Communism is a political theory about leading a society to equality. The term "communism" is ambiguous because the world can argue whether it is good or evil. At one point, communism was vastly powerful and advocated by many people in poverty. However, America feared this political view because their ideology was very different from that of communism's ideology. America's foundation is capitalism where Communism's foundation is equality. The rise of communism caused a series of events that led Americans to fear communists around the world, in their own country and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust.
Karl Marx, who founded the idea of communism, had a theory that socioeconomic systems are holding human societies' progress through class struggle: a conflict between ownership class and laboring class. Surprisingly, this idea became enormous and spread to countries all over the world. One of these countries was Russia where some people disagreed with their government structure, so a group of people enrolled in the communist party creating the Soviet Union. Their goal was to spread communism and gain more power to dominate the entire world. First, they convinced Eastern European countries to switch to communism. Eventually, European countries were divided into East and West by the "Iron Curtain" (Doc A), the boundary that separates the Warsaw Pact countries from NATO countries; America was in charge of Western Europe and the Soviet Union was in charge of Eastern Europe. Winston Churchill decried the Soviet Union's annexing of Eastern European countries by force was a threat to NATO. This was the first time people were actually concerned about communism spreading which lasted until 1991, the end of the cold war. To stop this fear caused by the Soviets on February 1946, George F. Kennan an American diplomat in Moscow proposed a policy of containment. This policy's purpose was preventing any extension of communist rule to other countries (Doc B).
