Tokyo
Tokyo Tokyo Metropolis, one of the 47 prefectures of Japan, has served as the Japanese capital since 1869. As of 2018, the Greater Tokyo Area ranked as the most populous metropolitan area in the world; the urban area houses the seat of the Emperor of Japan, of the Japanese government and of the National Diet. Tokyo forms part of the Kantō region on the southeastern side of Japan's main island and includes the Izu Islands and Ogasawara Islands. Tokyo was named Edo when Shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu made the city his headquarters in 1603, it became the capital after Emperor Meiji moved his seat to the city from Kyoto in 1868. Tokyo Metropolis formed in 1943 from the merger of the former Tokyo Prefecture and the city of Tokyo. Tokyo is referred to as a city but is known and governed as a "metropolitan prefecture", which differs from and combines elements of a city and a prefecture, a characteristic unique to Tokyo; the 23 Special Wards of Tokyo were Tokyo City. On July 1, 1943, it merged with Tokyo Prefecture and became Tokyo Metropolis with an additional 26 municipalities in the western part of the prefecture, the Izu islands and Ogasawara islands south of Tokyo.
The population of the special wards is over 9 million people, with the total population of Tokyo Metropolis exceeding 13.8 million. The prefecture is part of the world's most populous metropolitan area called the Greater Tokyo Area with over 38 million people and the world's largest urban agglomeration economy; as of 2011, Tokyo hosted 51 of the Fortune Global 500 companies, the highest number of any city in the world at that time. Tokyo ranked third in the International Financial Centres Development Index; the city is home to various television networks such as Fuji TV, Tokyo MX, TV Tokyo, TV Asahi, Nippon Television, NHK and the Tokyo Broadcasting System. Tokyo third in the Global Cities Index; the GaWC's 2018 inventory classified Tokyo as an alpha+ world city – and as of 2014 TripAdvisor's World City Survey ranked Tokyo first in its "Best overall experience" category. As of 2018 Tokyo ranked as the 2nd-most expensive city for expatriates, according to the Mercer consulting firm, and the world's 11th-most expensive city according to the Economist Intelligence Unit's cost-of-living survey.
In 2015, Tokyo was named the Most Liveable City in the world by the magazine Monocle. The Michelin Guide has awarded Tokyo by far the most Michelin stars of any city in the world. Tokyo was ranked first out of all sixty cities in the 2017 Safe Cities Index; the QS Best Student Cities ranked Tokyo as the 3rd-best city in the world to be a university student in 2016 and 2nd in 2018. Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics, the 1979 G-7 summit, the 1986 G-7 summit, the 1993 G-7 summit, will host the 2019 Rugby World Cup, the 2020 Summer Olympics and the 2020 Summer Paralympics. Tokyo was known as Edo, which means "estuary", its name was changed to Tokyo when it became the imperial capital with the arrival of Emperor Meiji in 1868, in line with the East Asian tradition of including the word capital in the name of the capital city. During the early Meiji period, the city was called "Tōkei", an alternative pronunciation for the same characters representing "Tokyo", making it a kanji homograph; some surviving official English documents use the spelling "Tokei".
The name Tokyo was first suggested in 1813 in the book Kondō Hisaku, written by Satō Nobuhiro. When Ōkubo Toshimichi proposed the renaming to the government during the Meiji Restoration, according to Oda Kanshi, he got the idea from that book. Tokyo was a small fishing village named Edo, in what was part of the old Musashi Province. Edo was first fortified in the late twelfth century. In 1457, Ōta Dōkan built Edo Castle. In 1590, Tokugawa Ieyasu was transferred from Mikawa Province to Kantō region; when he became shōgun in 1603, Edo became the center of his ruling. During the subsequent Edo period, Edo grew into one of the largest cities in the world with a population topping one million by the 18th century, but Edo was Tokugawa's home and was not capital of Japan. The Emperor himself lived in Kyoto from 794 to 1868 as capital of Japan. During the Edo era, the city enjoyed a prolonged period of peace known as the Pax Tokugawa, in the presence of such peace, Edo adopted a stringent policy of seclusion, which helped to perpetuate the lack of any serious military threat to the city.
