THE first English language translation of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party opened with the following: “A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism. All the powers of the Past have joined in a holy crusade to lay this ghost to rest — the Pope and the Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police agents.”

So we see that anti-communism has a long and sordid history. Indeed, Yanis Varoufakis’s preface to a recent edition of the Communist Manifesto is an anti-communist and inaccurate diatribe, with phrases like “card-carrying Stalinists” and “now defunct Communist regimes.” He also claimed that the Communist Manifesto was “commissioned by English revolutionaries” which is blatantly untrue.

By contrast, AJP Taylor’s introduction to the 1967 Penguin edition states: “Anti-communism causes more trouble in the world than ever communism does or did.”