Jewish Bolshevism
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Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism, is an
After the Russian Revolution, the
In Poland,
Origins
The conflation of Jews and revolution emerged in the atmosphere of destruction of
The worldwide spread of the concept in the 1920s is associated with the publication and circulation of
Jewish involvement in Russian Communism
Antisemitism in the Russian Empire existed both culturally and institutionally. The Jews were restricted to live within the Pale of Settlement, and they also suffered pogroms.[13]
As a result, many Jews supported gradual or revolutionary changes to the
Some scholars have grossly exaggerated Jewish presence in the Soviet Communist Party. For example,
In 2013, speaking about the Schneerson Collection at the Moscow Jewish Museum and the Center for Tolerance, Russian President Vladimir Putin erroneously said:
"The decision to nationalize the library was made by the first Soviet government, and Jews were approximately 80–85% members".[21]
According to historian Vladimir Ryzhkov, Putin's ignorant statement about the predominance of Jews in the Council of People's Commissars is due to the fact that "during the years of perestroika, he read the low-quality nationalist tabloid press".[22] Some media outlets also criticized the statements of the President of the Russian Federation. So the editors of the newspaper Vedomosti, condemning the head of state for marginality, posted the following statistics:[23][24]
"If we discard the speculations of pseudoscientists who know how to find the Jewish origin of every revolutionary, it turns out that in the first composition of the Council of People's Commissars of Jews there were 8%: of its 16 members, only Leon Trotsky was a Jew. In the government of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic of 1917–1922 Jews were 12% (six out of 50 people). Apart from the government, the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) on the eve of October 1917 had 20% Jews (6 out of 30), and in the first composition of the political bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) – 40% (3 out of 7)".— Vedomosti (dated 17 June 2013).
Nazi Germany
"
Slavic peopleall of the elements that are not purely Slavic, then the state would also immediately break up."
—
Michael Kellogg in his Ph.D. thesis argued that the racist ideology of Nazis was to a significant extent influenced by
Adolf Hitler primarily viewed
In
According to French spymaster and writer
By the mid thirties, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had created a special agency called the Anti-Komintern, dedicated to creating anti-communist propaganda and heavily publicizing their theory of Judeo-Bolshevism.[38]
Propaganda produced in 1935 by the psychological war laboratory of the German War Ministry described Soviet officials as "mostly filthy Jews" and called on Red Army soldiers to rise up and kill their "Jewish commissars". This material was not used at the time, but served as a basis for propaganda in the 1940s.[39]
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels speaking at the Nuremberg Party Rally in September 1935 said:
While National Socialism brought about a new version and formulation of European culture, Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself. It is not only anti-bourgeois, but it is also anti-cultural. It means, in the final consequence, the absolute destruction of all economic, social, state, cultural, and civilizing advances made by western civilization for the benefit of a rootless and nomadic international clique of conspirators, who have found their representation in Jewry.[40]
Members of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) were encouraged to fight against "Jewish Bolshevik sub-humans". In the pamphlet The SS as an Anti-Bolshevist Fighting Organization, published in 1936, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler wrote:
We shall take care that never again in Germany, the heart of Europe, will the Jewish-Bolshevik revolution of subhumans be able to be kindled either from within or through emissaries from without.[41]
After Operation Barbarossa Nazi propaganda depicted the war as a "European crusade against Bolshevism" and Waffen-SS units consisted largely or solely of foreign volunteers and conscripts.[42] In private conversations held in 1940s, Hitler also labelled Christianity a Jewish product analogous to Judeo-Bolshevism:
"The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practises a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance."
