From Mental Slavery to Brainwashing: Anti-Catholic Legacies in Anti-Communist Polemics
This chapter examines the constitutive role of nineteenth and early twentieth-century anti-Catholic polemics in shaping anti-Communist rhetoric during the early Cold War. It charts how crucial anti-Catholic tropes, according to which Catholicism denied free will, perpetuated psychological and spiritual enslavement, and perverted follower’s emotional lives, resurfaced as an anti-Communist tropes in 1940s and 1950s. Anti-communist writers, both consciously and unconsciously, drew on these anti-Catholic tropes to declare that Communism denied free thought through brainwashing, expectations of total obedience, and spiritual enslavement. These conceptual and rhetorical continuities, we argue, help explain why many thinkers conceived Communism as a threat not only to economic or political orders, but also to the psychological and emotional foundations of civilization itself.