New World Order: Communism by the Backdoor | Documentary

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The Communism by the Backdoor documentary is filmmaker Dennis Wise’s long form argument that the Western nations which declared victory in 1945 were themselves quietly captured by the ideology they claimed to have defeated. It is one of the most contested films in this library, and it is one that requires more context than most. Watching it usefully means being able to separate the documented history it draws on from the sweeping conclusions it builds on top of that history.

The Thesis the Film Advances

Wise’s claim is stated without qualification. He argues that both the victorious and the defeated powers of the Second World War have operated under covert communist influence since 1945, and that the apparent East against West confrontation of the Cold War concealed a deeper convergence. In this telling, the postwar international institutions, the expansion of state administration in Western countries and the cultural transformations of the following decades were not independent developments but expressions of a single directed program.

The film presents this as demonstrated rather than proposed. That framing is itself worth noticing, because the strength of the evidence varies enormously from one segment to the next.

What the Communism by the Backdoor Documentary Covers

The series moves through the interwar period, the wartime alliances, the negotiations that shaped postwar Europe, and the decades of institution building that followed. It spends considerable time on the wartime relationship between the Western allies and the Soviet Union, on the settlements that left Eastern Europe within the Soviet sphere, and on the question of how much Western policymakers knew about Soviet intentions and when they knew it.

It is a lengthy work assembled from archival footage, documents and narration, and it is constructed to be cumulative. Each segment is intended to make the next more plausible.

The Documented History Underneath the Claims

There is a real historical kernel here, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than waved away. Soviet intelligence penetration of Western governments during the 1940s was extensive and is not in dispute. The Venona project, a United States counterintelligence effort that decrypted Soviet diplomatic cables and was made public in 1995, confirmed that Soviet intelligence had recruited sources inside the American government. In Britain, the network later known as the Cambridge Five, including Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, operated at senior levels of the intelligence and diplomatic services for years before being exposed.

Anyone who dismisses the entire subject as paranoia is ignoring a well evidenced chapter of twentieth century history. Espionage on that scale was real, it was consequential, and it was for a period underestimated.

Where Historians Part Company With the Film

The gap between that documented espionage and the film’s thesis is very wide, and it is where the Communism by the Backdoor documentary loses most professional historians. Recruiting agents inside a government is a different thing from controlling that government. The historical record of the Cold War is a record of genuine and enormously expensive confrontation. The Western powers built NATO, pursued containment for four decades, fought costly wars in Korea and Vietnam explicitly to halt communist expansion, and ran sustained domestic counterintelligence and loyalty programs. Communist parties remained electorally marginal across the English speaking world throughout. A West covertly governed by communism since 1945 would have behaved very differently.

Viewers should also know who made the film and what else he has made. Dennis Wise is best known for an earlier feature length production presenting a sympathetic revisionist account of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, a work that historians and organizations that monitor extremist propaganda have documented as Nazi apologia. That context is directly relevant, because the conspiracy framework used here has a specific lineage. The claim that communism was a covert instrument wielded by a hidden group was a central pillar of Nazi propaganda, deployed in an explicitly antisemitic form to justify mass murder. Historians have traced that trope in detail. A viewer encountering this material without that background will not recognize what they are looking at.

How To Watch It

This film is included here because a research library is more useful when it lets people examine contested material directly rather than only reading characterizations of it. That is only true, though, if the examination is genuine. Treat the archival documents it presents as starting points to verify independently rather than as settled conclusions. Notice where the film moves from citing a source to asserting an intention behind it, because that transition is where the argumentative work is actually being done.

Read alongside it serious scholarship on Soviet espionage and on the historiography of the Cold War. The documented history is stranger and more interesting than most people assume, and it does not require the film’s larger framework to be remarkable.

This film was featured in the September 2025 Monthly Report. You can explore more films like it in the MUST WATCH Documentary Library.