Reflections on European Jewry’s Trek from Socialism to Fascism – and Back?
By Hans Modlich
Avi Lewis’ sweeping first ballot victory in the NDP leadership race has put socialism squarely back on Canada’s political agenda. His anti-Zionist slate swept all the key executive posts in the party.
He recalled his great grandfather as being a Bundist, as were the majority of Eastern European Jewry at the birth of the 20th century. The Jewish Labor Bund was secular, socialist, and profoundly anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live”. Molly Crabapple’s just released book “Here Where We Live Is Our Country” chronicles the lives of the Bundist internationalist and socialist leaders and their heroic resistance from Czarist times to the Warsaw ghetto’s worst depravities - a time when the world’s elites were just as indifferent to the genocide of Jews as they are today to the Palestinian holocaust.
Yet just last week the Knesset passed second reading on a “death penalty law” that ensconces the ‘Untermensch’ status of Palestinians in the very the same way that Hitler’s Nuernberg race laws targeted German Jews.
How do we explain this reversal within three generations? Within only one century, and a most turbulent century at that. A century that I believe could have achieved a socialist transformation -- to liberate ourselves from the endless existential wars of capitalism.
Ashkenazy vs Sephardic Jews
Being Canadian of German and Swiss German parentage, when I’m accused of being antisemitic, I usually respond: No, I am not antisemitic, I am pro-semitic.
Let me explain. For centuries Sephardic Jews, North African, Ethiopian, West Asian Jews have been getting along just famously with their Arabic or African neighbors, because they are essentially genetic cousins -- semitic cousins! So, when I am pro-Palestinian, I am also pro-semitic because Palestinians share the cultural heritage that Misrahi or Sephardic Jews share as well.
Ashkenazy Jews on the other hand have a European cultural and genetic origin which brings with it many far different reasons to explain why they were victims of such extreme persecution.
Foremost, among those reasons is of course the Eurocentric religious heritage of Christianity. Invariably Jews were accused of being “Christ killers”. The black plague in the Middle Ages was blamed on often migrant Jews who were not allowed to farm their own land. They were displaced to the margins of self-employment and driven to live in segregated Stettles. That’s where the first pogroms occurred – similar to the West Bank today where Palestinian towns and hamlets are ransacked by mainly Ashkenazy settler Jews, often Russian expats, who are behaving like the perpetrators of pogroms in the Middle Ages. But only now with the full sanction and collaboration of the armed forces of the State of Israel.
The Dreyfus case in France illustrates that anti-Semitism festered not just in Eastern Europe but in Western Europe as well as in Anglo Saxon society. We only need to recall MacKenzie King’s phrase “None is too many “.
The Roots of German Antisemitism post WW I
But let me focus on the factors leading up to the Holocaust in post WW I Germany. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on behalf of Germans by Walter Rathenau a prominent Jewish intellectual in the Weimar Republican government. The treaty was viewed by the German public as a betrayal of what in November 11th1918 was called an armistice - not at all a capitulation. The treaty ratified only on June 28, 1919,placed an immense burden of debt upon Germany and drove the economy into an inflationary spiral the likes of which the western world has not seen since. It destabilized the society and it fueled the propaganda of the pro-Kaiser right wing elements - blaming this betrayal on Rathenau, culminating in his assassination by royalists.
A second factor was the inspiring victory of the October 1917 Russian Revolution under the leadership of the Bolsheviks. – the first socialist overthrow of a capitalist state. Ukrainian Jewish-born Leon Trotsky led the Red Army that successfully fought off the invading armies of 27 western countries during the decimating civil war. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin all were leading Leninist Jews. In the German arena Rosa Luxembourg, Clara Zetkin and Karl Radek and many more pro-Bolsheviks were Jews or were Jew-baited by the Nazis. Not to overlook of course that Karl Marx was a German Jew.
Kurt Eisner who led a successful revolution in Munich against the King of Bavaria and had set up a short-lived Socialist Republic was a secular Jew. Ironically, he was assassinated by another Jew who wanted to prove his loyalty to aryan prejudices as a member of the white supremacist Thule society.
Ultimately the forces of the post war social revolution were defeated by the bourgeois loyalist federal forces under the leadership of Gustav Noske, who was the defence minister in the Social Democratic government of Friedrich Ebert. They treacherously decapitated the revolutionary leadership of the Spartacists, later Communist party, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919.
