The American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reform.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Class was always the domestic issue during the Vietnam War, not communism.
There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era.
But among them now were a large number of Communists in positions of great power within the new union movement, some of them actually moving close to the center of power. This was the crack in the wall through which they entered. Their power was to grow and prosper.
It evolved from my experience in the fifties, growing up during the McCarthy era, and hearing a lot of assumptions that America was wonderful and Communism was terrible.
Poland in the 1990s saw a surge of unrestrained, American-style capitalism. With millions of Poles living in the U.S.A., the defeat of communism led many to aim for a lifestyle derivative of Chicago or Detroit.
Hungarian communists were the most talented. They convinced everybody that reforming the communist party was better than making a new party.
The Communists were interested in getting into key positions as union officers, statisticians, economists, etc., in order to utilize the apparatus of the unions to promote the cause of revolution.
Communists have always played an active role in the fight by colonial countries for their freedom, because the short-term objects of Communism would always correspond with the long-term objects of freedom movements.
Ladies and gentlemen, communism didn't fall. It was pushed.
Communism didn't work because people weren't ready for it, it was corrupt, and because it squelched individualism.
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