The absence of war-inflicted devastation allowed Edo to devote the majority of its resources to rebuilding in the wake of the consistent fires and other devastating natural disasters that plagued the city. However, this prolonged period of seclusion came to an end with the arrival of American Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853. Commodore Perry forced the opening of the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate, leading to an increase in the demand for new foreign goods and subsequently a severe rise in inflation. Social unrest mounted in the wake of these higher prices and culminated in widespread rebellions and demonstrations in the form of the "smashing" of rice establishments. Meanwhile, supporters of the Meiji Emperor leveraged the disruption that t
Kokumin Dōmei
Kokumin Dōmei was a Japanese fascist political party in Japan active in the 1930s. In 1931, Home Minister Adachi Kenzō spoke out in support of the Imperial Japanese Army’s unauthorized incursions into Manchuria and against the diplomatic policies pursued by Kijūrō Shidehara, was expelled from the ranks of the Rikken Minseitō. Joining together with Nakano Seigō, Akira Kazami, others, Adachi formed the right-wing political organization Kokumin Dōmei in December 1932 The Kokumin Dōmei advocated a form of state socialism or corporatism with government control of strategic industries and financial institutions, the creation of a Japan-Manchukuo economic union; the new party consisted of defectors from the Minseitō, had an original strength of 32 seats in the Diet of Japan. In 1934, it demanded an inquiry into the Teijin Incident in an effort to bring down the cabinet of Prime Minister Saitō Makoto. However, in 1935, many members returned to the Minseitō fold, in 1936, Nakano left the party to form the Tōhōkai the following year, Kazami joining Fumimaro Konoe’s think tank, the Shōwa Kenkyūkai.
In the 1937 General Election, the party's strength fell from 32 seats to 11 seats. In June 1940, The Kokumin Dōmei was merged into the Imperial Rule Assistance Association as part of Hideki Tōjō's efforts to create a one-party state, thereafter ceased to exist. Mitchell, Richard H. Justice in Japan: The Notorious Teijin Scandal. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-2523-3. Sims, Richard. Japanese Political History Since the Meiji Renovation 1868-2000. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-06838-6
Right-wing politics
Right-wing politics hold that certain social orders and hierarchies are inevitable, normal, or desirable supporting this position on the basis of natural law, economics, or tradition. Hierarchy and inequality may be viewed as natural results of traditional social differences or the competition in market economies; the term right-wing can refer to "the conservative or reactionary section of a political party or system". The political terms "Left" and "Right" were first used during the French Revolution and referred to seating arrangements in the French parliament: those who sat to the right of the chair of the parliamentary president were broadly supportive of the institutions of the monarchist Old Regime; the original Right in France was formed as a reaction against the "Left" and comprised those politicians supporting hierarchy and clericalism. The use of the expression la droite became prominent in France after the restoration of the monarchy in 1815, when it was applied to the Ultra-royalists.
The people of English-speaking countries did not apply the terms "right" and "left" to their own politics until the 20th century. Although the right-wing originated with traditional conservatives and reactionaries, the term extreme right-wing has been applied to movements including fascism and racial supremacy. From the 1830s to the 1880s, there was a shift in the Western world of social class structure and the economy, moving away from nobility and aristocracy towards capitalism; this general economic shift toward capitalism affected centre-right movements such as the British Conservative Party, which responded by becoming supportive of capitalism. In the United States, the Right includes both social conservatives. In Europe, economic conservatives are considered liberal and the Right includes nationalists, nativist opposition to immigration, religious conservatives, a significant presence of right-wing movements with anti-capitalist sentiments including conservatives and fascists who opposed what they saw as the selfishness and excessive materialism inherent in contemporary capitalism.
The political term right-wing was first used during the French Revolution, when liberal deputies of the Third Estate sat to the left of the president's chair, a custom that began in the Estates General of 1789. The nobility, members of the Second Estate sat to the right. In the successive legislative assemblies, monarchists who supported the Old Regime were referred to as rightists because they sat on the right side. A major figure on the right was Joseph de Maistre, who argued for an authoritarian form of conservatism. Throughout the 19th century, the main line dividing Left and Right in France was between supporters of the republic and supporters of the monarchy. On the right, the Legitimists and Ultra-royalists held counter-revolutionary views, while the Orléanists hoped to create a constitutional monarchy under their preferred branch of the royal family, a brief reality after the 1830 July Revolution; the centre-right Gaullists in post-World War II France advocated considerable social spending on education and infrastructure development as well as extensive economic regulation, but limited the wealth redistribution measures characteristic of social democracy.
