How Four Influential Socialist Anti-Semites Shaped the Left

Pages: 1 2

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

“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

“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.

Pages: 1 2

  • Viking

    Karl Marx was the nice jewish man who invented marxism.

    Socialism as political philosophy is older than marxism and originally had a different content.

    • Daniel Greenfield

      Marxism is a form of Socialism.

      Marx was born a Christian and became an Atheist who had Jewish ancestry.

      • johnnywoods

        No one was ever "born a Christian". JESUS said "Ye must be born again."

        • Daniel Greenfield

          Theological debates aside, his father converted and he was baptized. At some point in time he became an atheist. Which is what he stayed.

          • johnnywoods

            Point taken.

      • nina

        Marx was born to Jewish parents, but was in antisemitic schools where he learned to hate his people.

    • dav

      Who cares? It's a bankrupt political philosophy born out of the desperate circumstances in Europe during the mid 19th century. Marx finished Das Kapital during our American Civil War. He's about as relevant as Warren Harding

      • Daniel Greenfield

        If over a billion people today lived under an economic system partly developed by Warren Harding, you would have a point.

    • Jim_C

      Ben Franklin was something of a socialist. George Orwell is one of the most famous democratic socialists–and this site loves to quote Orwell.

      • Daniel Greenfield

        Orwell is generally quoted as a critic of totalitarian socialism, rarely for his advocacy.

      • Wiley

        Orwell is in a league all his own, which is why people as far removed intellectually and morally as Christopher Hitchens and John Lukacs from each other can both refer to him accurately and approvingly without contradiction. Would love to see some data confirming Franklin as a "socialist."

        • Jim_C

          Orwell isn't very much removed at all from many people.

          I did mean the Franklin quote as a bit of mischief, but here's a good quote:

          "All property indeed, except the savage’s temporary cabin, his bow, his matchcoat, and other little acquisitions absolutely necessary for his subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public convention. Hence the public has the right of regulating descents and all other conveyances of property, and even of limiting the quantity and the uses of it. All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species, is his natural right which none can justly deprive him of: But all property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages. He can have no right to the benefits of society who will not pay his club towards the support of it."

  • skulldiggerin

    Well, the cloven hoof (the same one that answered the Fox Sisters,launching
    the Spiritism Movement in America)is all over the minds of these nitwits.
    However, as intellectuals they were light-years above the Islamic Arabs who
    have to rely on them and on blasphemous Israel-hating Jewish intellectuals
    (Noam Chumpsky) to make their case against Israel.
    Otherwise all they can howl is "AllahalakB00M !"

    Just a little footnote for Little History, have you ever seen a picture of this
    false prophet with his filthy beard shaven off ?
    An idealized portrait of a younger version of this phony depicted as a god
    was used for the cover of "The Youth Of Karl Marx"(uuuuurrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhh !)
    by one Elena Ilina (re-uuuurrrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhh !) published in the
    SU(where else ?) in better times.
    Later a miniature that served as model for the sycophantic depiction
    was discovered : it shows the young phony with a mouth like a maggot.
    Hence the shrubby beard to conceal the unsavory feature.

    • Wiccanwolf

      Marx in his "studies" of Communism allowed one of his children to starve to death. He was so engrossed in the theory, he didn't work. He later commented on the childs death. "He was weak and the weak must die so the strong can survive. Damned he and Casey Anthony should have hooked up.

      • skulldiggerin

        There are indications his relations with Friedrich Engels were no healthy ones.
        Karl's wife, poor Jenny, had fits of jealousy because of the two's "intimacy".

        When you reject GOD you go squarely against HIS WORD,
        which Karl did by often provoking his own father with taunts like :
        "I am Old Nick himself ! How's that for you ?"

        Engels gave him regularly large sums which he spent in bouts of drinking,
        once a 7-day long party.
        Many of these sums were payment for his hack writing, and Engels was the
        go-between for the arcane group that hired Karl to write "The Manifesto".

