Seeing red in Iran

IN the run-up to yesterday’s US mid-term elections , it became obvious that, almost four decades after the Cold War ended, the ‘spectre of communism’ Marx and Engels identified in the 19th century still haunts Western consciousness. Islamophobia might have been the most prominent weapon, but it was accompanied by diatribes against Marxists and communists, invariably directed against people who are neither. For good measure, some of them are simultaneously derided as Islamist jihadists. The American establishment’s obsession with the communist threat, real or imagined, dates back to the early…