Anti-Communism: It’s High Time to Diagnose and Counteract

Abstract

Anti-communism is as old as communism, maybe even older. In the Communist Manifesto Marx writes about the "spectre of communism", which "haunts Europe" and against which "all powers of old Europe" have united: "Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies". The communist party had not yet been created, the program had not crystallised yet, there were not yet people who would have identified themselves with the ideas of communism. Nevertheless, representatives of the old feudal and the new capitalist worlds had already protested against them. And they opposed them fiercely, using all available tools, both legal (prison sentences, fines) and extra-legal (assaults on members of left-wing organisations, destruction and arson of their premises, social ostracism). This is not the place to dwell on the history of anti-communism. It suffices to say that it is long and bloody. In the 20th century alone, it was marked by: murders both of activists (Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were killed in January 1919 in Berlin by Freikorps militants) and of whole communities -these attacks bear a resemblance to genocide (more than half a million leftist activists, mainly communists, were murdered in Indonesia between 1965-1966 on the command of the right-wing general Suharto), the banning of political parties (the Communist Workers' Party of Poland was banned in early 1919; there were paragraphs in the

Gender Studies im Dialog

“…Um solche Angriffe erfolgreich abzuwehren, sollten sich Gender-Wissenschaftler:innen kritisch mit beiden Phänomenen auseinandersetzen -besonders mit dem Antikommunismus, der in vielen Ländern Ost-und Ostmitteleuropas eine eigene ›kulturelle Kategorie‹ darstellt, die auch von den Wissenschaftler:innen selbst reproduziert wird (vgl. Mrozik 2019). Das Paradoxe ist, dass der vor allem als Ablehnung des Realsozialismus verstandene Antikommunismus nach 1989 zur treibenden Kraft für die Einrichtung moderner, nach westlichem Vorbild ausgerichteter Zentren für Gender Studies in den postsozialistischen Staaten wurde, während der Antikommunismus heute -30 Jahre nach der Transformation -de facto Menschenrechte infrage stellt und somit die Hauptursache für die Verdrängung der Gender Studies aus diesen Ländern ist.…”