Horkheimer saw anti-communist obsession as blinding statesmen to real threats to peace.

Evidence

With more caution, and avoiding concepts like capitalism and communism, Horkheimer lamented, as an immediate danger, what Thomas Mann had again and again criticized during the war as being the basic folly of the epoch: the bourgeois world’s ability to be seduced by a fear of communism. `The antagonism between East and West, which allowed yesterday’s aggressor to grow strong and to attack, is today again a powerful temptation to statesmen to see things from this perspective alone and blind themselves to other threats to peace in the world.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1720

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls his 1940s analysis of how anti-communism allowed fascism to rise — now critiqued as recurring in the Cold War alignment. — connects to: Late Horkheimer embraced anti-Communist and pro-American rhetoric — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 1726

Broader Connections

• Late Horkheimer embraced anti-Communist and pro-American rhetoric #expands (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 1726