"The crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the specter of Communism"
About this Quote
Taylor lands a historian's slap: the West spent decades chasing a ghost with an even less substantial ghost. By calling the anti-Communist "crusade" more imaginary than Communism's own "specter", he flips Marx's famous phrase back on its Cold War heirs. The jab isn't that Soviet power was harmless, but that Western politics inflated it into a totalizing myth - a moral drama that could explain everything, justify anything, and require no self-scrutiny.
"Crusade" is the tell. It's not a policy; it's a ritual. It implies purity tests, heresy hunts, and a worldview where complexity counts as betrayal. Taylor, famously allergic to sanctimony, is pointing at the psychological and domestic uses of anti-Communism: disciplining labor movements, narrowing permissible debate, laundering old imperial instincts into a new ideological costume, and converting messy geopolitics into a simple battle of light versus dark. In that sense, the crusade is "imaginary" because it often fought an abstraction rather than specific actions - a floating signifier that could be attached to civil rights activists, welfare states, neutralist leaders, inconvenient academics.
Context matters: Taylor wrote in the long afterglow of McCarthyism, NATO consolidation, and recurrent war scares, when Communism functioned as both external enemy and internal explanation for social change. His intent is provocation with a ledger: he wants readers to notice how much of the Cold War was performed for Western audiences, how fear becomes a governing technology. The subtext is uncomfortable and very Taylor: the most consequential fantasies are the ones powerful states tell about themselves.
"Crusade" is the tell. It's not a policy; it's a ritual. It implies purity tests, heresy hunts, and a worldview where complexity counts as betrayal. Taylor, famously allergic to sanctimony, is pointing at the psychological and domestic uses of anti-Communism: disciplining labor movements, narrowing permissible debate, laundering old imperial instincts into a new ideological costume, and converting messy geopolitics into a simple battle of light versus dark. In that sense, the crusade is "imaginary" because it often fought an abstraction rather than specific actions - a floating signifier that could be attached to civil rights activists, welfare states, neutralist leaders, inconvenient academics.
Context matters: Taylor wrote in the long afterglow of McCarthyism, NATO consolidation, and recurrent war scares, when Communism functioned as both external enemy and internal explanation for social change. His intent is provocation with a ledger: he wants readers to notice how much of the Cold War was performed for Western audiences, how fear becomes a governing technology. The subtext is uncomfortable and very Taylor: the most consequential fantasies are the ones powerful states tell about themselves.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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