Communism and America Main Menu

Communism and America

26405
Introduction: Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, before the Cold War ended in 1991, there was a hysterical fear of communism in the United States. Joseph McCarthy, a senator in the 1950’s, fed the hysteria by accusing Americans of being communist agents. Americans feared, with good reason, that if they were suspected of being communists, their careers and lives could be ruined. Americans could see propaganda that suggested that anyone they knew could be a communist. The fear of a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union only helped to escalate the fears Americans had of communism. Public service videos were made to show what to do in the event of a nuclear explosion going off near them, as if any day a bombing would happen.
               The hysterical fear of communist insurgency in the United States was unfounded and resulted in the lives of Americans being ruined, and American and foreign lives being lost. There was never any evidence to back the claims of McCarthy or anyone else that America and the world could fall to communism. The general American public was anti-communist, and there was never any great plot to subvert the nation form within and turn it communist. The Domino effect turned out to carry no weight, as it turned out that a few countries converting to communism would not spread across the world like a virus. Americans could have disagreed with and resisted communism in their own country without mass hysteria or jumping into the Vietnam War. 

How to Spot a Communist