Talk:Red Scare

message: 4.34.166.104 removed the following text:
: It is interesting to note that, with the exception of North Korea, governments of communist states generally did not promote similar fears of possible attacks by the USA or other countries.
with the justfication that "Fidel Castro in Cuba, not just N. Korea, scares his people about the USA potentially invading. So has every communist country at some point."
I think this is not correct (although may be the sentence should be rephrased).  I grew up in the Soviet Union and the issue of US attack or invasion or anything was hardly ever brought up in school, on TV, in the papers. My father grew up in 1960s and the public was not told that an attack is immenent or anything. Yes, there definitely were some warnings, in a few decades in a country of several hundred million people there must have been some, but it was by no means widespread - it would have been very uncommon occurence. We were told that American economic system is bad (and now that our country is no longer communist, I am an adult and I can watch American films such as The Corporation I realise that we were told the truth all along :) ), but we were never told that we will be fighting America in a war. Just to make myself clear - it's obvious that the Party leaders and the military considered the threat of attack to be quite real, but that's their job and it's not really the subject of the article.
I haven't been to Cuba yet, but I've read enough Castro's speeches and nowhere does he appear scaring his compatriots. Yes, the threat of an American invasion is very real (because it happened many times in the past), unlike the threat of a Soviet invasion, but the public is not kept in constant fear by duck and cover exercises. Neither was the public in Iraq for that matter - until the attack was imminent, Iraqis were not constantly brainwashed that the US will attack (judging from what little material I found written by Iraqis in English online). So that's why I am reverting the change for now. Paranoid 23:46, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scares in communist countries 

message: I've grown up in Eastern Europe (in Hungary) and although I don't know about the propaganda mentioning any imminent attack by the "imperialists", but the fear of "counter-revolution", i.e. an uprising against the soviet-backed governments was real. 
In Hungary we had a special militia set up after the uprising in 1956 called the "Munkásőrség" (= Workers' Guard) created exactly for the purpose of suppressing any further insurgencies. 
There were uprisings in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Prague (1968) all suppressed by Soviet tanks.
In the 50s we had propaganda movies, where the bad guy was usually a saboteur, who tries to undermine  the building of communism. In some countries, they were real. (Bay of Pigs Invasion, Operation Mongoose).
I'm not saying, that we were scared with an American invasion at any point in time, but there was a sense of anxiety and preparation for war.
The governments had to justify the existence of huge conscripted armies (2 years conscription was not uncommon), the gigantic Soviet bases all over Eastern Europe, the big air-raid shelters I remember playing in as a kid. What would you need those for if the "imperialists" wouldn't want to attack? (Of course, all the communist countries were peaceful and would only act in self defence.)
Maybe that's why a lot of people find that specific sentence misleading. It suggests that Americans scared themselves with the communist threat, meanwhile the population of communist countries lived relaxed and laid back, knowing that the West would never attack us. This is just not entirely true.
Nyenyec 05:50, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fear of "counterrevolution" in Eastern Europe 

message: The short answer is yes, the Red Scare specifically targeted African American "radicals".  Kornweibel's books review BI's internal communications as their tactics evolve into the full blown Scare.  The book on 1919 - 21 is especially relevant.  The book on WWI shows the genesis of the mania that would culminate years later. 
The longer answer is that the repression worsened in the Red Scare, but wasn't new. The Bureau of Investigation I didn't just launch into the Red Scare without preparation.  The BI was set up in 1909 to investigate anti-trust cases.  In the run up to WWI, it began investigating people who opposed the war, or were insufficiently patriotic.  Targets of the investigation included African American socialists and unionists, but also religious pacifists, people who agitated against lynching or wanted to solve problems in the US before going to war.  After the war ended, the charges used to justify the investigations changed.  Dissidents were assumed to be influenced by Bolsheviks rather than Germans.  Internal memos quoted by Kornweibel show agents brushing off complaints about lynching.  Some African Americans did join the incipient Communist party.  See the entry on the African Blood Brotherhood for an example.  BI documents show they took this as proof of the conspiracies investigators had alleged all along.    The WWI book is pretty readable, if you can find it.  The Red Scare book is more academic. DJ Silverfish 22:08, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Racism in the Red Scare