In his speech to the Reichstag justifying Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Hitler said:
For more than two decades the Jewish Bolshevik regime in Moscow had tried to set fire not merely to Germany but to all of Europe ... The Jewish Bolshevik rulers in Moscow have unswervingly undertaken to force their domination upon us and the other European nations and that is not merely spiritually, but also in terms of military power ... Now the time has come to confront the plot of the Anglo-Saxon Jewish war-mongers and the equally Jewish rulers of the Bolshevik centre in Moscow![46]
Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel gave an order on 12 September 1941 which declared: "the struggle against Bolshevism demands ruthless and energetic, rigorous action above all against the Jews, the main carriers of Bolshevism".[47]
Historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Wehrmacht officers regarded the Russians as "sub-human", and were from the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939 telling their troops the war was caused by "Jewish vermin", explaining to the troops that the war against the Soviet Union was a war to wipe out what were variously described as "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans", the "Mongol hordes", the "Asiatic flood" and the "red beast", language clearly intended to produce war crimes by reducing the enemy to something less than human.[48]
Joseph Goebbels published an article in 1942 called "the so-called Russian soul" in which he claimed that Bolshevism was exploiting the Slavs and that the battle of the Soviet Union determined whether Europe would become under complete control by international Jewry.[49]
Nazi propaganda presented Barbarossa as an ideological-racial war between German Nazism and "Judeo-Bolshevism", dehumanising the Soviet enemy as a force of Slavic Untermensch (sub-humans) and "Asiatic" savages engaging in "barbaric Asiatic fighting methods" commanded by evil Jewish commissars whom German troops were to grant no mercy.[50] The vast majority of the Wehrmacht officers and soldiers tended to regard the war in Nazi terms, seeing their Soviet opponents as sub-human.[51]
Outside Nazi Germany
Great Britain, 1920s
In the early 1920s, leading British antisemite
[Bolshevism] among the Jews is nothing new. From the days of
Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.[53]
Author Gisela C. Lebzelter noted that Churchill's analysis failed to analyze the role that Russian oppression of Jews had played in their joining various revolutionary movements, but instead "to inherent inclinations rooted in Jewish character and religion".[54]
Finland
In 1919 the White Guard-associated propaganda organ Church-National Enlightenment Bureau published "What is Bolshevism", targeted at former Red Guards. The book argued that communism was a Jewish plot and communist leaders were almost exclusively Jewish and Jews were a race "that has a peculiar ability to live without working at the expense of others by swindling".[55]
In 1920 the chief of the newly established Finnish Security Police advised his personnel on how to proceed with Jews coming from Russia: “One must be very much on one’s guard, particularly with the Jews, for according to the received information, at least 80 percent of all Bolshevik leaders are thought to be Jews”.[56]
The Finnish charge d'affaires to the USSR and future Prime Minister Antti Hackzell wrote in the 1920s that Jews controlled the state spying and terror apparatus.[57]
In the 1930s and 1940s several far-right newspapers such as Ajan Suunta, Kansallissosialisti and Herää Suomi spread the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. The Patriotic Citizens of Viitasaari also spread leaflets in prints of tens of thousands, tirelessly trying to prove the Jews sought world domination through communism.[58]
After the war, Untersturmführer Unto Parvilahti's memoirs made the case the USSR was led by Jews, and Parvilahti's book became a great success, going through 11 editions and being translated into multiple languages. Parvilahti also became a sought after speaker in veterans events and conservative parties speaking tours.[59]
Works propagating the canard
The Octopus
The Octopus is a 256-page book self-published in 1940 by Elizabeth Dilling under the pseudonym "Rev. Frank Woodruff Johnson". In it, she describes her theories of Jewish Bolshevism.[60]
Behind Communism
Frank L. Britton, editor of The American Nationalist published Behind Communism in 1952. It disseminated the myth that Communism was a Jewish conspiracy originating in Palestine.[61]
Europa: The Last Battle
Europa: The Last Battle is a 2017 neo-Nazi propaganda film which promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories, including claims that communism was a Jewish ideology.[62]
Analysis
