Red-baiting
Red-baiting, also known as reductio ad Stalinum and red-tagging, is an intention to discredit the validity of a political opponent and the opponent's logical argument by accusing, denouncing, attacking, or persecuting the target individual or group as anarchist, communist, Marxist, socialist, Stalinist, or fellow travelers towards these ideologies. In the phrase, red refers to the color that traditionally symbolized left-wing politics worldwide since the 19th century, while baiting refers to persecution, torment, or harassment, as in baiting.
Communist and associates, or more broadly socialist, have been used as a pejorative epithet against a wide range of individuals, political movements, governments, public, and private institutions since the emergence of the communist movement and the wider socialist movement. In the 19th century, the ruling classes were afraid of socialism because it challenged their rule. Since then, socialism has faced opposition, which was often organized and violent. During the 20th century, as socialism became a mainstream movement and communism gained power through communist parties, their main opponents were the political right, alongside organized anti-communists and critics of socialism. The United States is a notable exception among the Western world in not having had a major socialist party, and for having engaged in red-baiting, resulting in two historic Red Scare periods during the 1920s and 1950s. Such usage as an insult has been used as a tactic by the Republican Party against Democratic Party candidates, and has continued into the 21st century, including by conflating Nazism with socialism.
In the United States, the term red-baiting dates to as far back as 1927. In 1928, blacklisting by the Daughters of the American Revolution was characterized as a "red-baiting relic". A term commonly used in the United States, red-baiting in American history is most famously associated with McCarthyism, which originated in the two historic Red Scare periods. While red-baiting does not have quite the same effect it previously did due to the Revolutions of 1989, some pundits posit that notable events in 21st-century American politics indicate a resurgence of red-baiting consistent with the Cold War era. Other have noted parallels between red-baiting and attacks on other contemporary left-wing dissenters, such as pro-Palestinian students.
Background
Both communist and socialist movements have faced hostility since their breakthrough in the 19th century. Friedrich Engels stated that in 1848, at the time when The Communist Manifesto was first published, socialism was respectable, while communism was not. The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered respectable socialists, while working-class movements that proclaimed the necessity of radical change denoted themselves communists; this latter branch of socialism produced the communist work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany. While democrat liberals looked to the Revolutions of 1848 as a democratic revolution, which in the long run ensured liberty, equality, and fraternity, communists denounced 1848 as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the legitimate demands of the proletariat.In countries such as 19th-century Germany and Italy, socialist parties have been banned, like with Otto von Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws. In the 1950s, West Germany and the United States banned the major communist party, the Communist Party of Germany and the Communist Party USA, respectively. With the expansion of liberal democracy and universal suffrage during the 20th century, socialism became a mainstream movement which expanded for most of the world, as center-left and left-wing socialist parties came to govern, become the main opposition party, or simply a commonality of the democratic process in most of the Western world; one major exception was the United States. In the Eastern world, communist parties came to power through revolution, civil war, coup d'état, and other means, coming to cover one-third of the world population by 1985, while in Western Europe communist parties were part of several post-war coalitions, before being ejected on the United States' orders, such as in Italy. Those parties in the West continued to be an important part of the multi-party democracy process; those in the East became an oppressive driving force for most of the 20th century due to the Soviet Union's role in World War II as part of the Allied powers against the fascist-led Axis powers, and later in the Cold War. In Western Europe Socialist parties greatly contributed to existing liberal democracy.
History
Peru
Since the 1930s, the political elite of Peru used fear mongering tactics to influence the public by targeting foreign communist movements according to historian Antonio Zapata of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, beginning with Joseph Stalin and later with Fidel Castro. Terruqueos began to appear during the 1980s and would occur throughout the internal conflict in Peru. The basis of the terruqueo began during the presidency of Fernando Belaúnde when Legislative Decree 46 broadly defined terrorism as "any form of glorification or defense of the political discourse of subversive organizations". Into the 1990s, authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori utilized terruqueos with the help of the National Intelligence Service to discredit those who opposed him, including dissenters from his own government, with political scientist Daniel Encinas saying that this would evolve into conservative politicians using the attack to target those opposed to Fujimori's neoliberal economic policies and that the right-wing used the terruqueo as a "strategy of manipulating the legacy of political violence". Ultimately, a culture of fear was created by Fujimori according to Jo-Marie Burt, with individuals fearing that they would be described as a terrorist.The terruqueo would then become so prominent that political discussions in Peru often devolved into the attacks, especially during elections. According to Fernando Velásquez Villalba, terruqueos are a latent phenomenon that appear more frequently in times of crisis. Terruqueos were intense against Pedro Castillo; he was portrayed as a "communist threat" that would bring "terrorism" and humanitarian disaster similar to Venezuela. When the 2022–2023 Peruvian political protests occurred, right-wing groups and the government of Dina Boluarte used the terruqueo to label protesters as terrorists, providing an excuse for authorities to use violence with impunity. Experts of the United Nations condemned its usage during the protests.
