Alexander Chirila, PhD, is Director of the Teacher's Education Department at Turtle Mountain Community College where he teaches literature and the humanities. His novel, True Immortality, is available at Amazon.  His research and writing on comparative spirituality are at Meditating at the Crossroads. His paper, "Creating the Idealized Nemesis: The Collective Psychology of the Red Scare" is online here.

The idealized nemesis, constructed by the collective psychology of a nation, takes many forms: from the barbarous hordes storming the gate to the cunning opponent scheming across a global chessboard.

Perhaps the most insidious of these nemeses is the enemy within. Characterized as a “fifth column,” viral infection, or spreading cancer, the enemy within generates a range of psychological reactions on the national scale, including an inward-focused aggression fixated on “rooting out” the enemy by emphasizing and mythologizing a standard of health linked to collective self-identity.

The enemy, in turn, is a negative composite of oppositional, undesirable, and grotesque qualities that are uniquely configured to infiltrate, contaminate, and potentially transform a national body.

J. Edgar Hoover’s view of communism substantiated the viral metaphor:

Victory will be assured once communists are identified and exposed because the public will take the first step of quarantining them so they can do no harm. Communism, in reality, is not a political party. It is a way of life–an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic; and like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the nation (1947).