In British politics, the terms "right" and "left" came into common use for the first time in the late 1930s in debates over the Spanish Civil War. The Right has gone through five distinct historical stages: the reactionary right sought a return to aristocracy and established religion; the meaning of right-wing "varies across societies, historical epochs, political systems and ideologies". According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, in liberal democracies, the political right opposes socialism and social democracy. Right-wing parties include conservatives, Christian democrats, classical liberals, nationalists and on the far-right. Roger Eatwell and Neal O'Sullivan divide the right into five types: reactionary, radical and new. Chip Berlet argues that each of these "styles of thought" are "responses to the left", including liberalism and socialism, which have arisen since the 1789 French Revolution; the reactionary right looks toward the past and is "aristocratic and authoritarian".
The moderate right, typified by the writings of Edmund Burke, is tolerant of change, provided it is gradual and accepts some aspects of liberalism, including the rule of law and capitalism, although it sees radical laissez-faire and individualism as harmful to society. The moderate right promotes nationalism and social welfare policies. Radical right is a term developed after World War II to describe groups and ideologies such as McCarthyism, the John Birch Society and the Republikaner Party. Eatwell stresses that this use has "major typological problems" and that the term "has been applied to democratic developments"; the radical right includes various other subtypes. Eatwell argues that the extreme right' has four traits: "1) anti-democracy; the New Right consists of the liberal conservatives, who stress small government, free markets and individual initiative. Other authors make a distinction between the cent
Hideki Tojo
Hideki Tojo was a Japanese politician and general of the Imperial Japanese Army who concurrently served as the Imperial Rules Assistance Association's leader and 27th Prime Minister of Japan during much of World War II. He was among the most outspoken proponents for preventive war against the United States before the attack on Pearl Harbor and one of the leading perpetrators behind Japanese war crimes against prisoners of war and civilians during the Pacific conflict. After the end of the war, Tojo was arrested and sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, hanged on December 23, 1948. Hideki Tojo was born in the Kōjimachi district of Tokyo on December 30, 1884, as the third son of Hidenori Tojo, a lieutenant general in the Imperial Japanese Army. Under the bakufu, Japanese society was divided rigidly into four castes. After the Meiji Restoration, the caste system was abolished in 1871, but the former caste distinctions in many ways persisted afterwards, ensuring that those from the former samurai caste continued to enjoy their traditional prestige.
The Tojo family came from the samurai caste, though the Tojos were lowly warrior retainers for the great daimyōs that they had served for generations. Tojo's father was a samurai turned Army officer and his mother was the daughter of a Buddhist priest, making his family respectable, but poor. Hideki had an education typical of a Japanese youth in the Meiji era; the purpose of the Meiji educational system was to train the boys to be soldiers as adults, the message was relentlessly drilled into Japanese students that war was the most beautiful thing in the entire world, that the Emperor was a living god and that the greatest honor for a Japanese man was to die for the Emperor. Japanese girls were taught that the highest honor for a woman was to have as many sons as possible who could die for the Emperor in war; as a boy, Tojo was known for his stubbornness, lack of a sense of humor, for being an opinionated and combative youth fond of getting into fights with the other boys and for his tenacious way of pursuing what he wanted.
Japanese schools in the Meiji era were competitive, there was no tradition of sympathy for failure. Tojo was of average intelligence, but was known to compensate for his limited intelligence with a willingness to work hard. Tojo's boyhood hero was the 17th-century shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu who issued the injunction: "Avoid the things you like, turn your attention to unpleasant duties". Tojo liked to say: "I am just an ordinary man possessing no shining talents. Anything I have achieved I owe to my capacity for hard work and never giving up". In 1899, Hideki entered the Army Cadet School; when he graduated from the Japanese Military Academy in March 1905, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry of the IJA. In 1905, Tojo shared in the general outrage in Japan at the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the war with Russia, which the Japanese people saw as a betrayal as the war did not end with Japan annexing Siberia as popular opinion had demanded; the Treaty of Portsmouth was so unpopular that it set off anti-American riots known as the Hibiya incendiary incident as many Japanese were enraged at the way the Americans had cheated Japan as the Japanese gains in the treaty were far less than what public opinion had expected.
Few Japanese at the time had understood that the war with Russia had pushed their nation to the verge of bankruptcy, most people in Japan believed that the American president Theodore Roosevelt who had mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth had cheated Japan out of its rightful gains. Tojo's anger at the Treaty of Portsmouth left him with an abiding dislike of Americans. In 1909, Hideki married Katsuko Ito, with whom he had four daughters. In 1918–19, Tojo served in Siberia as part of the Japanese expeditionary force sent to intervene in the Russian Civil War. Tojo served as Japanese military attache to Germany between 1919-1922; as the Imperial Japanese Army had been trained by a German military mission in the 19th century, the Japanese Army was always strongly influenced by intellectual developments in the German Army, Tojo was no exception. In the 1920s, the German military favored preparing for the next war by creating a totalitarian Wehrstaat, an idea, taken up by the Japanese military as the "national defense state".
