The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 15: Judeo-Bolshevism

Mike: Common-ism

[Theme song]

Nazi SS UFOsLizards wearing human clothesHinduism’s secret codesThese are nazi lies

Race and IQ are in genesWarfare keeps the nation cleanWhiteness is an AIDS vaccineThese are nazi lies

Hollow earth, white genocideMuslim’s rampant femicideShooting suspects named Sam HydeHiter lived and no Jews died

Army, navy, and the copsSecret service, special opsThey protect us, not sweatshopsThese 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 different places in different periods throughout the 20th century. I wanted a broad geographical canvas, and I didn't want to just simply focus on one country or do a kind of comparison between two countries or something like that. So I wanted to sort of figure out a way to tell this as a European story, and to be able to track the different ways in which this conspiracy theory circulated across borders and from one political formation or political group to another and also over time.

The other thing that I wanted to focus on with this book in addition to the broad geographical canvas was also the notion that I didn't want a book that was just going to be a lot of different antisemitic texts one after the other, and so I just kind of piled them up in a big heap and kind of read them closely and pulled out all the different symbolisms. I wanted instead, to try to show using carefully chosen examples of people or groups or political parties or moments in history or events to really show how this ideological substance, this conspiracy myth, became something that had meaning and had power for people that shaped the way in which they saw and interpreted what they were doing and what others were doing.

And so for that reason, I think, very carefully throughout each chapter, I try to find actors in a way that I could hang the narrative on and that I could sort of develop the analysis by leading with specific kind of concrete, more vivid examples. And that may be perhaps what you picked up on when you were reading it.

Mike: Okay, so let's get into it. A lot of people know kind of the rudiments of old-school antisemitism and anti-communism, but not how they co-evolved into the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. So, how did antisemitism and anti-communism become modern?

Paul: Yeah, it's an interesting question. What I wanted to try to think about in the book–and I explore this I think most carefully in the first chapter–is the way in which very old ideas about Jews, specifically about the ways in which Jews, have been used to symbolize in a sense a world turned upside down or illegitimate power or some kind of dystopia. And you can see this particular set of ideas throughout a number of centuries going back into the Middle Ages. So I begin with this, this idea that Jewish power is somehow illegitimate power.

And then I look very carefully at the accusations that were circulating in Europe during World War I about Jews in a sense gathering power on the homefront while the true members of the nation were away on the front fighting. And so there was a real concern across Europe about Jewish loyalty and about Jews as being potential subversives or traitors or spies. And that feeds very easily into Jews as revolutionaries.

So you have these two things that come together in that sort of end of World War I moment where also the Bolshevik revolution breaks out, and that there's this very old language that is familiar and comfortable to so many people thinking about Jews as eager to sort of accumulate illegitimate power, that's the very old story that reaches back to the Middle Ages, but tied to this very particular moment in European history in which there's concern about Jewish responsibility for the collapse, for example, of empires from Russia to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the role that they're playing in revolutionary movements and revolutionary politics in so many different places across the European continent at that time.

And I think it's the crucible of those two in that moment that really creates the Judeo-Bolshevik myth as a particular form of Jewish conspiracy theory. I'm not saying it's different. I'm saying that there are many different faces and iterations of the myth of a Jewish conspiracy, but that this is a particular one or particular version. And that it does particular ideological things, particular political things for people during the 20th century.

Mike: Okay, so if modern anti-Semites and modern anti-communists largely belong to the right, their ideas coalesced into this conspiracy theory of Judeo-Bolshevism. Now you honestly don't spend a large amount of space in the book describing the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, and there's two things going on in your book.

On the one hand, you have the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism which is this theory that there is a secret cabal of Jews who control the world through joint efforts of banking finance and world communist movements that operate to destabilize Western civilization through financial panics and revolutions, so there's that.

Then on the other hand there's what you spend more time on, which is the perception that communism or at least its excesses in actual existing communism, is Jewish in origin and operation. Like, it's not necessarily a belief in a conspiracy necessarily so much as a dislike of Jews and the belief that they're inordinately involved in communism.

So when antisemitism and anti-communism became modern and intertwined, the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, this totalizing conspiracy theory started to form. Who were the major players in that and what kinds of influence do they have?

Paul: Yeah. I guess there are two things I want to pick up on in your question. The first is that I think you're right that I'm more interested in approaching the question in a particular way. And that is that, you know, a lot of the kind of antisemitic rhetoric and antisemitic ideology from the 20th century, there was this real insistence that you could somehow count the number of Jews who were in communist parties, and you could determine that this was a high number and that ther