http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RedScare

Charles Stanforth, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull "I hardly recognize this country anymore. The government's got us seeing Communists in our soup!"

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The communist menace. The Hammer and Sickle. Formerly a common villain source for Big Bad or henchmen villains in Spy Fiction, it's now a Discredited Trope since the end of the Cold War, although an even more Eastern revival of sorts is possible (see below). Instead, rogue former Soviet scientists tend to be in vogue in the role of the Mad Scientist who works for the Big Bad, as well as The Mafiya.

The Red Scare allows any of the presumably First World heroes to suddenly have counterparts in the (Communist) Second World or (non-aligned) Third World. The Red Scare can produce all manner of reasonably honorable characters that are nevertheless rivals of the heroes or antagonists simply because of geopolitics. Likewise, the Red Scare can include elements that are meant to invoke the fear of the Cold War as well. A General Ripper character is often seen in this situation, usually on the American side but occasionally amongst the Soviets too.

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Expect the technically inaccurate descriptor "Russians" to be used a lot. While much of the Soviet leadership was indeed Russian, some weren't, most particularly Josef Stalin, who was Georgian (and, no, we don't mean like Jimmy Carter); at the same time, some Russians (most notably the White émigrés) were actively ANTI-communist and aligned with the West in the Cold War. The Red Scare overlaps with Dirty Communists. Red Scare focuses on the overarching effect of the Cold War while Dirty Communists are merely horrible people that serve the Soviet State, but both are essentially tropes governed by propaganda against an ideology without properly dealing with what that ideology actually is, or what actual policies those governments have.

The Red Scare is different from works genuinely critical of the Soviet governments and specific aspects of the ideology. It only qualifies if it meant to invoke Cold War tensions and feelings against a "foreign" power, whether it's Russian, Vietnamese, Cuban, African, or North Korean communists. Communist China should also qualify, but since it became an American trading partner, this trope is far less in play, especially since China introduced market reforms and liberalism, and these days is usurping the place formerly held by Japan as a rising Asian superpower (see also Yellow Peril and China Takes Over the World).

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See also Dirty Communists. Brown Scare is an equivalent term for irrational fear of fascism or right-wing extremists, though less frequently-used, and far more rarely represented.

Subtropes:

Contrast Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell.

Examples

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Comicbooks

Films — Live-Action

Literature

Mocked in the John Wyndham Cosy Catastrophe novel The Kraken Wakes with the minor character of Tuny; she continues to insist the Russians are behind the book's ever-escalating attacks on humanity from the depths of the sea, when it's soon made clear they couldn't possibly be doing it.

In the Modesty Blaise novel The Night of Morningstar, published in 1982, the villains' plan turns out to be masterminded by a high-ranking Russian intelligence officer, with the hidden goal of easing the way for the USSR to annex Romania and Yugoslavia. He predicts that with him masterminding things the USSR will have Western Europe, including Britain, sewn up within a decade.

In Shanghai Girls, which partially takes place in The '50s,the Louie family is investigated for being Communist sympathizers. This happens because they are Chinese immigrants (only Pearl's daughter Joy was born in America) and because Joy is a member of a Communist organization at her college.

The Astounding, the Amazing and the Unknown by Paul Malmont has several sci-fi writers during World War II investigating Weird Science left behind by a deceased Nikola Tesla. At the same time the writers are under investigation for being members of a Communist spy ring because one of them wrote a pulp magazine story predicting the use of the atomic bomb (he got the idea from scientific journals). Two agents try to question L. Ron Hubbard on his connection with "known communists" Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel focuses on a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Jewish immigrant couple accused of espionage, and their children growing up in the shadow of their deaths. Besides its fictionalized depiction of the Rosenberg trial, the novel's also notable for depicting the 1949 Peekskill Riot , where right-wing vigilantes attacked a concert held by Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger and other progressive activists.

, where right-wing vigilantes attacked a concert held by Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger and other progressive activists. The Rosenbergs also appear in Julian Cantor's The Hours Count, about a Jewish woman who befriends Ethel Rosenberg and attempts to prove her innocence.

Live-Action TV

Music

Satirized by Bob Dylan in "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues", in which the POV character buys a little too much into the Red Scare:

Lincoln,

To my knowledge theres just one man

Thats really a true American:

I know for a fact he hates Commies cus he picketed the movie Now Eisenhower , hes a Russian spy Jefferson and that Roosevelt guyTo my knowledge theres just one manThats really a true American: George Lincoln Rockwell I know for a fact he hates Commies cus he picketed the movie Exodus

The Chad Mitchell Trio song "John Birch Society" satirizes the titular group, a fervently anti-Communist organization that finds allegedly subversive elements everywhere.

There's no one left but thee and we...and we're not sure of thee. The CIA 's subversive! And so's the FCC!There's no one left but thee and we...and we're not sure of thee.

Professional Wrestling

Tabletop Games

Theatre

The Crucible famously was written as an analogy for 1950s Cold War paranoia (basing its analogy around similarities between those events and the Salem Witch Trials in the late 17th century). For writing it, its author, Arthur Miller (later Mr. Marilyn Monroe), was blacklisted for a period.

An early John Osborne play called Personal Enemy focuses on an American serviceman captured in the Korean War who refuses to be repatriated after the war ends. Throughout the play his friends and family members are accused of Communism, hounded by HUAC agents and even declared to be homosexuals.

In That Championship Season, Scranton mayor George Sitkowski is fighting a tough battle for re-election against the younger, more dynamic Norman Sharmen. He and his former basketball coach, whom he still relies upon for life advice twenty years later and who regards Joseph McCarthy as a personal hero, have discovered that Sharmen has an uncle who was accused of being a Communist twenty years earlier, and plan to use this information to discredit him. George's former basketball teammates - among whom are one of his top donors, Phil Romano, and his campaign manager, James Daley - are sceptical, since it is now 1972 and no-one cares about Communists in the family anymore. Phil still tries to use this information to blackmail Sharmen when he refuses a side-switching donation/bribe, but Sharmen simply laughs and says it was his cousin, not his uncle, and hangs up on Phil.

Videogames

Web Comics

In Housepets!, Duchess asks Boris to approach King and ask if he has purebred papers so she could use him for a dog show. Apparently he only asked King, originally a human born at the tail end of the Cold War, just for "papers". King was a bit unnerved. King: Oh, purebred papers. For a second I thought you were asking for something else.

Web Originals

Imagine if Joseph McCarthy's Un-American Activities committee had never stopped. That's one of the major turning points of A World of Laughter, a World of Tears, where the Red Scare doesn't end. At all.

The Chaos Timeline has its own version, with the Socialists governing western Europe and the Red Pirates terrorizing the seas.

Inverted in Reds!, where a white scare holds sway during the years after the Red Revolution. Complete with many newly-elected Republican and Democratic (the few who didn't go into exile with the Military Junta or joined Harry Truman's Democratic Labor and Farmers League) members of the Peoples Deputies being prevented from taking their seats after refusing to swear the new oath of office.

World War II: Episode 10 - "Molotov's Heel on Finland and Nobody to Fight in the West" mentions Communist members of French Parliament being detained in 1939 over concerns about national security along with thousands of Communist activists.

Western Animation

Jonny Quest TOS (1964-1965). Three episodes ("Arctic Splashdown", "Pirates From Below" and "The House of Seven Gargoyles") involved Russian or Eastern European Communist villains and three had Chinese Communist villains ("The Quetong Missile Mystery", "Terror Island" and "Monster in the Monastery").

Real Life