In 1922, on his way home to Japan, Tojo took a train ride across the United States, his first and only visit to America, which left him with the impression that the Americans were a materialistic "soft" people devoted only to making money and to hedonistic pursuits like sex and drinking. Tojo boasted that his only hobby was his work, he customarily brought home his paperwork to work late into the night, he refused to have any part in raising his children, which he viewed both as a distraction from his work and a woman's work, having his wife do all the work of taking care of his children. A stern, humorless man, Tojo was known for his brusque manner, his obsession with etiquette, for his coldness. Like all Japanese officers at the time, Tojo slapped the faces of the men under his command when giving orders, saying that face-slapping was a "means of training" men who came from families that were not part of the samurai caste, for whom bushido was not second nature. In 1924, Tojo was offended by the Immigration Control Act passed by the American Congress b
Republic of China (1912–1949)
The Republic of China controlled the Chinese mainland between 1912 and 1949. It was established in January 1912 after the Xinhai Revolution, which overthrew the Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China, its government moved to Taipei in December 1949 due to the Kuomintang's defeat in the Chinese Civil War. The Republic's first president, Sun Yat-sen, served only before handing over the position to Yuan Shikai, leader of the Beiyang Army, his party led by Song Jiaoren, won the parliamentary election held in December 1912. Song Jiaoren was assassinated shortly after and the Beiyang Army led by Yuan Shikai maintained full control of the Beiyang government. Between late 1915 and early 1916, Yuan Shikai tried to reinstate the monarchy before abdicating due to popular unrest. After Yuan Shikai's death in 1916, members of cliques in the Beiyang Army claimed their autonomy and clashed with each other. During this period, the authority of the Beiyang government was weakened by a restoration of the Qing dynasty.
In 1921, Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang established a rival government in Canton City, Canton Province, together with the fledgling Communist Party of China. The economy of North China, overtaxed to support warlord adventurism, collapsed between 1927 and 1928. General Chiang Kai-shek, who became KMT leader after Sun Yat-sen's death, started the Northern Expedition military campaign in 1926 to overthrow the Beiyang government, completed in 1928. In April 1927, Chiang established a nationalist government in Nanking, massacred communists in Shanghai, which forced the CPC into armed rebellion, marking the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. There were industrialization and modernization, but conflict between the Nationalist government in Nanking, the CPC, remnant warlords, the Empire of Japan. Nation-building took a backseat to the Second Sino-Japanese War when the Imperial Japanese Army launched an offensive against China in 1937 that turned into a full-scale invasion. After the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II in 1945, the Chinese Civil War resumed in 1946 between the KMT and CPC, with both sides receiving foreign assistance due to the Cold War from the USA and USSR, respectively.
During this period, the 1946 Constitution of the Republic of China replaced the 1928 Organic Law as the Republic's fundamental law. Near the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party established the People's Republic of China, overthrowing the nationalist government on the Chinese mainland; the Government of the Republic of China moved from Nanking to Taipei in 1949, controlling only the Taiwan area after 1949. The official name of the state in the mainland was the "Republic of China". Shortly after the ROC's establishment in 1912, while it was still located on the Chinese mainland, the government used the short form "China" to refer to itself, which derives from zhōng and guó, a term which developed under the Zhou dynasty in reference to its royal demesne, the name was applied to the area around Luoyi during the Eastern Zhou and to China's Central Plain before being used as an occasional synonym for the state during the Qing era; the ROC used alternate names throughout its existence were Republican China or Republican Era, as well as the Beiyang government, the Nationalist government.
A republic was formally established on 1 January 1912 following the Xinhai Revolution, which itself began with the Wuchang Uprising on 10 October 1911 overthrowing the Qing dynasty and ending over two thousand years of imperial rule in China. From its founding until 1949 it was based on mainland China. Central authority waxed and waned in response to warlordism, Japanese invasion, a full-scale civil war, with central authority strongest during the Nanjing Decade, when most of China came under the control of the Kuomintang under an authoritarian one-party military dictatorship. At the end of World War II in 1945, the Empire of Japan surrendered control of Taiwan and its island groups to the Allies, Taiwan was placed under the Republic of China's administrative control; the communist takeover of mainland China in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 left the ruling Kuomintang with control over only Taiwan, Kinmen and other minor islands. With the 1949 loss of mainland China in the civil war, the ROC government retreated to Taiwan and the KMT declared Taipei the provisional capital.
