There existed many currents of socialism, Marxism, and communism in the world, and even parties that were theoretically loyal to the Soviet Union acted independently when they saw fit. And Marxism as a guiding ideology, including in the Marxist-Leninist formulation cemented by Stalin, certainly did not prescribe that everyone everywhere make revolution at all times. In their worldview, you certainly didn’t get socialism just because you wanted it.
Before Marx himself started writing, there was already a tradition of “utopian socialists.” One of the main points of Marxism was to reject the idea that you could simply will the world you want into existence, and Marx laid out a theory in which societies moved forward through conflict between economic classes. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Friedrich Engels praised capitalism as a revolutionary force, saying that the emergence of the bourgeoisie had liberated humanity from the bonds of feudalism and unleashed powers hitherto unseen. He predicted that the capitalist mode of production would lead to the growth of a working class, which would then overthrow these bourgeois masters in the advanced capitalist countries. This is not how it actually worked out in Europe, but the Soviets still believed in the theory, and in the primacy of class development and economic relations. You had to get through capitalism to get to socialism, their theory went.
Well before the Russian Revolution, some Marxist parties in Europe, such as the Social Democrats in Germany, rejected the revolutionary path and committed themselves to forwarding the interests of the working class within parliamentary electoral systems. Even among the explicitly pro-Soviet parties in the new Communist International, or “Comintern,” active from 1919 to 1943, applications of the official ideology varied, and the way that they actually acted was usually based on some combination of the possibilities offered by their local conditions, an interpretation of Marxist orthodoxy, and geopolitical concerns.24
The case of Mao Zedong in China is an important example. The Comintern provided training to both his Communist Party and the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, directing them to organize along Leninist lines, meaning that they would be strictly disciplined and governed by the principle of “democratic centralism.” The Chinese Communists were ordered by Moscow to work directly with the Nationalists in a broad “United Front,” a concept that the Comintern itself had developed.25 It was believed that because China was such an impoverished peasant society, the country was nowhere near the state of capitalist development that would make revolution possible.
The experiences of an older Communist Party inspired this approach. A Dutchman named Henk Sneevliet, the local Comintern boss, had helped found Asia’s first Communist Party outside the former Russian Empire—the Indonesian Communist Party—and thought the Chinese party could learn from the success that Indonesian Communists had working with the Islamic Union mass movement.26 Mao’s job was to support the “bourgeois” Nationalists, and play a secondary role in the construction of a capitalist nation. A loyal Communist, Mao obeyed. This did not work out so well for the Chinese Communists. In 1927, Chiang turned on them. Starting with a massacre in Shanghai, Nationalist troops killed more than one million people, taking aim at Communists, peasant leaders, and organizers, across the country in a wave of “White Terror” over the next few years.27 The Chinese Communists and the Nationalists teamed up again to fight off the occupying Japanese until the end of World War II, and afterward, Stalin ordered the Communists to stand down again.28
In Eastern Europe, Stalin took a very different approach, as he considered this area his rightful sphere of influence, because his troops had taken it from Hitler, and an important buffer against possible invasion from the West. After the announcement of the Truman Doctrine and the beginning of the Marshall Plan, Moscow engineered a communist coup in Czechoslovakia. The Western powers did not play fair in the territory their armies had occupied, either. After it became clear that so many Italians and French wanted to vote freely for Communist parties, the US intervened heavily in Western Europe to make sure that the leftists didn’t take over. In Paris, the government, which was heavily dependent on US financial aid, ousted all its Communist ministers in 1947.29 In Italy the US funneled millions of dollars to the Christian Democratic Party and spent millions more on anticommunist propaganda. Big stars like Frank Sinatra and Gary Cooper recorded spots for the US government’s Voice of America radio station. Washington organized a huge writing campaign from Italian Americans to friends and relatives back in the home country, with form letters including messages such as “A communist victory would ruin Italy. The United States would withdraw aid and a world war would probably result” and “If the forces of true democracy should lose in the Italian election, the American Government will not send any more money to Italy.”30 The Communists lost.
By the end of the 1940s all of the area that had been liberated by the Red Army consisted of one-party Communist states, and all of the area controlled by Western powers was capitalist with a pro-American orientation, regardless of what the people may have wanted in 1945.
After a famous Winston Churchill speech, many in the West began to say that Eastern European socialist states were behind an “Iron Curtain.” Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, whose party remained popular for decades, said that the United States was a nation led by ignorant “slaveholders” who now wanted to buy entire nations just as they had bought human beings.31 Stalin, as a Marxist-Leninist, certainly thought that communism would eventually win. The laws of history made that inevitable. But for that very reason—and because the Soviets had been so weakened by the war—he had no intention of invading Western Europe. He thought that the next world war would break out between the imperialist Western powers, as his own theories seemed to indicate.32
But in China, Mao decided to ignore Stalin’s directives this time, continuing to wage a civil war after the end of World War II. In 1949, he finally defeated the Nationalists, whose venality, brutality, and incompetence had long troubled their backers in Washington. Like Ho Chi Minh in August 1945, Mao had also been under the illusion that he could have good relations with the United States. He was wrong, of course.33 After his victory, the emergency of “Red China” led to violent recriminations back in the United States.
