Communism

Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization based on common ownership of the means of production. It is usually considered a branch of the broader socialist movement that draws on the various political and intellectual movements that trace their origins back to the work of Karl Marx.

Communism in The Gladiator
In one alternate visited by Crosstime Traffic, communism became the world's dominant ideology by the late 20th century after the Soviet Union won the Cold War. The ideology made concessions in each country. In the Italian People's Republic, for example, the Catholic Church was left largely unmolested, with the pope as spiritual leader, and the Lateran Treaty respected even though the Vatican was not a communist government.

Nonetheless, the governments of each state, as directed by the Soviet Union, kept a sharp eye trained on their people.

The Crosstime Traffic employee Eduardo Caruso considered this alternate to be only slightly better than ones in which Fascism had come to dominate the world.

Communism in In the Presence of Mine Enemies
Communism was vehemently opposed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. After the Axis won World War II, the Soviet Union was destroyed, and Communism was stamped out throughout the world.

Communism in "Uncle Alf"
After Germany defeated Russia following a brief war in 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II helped his cousin and former enemy Tsar Nicholas II put down a communist revolution in 1916 and keep his throne.

In 1929, Feldwebel Adolf Hitler of the German Feldgendarmerie told his niece Geli Raubal that the Tsar "was and is a woolly headed fool of a Russian" for not hanging more revolutionaries in 1905. That year, Hitler was sent to Lille, France to capture the communist agitator Jacques Doriot.

Communism in Worldwar
Communism was abhorrent to the Race on many levels. The Soviet Union, a not-empire that embraced communism, had been founded on the regicide of its former emperor, a notion that horrified the monarchist Lizards. In China, a country that did not easily accept Race rule, the most organized and effective resistence was offered by the Chinese Communist Party.

The Race wasn't the only one wary of the spread of Communism. A driving component of Nazi Germany's ideology was an anti-communism. And while the United States supported communist resistance in China, it did so somewhat grudgingly. The US had long had an anti-communist bent to its politics.

In fact, the brutal totalitarianism of the Soviet political system both before and after the war against the Race made communism repugnant to anti-totalitarians of every stripe.