to the Communist way of life was also responsible for making a stand
for morally upstanding (American) values. 

VII. Good night, and good luck: A note on Edward R. Murrow and the Social Conscience

The proceedings of the much-heralded “battle” between Senator McCarthy and television and radio
personality Edward R. Murrow has lauded as a seminal case in the duties of the journalist as critical
analyst of a country’s political leaders and policies. In the way in which we understand the hierarchy of
the vernacular sign and its ability to comment on its parent ideology, Murrow did not make a stand. The
protection of or advocacy for the Communist party on American shores or abroad was never perpetrated
by Murrow:

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig
deep in our history and doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from
men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment
unpopular. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the
result. There is no way for a citizen of the Republic to abdicate his responsibility."

We can understand this quotation as a way of commenting on the policies of McCarthyism as its own
doctrine without focusing on the goals or interests of that policy. While Murrow’s own direct intention
was not the legitimacy of the Communist party as a direct example of legitimacy, it was a campaign for the
legitimacy of alternative political ideas even at times where they are “unpopular” within the political
and/or public sphere. Murrow’s expose’ and follow-ups with Senator McCarthy did much to expose the
tactics of one man’s campaign that drew itself in direct conflict with many foundational American civil
rights, but it was never Murrow’s intention to pave the way for a clearer understanding of those rights,
only how they were being infringed by McCarthy. Nevertheless, Murrow did give light to the idea that it
was capable of addressing those with differing opinions, even those of communist leaning, without
immediately being stricken from social life or even possibly being put into prison. In this manner, Murrow
was able to address the connection of the word vernacular signs connected with Communism (“commie”,
“red”, “pinko”) to a sense of legal peril, but did not open a discourse where they could be considered valid
in and of themselves. The fall of McCarthy, aided by Murrow’s reporting at CBS News, did not herald a
surge in deligitimizing the government’s connection with upstanding moral decisions due to the fact that
they were intimately involved in the American political process, nor did it close the book on rampant anti-
Communist sentiment on American shores despite the new legitimacy of differing opinions that Murrow
afforded the American public through his reporting and support from the political sphere of influence in
American at the time. That opinion would prevail in public opinion through the days of the Nixon
Administration, where the synonymous connection between moral dignity and elected officials was
irreparably damaged in the eyes of the American public.

VIII. Schism: Nixon and the Redeployment of the Vernacular Sign

The Watergate Scandal would redefine the role of government accountability in the usage and deployment
of the vernacular sign in terms of attacking alternative political ideologies. Nixon’s activities that came to
light through a series of clandestine investigations by two Washington Post journalists was as much the
stuff of spy films as it was of true life political maneuvering behind the scenes. Most importantly, it would
become the first major scandal to envelop the Oval Office itself and directly challenge a President’s
legitimacy in making decisions that could be understood in the public sphere as undeniably “good for the
country”. This distanced the public from a binary model of good vs. evil that had been invigorated once
more by the space race, where the Soviets had succeeded in placing the first man in orbit, while the
Americans had replied in kind with the first moon landing. However, muddied public opinion took root
with the poorly executed and planned involvement in the Vietnam war, one meant to block communist
expansion into the region. The ensuing Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration took the
anxiety that had been growing on the nation’s shores and exploded it into a schism where the government
was operating on a different social understanding of the “battle with Communism” than that of the
general public. Where cries of “Better dead than Red” had once been popular, anti-war rallies had
squashed such phrases in favor of those challenging the administration to bring the troops home from an
increasingly disastrous offensive. If it can be said that there was an “anti-communist movement” within
the United States, the failure of the Nixon administration to be candid and act in the “best interest” of the
people as perceived by the public sphere would do irreparable damage to that movement, as the social
trend turned to focusing on the policies of the United States itself as opposed to keeping an eye fixed on
the activities of the Soviet Union. it is not to say that paranoia surrounding Soviet activity both at home
and abroad was eradicated in this era, but that paranoia became a secondary concern to the moral and
ethical activity of the government of the United States. The preservation of American values was seen to
be a process that had to begin at home by ensuring due process and public accountability within
government as a way of combatting the Soviet alternative. Providing the “better” alternative to the
Soviet/Communist way of life would become the primary rallying point for Americans against any
Communist sentiment in the years to come, and this attitude would continue through the final days of the
Soviet Union, the Iron Curtain, and beyond.