Global McCarthyism
McCarthyism is named after Senator Joseph McCarthy, who led a wild search for communists in the US government in the early 1950s, but it’s best understood as a process that started before that man famously began drunkenly berating people in front of the entire nation, and its consequences extended long after he was exposed as a liar.34 The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began its activities in 1938, and only finished in 1975. The famous public trials weren’t simply “witch hunts,” in which mobs went after entities that don’t exist; there really were communists in the United States. They were active in labor unions, Hollywood, and some parts of the government, and the Communist Party USA had attracted many black and Jewish members. They were never hugely popular in the 1930s, but what changed after World War II was that communists were no longer welcome at all.
McCarthyism was a top-down process, driven especially by the presidency and the FBI. In 1947, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been hugely influential in creating and disseminating the anticommunist consensus, addressed HUAC and gave voice to some of the fundamental assumptions of that ethos.35 He said that communists planned to organize a military revolt in the country, which would culminate in the extermination of the police forces and the seizure of all communications. He said:
One thing is certain. The American progress which all good citizens seek, such as old-age security, houses for veterans, child assistance, and a host of others, is being deployed as window dressing by the Communists to conceal their true aims and entrap gullible followers.… The numerical strength of the party’s enrolled membership is insignificant… for every party member there are ten others ready, willing, and able to do the party’s work.… There is no doubt as to where a real Communist’s
loyalty rests. Their allegiance is to Russia.36
Hoover had presented a logical death trap. If anyone accuses you of being communist, or communist-adjacent, no defense is possible. If you are simply promoting mild social reform, well, that is exactly what a communist would do, in order to conceal their true motives. If your numbers are insignificant, that is only further proof of your deviousness, as your comrades are all lurking in the shadows. And if there are a lot of you, or you’re openly, proudly communist, that’s just as bad.
As McCarthyism took off, anything smelling even remotely like communism was expelled from polite American society. A young actor named Ronald Reagan imposed a loyalty oath on all the members of the Screen Actors Guild, the powerful union he led at the time. At the levels of government that mattered, everyone who remained was a fanatical anticommunist—which meant that some of the smartest experts in the State Department, the US diplomatic service, were purged. Because of the “loss” of China to communism, longtime Asia specialists in particular were accused of harboring left-wing sympathies.37
As one Brazilian historian puts it, the USA had not invented the ideology, but in the years after World War II, the country was transformed into the global “fortress of anticommunism,” expending considerable resources on promoting the cause, and serving as a reference and source of legitimacy for like-minded movements around the world.38
By the end of the 1940s, the lines defining the First and Second World had become relatively stable. What was still in flux, however, was the future of the Third World.
The Jakarta Axiom
After the Truman Doctrine and the beginning of McCarthyism, there was no question that communists, and communist governments, were the enemy of Washington. No matter what they hoped for in 1945, Ho Chi Minh and Mao were not going to be welcomed onto the world stage. It was not so clear, on the other hand, what the men running the US government would do with the growing wave of radical Third World movements that were opposed to European imperialism, were not communist, but resisted forming an explicit alliance with Washington against Moscow. This was a very common phenomenon. Many leaders of Third World independence movements associated the United States with its Western European imperialist allies; others believed the Soviet Union was an important friend in the struggle against colonialism. Even if they did not want to be ruled by the Soviets, they wanted as many allies as they could get.
In 1948, the outcome of a small power struggle in the former Dutch East Indies seemed to offer a solution. On the island of Java, independence forces were battling an army that had arrived from the Netherlands in the attempt to reconquer its colonies in Southeast Asia. They had lost this vast archipelago to the Japanese during World War II, and refused to recognize the government set up by locals in 1945. During the war of independence, right-leaning republican forces clashed with communists within the revolutionary movement around the city of Madiun, East Java. The communists were defeated, with the support of independence leader Sukarno, and the head of the Indonesian Communist Party was killed in what became known as the Madiun Affair.39 The huge nation that Sukarno would go on to lead after the Dutch were finally expelled in 1949, now called Indonesia, was seen as willing enough to put down communist uprisings to be of long-term advantage of the United States.
Under Truman, the US foreign policy establishment saw Sukarno’s nascent Indonesia as the axiomatic case of a sufficiently anticommunist anticolonial movement, and so the name of its capital, Jakarta, came to signify this principle of tolerance for neutral Third World nations. As Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad put it, Washington adopted the “Jakarta Axiom.”40
This position was not very stable, nor were the real-world actions of the United States satisfactory to the leaders of the new Third World. A young congressman from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy had the curiosity, ambition, and money to travel the world trying to get an idea of their attitudes, and what he got was an earful.
