Anti anti-communism

Academic Albert Szymanski drew a comparison between the treatment of anti-communist dissidents in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death and the treatment of dissidents in the United States during the period of McCarthyism, claiming that "on the whole, it appears that the level of repression in the Soviet Union in the 1955 to 1980 period was at approximately the same level as in the United States during the McCarthy years (1947–1956)."[4]

Academic Noam Chomsky noted double standards in his criticism of The Black Book of Communism. In outlining economist Amartya Sen's research on hunger that while India's democratic institutions prevented famines, its excess of mortality over Communist China, potentially attributable to the latter's more equal distribution of medical and other resources, was nonetheless close to four million per year for non-famine years.[5] Chomsky argued that if the methodology of the Black Book" was applied to India, then "the democratic capitalist 'experiment' has caused more deaths than in the entire history of [...] Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone."[6] In her 2012 book The Communist Horizon, political philosopher Jodi Dean argues that a double standard exists amongst all sides of the political spectrum, including conservatives, liberals and social democrats, in how communism and capitalism are perceived nearly two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Dean states that the worst excesses of capitalism are often minimized while communism is often equated only with the Soviet Union and experiments in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia are often ignored, with an emphasis placed on the Stalin era and its violent excesses including gulags, purges and famines and almost no consideration for the modernization of the economy, the successes of Soviet science (such as the Soviet space program) or the rise in the standard of living for the once predominantly agrarian society. The collapse of the Soviet Union is therefore seen as the proof that Communism can not work. This allows for all left-wing criticism of the excesses of neoliberal capitalism to be silenced, for the alternatives will supposedly inevitably result in economic inefficiency and violent authoritarianism.[7][8][3]

Other academics and journalists such as Kristen Ghodsee and Seumas Milne assert that in the post-Cold War era any narratives which include Communist states' achievements are often ignored while those which focus exclusively on the crimes of Joseph Stalin and other Communist party leaders are amplified. Both allege this is done in part to silence any criticism of global capitalism.[9][10][2] Political scientict Michael Parenti holds that Communist regimes, as flawed as they were, nevertheless played a role in "tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism and imperialism" and criticices left-wing anti-communists in particular for failing to understand that in the post-Cold War era Western business interests are "no longer restrained by a competing system" and are now "rolling back the many gains that working people in the West have won over the years." Parenti adds that "some of them still don't get it."[11]

In a critique of Stephen F. Cohen, Jonathan Chait used a fully hyphenated form of the term, calling Cohen "an old-school leftist who has carried on the mental habits of decades of anti-anti-communism seamlessly into a new career of anti-anti-Putinism".[12]

• McCarthyism