Researchers in the field such as Polish philosopher Stanisław Krajewski[63] or André Gerrits,[64] denounce the concept of Jewish Bolshevism as prejudice. Law professor Ilya Somin agrees, and compares Jewish involvement in other communist countries:
"Overrepresentation of a group in a political movement does not prove either that the movement was 'dominated' by that group or that it primarily serves that group's interests. The idea that communist oppression was somehow Jewish in nature is belied by the record of communist regimes in countries like China, North Korea, and Cambodia, where the Jewish presence was and is minuscule."[65]
Several scholars have observed that Jewish involvement in Communist movements was primarily a response to antisemitism and rejection by established politics.[66][67][68] Others note that this involvement was greatly exaggerated to accord with existing antisemitic narratives.[69][70][71][72][73][74]
Philip Mendes observed this on a policy level:
The increasing Jewish involvement in political radicalism... left government authorities with a number of potential options for response. One option was to recognize the structural link between the oppression of the Jews and their involvement in the Left, and to introduce social and political reforms which ended discrimination against Jews... This option would have meant accepting that Jews had as much right as any other religious or ethnic grouping to freely participate in political activities. The second option... was to reject any social or political emancipation of Jews... Instead, this policy blamed the Jewish victims for their persecution, and assumed that anti-Semitic legislation and violence was justified as a response to the alleged threat of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. In short, cause and effect were reversed, and Jewish responses to anti-Semitism were utilized to rationalize anti-Semitic practices.[68]
See also
- Cultural Bolshevism
- Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory
- Israeli Communist Party
References
Citations
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- Frederickson, Kari (1996). "Cathrine Curtis and Conservative Isolationist Women, 1939–1941". The Historian. 58 (4): 826.
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- ^ Pipes 1997, p. 93.
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- ^ Levin 1988, p. 13.
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- ^ Kershaw 1999, p. 303.
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- ^ "Goebbels Claims Jews Will Destroy Culture". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. September 1935. Archived from the original on 23 February 2014. Retrieved 11 February 2014.
- ^ Himmler 1936, p. 8.
- ^ Paul Hanebrink. A Specter Haunting Europe The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevis,. p. 148
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- ^ Goebbels, Joseph (1943). "Die sogenannte russische Seele" [The So-Called Russian Soul]. Das eherne Herz [The iron heart]. Translated by Bytwerk, Randall. Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP. pp. 398–405. Archived from the original on 24 November 2013. Retrieved 14 December 2013 – via German Propaganda Archive at Calvin University.
- ^ Förster 2005, p. 126.
- ^ Förster 2005, p. 127.
- ^ Webb 1976, p. 130.
- ^ Churchill 1920.
- ^ Lebzelter 1978, p. 181.
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- ^ Gerrits 2009, p. 195.
- ^ Somin, Ilya (29 October 2011). "Communism and the Jews". The Volokh Conspiracy. Archived from the original on 30 March 2014. Retrieved 30 March 2014.
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- ^ Jaff Schatz, "Jews and the Communist Movement in Interwar Poland," in Jonathan Frankel, Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism: Studies in Contemporary Jewry Archived 1 March 2020 at the Wayback Machine, Oxford University Press US, 2005, p. 30.
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Further reading
- Mikhail Agursky: The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR, Boulder: Westview Press, 1987 ISBN 0-8133-0139-4
- Harry Defries, Conservative Party Attitudes to Jews, 1900–1950 Jewish Bolshevism, p. 70, ISBN 0-7146-5221-0
- Fay, Brendan (26 July 2019). "The Nazi Conspiracy Theory: German Fantasies and Jewish Power in the Third Reich". Library & Information History. 35 (2): 75–97. S2CID 201410358.
- Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein: '"Juedischer Bolschewismus". Mythos und Realität'. Dresden: Antaios, 2003, ISBN 3-935063-14-8; 2.ed. Graz: Ares, 2010.
- Muller, Jerry Z. (2010). "Radical Anticapitalism: the Jew as Communist". Capitalism and the Jews. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-3436-5.
- ISBN 0-691-11995-3
- Scott Ury, Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry (Stanford, 2012). ISBN 978-0-804763-83-7
- Hanebrink, Paul (2018). A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-04768-6.
External links
- Media related to Jewish Bolshevism at Wikimedia Commons