Hitler’s Hounding of the Bolshevik Jew
Hitler’s Mein Kampf is replete with the hyphenated word “Bolshevik-Jew”. The National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP - Nazi for short) used the phrase “Wer vom Juden frisst, stirbt daran”. Literally translated: - “He who eats off the Jew, will die of it”. The Nazi’s pretended anti-capitalism relied heavily on demonstrating that big capitalists like the owners of the famous Wertheim department store were wealthy Jewish tycoons exploiting aryan workers.
Still, most prominent German artists at the time such as Max Lieberman were Jewish, so were the leading authors Lion Feuchtwanger and Kurt Tucholsky and, leading scientists like Einstein. All of them considered themselves first and foremost to be part of the German society emerging as it was from the most devastating war the world had ever seen. They were progressives and had nothing in common with Zionism.
The pre-eminent political role of Jews in Germany was clearly left-wing at the time and reflected the fact that two thirds of the working class was socialist, albeit divided between social democrats and communists.
Emergence of Oil Imperialism
Another byproduct of the First World War was that the new war economy would be fueled by oil rather than coal. This was the real reason behind Lord Balfour’s Declaration of 1919 that implanted the colonial seed of the Zionist occupation, as well as the Sykes Picot Treaty of 1921 that randomly divided the defeated Ottoman Empire into present day Syria and Iraq.
While still under the British mandate, in order to populate the fledgling colonial enclave, Zionists negotiated the 1933 Haavara agreement with the Nazis. Under its terms Hitler allowed the pre-war exodus of 60,000 Jews to Palestine, but of course confiscating most of their German property. They were less than welcomed by the indigenous Palestinian population, leading to their first uprising, brutally suppressed by the British in 1936.
In the early 50’s over 100,000 Iraqi Jews were airlifted to Israel. These Sephardic Jews had been fully integrated in the social fabric of the Arab world. Judaic targets including synagogues were struck to seed panic and entice the intimidated faithful to seek refuge under Zionism. Recent revelations indicate that these dirty trick bombings are suspected to have been the work of the Mossad. A precedent for the IDF Hannibal doctrine elucidated post October 7th by Max Blumenthal.
Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum of Human Rights will finally open an exhibit of the 1948 Nakba, the catastrophic ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland. The extent to which the current Gaza genocide will be featured remains to be seen. Officially the exhibit is hosted for only a two-year period. Media mogul Izzy Asper has been doing his utmost to prevent its inclusion.
As President Richard Nixon would later put it, Israel became “our aircraft carrier in the Middle East”. The quest for control of oil wealth by America rather than Britain began with the overthrow in 1953 Teheran of the secular democratic government led by nationalist Mohammad Mosaddeq. This is described by many as the first CIA instigated system change, illegal in post-UN terms and was ironically engineered with the very support of the Mullahs. Only to install the Shah’s brutally authoritarian anti-communist regime which lasted until the victorious 1979 Islamic revolution.
From its very Inception Capitalism has Persecuted Minorities and the Indigenous
The conquest of the Americas coincides with the beginnings of primitive accumulation under capitalism. Queen Isabella’s inquisition in 1492 Spain targeted not only Moors but also Jews.
I found surprising evidence of this far afield in the Peruvian Andes. In the tiny town of Celendin only some 100 kms from Cajamarca where in 1532 Pizarro had betrayed and killed the Inca emperor Atahualpa.
We were protesting the police killing of five mining protest leaders – including a young priest –against an expansion of the Conga gold mine operated by US owned Newmont Gold, larger yet than Barrick Gold. In the small-town museum the antique mahogany backdoor had carved in it -- a Star of David! ‘Nuevos Cristianos’, as the persecuted Jews had to call themselves, were driven by the inquisition beyond the headwaters of the Amazon to settle all the way, 2650 m high up in the western Cordillera.
In its first 13 years of operation the Conga mine had produced enough wealth to equal to what would have paid off Peru’s entire national debt. Instead, the poisoned aquifers from the leaked orange arsenic leachate had led to cancers, deformities threatening to destroy the marginal dairy income of the region’s Quechuan population. Ironically the bullet casings that had killed the protesters bore imprints proving that they were made in Israel. The tentacles of the terror state had reached across continents and killed its own descendants.
From Victim of Genocide to its Perpetrator in Only Eighty Years?