The Communist Party of China took over all of mainland China and founded the People's Republic of China in Beijing. In 1912, after over two thousand years of imperial rule, a republic was established to replace the monarchy; the Qing dynasty that preceded the republic experienced a century of instability throughout the 19th century, suffered from both internal rebellion and foreign imperialism. The ongoing instability led to the outburst of Boxer Rebellion in 1900, whose attacks on foreigners led to the invasion by the Eight Nation Alliance. China signed the Boxer Protocol and paid a large indemnity to the foreign powers: 450 million taels of fine silver. A program of institutional reform proved too late. Only the lack of an alternative regime prolonged its existence until 1912; the establishment of the Chinese Republic developed out of the Wuchang Uprising against the Qing government on 10 October 1911. That date is now celebrated annually as the ROC's national day known as the "Double Ten Day".
On 29 December 1911, Sun Yat-sen was elected president b
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political concept of a mode of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, exercises an high degree of control over public and private life. It is regarded as the most complete form of authoritarianism. Political power in totalitarian states has been held by rule by one leader which employ all-encompassing propaganda campaigns broadcast by state-controlled mass media. Totalitarian regimes are marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, restriction of speech, mass surveillance and widespread use of state terrorism. Historian Robert Conquest describes a "totalitarian" state as one recognizing no limits to its authority in any sphere of public or private life and which extends that authority to whatever length feasible; the concept was first developed in the 1920s by both Weimar jurist Carl Schmitt and, concurrently, by the Italian fascists. Italian fascist Benito Mussolini said "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
Schmitt used the term Totalstaat in his influential 1927 work on the legal basis of an all-powerful state, The Concept of the Political. The term gained prominence in Western anti-communist political discourse during the Cold War era as a tool to convert pre-war anti-fascism into postwar anti-communism. Totalitarian regimes are different from other authoritarian ones; the latter denotes a state in which the single power holder – an individual "dictator", a committee or a junta or an otherwise small group of political elite – monopolizes political power. " authoritarian state is only concerned with political power and as long as, not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty". Authoritarianism "does not attempt to change the world and human nature". In contrast, a totalitarian regime attempts to control all aspects of the social life, including the economy, art, private life and morals of citizens; some totalitarian governments may promote an elaborate ideology: "The proclaimed ideology penetrates into the deepest reaches of societal structure and the totalitarian government seeks to control the thoughts and actions of its citizens".
It mobilizes the whole population in pursuit of its goals. Carl Joachim Friedrich writes that "a totalist ideology, a party reinforced by a secret police, monopoly control of industrial mass society" are the three features of totalitarian regimes that distinguish them from other autocracies; the notion of totalitarianism as a "total" political power by the state was formulated in 1923 by Giovanni Amendola, who described Italian Fascism as a system fundamentally different from conventional dictatorships. The term was assigned a positive meaning in the writings of Giovanni Gentile, Italy’s most prominent philosopher and leading theorist of fascism, he used the term totalitario to refer to the structure and goals of the new state, which were to provide the "total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals". He described totalitarianism as a society in which the ideology of the state had influence, if not power, over most of its citizens. According to Benito Mussolini, this system politicizes everything spiritual and human: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
One of the first to use the term "totalitarianism" in the English language was the Austrian writer Franz Borkenau in his 1938 book The Communist International, in which he commented that it united the Soviet and German dictatorships more than it divided them. The label "totalitarian" was twice affixed to the Hitler regime during Winston Churchill's speech of October 5, 1938 before the House of Commons in opposition to the Munich Agreement, by which France and Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland. Churchill was a backbencher MP representing the Epping constituency. In a radio address two weeks Churchill again employed the term, this time applying the concept to "a Communist or a Nazi tyranny"; the leader of the historic Spanish reactionary conservative party called the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right declared his intention to "give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity" and went on to say: "Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state.
