How Four Influential Socialist Anti-Semites Shaped the Left

by Daniel Greenfield

1. Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in the face of which no other god may exist… The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world.”

Marx’s influence on the socialist movement and its various streams cannot be underestimated, and neither can the extent to which his view of Jews as the embodiment of capitalism became embedded on the left.

In a handful of sentences, Marx depicted Jews as the anti-thesis of Socialism, a theme that he was to repeatedly revisit, and more poisonously in such essays as “The Russian Loan”, where he implicitly suggested that war would continue for as long as the Jews existed.

“Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew… In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.”

Coded forms of this thinking can still be found among leftists who blame wars on Wall Street and assemble Jewish neo-con war conspiracies. The linkage of capital, war and the Jews made Anti-Semitism a permanent part of Socialist thought. Since the Holocaust its expressions have become more coded, but the essence remains.

While Marx did not invent Socialist Anti-Semitism, he helped grant intellectual legitimacy to left-wing populists who merged worker’s rights rhetoric with bigotry. But Marx’s formulation implicitly set the elimination of the Jews as a necessary step to the end of war and capitalism.

2. H.G. Wells (1866 – 1946)

“And yet between 1940 and 2059, in little more than a century, this antiquated obdurate culture disappeared. It and its Zionist state, its kosher food, the Law and all the rest of its paraphernalia, were completely merged in the human community.”

While H.G. Wells is best remembered today for a handful of futuristic novels, some of his more significant work of the time envisioned the creation of a utopian, yet totalitarian socialist state. And arguably the European left has followed his plan a little too closely.

Wells follows Marx’s linkage between Jews, capital and war. The elimination of the Jews as a separate people is necessary for Wells’ modern world state to come into being. So while in “The Shape of Things To Come”, he disposes of Christianity in a single paragraph, and Islam in another (Wells supposed that Islam would disappear as Arabic fell into disuse), but several paragraphs are devoted to the elimination of the Jews.

The hostility toward Israel is manifestly there. The Jews are described as abandoning the Socialist cause of creating the world state, preoccupied instead with “the dream of a fantastic independent state all of their own”. “Only a psycho-analyst could begin to tell for what they wanted this Zionist state,” Wells sneers.

Wells’ solution to Marx’s Jewish Question was to wipe out the Jews as a distinct people, without engaging in physical extermination. But religion, state and even a distinct ethnic identity had to go.
Even as the Nazi Holocaust had begun, H.G. Wells wrote in The New World Order (1940);

“The hostile reaction to the cult of the Chosen People is spreading about the entire world to-day… there has never been such a world-wide—I will not use the word anti-Semitism because of the Arab—I will say anti-Judaism… it is becoming world-wide and simultaneous… Until they are prepared to assimilate and abandon the Chosen People idea altogether, their troubles are bound to intensify.”

It was a more elegant phrasing of a Julius Streicher quote from that same year, “The time is near when a machine will go into motion which is going to prepare a grave for the world’s criminal – Judah – from which there will be no resurrection.”

Wells had prefigured the left’s fixation on Israel as the cause and justification for the hatred of the Jews. It is very much extant today.

3. Henry Hyndman (1842–1921)

“The condition of the people… favours the spread of Socialist doctrines, whilst the attack upon the Jews is a convenient cover for a more direct attack at an early date upon the great landlords and Christian capitalists.”

Hyndman founded England’s first Socialist political party, the Social Democratic Federation. He also went on to found the National Socialist Party, which eventually became part of the Labor Party.

Hyndman and the SDF’s newspaper “Justice” carried on a relentless campaign of attacks against Jews. What is unique about Hyndman is that he employed those attacks only as a cover for a larger anti-war movement.

The high point of Hyndman and the SDF’s Anti-Semitism came during the Boer War. To oppose the war was to be accused of disloyalty. Instead Hyndman recreated the war as a Jewish conspiracy, and campaigned against “Imperialist Judaism in South Africa”, the “Jew War in the Transvaal” fought on behalf of an “Anglo-Hebraic Empire” in Africa.

Socialists had often legitimized Anti-Capitalism by associating it with Anti-Semitism, but Hyndman legitimized an Anti-War position by treating it as not a campaign against England, but against the Jews.

Hyndman did not appear to be any more bigoted than most of his contemporaries, but he was far more cynical. When Hyndman wanted to attack the press, he called it the “Jew-Jingo Press”. When he wanted to attack the government, it was the “Jew clique”. By employing bigotry, Hyndman transformed himself from a traitor to a patriot battling the ‘alien’ subversion of England.

This is the same tack taken by much of the Anti-war movement today, which dodges accusations of disloyalty by claiming to fight against a Likud or Zionist takeover of foreign policy. And today the Hyndman tradition is still strong in the UK with the likes of George Galloway, shouting, “Show us the shekels, Richard.”

4. Pierre Leroux (1797 - 1871

“When we speak of Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce.”

Leroux is credited with coining the term, ‘Socialism’. He also expressed the idea of commerce as an original Jewish sin in the clearest of terms. To Leroux, banking was the original sin of the Jews. And therefore commerce was the Jewish spirit.

Fourier, the co-creator of French Socialism, would take this premise to its more explicit conclusion, writing; “Every government having regard to good morals ought to repress the Jews”.

Unlike Wells or Marx, Fourier and Leroux were not so much aspiring to a new order, as they were to a scientific application of an old order. A return to a pre-commercial civilization based on cooperation, rather than competition. This would be impossible if commerce were a natural human form of resource organization and distribution. So it was necessary to theorize that commerce was something alien. A creation of the Jews.

The appealing idea that commerce is a Jewish entity, or that war is a Jewish entity, or in Hitler’s formulation, conscience is a Jewish entity, means that any part of humanity can be cut out so long as you define it as Jewish.

