“You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China. Right? They are motivated. They're arrogant. They're on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian West is on the retreat.”

—Former White House chief strategist and white nationalist Steve Bannon (Source)

Whether they're stealing our elections, stealing our jobs, stealing our personal data, or even starting global pandemics, these days it seems like the “CCP” is lurking around every corner, plotting to destroy us… but are they?

Although anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about “Bolshevik Jews” are typically recognized for being the racist Nazi propaganda that they actually are, the equally insidious Sinophobic scaremongering about “Chinese Communists” is generally seen as permissible in modern Western Capitalist societies, both due to it typically being far more subtle in nature and also due to the fact that it can generally be rationalized by simply asserting that the PRC (People's Republic of China) somehow poses a threat to the United States, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

This blog will explore the links between this third Sinophobic Red Scare and historical and present day rightwing extremism, racism, and colonialism, as well as debunking many of the lies frequently repeated in Western mainstream media about the PRC and the CPC (Communist Party of China) that help to fuel it.

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1. Nazism and Anti-Communism: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Communism was antithetical to Nazism because communism prioritized class above nation and race. … As soon as the Nazis rose to power, they began targeting communists, both inside and outside Germany. In 1933, the first concentration camp opened at Dachau to hold political prisoners. The first prisoners were all communists. … As early as 1933—before the Nazi regime had made any significant moves against Jews or the disabled—German Communists were detained in mass arrests and tortured. Once the war began, the Commissar Order demonstrated the depth of Nazi fear and hatred of communism. Issued in June 1941, the Commissar Order directed German soldiers to “shoot on principle” all Soviet commissars (Soviet Communist Party officials) and POWs, in violation of international law.

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Throughout the 20th century, Fascists and white supremacists were always at the forefront of anti-Communist movements all over the world, just as Communists and Socialists were always at the forefront of anti-Fascist and anti-colonialist movements worldwide.

Here in the US, we can see this same pattern during both the first and second Red Scares. As early as the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was actively going after suspected Communists, and the infamous anti-Communist senator Joe McCarthy was also a Hitler fanboy and an anti-Semite.

The 1920s saw a resurgence of Klan membership culminating in a membership peak of an estimated 4 million Americans. In 1930, a member of the Alabama KKK named John G. Murphy testified to the House Special Committee to Investigate Communist Activities that the Klan worked with the Birmingham police and the Federal Department of Justice by surveilling communists. According to Murphy, Klansmen would monitor meetings and report them to the local police, “who sent several men there” to arrest attendees.

In 1949, Paul Robeson and other musicians put on a concert in Peekskill, NY, which was attacked by a crowd of fascist thugs shouting “We’re Hitler’s boys” and “Go back to Russia, n****r.” The police allowed the mob to attack the progressives and send 140 to the hospital — Robeson claimed “perhaps no single event in the postwar anti-fascist struggle has had the same impact and importance as the incident of Peekskill.”

Gov. Dewey ordered an investigation, but put it in the hands of Fanelli, the man he had charged with the responsibility of seeing that what happened didn’t happen. Fanelli presented his information to a county grand jury. Its report absolved the police from blame in the first riot, ignored concert-goers’ charges that police stood by or even joined in the second riot, and devoted a great deal of space to pointing out the dangers of communism in Westchester. The concert organizers had provoked the riot for propaganda purposes, according to the report.

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During the 1930s, particularly after James A. Colescott of Indiana took over as imperial wizard, opposition to Communism became another primary aim of the Klan.

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For years, friends recounted how [Sen. Joe] McCarthy would pull out his copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, saying, “That’s the way to do it.” But, they were quick to add, that was just Joe being provocative. Now, the Malmedy hearings suggested a deeper-seated anti-Semitism. Why else would this one senator among 96 crusade to save the worst of Hitler’s shock troopers? Why single out Jewish investigators who, McCarthy claimed during the hearings, “intensely hate the German people as a race” and had formed what amounted to a “vengeance team?”

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As we can see here, the history of American anti-Communism and the history of American Nazism are one and the same, just as they are in eastern Europe, Latin America, Japan, and literally every other country and region of the world in which anti-Communist ideology establishes a foothold, and the present day demonization of the CPC here in the US and the collective West more broadly is merely the latest iteration of the same Fascist red scare propaganda of the 1920s.