When the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it". George Orwell made frequent use of the word totalitarian and its cognates in multiple essays published in 1940, 1941 and 1942. In his essay Why I Write, he wrote: "The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood; every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it". During a 1945 lecture series entitled The Soviet Impact on the Western World, the pro-Soviet British historian E. H. Carr claimed: "The trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable" and that Marxism–Leninism was by far the most successful type of totalitarianism as proved by Soviet industrial growth and the Red Army's role in defeating Germany. Only the "blind and incurable" could ignore the trend towards totalitarianism, said Carr. In The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, Karl Popper articulated an influential critique of totalitarianism: in both works, he contrasted the "open society" of liberal democracy with totalitarianism and argued that the latter is grounded in the belief that history moves toward an immutable future in accordance with knowable laws.
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Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an intense rivalry. Anti-communism has been an element of movements holding many different political positions, including nationalist, social democratic, libertarian, fascist, capitalist and socialist viewpoints; the first organization dedicated to opposing communism was the Russian White movement, which fought in the Russian Civil War starting in 1918 against the established Communist government. The White movement was supported militarily by several allied foreign governments, which represented the first instance of anti-communism as a government policy; the Communist Red Army defeated the White movement and the Soviet Union was created in 1922. During the existence of the Soviet Union, anti-communism became an important feature of many different political movements and governments across the world.
In the United States, anti-communism came to prominence with the First Red Scare of 1919–1920. During the 1920s and 1930s, opposition to communism in Europe was promoted by conservatives, social democrats and fascists. Fascist governments rose to prominence as major opponents of communism in the 1930s and they founded the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936 as an anti-communist alliance. In Asia, the Empire of Japan and the Kuomintang were the leading anti-communist forces in this period. After World War II, fascism ceased to be a major political movement due to the defeat of the Axis powers; the victorious Allies were an international coalition led by the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, but after the war this alliance broke down into two opposing camps: a Communist one led by the Soviet Union and a capitalist one led by the United States. The rivalry between the two sides came to be known as the Cold War and during this period the United States government played a leading role in supporting global anti-communism as part of its containment policy.
There were numerous military conflicts between Communists and anti-Communists in various parts of the world, including the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Soviet–Afghan War. NATO was founded as an anti-communist military alliance in 1949 and continued throughout the Cold War. With the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of the world's Communist governments were overthrown and the Cold War ended. Anti-communism remains an important intellectual element of many contemporary political movements and organized anti-communism is a factor in the domestic opposition found to varying degrees within the People's Republic of China and other countries governed by Communist parties. Since the split of the Communist parties from the socialist Second International to form the Communist Third International, social democrats have been critical of Communism for its anti-democratic nature. Examples of left-wing critics of Communist states and parties are such as Friedrich Ebert, Boris Souveraine, Bayard Rustin, Irving Howe and Max Shachtman.
The American Federation of Labor has always been anti-communist. The more leftist Congress of Industrial Organizations purged its Communists in 1947 and has been staunchly anti-communist since. In Britain, the Labour Party strenuously resisted Communist efforts to infiltrate its ranks and take control of locals in the 1930s; the Labour Party became anti-communist and Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee was a staunch supporter of NATO. Although most anarchists describe themselves as communists, most anarchists criticize authoritarian Communist parties and states. Many argue that Marxist concepts such as dictatorship of the proletariat and state ownership of the means of production are anathema to anarchism; some anarchists criticize communism from an individualist point of view. Anarchists participated in and rejoiced over the 1917 February Revolution as an example of workers taking power for themselves. However, after the October Revolution it became evident that the Bolsheviks and the anarchists had different ideas.
Anarchist Emma Goldman, deported from the United States to Russia in 1919, was enthusiastic about the revolution, but was left sorely disappointed and began to write her book My Disillusionment in Russia. Anarchist Peter Kropotkin proffered trenchant criticism of the emergent Bolshevik bureaucracy in letters to Vladimir Lenin, noting in 1920 that " is positively harmful for the building of a new socialist system. What is needed is local construction by local forces. Russia has become a Soviet Republic only in name". Many anarchists fought against Russian and Greek Communists—many were killed by them, such as Lev Chernyi, Camillo Berneri and Konstantinos Speras. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels outline some provisional short-term measures that could be steps towards communism, they note: "These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. In most advanced countries, will be pretty applicable". Ludwig von Mises described this as a "10-point plan" for the redistribution of land and production and argues that the initial and ongoing forms of redistribution constitute direct coercion.
Neither Marx's 10-point plan nor the rest of the manifesto say anything about who has the right to carry out the plan. Milton Friedman argued that the absence of voluntary economic activity makes it too easy for repressive political leaders to grant themselves coercive powers. Friedman's view was shared by Friedrich
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