Philippines
In the Philippines, red-tagging poses threats to the lives or safety of its targets and impinges on the right to free expression and dissent. Red-tagged individuals also tend to become vulnerable to death threats and allegations of terrorism. The United Nations warns that red-tagging is a "criminalizing discourse" that undermines the value of the work of human rights defenders and places them at risk of violence and various forms of harassment.Communism has generally been viewed with disfavor and particular distrust by large sectors of Philippine society ever since the country gained independence from the United States on 4 July 1946 through the Treaty of Manila. Shared ideological preferences with the United States, resulting from more than four decades of benevolent assimilation and exacerbated by the onset of the Cold War, have resulted in some Filipinos being predisposed to suspicion of communist sympathies. This predisposition makes red-tagging an effective fear appeal tool used by players in the political arena, given that it authorizes law-enforcement agencies and the military to act on the taggings.
Red-tagging is almost never employed in foreign relations of the Philippines, including members of ruling communist parties, owing to the principle in international law of Westphalian sovereignty in another country's domestic affairs. This can be seen especially in the government's cordial relations with the Lao People's Revolutionary Party and the Communist Party of Vietnam, both of which are ruling parties of ASEAN member states. One of the notable exceptions to the nontagging of foreigners was United States citizen Brandon Lee, an ancestral-domain paralegal in the Cordillera Administrative Region. Lee was tagged as a communist and automatically an "enemy of the state" and was subsequently shot four times. United States citizen Liza Soberano and Australian citizen Catriona Gray have also since been red-tagged and publicly threatened, the former with assassination and the latter with rape.
Australia
In the early 1950s, Liberal Party leaders like Robert Menzies red-baited Labor politicians and described them as insufficiently tough on the People's Republic of China.United States
20th century
Red-baiting was employed in opposition to anarchists in the United States as early as the late 1870s when businessmen, religious leaders, politicians and editorial writers tried to rally poor and middle-class workers to oppose dissident railroad workers and again during the Haymarket affair in the mid-1880s. Red-baiting was well established in the United States during the decade before World War I. In the post-war period of 1919–1921, the United States government employed it as a central tactic in dealing with labor radicals, anarchists, communists, socialists, and foreign agents. These actions in reaction to the First Red Scare and the concurrent Red Terror served as part of the organizing principle shaping counter-revolutionary policies and serving to institutionalize anti-communism as a force in American politics.The period between the first and second Red Scares was relatively calm owing to the success of government anti-communism, the suppressive effects of New Deal policies on radical organized labor and the patriotism associated with total mobilization and war effort during World War II. Red-baiting re-emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s during the period known as the Second Red Scare due to mounting Cold War tensions and the spread of communism abroad. Senator Joseph McCarthy's controversial red-baiting of suspected communists and communist sympathizers in the United States Department of State and the creation of a Hollywood blacklist led to the term McCarthyism being coined to signify any type of reckless political persecution or witch-hunt.
The history of anti-communist red-baiting in general and McCarthyism in particular continues to be hotly debated and political divisions this controversy created continue to make themselves felt. Conservative critics contend that revelations such as the Venona project decryptions and the FBI Silvermaster File at least mute if not outright refute the charge that red-baiting in general was unjustified. Historian Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in The Washington Post that evidence revealed in the Venona project forced him to admit that McCarthy was "still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him" but has continued to believe that McCarthy did not identify the correct people. A similar view was expressed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who led the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy declassifying the Venona decryptions. Liberal scholars contend that even if someone could prove that the United States government was infiltrated by Soviet spies, McCarthy was censured by the Senate because he was in fact reckless and politically opportunistic, and his red-baiting ruined the lives of countless innocent people. In 1950, United States president Harry S. Truman had called McCarthy "the greatest asset the Kremlin has." Historian Ellen Schrecker wrote that "McCarthyism did more damage to the constitution than the American Communist Party ever did".