IX. The End of an Era

The fall of the Soviet Union occupies an important time in the minds of the American social
consciousness, it is the defining point for a conflict that had continued since the the first brick was laid in
the Berlin Wall. A war of ideas had been raging since even before that conflict began, tracing its roots back
to September 1st, 1939 and the Nazi invasion of Poland. Two days later, Europe was at war with Adolf
Hitler and Nazi Germany. Three opposing ideologies found themselves throughout the next six years knee
deep in a conflict that left millions upon millions dead. After the defeat of Hitler, the war escalated as the
two remaining socio-economic ideologies, capitalism and communism, began a long and bitter war of
attrition, using puppet battlefields (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan) to conduct open warfare without
resorting to the devastation that would come with nuclear weapons. 

The eventual “triumph” of the United States, was largely due to the inability of the Soviet Union to
reconcile its politics with the values and economics the state purported. The “victory” of the United States
was an irrelevant event in terms of its truth, or better, its historocity. It was the “defeat” of the Soviet
Union which allowed its dynamic counterpart (that “victory”) to rally itself as an assumed truth. In
keeping with the “us vs. them” dichotomy which was commonplace within American propagandizing
during the Cold War era, the idea of “victory” and “defeat” allowed a black and white closure to a black
and white conflict in the discourse of the American public, as exercised through its perfected
representation within its political offices. The crumbling Soviet behemoth had been toppled by its
ideological opponent, the free-market state championed by America. This easily digested duality allowed a
cleanliness of discourse to encapsulate the Cold War vernacular into its understanding of being “justified”.
To put it bluntly, those “commies” had been wrong all along. This justification extended beyond the short-
term implications of social discussions and the news, and allowed a permanent alteration of how the
“defeated” ideology was considered and addressed. The association of the vernacular with the idea of
“victory” over the ideologies from which those vernacular signs were derived allowed a transformation of
those vernacular signs into valid consideration of that ideology, that which had once been a derisive or
humorous derivative of the parent ideology had, through the “victory” of the proprietor of that discourse,
taken the place of that parent.

This victory, no matter how empty for the Reagan presidency, was instrumental in forming the worldview
of the next ascendancy in American political thinking. As the lone superpower to emerge from World War
II and the Cold War, America’s political position was understood to be the major influence on world
economics and political policy in the coming years. Noted scholar and political thinker Francis Fukuyama
saw this as an opportunity to spread the “success” of the American political and economic system in his
widely read and praised book The End of History. His Hegelian notion of the end of history, also a less
than subtle jab at Marx, provided the framework for the contemporary “neoconservative” movement that
dominates the current Bush presidency and has been the backbone of the American Republican Party
since the tail end of the Reagan presidency. Fukuyama’s writing plays an instrumental role in the
recodification of alternative political ideologies, and gives a clear framework for their transformation from
viable and noteworthy political alternatives to exhausted and discounted theories to, ultimately, a joke to
be ridiculed.

The role of America, as Fukuyama suggested, was to spread the liberal democratic ideal, one that
embraces the concepts of free-market capitalism as its bedrock, throughout the world, largely in a
diplomatic, “setting the example” method (Fukuyama 127). Noting the American system of economics and
government as having been responsible for achieving the nearly mythic “end of history” set the precedent
within the dominant political officials within the United States government that democratization was now
no longer something to be protected, as it had been during the days of the Cold War, but now freely
mandated. In contrast, the mandate excluded the discussion of alternative political ideologies as a mixture
of ridicule for their “failure” and need for the social sphere to recognize the total victory of the American
“way of life” through the utter rejection to the policies of the enemies it had defeated. This method
explains the continued anxiety by many politicians to eradicate all traces of traditionally socialist policies
within the framework of the United States government and legal systems, most of them maintained from
the implementation of the New Deal. Of the perception of the Communism, Fukuyama writes in a New
York Times opinion piece: “Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce
when practiced by the United States.” Conscientious of his interpretation of the representation of
Communist ideology within the United States, Fukuyama’s neoconservatism was a welcome challenge to
decades of stalemate between two superpowers.

X. The New Terms

The introduction of the neoconservative ideal of understanding America’s role as the world’s lone
superpower allowed a sudden shift within the political sphere in how alternative political ideologies were
to be addressed. This ideological backing coalesced with the popularity of the Reagan Presidency’s
“victory” over the Soviet Union to unite into a universal condemnation of the Soviet Union for both its
moral infractions as well as its economic instability, one that the American “way of life” had been
instrumental in exposing, or so the public willfully believed. This universal condemnation of Communism
allowed for a blanket refutation of all of the terms that had come to be associated with that parent
ideology (Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism) with only the notion of perestroika (as an imitation of the
American system) retaining a sense of dignity within the American academic, social and political spheres.