Jack Kennedy, or JFK, was a rare bird among the US elite. He was a Catholic, and he was much more than the “First Irish Brahmin”—he was the first member of American royalty to descend from the masses of people who had come to the country as impoverished immigrants rather than as colonizers.41 His father, Joseph Kennedy, had fought prejudice and probability to build a huge fortune in finance and real estate, and by the time young Jack went off to fight in World War II, he had been on a grand tour of Europe, swung through most of South America, and graduated from Harvard.
Joe Kennedy understood one fundamental truth about political power in the United States. You can buy it. He spent a “staggering sum” on Jack’s 1946 congressional race, according to one of his cousins. He told two reporters: “Politics is like war. It takes three things to win. The first is money and the second is money and the third is money.” Joe’s assistant liked to hand out cash in public toilets, just to be on the safe side.42 Jack, who like his father was considered a playboy by those who knew him, won easily. But US politics can’t run on money alone—he did also need to maintain public support. The nature of his working-class Catholic constituency pushed him a bit to the “liberal” side of the aisle, however, into an alliance with those who had supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
But Jack certainly had no time for the reds. During his first campaign, he said, “The time has come when we must speak plainly on the great issue facing the world today. The issue is Soviet Russia.”43 He saw labor unions as self-serving and infiltrated by communists, and let their members know it in congressional hearings. And in 1954, when a special Senate committee recommended that Joseph McCarthy be condemned for breaking Senate rules, John F. Kennedy was the only Democrat not to vote against him.44 However, perhaps because he was so well traveled, or perhaps because he was Irish, and knew in some very small way what it felt like to come from a people who had been oppressed somewhere, JFK viewed the Third World differently from most of the Washington elites. While so many others saw any deviation from an explicit alliance with the US as communist subversion of the global order, JFK believed that emerging nations were insisting on their right to forge their own path, and that this was entirely understandable.
In 1951, he went on a trip to Morocco, Iran, Egypt, Indochina, Malaya, Burma, India, and Pakistan, and came to the conclusion that the United States had failed to understand the importance of “nationalistic passions… directed primarily against the Colonial policies of the West.”45
Later that year, he went on another one of his long jaunts, this time to Israel, Iran, Pakistan, Singapore, French Indochina, Korea, Japan, and Indonesia. He observed that the US “was definitely classed with the imperialist powers of Europe.” Washington desperately needed to align with the emerging nations, but that was difficult because Americans were “more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people.”46
Reflecting on the situation in Vietnam, he reported that the United States had “allied ourselves to the desperate effort of a French regime to hang on to the remnants of Empire.” He said, “If one thing was borne into me as a result of my experience in the Middle as well as the Far East, it is that Communism cannot be met effectively by merely the force of arms.”47
But it was in India that Jack and his brother Bobby really got a lecture from one of the world’s new class of leaders. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, like Gamal Abdel Nasser, who came to power in Egypt in 1952, favored the construction of a socialist society. Both these leaders rejected the Leninist model and wanted to forge their own path, but when push came to shove, they often preferred to align with the Soviets rather than with the Americans and their European allies. Even if he had known about the worst tragedies of the 1930s in the Soviet Union, it would be hard to blame Nehru for distrusting the Western powers. During World War II, British policies created a famine that took the lives of four million people.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill blamed the Indians for the famine his own government caused, saying it was their fault for �
��breeding like rabbits,” and asked why Gandhi—whom Churchill loathed—hadn’t died yet.48
When Jack and two younger siblings dined with Nehru in 1951, the Indian leader was imperious, acting bored and unimpressed, and only showed interest in their sister Pat, Bobby Kennedy reported. When JFK asked Nehru about Vietnam, the Indian leader dismissed the French war as an example of doomed colonialism, and said the US was pouring its aid money down a “bottomless hole.” He gently lectured the Kennedys, as if he were speaking to children, and Bobby wrote down in his notes, in an exasperated tone, that Nehru told them communism offered the people of the Third World “something to die for.” Bobby continued jotting down Nehru’s comments in his journal: “We [Americans] have only status quo to offer these people.”49
Smiling Jones and Wisner’s Weirdos
As the United States woke up to its position of unprecedented global power, there were a few ways its government could interact with the rest of the world. The president was in charge of the Department of War, or the Pentagon, which soon became the Department of Defense. There was the State Department, the US foreign ministry and diplomatic service, which had been in operation since 1789. But there was no dedicated spy service—there was no permanent institution engaged in gathering information abroad and licensed to carry out secret operations, covert action seeking to change the course of events around the world. The Americans did not have the centuries of experience running a global empire the British did, or even the experience of ongoing, self-defensive spycraft the Soviets inherited from the Russian Empire. But Washington created a new intelligence agency very quickly, using the country’s vast wealth to fund it generously and young men who cut their teeth abroad during World War II to staff it.
The Jakarta Method Page 3