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1 Reds Not a single major account of post–World War II American life and culture omits discussion of the Red Scare—as the phenomenon, alleged to have become a major preoccupation of many citizens during the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s, is now familiarly termed. Accordingly, chroniclers of the era attempt often to depict a great atmospherics of fear permeating the culture from top to bottom, within and without, and everywhere in between. This supports a certain strain of ideological argument ,but thematically it never quite comes off. The effect is something vaguely humorous—like the panicked crowds of a city fleeing from space aliens or a movie monster, or of kids going fitfully to sleep at night while worrying about evil creatures under the bed. I suspect that, like me, many who came of age at the time read historical studies of it with a recurrent sense of disjunction between political accounts of the era and the recollection of how particular political moments—frequently spotlighted as nodes of scandal or crisis—were really experienced by most Americans. For a young person such as myself growing up in post-1945 America, the Reds were certainly represented as the enemy, and in substantial degree , we were encouraged to believe, the enemy was everywhere. Most visibly, the Reds were the Russians, or, more properly, the Soviets, bent on communist world domination. Forget about the brave World War II ally, fighting for Mother Russia against the Nazis in the great patriotic war; about Stalin, the Big Three partner, along with Roosevelt and Churchill, the little father of the Russians, Uncle Joe.The Soviets became 14 / Chapter 1 the relentless expansionists of the Communist bloc, the ruthless masters of the Iron Curtain countries, with their puppet governments. By 1949 they had the atomic bomb; as things quickly turned out, they had gained important parts of the technology through a system of spies within the United States capable of infiltrating the most secret of projects and security systems. After 1949 the Reds also included the Communist Chinese, the new masters, under Mao Tse-tung, of the great Asian mainland; concurrently, they also extended their reach into Korea and Indochina, with the first, a communist dictatorship under Kim Il-sung, openly attacking southward in 1950 and precipitating a three-year war against U.S.-led U.N. forces; and the second, a revolutionary regime under Ho Chi Minh, waging a successful guerilla conflict against the French and eventually the United States. A notable feature of the two “anticommunist,” “hot” wars Americans would actually fight, both in the latter precincts of Asia, would be that primary “communist” sponsorship could never be determined as predominantly Russian or Chinese. On the world landscape,and in American minds,such sudden postwar reconfigurings of friend versus enemy required a certain hasty, parallel logic of geopolitical substitution. The Nazis and the Japanese were still back there in memory, to be sure, but their imperialist designs and heinous deeds were quickly fading from real-life history—good enough still for villains in war movies, comic books, and other popular-culture celebrations of Allied heroism but no longer part of the official calculus . From 1945 on, as a strategic bulwark in Europe, we needed the Germans almost immediately. Documentation of the death camps was downplayed . Some small mention of state terror against civilians was rendered at the Nuremberg Trials, but the focus of the tribunal was on war crimes in the military sense. As symbolic figures, Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and, eventually, Goering did the Allies the favor of committing suicide ; by 1947 second-line members of the Nazi hierarchy were nearly all imprisoned or executed. “West” Germany and, to a similar degree, “free” Austria, both demilitarized and democratized under Allied occupation, became key strategic pieces in the puzzle of Western defense against the Soviets, interchangeably known as Russia and the Iron Curtain countries or the Communist bloc. They were also proclaimed as exemplary Reds / 15 new “free world” European nations, showpiece Western-style democracies and capitalist market economies. As against the menace in Europe and the Mediterranean of thriving Communist parties in the political mix of France, Italy, and Greece, the Germans in particular were quickly rehabilitated in the American mind into a nation of the defeated and misled, suffering, bombed-out veterans and their families, starving and dispossessed, propagandized and lied to, who had been ignorant of the enormity of the Nazis’ crimes. Repenting of their militarism, “West” Germans became...

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