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In 1952, Aurel Kolnai published The Errors of Anticommunism in Spanish. Notably, this was facilitated by a publishing house controlled by an insidious group, which at the time promoted a pseudo-traditionalism inspired by Menéndez Pelayo. Like all ideological distortions, this group sought to «redirect» Hispanic political tradition towards the murky waters of dynastic liberalism and, ultimately, conservatism.
These distortions, however, cannot be attributed to Kolnai himself. His work primarily focused on critiquing the errors of those labeled «anticommunists», who, whether through various forms of lukewarmness or through optimistic or pessimistic cowardice, consistently missed their mark. Leopoldo Eulogio Palacios pointed this out, especially regarding the inaccuracy of applying these judgments to the Iberian world, which had suffered the horrors of Marxism firsthand. On this topic, Professor José Miguel Gambra offers a valuable reference.
It is worth noting that the errors of anticommunism I intend to highlight do not directly overlap with those identified by Kolnai. Rather, they can be found in what may appear to be the opposite direction—the domain that fiercely advocates for an all-out battle against any form of communism. These errors, in my view, can be divided into theoretical and practical.
The theoretical errors stem from the incorrect assumption that definition can be derived from negation. Let me clarify. As Aristotle notes, negation is not definition. Many anticommunists define themselves only in terms of what they oppose, rather than what they affirm. This lack of positive affirmation is often exploited by non-communist ideologies, which fill the void left by theoretical anticommunists. As a result, revolutionary ideologies such as liberalism or fascism are often justified in the name of anticommunism. The fallacy of thinking that the negation of Marxism constitutes a political affirmation leads, ironically, to the opposite conclusion, where politics is reduced to a set of opinions as ideological and revolutionary as Marxism itself, with the only commonality being the rejection of Marxism. Some may argue that traditionalism fell into this error during the 1936 Crusade. While personal errors do not discredit the body of ideas, this objection is misplaced. It fails to recognize that traditionalism did not rise against Marxism as an exclusive evil. Rafael Gambra reminded us that the Carlists fiercely fought red totalitarianism, but only because they rightly recognized it as a reformulation of the quintessential revolutionary ideology that had already broken the old order, namely liberalism. The Carlists were anticommunists because they were first antiliberals, in opposition to the disruption that liberalism had caused—and continues to cause—within the natural order of things. This was not the case, for example, with conservative liberals, who were alarmed by the consistency with which the Soviets had applied their own premises, or with the Falangists, who did not oppose Marxism because it was socialist, but because it was internationalist.
On the practical side, the errors of anticommunism are equally evident. Today, we encounter a plethora of short-sighted readings of the current state of affairs, trapped in Manichean frameworks imported from the gringo world that reduce everything to a choice between Liberty and Marxism. This grotesque strategy, which emerged from U.S. foreign policy decades ago and was embraced uncritically by the Spanish right under General Franco, hardly requires further refutation. What is important to highlight is the vast prudential distance between this approach and the actual state of contemporary affairs. Don Álvaro d’Ors pointed out that the Cold War ended with a trade-off in which the Americans achieved economic hegemony in exchange for a certain level of acknowledgment of Marxist ideology.
This alliance, exported by international organizations under Washington’s leadership, has resulted in the complete hegemony of liberalism today. Its premises have been radicalized by socialist-leaning elements, with contemporary social democracy serving as a prime example. As such, today’s anticommunists rail against an impending Marxism, mistakenly identifying behaviors that originate from the most grotesque forms of Americanism, as Thomas Molnar had already denounced. Concepts like the «culture war» obscure the reality of the situation and provide anticommunists with fuel for their skirmishes against a straw man, designed only to reinforce hegemonic liberalism.
This paradox, as curious as it is consistent, is that Marxism—originally intended to destroy liberalism, or rather its bourgeois interpretation—has transformed the Soviet red beast into the guard dog of international plutocracy. And the anticommunists, once ineffectively fighting, are today not fighting at all.
Miguel Quesada, Círculo Cultural Francisco Elías de Tejada
Translated by the Gremio San Jerónimo
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