Calling progressives Communists and Marxists started with Hitler. Even after the war it was carried on by Fascists. From Wikipedia:
Origins
The phrase “cultural Marxism” to mean a cultural attack from the left aimed at destroying society and installing Marxism/Bolshevism can be traced back to the 1930s, appearing in the 1938 July-September volume of “British Union Quarterly”, the journal of The British Union of Fascists.[11][12] The short essay claims the source of cultural Marxism is the “deracinated” nature of “city-dwelling”, and the “indiscriminate toleration-psychosis of liberalism, inherent in Social-Democracy”.[11][13]
It’s not pointed out enough that Conservatism is Cultural Fascism.
So long as there have been communists there’s been people accusing everyone to their left of being communists.
Wikipedia describes the first Red Scare as happening in 1917, after the Soviet revolution and WWI. But you can also look at labor movements before that. For example, in the Haymarket Affair in 1886, someone in a crowd threw a bomb at a police officer during a protest, which has been speculated to have been a plant. The point was to smear the whole labor movement as anarchists and communists, as violent radicals, even though many of them were not.
But we can go even further back, in 1848, the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto are:
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Karl Marx himself is already talking about how every center-left opposition party is accused of being communist, and about how those same center-left parties will hurl the same accusations at parties to their left, and even against parties to their right (“reactionary adversaries”).
Yes, the Nazis branded progressives as communists, and the Nazis did come up with things like “Cultural Marxism,” but they were hardly the first ones in history to do it.
Calling progressives Communists and Marxists started with Hitler. Even after the war it was carried on by Fascists. From Wikipedia:
It’s not pointed out enough that Conservatism is Cultural Fascism.
There were absolutely red scares before Hitler.
Say more.
So long as there have been communists there’s been people accusing everyone to their left of being communists.
Wikipedia describes the first Red Scare as happening in 1917, after the Soviet revolution and WWI. But you can also look at labor movements before that. For example, in the Haymarket Affair in 1886, someone in a crowd threw a bomb at a police officer during a protest, which has been speculated to have been a plant. The point was to smear the whole labor movement as anarchists and communists, as violent radicals, even though many of them were not.
But we can go even further back, in 1848, the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto are:
Karl Marx himself is already talking about how every center-left opposition party is accused of being communist, and about how those same center-left parties will hurl the same accusations at parties to their left, and even against parties to their right (“reactionary adversaries”).
Yes, the Nazis branded progressives as communists, and the Nazis did come up with things like “Cultural Marxism,” but they were hardly the first ones in history to do it.