By Chris Trotter*

On March 10, 1948, Jan Masaryk, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia, was found dead under his bathroom window. His death was ruled a suicide, but very few Czechs believed the official story. Everyone knew that Masaryk, son of the country’s first president, Thomas Masaryk, had been a thorn in the side of Czechoslovakia’s communist-dominated government for months. As long as he remained in office, it was still possible for liberals and conservatives to believe that the democratic state over which his father had presided was still breathing. The murder of Jan Masaryk and the murder of democracy in Czechoslovakia took place at precisely the same time, at the hands of the same Soviet assassins.

Six months after Masaryk’s assassination, the Berlin Airlift was in full swing. Determined to drive the Western allies out of the Soviet zone of East Germany, Joseph Stalin had ordered the blocking of the city’s land corridors to the west. Without the food and fuel delivered to West Berlin by road and rail, the city would be forced to capitulate, and another thorn in the side of the new Soviet masters of Eastern Europe would be removed. What Stalin had not counted on was American air power. After nearly a year of resupplying the Berliners by American planes, the Soviets threw in the towel. West Berlin remained a free city.

These brief historical snapshots from the late 1940s reveal exactly why the governments of Western states, soon united under the umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), were increasingly alarmed by the behavior of their former wartime ally. Why, within the security services and throughout government departments in Western democracies, anti-Communist attitudes began to harden and serious questions began to be raised about the loyalty of individuals known to be sympathetic to the left in general and the Soviet Union in particular.

With the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949, and the subsequent revelation of the extent to which Soviet espionage had made this possible, Western suspicion of the left metastasized into political paranoia at full share. The years that followed, known as the McCarthy era (named after the senator from Wisconsin who took charge of Red Scare) were notorious for “witch hunts” that saw people fired, imprisoned and even executed for the “crime” of being a communist. Freedom of speech and freedom of association counted for little in the Cold War battle against the “global communist conspiracy”.

Seventy years later, the word “McCarthyism” is on everyone’s lips. Politicians and journalists point to the ongoing persecution of individuals whose ideas are not comfortable with the “powers that be” and attempt to construct an argument for equivalence.

It’s not that difficult. Again, people who voice unpopular views risk their jobs. Once again, lists of required beliefs are being developed to weed out politically unacceptable aspirants to government funding and/or government jobs. People who once spoke freely to mass audiences are “de-platforming” – lest their perverted ideas gain followers.

There is, however, a huge difference between the persecution of communists that took place in the decade following World War II and the attacks on those who express heterodox views in the early years of the 21st century.

The first and most obvious difference is that the Soviet Union was a brutal, totalitarian nuclear power whose leaders openly boasted that their Marxist-Leninist ideology would “bury” capitalism. The Soviets operated a global network of spies – some of whom, like Kim Philby, rose to the highest echelons of the Western security apparatus. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics thus constituted a real threat to the freedom and security of the capitalist West. While state authorities, encouraged by an aggressive media, may have caught up with far too many innocent citizens in their anti-Communist witch hunt, no one can honestly say that their fear and bigotry were without at least a rationale part.

Identifying the equivalent of the Soviet Union behind the persecution of today’s conservatives and liberals poses real difficulties for contemporary political analysts. What, exactly, is the source – or sources – of the fear and antagonism currently traversing the civil service, academia and mainstream news media? What reduces to a wary silence officials, professors and journalists hitherto talkative? What drives an entire government to embark on a quest to root out “hate speech” from all public discourse – even at the cost of matching the Bill of Rights Act?

There are those on the right who are adamant that what they call the “reawakened” are no more nor less than the children and grandchildren of the Marxists who started what they called “the long march across institutions” in the 1960s and 1970s, and who have now risen to positions of power and influence in public service, academia, and mainstream news media.

From these “commanding heights” of our society and culture, the right argues, these “woke commissioners” oversee the deliberate dismantling of our liberal-democratic capitalist institutions. Like a sinister specter, the communism that most people in the West thought was dead and buried rose from the grave to wreak terrible revenge.

A slightly less paranoid explanation identifies “Wokeism” as the ideological terminus of the so-called “new social movements” of the 1960s and 1970s: anti-racism, feminism, gay liberation and environmentalism. With the economic, social and political doctrines of actually existing socialism buried under the triumph of liberal capitalism in the 1990s, these new movements, often lumped together under the heading “identity politics,” became the only “left” game in town. .

Supported, as they are, by the center-left parties of the major Western powers: the United States Democratic Party; Labour, Social Democrat and Green parties from Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; identity politics can boast of having sponsors just as powerful as the Communist International (Comintern) of the 1920s and 1930s.

If it was Stalin’s murderous totalitarianism that terrified Western nations in the years following World War II, sparking the Cold War and causing them to lash out at anyone considered a “fellow traveler” of people who murdered Jan Masaryk and blockaded Berlin, then we can only assume that it was the West’s alleged racism, sexism, homophobia and hatred of the natural world that mobilized the Identity politicians behind the woke witch hunts.

Putting his own eccentric twist on this explanation, the eminent English historian, David Starkey, postulated “revivalism” as a 21st-century echo of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. He compares today’s social media to the advanced communication technology of the printing press in the days of Martin Luther. A technology that spread the revolutionary creed of Protestantism across Europe with unprecedented speed. Starkey’s entertaining “The Woke Reformations: Historical Parallels” is available on You Tube.

Whatever drives the persecution of old-school liberals and conservatives in the 21st century West: redux Marxism; identity policy; or the socially mediated quasi-religious fervor identified by Starkey; its proponents would be wise to question the common fate of history’s witch hunters. The intensification of ideological pressures is only bearable so long before ordinary men and women reaffirm the virtues of tolerance and common sense.

The Enlightenment stripped religious extremism of its political weight. McCarthy was censured by the US Senate. The Soviet Union has fallen. The Czechs have again become a free people. Wokeism, with all its militant intolerance of debate, will also fail.

As Jan Masaryk put it, paraphrasing the Czechoslovak state motto: Pravda vítězí, ale dá to fušku. – “Truth prevails, but it is drudgery.

* Chris Trotter has been a professional writer and commentator on New Zealand politics for over 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work can also be viewed at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.