In today’s Israel, judging from Gideon Levy, Netanyahu’s genocidal policies enjoy near unanimous support. Two and a half years of impunity for war crimes in Gaza, together with defiance of the ICC and IJC with the complicity of Western governments have intoxicated the overwhelming majority with a deep-seated sense of racial superiority over Palestinians and Arabs in general.
Add to this Trump’s castration of the UN in Resolution 2803, passed last November with the abstention of both Russia and China, and the Donald’s unabashed self-anointment as the highest arbiter of world peace? How much closer to the vanity of a Hitler can you get?
The military offensives in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, combined with aerial supremacy over the whole West Asian region have instilled a mood of invincibility no different than that of the Nazis in the early years of the war.
The latest attack on Iran was presented as a cakewalk, just like Germany’s invasion in June 1941 of the USSR. Hubris lasted until their defeat in Stalingrad in January 1943. With a half million dead and a quarter million POW’s it was to be the major turning point in WW II.
Last month’s words of warning by IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir that his forces are woefully overextended have been brushed aside in Israel’s euphoria.
The pendulum swings back towards socialism?
As the dastardly assault on Iran is now in its second month, I recommend viewing an interview Chris Hedges held April 1st with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who is a superb, retired military analyst. and served as chief of staff to Colin Powell. Aaron Mate from the Grayzone also provided further insight and Dimitri Lascaris has just given his firsthand impression after an 11-day eyewitness journey of destroyed Iranian civilian infrastructure and the Strait of Hormuz.
Their consensus is that Trump and Netanyahu have bitten off more than they can chew, that they have lost control over the war. Aaron Mate quoted Jim Webb, a third generation US marine, “when you rely on hubris to animate your plans, you’re walking right into a trap”.
Diplomatically Trump has already lost this war with almost all the NATO partners leaving him in the lurch. The mid-terms are severely narrowing his options.
On the other hand, what will Netanyahu do, once Trump pulls back? What did Hitler do after horrendous Wehrmacht casualties deep in the Russian winter? Wikipedia has the answer. If you search Sportpalast Rede, made Feb19,1943 by his consummate propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels: “Wollt ihr den Totalen Krieg?” [Do you want the Total War? ]
Bibi’s use of his ultimate weapon cannot be excluded. Except that the price for using it would once and for all settle the question that Zionist Israel is a state terrorist and a global pariah.
The present conjuncture reminds us of another historic moment in which Teheran featured prominently. Namely the 1943 allied Tehran Conference, called almost a year after Stalingrad. Tehran not only reflected the turnaround in the war following the massive influx of Land-Lease weaponry to rearm Soviet troops, 12,000 tanks, 21,000 airplanes, half a million trucks and 15 million pairs of north American army boots.
Today the fate of Trumpism and Zionism hangs in the balance in this war. Along with the fate of all of humanity. On March 27th eight million Americans mobilized in the No Kings demonstrations taking place across major cities and reaching into small town America. Canadians stand decisively opposed to being drawn into the fight, as Carney has had to find out.
Finally, getting back to the leftward shift in the NDP, Avi Lewis has fertile ground to deepen his opposition to Trump’s demand that we boost military spending to 5% of GDP.
And in the words of Dimitri Lascaris in his April 3rd post Why I stand with the people of Iran: --
“…what the hell, I’m going to join the NDP and vote for Avi, because Avi I think at this stage is the best hope we have in Canadian politics. I wish Avi well. I hope very much that Avi will be true to his principles. But I think the acid test is going to be whether Avi Lewis will come out strongly and unequivocally against NATO, against the NATO proxy wars including in Ukraine.
“I know he is a passionate supporter of the Palestine cause and he deserves kudos for that, but it’s all one big war machine, you know you can’t really oppose what is being done in Palestine without opposing NATO, without opposing the Ukraine war, without opposing the military industrial complex and without opposing this criminal war of aggression on Iran.
“So, my friend if you’re listening, buckle up, prepare for the flak but be true to your principles and stand against the war machine. I have no doubt that you will be rewarded handsomely for this by people of conscience in Canada, rewarded politically I mean with their support and their admiration. And if by any chance Avi goes astray and does what every other NDP leader of my lifetime has done and that is sell out, well sadly I’m going to have to take up the task of calling him out on it. And let us hope that doesn’t happen - you’re a better man than that - please prove it to us!”