The error of Leroux, Fourier and so many other Socialists was that they built their entire philosophy on a lie about human nature, and then did their best to plaster over that lie with bigotry. The economics of their program were unworkable, the sociology of it even more so. And so the Jews became the scapegoats of Socialism.

To Wells, Jewish identity was an obstacle to the New World Order, but he was in denial about the fact that every cultural identity was an obstacle. So Wells too repeated the basic Socialist error of taking an unworkable premise, and assuming that it would be workable if only it weren’t for the Jews.

Today, the existence of Israel is treated as an obstacle to world peace. Once again the left is possessed by the idea that if the Jewish question is finally resolved, a modern rational world state can come into being. The flip side of this childish and bigoted belief is genocide. For if the Jews are all that stands in the way of Socialism and World Peace– then the Jews must go.

SOURCE

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We Can't All Get Along

Bruce Bialosky

In an attempt to quell the 1992 riots that broke out in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers who beat him senseless, Rodney King uttered these famous words: “Can’t we all get along?” Today, Mr. King could go to Washington D.C. and ask the same question, but the answer, as it was 20 years ago, is breathtakingly simple: No. There was an unmistakable illustration of this in a recent Wall Street Journal column by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Ironically, Mr. Sanders is respected by many Republicans because he clearly, unabashedly admits what he is – a Socialist. He doesn’t try to hide behind wishy-washy terms like “progressive” or “liberal.” Like Popeye, he clearly says “I am what I am.” But really, how different is he from Mr. Obama, Ms. Pelosi, and the rest of their brood in Congress?

Mr. Sanders made his case for how to address the debt ceiling; but more importantly, he put forward his opinion on what is causing our enormous deficit:

1. He claimed that the “Rich,” along with large corporations, have been evading taxes in the United States.

2. He alleged that Republicans have been “fanatically determined to protect the interests of the wealthy and multinational corporations so that they do not contribute a single penny toward deficit reduction.”

3. He further stated that “if the Republicans have their way, the entire burden of deficit reduction will be placed on the elderly, the sick, children, and working families.”

Would someone explain how this rhetoric differs from the likes of Pelosi, Schumer, or Obama?

Sanders went on to state that the American people want the wealthy and large corporations to pay their “fair share” of taxes. Unfortunately, Mr. Sanders clearly doesn’t understand that corporations do not actually pay taxes, but merely pass them on to customers in the form of higher prices. He’s also clearly ignorant of the fact that the lower-earning 50% of the population pay less than 2% of all taxes, and that the upper 5% of earners already pay about 59%. So, exactly how much does he really want them to pay?

This is the impenetrable wall between Socialists like Sanders and we Capitalists. We believe that people who work hard and earn money are not obligated to support the remainder of the population, and that coercing them to do so is not only bad public policy, it is ineffective. We believe, unlike the President, that if someone has extra earnings – whether they need them or not – it is their choice how to dispose of (or invest) them, and that these assets should not be confiscated by the government, which habitually employs the money far less productively, or (worse) hands it over to favored constituencies.

Sanders believes that America is filled with large multitudes of pitifully stupid, “little” people, all of whom need the protection of government elites to make better decisions for them. Capitalists believe that these decisions are best made by individuals and their families who are actually quite capable in their own regard.

Regrettably for the last 80 years, Capitalists have been losing the argument in America. In the relatively peaceful period from 1960 to 2010, the percentage of GDP consumed by government has grown from 27% to 37%. Mr. Sanders and his comrades have the budget on a trajectory toward 50%, and the sad part is that too often, Capitalists have been complicit in the quest to bring Socialism to America.

In November 2010, the American people finally said “Enough!!” They haven’t totally come to their senses because there is still widespread resistance to long-needed reforms of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But at least they now have a true picture of Mr. Sanders’ ideal government, having seen how Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their acolytes strive to “fundamentally change the nature of America.”

We openly admit that we want smaller government. We also admit that not only is Capitalism the best economic system, it is the primary reason for the vast wealth of Americans. We believe that expansive government, complete with its invasive rules, mindless dictates, and shameless bureaucrats, is principally a vehicle for those who aspire to a truly Socialist society. And we also believe that they want more and more people getting those monthly checks (currently 80 million as stated by Treasury Secretary Geithner).

Like many European leaders, such as Prime Minister Zapatero of Spain, Mr. Sanders openly states that he’s a Socialist. Others like Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC show host, has stated clearly he is a socialist. Yet there’s not an inch of difference between their policies and almost every elected Democrat in this country. You can count on two hands the Democratic members of Congress whose opinions are materially different.

So there you have it: they are Socialists and we are Capitalists. We admit it and they almost totally deny it. They believe that if we’re in charge, there will be Armageddon. We know that they’ve been in charge and they’ve brought us to the brink of Armageddon. That is why there is so little bipartisanship in Washington D.C.

There’s a war going on for the future of America. God forbid the Capitalists don’t win.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Who says liberals want government out of the bedroom?: "Nothing is off limits anymore. Nothing. Not as far as politicians are concerned. Democratic State Senator Kevin De Leon wants California to mandate fitted sheets in the state’s hotels, and forbid flat sheets."

Post office proves government unions are a bad idea: "If you think government unions are not a threat to good government, just take a look at the U.S. Postal Service, which is what eventually could happen to every governmental unit that has union workers who are allowed to collectively bargain. The Postal Service is hemorrhaging money. It is spending $1 million a week paying employees not to work"

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc. He also has a lot to say about the latest British riots.

I have just put up a small Bible study of Jude verse 25 on my Scripture blog

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my Facebook page as I rarely access it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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