Alt Left: The Jewish Bolshevism Nonsense

This theory is not only nonsense, but it’s also very dangerous nonsense because this really is Nazism in a nutshell at its very essence. People don’t realize that Nazis hated Communists as much as Jews. When the Einsatzgruppen were ravaging the Baltics and the USSR, two types of people tended to be killed on sight by these assassination squads in many cases:

1. Jews
2. Communists

And neither was favored over the other. Furthermore the lines were blurred, as the Nazis’ main enemy was Communism, and Nazi theory held that Communism was a Jewish plot, and essentially all Jews were Communists who had to be killed to snuff out the Bolshevik threat.

Of course they had other reasons for hating Jews, but most folks don’t Trealize how important the Commie Jews theory was in the annihilation of the European Jews.

This line went along with growing anti-Semitism on the Right in the US and elsewhere along the lines that the Bolshevik Revolution has been a Jewish revolution and that Communist Jews posed a threat to the so called Free World, which was always anything but.

This line held basically that all Jews were Communists. It wasn’t true, though most European Jews in the 1930’s were definitely on the Left, especially in places like Poland. Many were just liberals and social democrats though. An old line says that maybe one out of ten Jews is a radical, but five out of ten radicals are Jews. So you do the math.

While there were many Jews in the leadership positions of the early Soviet government, most Jews were not Bolsheviks. In the 1917 election before the Bolsheviks seized power, 70% of Russian Jews voted for the Zionist party.

They may have supported the Bolsheviks after they seized power, but the majority of people in the country did anyway, including a lot of the military, especially the military intelligence of the Czar’s army, most of whom went over to the Reds.

I did some research on the makeup of the early Bolsheviks and there were people from all ethnic groups of the USSR. Yes there were a lot of Jews, but there were just as many Latvians, of all people, and possibly more. So I guess the Bolshevik Revolution was a Latvian Revolution, right?

There followed short lived Communist revolutions in the several years after the October Revolution, one in Hungary under Bela Kun, a Hungarian Jew, and another in Bavaria under Rosa Luxembourg and some others, all German Jews.

Kun’s regime lasted only a few months, but he did kill some people, though the death count, which may be as low as 300, is much exaggerated by anti-Semites and Nazi sympathizers. But he killed just enough to scare the European middle classes.

The Bavarian government was overthrown after a few months, but the fact that it existed at all spread horror throughout the German petit bourgeois.

It was this early revolution on German soil that cemented the Nazis’ belief in Jewish Bolshevism, which held that all Jews were Communists intended on overthrowing all non-Communist regimes and seizing power for the Jews over the Gentiles the world over. The theory said that the main reason the Jews wanted to do this was to get rich by exploiting the Gentile masses when they had established World Communism.

As anyone knows, nobody goes into Communism thinking of getting rich. And Communists don’t exploit workers to make a profit anyway. That goes right against Marxist theory. It’s nearly on the level of a transgression.

So this part of the theory was so nonsensical it is almost laughable.

But many to most hardcore anti-Semites continue to push this line to this very day, that Communist Jews are a threat to the world, want to take over all countries and convert them to Communism, thereby finally ruling over their hated Gentile enemies, while at the same time ruthlessly exploiting the Gentiles so that these Communist Jews get filthy rich under this world Communist system.

The theory is so absurd that you would think it would have no more than a limited shelf life, but its recrudescence seems eternal and vigorous. Perhaps the theory’s staying power speaks more about the essential irrationality of obsessive, paranoid, conspiratorial anti-Semitism than anything else.

The Holocaust was largely driven by this belief in subversive Jewish Bolshevik Communists out to overthrow the established governments of Europe. It was a paranoid argument with no basis at the time, and it still is.

European Jews in the 1930’s had little power. They held quite a few high positions in some countries, especially in Hungary and Germany, and in Germany they had acquired quite a bit of money, but they had little power in either country. What Jewish power existed was quickly overthrown by the Nazis when they came into power.

Many of the East European Jews, especially the Polish and Russian Jews, had become terribly poor in recent decades. They lived in ignorant, backwards, poverty-stricken villages called stetls. They were pathetic but they were hardly world-controlling wealthy Jewish profiteers and oligarchs. It’s hard to see how they were a threat to anyone, but Polish anti-Semitism was very high anyway.

These Jews were poorly assimilated and this is offered as a reason for Polish antisemitism, but many Jews in Western Europe were much more assimilated (indeed assimilation was the laudable goal of most West European Jews).

The German Jews were the most assimilated in all of Europe. Lot of good it did them. In the previous century the assimilation was so thorough that many Jews had left Judaism and converted to Christianity, especially Protestantism.

This caused no end of problems for Nazis trying to figure out who was a Jew and who wasn’t. To this day you can find many German Protestants who will tell you that their ancestors were Jewish converts to Christianity. Even in Marx’s time this was quite common.