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Anti anti-communism is opposition to anti-communism as applied in the Cold War. The term was first coined in 1984 by Clifford Geertz and was meant to show that it was possible to criticize anti-communism, particularly its excesses like McCarthism, without being a communist. For example, there were both liberal and conservative criticism of Cold War era anti-communism in countries like the United States.
In the post-Cold War era, the term came to include the analysis of scholars and journalists who argue that anti-communist narratives had exaggerated the repression and crimes of Communist states, that the criticism of Communist party rule should not be applied to communism as a whole or to other left-wing politics in order to discredit them and their criticism of capitalism (particularly neoliberal capitalism), and that the victims of Communism narrative (the body count of the deaths caused, directly or indirectly, by Communist governments) popularized by The Black Book of Communism has a double standard in that it could be equally applied to capitalism or to other systems and ideologies to reach the same if not bigger number of victims, and that in general there is a double standard in memory politics between the excesses of capitalism and those of Communist states.
Critics contend that anti anti-communism is an attempt to downplay Soviet espionage and the threat posed by communism, and that it is a form of whataboutism. Supporters respond that they are not downplaying the excesses and crimes of Communist states or rehabilitating real socialism but are trying to contextualize them within a comparative analysis of double standards.