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2. Painting the Yellow Peril Red: the Racist Origins of the Third Red Scare

The United States and China fought a bloody but undeclared Korean War in 1950-1953. Over 36,000 American soldiers were killed, most of them in fighting the Chinese inside Korea. Anti-Chinese sentiment escalated, with increased popular fear of communist espionage because of the Chinese Civil War and China's involvement in the Korean War. During the era, suspected Communists were imprisoned by the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousands of them lost their jobs. Many of those who were imprisoned, lost their jobs or were questioned by committees, had a real past or present connection of some kind with the Communist Party. However, for the vast majority of them, their potential to do harm to the nation and the nature of their communist affiliations were both tenuous. Among these victims were Chinese Americans, who are often viewed with suspicion of being affiliated with the [CPC].

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Although the WWII-era internment of Japanese Americans has received plenty of media coverage in recent years following Donald Trump's xenophobic travel ban during his first term in office, the persecution of Chinese Americans during the Second Red Scare has received far less media attention, despite the fact that the same Sinophobic racism and anti-Communist hysteria that were responsible for it are still present to this day.

The fact of the matter is that there is a long history of Sinophobic racism here in the US that predates even the first Red Scare of the 1920s, as well as a long history of us committing atrocites against the people of East Asia, which (following WWII) particularly took the form of ruthless wars of aggression against East Asian nations who were freeing themselves from the yoke of Western colonialism and neocolonialism through Communist revolutions.

The Vietnam War was a war like no other in terms of brutality, hatred, and utter destruction. Both the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and their countryside guerrilla allies, the National Liberation Front (NLF) more commonly known as the Viet-Cong (VC) as well as the Americans and their South Vietnamese counterparts showed little to no mercy to each other as well as the millions of civilians caught between them.

America would bring to bear the infinite firepower of its arsenals and drop nearly 3.5x more ordnance on the hostile North and friendly South than all explosive ordnance detonated during the Second World War by all nations combined. In the Quang Tri province alone, it was estimated 99% of all infrastructure was completely destroyed by American B-52 raids.

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That is an excerpt taken from an excellent blog written by my good friend MrPwong right here on Paint, and I strongly encourage anyone here interested in learning more about the evils that were committed against the people of Vietnam during the Vietnam war to read it.

Anyway, we've already gone to war against both Korea and Vietnam—both East Asian Communist nations just like China is—and so the Chinese have every right to fear American aggression in the Asia-Pacific region. Meanwhile the PRC has never bullied or oppressed other countries the way that we here in the US routinely do to this day, nor have they ever committed the same sort of heinous war crimes that we committed against them and their Korean allies during the (technically still ongoing) Korean war.

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3. Make America Hate Again: Chinese Invasions, Chinese Election Theft, and Other Racist Fairytales

"There are certain Chinese coming in that are really disturbing," Gatestone Institute senior fellow Gordon Chang said on "Mornings with Maria" Monday. "Packs of Chinese males of military age, unattached to family groups pretending not to speak English. These are probably saboteurs who are coming in on the first day of war with Asia."

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Ever since the historic election victory of former US president Barack Obama in 2008, there has been a steady increase in racist red scare propaganda here in the US. And given that the PRC is the only remaining Communist superpower in the world, it should surprise nobody that this racism would shift in a Sinophobic direction over time (like in the Fox Business article that I quoted above), as the Chinese bogeyman succesfully replaces the Soviet bogeyman of the 20th century as the #1 threat to our “rules-based international order”.

Such propaganda is (just as in years past) predominantly coming from the far right here, leading to ridiculous Sinophobic conspiracy theories such as the aforementioned Chinese invasion hoax and the Chinese election theft hoax, and it is also consistently weaponized by Republican politicians and rightwing media outlets against their fellow rightwing authoritarians in the Democratic Party here, as can be seen in the ridiculous Red Scare nicknames “Beijing Biden” and “Comrade Kamala”.

The fact of the matter is that Communist is a dirty word here in the US, and it has been consistently ever since the first Red Scare of the 1920s. Although anti-Semitism and Russophobia certainly still have their place in rightwing identity politics, the former now mostly takes the form of Islamophobia due to the rise of Zio-Nazism in the West, while the latter has declined due to the obvious fact that Russia is no longer a Communist country.

For his part, current US president Donald Trump is personally guilty of both stoking Sinophobic hatred and using Red Scare tactics against his political opponents, but given that even “Beijing Biden” was willing to call the president of another nuclear-armed superpower a “dictator”, it is quite obvious that the Third Red Scare—and the existential threat that it poses to us all should it lead us into yet another anti-Communist war of aggression in East Asia—is much bigger than just one man or one political party here, it is systemic.

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4. Decolonization, Diplomacy, and Socialist Democracy: the True Legacy of the CPC

“Every Communist working in the mass movements should be a friend of the masses and not a boss over them, an indefatigable teacher and not a bureaucratic politician.”

—Chairman Mao Zedong (Source)

While the US has a long and bloody history of genocide, slavery, torture, and constant war, the People's Republic of China does not.