The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 15: Judeo-Bolshevism The Nazi Lies Podcast

Mike: Common-ism
[Theme song]
Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi lies
Race and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi lies
Hollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews died
Army, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi lies
Mike: Welcome to another episode of the Nazi Lies podcast. I'm happy to be joined by Rutgers History Professor, Paul Hanebrink, author of the really easy to read book, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. The book charts the development of the belief that communism or certain forms of it are instruments of Jewish power and control, from its pre-history and medieval antisemitism and Red Scare propaganda, through his development among proto-fascist and ultimately a Nazi Party, and the legacy of fascist campaigns against Judeo-Bolshevism in former fascist states. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Hanebrink.
Paul Hanebrink: Thanks very much for having me, it's a pleasure to be here.
Mike: So before I opened your book, I was expecting to hear a story of the fascist myth of Judeo-Bolshevism as told primarily by fascists through to the present day, but that's not the story you tell. Instead, you tell more of a people's history of believing that Judaism and communism in whole or in part are linked and tied to bad things generally. Besides the fact that this is your area of expertise, why did you decide to tell this history?
Paul: I'm glad that you picked up on that. I am very much interested in how this myth or this conspiracy theory connects to a whole host of other issues. And I came to it actually when I was in Hungary in the 1990s. I'm a historian of Hungary by training, and I was doing my research for my dissertation, and my dissertation was on Hungarian nationalism and its relationship to Christianity in the 1920s and '30s and '40s. I was really struck by how so many of the different phrases and ideas and, sort of, thinking about Jews and communism which I was reading in my archival sources during the day, were reflected in journalism and in sort of public discussion about the recently vanished communist regime and what that had meant for Hungary and for the Hungarian national society.
And I knew also that this was not just a particularly Hungarian issue, that this same kind of conversation, the same kind of debates about the relationship of Jews to communism was going on in other countries across the former Soviet bloc, especially in Poland, especially in Romania. And I knew that it had also been a major factor in Nazi ideology and an issue that kept coming back in strange ways even in German society.
So I wanted to try to think about why this idea had such legs, as it were, why it seemed to endure across so many different kinds of regimes, and also try to figure out why it was so ubiquitous if you will, why it could be appearing in so many different places and so many different societies simultaneously. And so the book is an attempt to try to paint a broad canvas in which I could explore the different things that it meant to different people at different times.
Mike: Okay. One thing I brought up in book club was that the book almost feels like a military history in the way you tell it, very event- and people-heavy and diachronic across the chapters, but told geographically within the chapters. So talk a little bit about your choice of historiography, because it definitely feels like a careful choice you made in how consistent your style remains throughout.
Paul: Yeah. Well, I mean, as I said, one of the things I wanted to do was I wanted to capture the sense that this was a conspiracy theory that was powerful in a lot of places at the same time, and that it didn't radiate out from one place to another, but that it sort of sprang up like mushrooms in a lot of