TraductionAmerican and European anti-communist crusade in the interwar years 1918-1939
the formative period of American and European anti-communist crusade began not in the aftermath of the Second World War, but in the first three decades of Bolshevik power. American and European anti-Communist crusade abided essentially unchanged into the Cold War era. As showed by Denan Frank Fleming in his massive two volumes on the Cold War and its origins, the s called Cold War has rooted in the Bolchevik Red Revolution of 1917. Frances Stonor Saunders in his seminal work on the CIA and the cultural cold war, depicts the strategy of the CIA which, through myriad of cultural networks and especially through its Congress for Cultural Freddom run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 to 1967, succeeded by gathering under the label of anticommunism respectively, liberals, conservatives and an anti-communist left in Europe especially where there were strong communist parties like in France and Italy.
The idea of containment of communism do not date from the Truman doctrine but had been really implemented by the victors of the First World War through the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and through the creation out of nothing of proxy states aiming at playing the role of what we called the Cordon sanitaire. This same idea of containment of communism had been also reaffirmed in 1921 in the Colby Note implemented to an extent, and coupled with trade, mutual engagement and collectivist social reform at home and through international agencies such as the ILO. This idea survived unchanged into the Cold War era. With the rise of the Soviet Union as great power in the aftermath of the Second World War, American and European had been stiffened breaking with the a soft” containment existent in the interwar years had been accused to be accomplice with the advance of communism and not its containment.