The familiarity with which Communism could be addressed, with its foundations in the absolute evil
represented by nazism/fascism, contributed to the growing demand for “nostalgic morality” within the
American voting demographic, and its political figures began to reflect this shift in displaying morality.
The long-standing, propagandized link between atheism and immorality was cemented in the projection
of communists as immoralists (who had learned from the Nazis), allowing America to label itself as the
moral alternative, rooted in a Judeo-Christian genealogy traced back to the original Europeans who
settled the east coast, regardless of the popular conceptions of the founding fathers and the documents
that defined the basis of American law.

This alliance of Communist ideology with immoralist tendencies was the definition by which we could
prescribe “commie” as a derogatory term that was not only an insult to one’s character, but also to one’s
ability to be an “American”. The popular notion of America’s “Christian” origin only served to augment
Communism’s space of ostracism and the ability of the vernacular of that word to separate persons very
cleanly and distinctly. By placing someone on the opposite end of a spectrum of ideology, while allying
oneself with the popular beliefs of a region and/or period, discourse is essentially nullified and converted
into a majority/minority confrontation. This practice has jeopardized the discourse of communism,
particularly within the social spheres of the “average American” due to the repeated themes of patriotism
and standardized morality through religious adherence within the culture. Thus, the vernacular that
surrounded Communism and other alternative political ideologies were once again transformed in post-
Cold War America. Where before the ostracizing nature of being labeled a “commie” was able to confer
that there were two viable political ideologies, the demise of the Soviet Union placed the discourse of
“Communism” into the realm of history without a contemporary impact. Communism, and all of the
ideologies and vernacular terms that came along with it, became dated and disrespected for their inability
to persist throughout time. They became more malleable as their subject matter moved from the
contemporary and into the realm of memory, where their ability to be reappropriated became limitless
and the progression from viable political alternative to aimless joke fodder became complete.
XI. An Act of Memory

The demise of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War was an event which demanded the recollection of
what that superpower had represented in the eyes of its “enemy”, the United States of America. Much like
a wake, the fall of the Soviet Union demanded those who had been most critical to pass a final judgment
on that superpower and its ideologies as it collapsed. The rise of the neoconservative agenda co-opted that
demise as a way to signal the “end of history” and the coming spread of liberal democracy with America
leading the way, and the political rhetoric of the time came to reflect that as the process of “remembering”
the Soviet Union began. It is this process of remembering which has colored the discourse of
Communism, Marxism, Leninism and other affiliated ideologies since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and
dominates the ways in which those ideologies are presented and represented in American academic
discourse from elementary history classes through doctorate theses. The process of dismissing
Communist theory is rooted in the “fact” that Capitalism proved itself a more viable and realistic
alternative, succeeding at maintaining a happy populace while remaining productive. Coming from a
cultural tradition where it was insisted that being an “American” meant living in opposition and disdain of
the Communist alternative, the rejection of Communist ideals based not on the facets of its ideology but
its historical representation is a direct product of the binary model of morality that was the cornerstone of
American efforts at propagandizing the Cold War conflict. The link between Fascism, Nazism,
Communism and Totalitarianism (as the final, parent ideology to encompass each of the prior political
models) provided the academic base in which Communism could be historically traced to Nazism, and
thus absolute evil. The intermixing of political agenda, binary moral models and academic justification
solidified the current attitude towards Communism within the American, and ultimately the Western
world.

XII. Specters of Marx

Derrida provided the Western world the realization that Marx continues to haunt the discourses of
political, social and economic justice and progressive change, and made it clear that the world is
confronted with multiple specters of this man’s original thought: both in re-interpretations as well as the
ideologies that once held sway over much of the civilized world. To see these specters, we must first
introduce ourselves to the executioner, which was itself largely a product of the United States’ desire to
preserve loyalty through the construction, manipulation and implementation of binary moral models
based on differing social, political and economic understandings of our world. Introducing morality into
these ideological differences has forever infused the ways in which we address alternative ideologies, such
as Communism, with a sense of loaded moral purpose. The “commie”, “red” and “pinko” has been
distributed beyond its social, economic and political implications into a condemnation that can be
understood exclusively in the moral sphere. These adaptive uses, the vernacular signs for that ideology,
continue to be the major obstacle towards serious re-evaluation of and scholarship towards the
understanding and introduction of alternative political ideologies into the general body of political
discourse in the Western world. They leave the members of the social sphere with segmented and rigid
traditional understandings of Communism without leaving room for active inquiry or serious
understanding of its processes and demands on the individual and the society at large, yet still those
questions linger. The presence of the behemoth that was the Soviet Union for much of the 20th century
was as much of a testament to the strength of that system as have been the failed Marxist coups the world
over. The conceptualization of a Communist society continues to hold its luster, even as it is condemned
as a political pipedream by serious academics and average citizen alike.

--

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