        In fact this text was not of Karl's own. They were notes from one Adam Weishaupt
        of Ingoldstadt University in late 18th Century Bavaria Karl was given later in England, to rearrange in book form and rubberstamp his bogus' name on the cover as author.
        The arcane group in question who hired this filthy phony, called itself
        "The League Of The Just", an organization of German expatriates dedicated
        to "Social Justice"…
        They were in fact believed to be members of the Bavarian Illuminati who came
        to France first in 1786 to lay their poisonous eggs for the Revolution and later the Terror, to roost.
        And then to England to continue their nefarious work.
        The consequences we are living today.

        The study of the events leading to a big event is more edifying than the study of
        the big event itself.
        The history of the years before 1789 shows Paris invaded by a horde of extraordinarily rich Germans from Bavaria who brought with them all kinds of pseudo-scientific practices, the most notorious among them was Franz Anton Mesmer's experiences on "Animal Magnetism".
        But Illuminati Clubs flourished openly everywhere in Paris, and elsewhere too.

        And made their way to America…

        And they keep telling us there is no conspiracy and
        that they will kill anyone who says there is !

      • skulldiggerin

        By the way, Mesmer's Animal Magnetism later metastased into "Christian Science"
        in Boston, J.P. Morgan's hometown …

  • Tziona

    Wow, there is a serious revelation here that we must all recognise and internalise.

    "Who is your Jew?"

    When a "thinker" knows in his heart that his philosophy has failings, but his ego won't admit it, he projects the failings onto "his" Jews. But having blamed his Jews he cannot then work through the philosophy and correct the errors, thus condenming the philosophy to failure and himself to a lifetime of anti-Semitic frustration. Anti-Semitism is a psychosis.

    Conversely, we can look at any philosophy, ideology or scheme that uses anti-Semitic imagery (including today, anti-Zionist imagery) to see its failings and what even the author recognises as flaws, albeit subconsciously.

    • Michael

      Great synopsis on how the weak-minded function. Not long ago, I thought this behavior was a planned process, but now it is clear it is just part of a primitive instinct.

  • Daren

    JUDAH is the fountainhead of our civilized world as we know it. Call it what you will! Western civilization. Judeo-Christian civilization. Whatever form of people living together in a civilized manner! The LIGHT to a depraved,decadent world! A bulwark against a heinous,insidious barbarism masquerading as enlightment in the world today! Islam , marxism , whatever you want to call it! WE ARE ALL JEWS!!! The only formidible edifice which stands in their way to the NEW WORLD BARBARISM !!! WE must stand united against them!!!

    • Ralph

      Right, because the Greeks and the Romans were just standing around waiting for Judah to tell them what to do. No, we are not all jews.

      • PhillipGaley

        No, but right because as with the Greeks was to be seen in the Melasian controversy, Athens which had been 700 years abuilding, but lacking sense of right, after the destruction of Melos, was rather suddenly removed—and, saddled with the burden which slavery is, they had gone about as far as could have been expected.
        And similarly for Rome, but also, lacking sense of zero, their engineering had reached its zenith.
        So, yes, if they only knew, the Greeks and the Romans would have seen themselves as they are now more clearly to been seen, as merely in the way, standing against progress, waiting for a better direction to be pointed out to them, . . .
        Is our "Ralph" here, a 'Jew' in that larger sense of struggle for supremacy of decency—well, maybe not?

    • PhillipGaley

      Yes, in the warfare between progress and barbarism, Judah and the story of Tamar is one example—had all of his sons died, while the law did not oblige he himself, to take her, it did recognize rule of law as above arbitrary disposition; and as he himself, said when ready to have her burnt: "She hath been more righteous than I.", which, in this, is put an example of submission of all to rule of law, . . . in which the lesser also, have right, and a stake in the commonwealth, . . .

  • Asher

    These anti-semites are part of the world of the Anti-Christ, they breed hatred and chaos and destroy the lives of normal-happy people.

  • Cynic

    Well’s statement: “this antiquated obdurate culture ” shows just how futuristic his vision was that he could not foresee the technological advances that it would bring to light in medicine, electronics, agriculture etc.

  • Wingnut

    Hi

    We ALL see the pyramid scheme symbol on the back of the USA one dollar bill. We ALL see the servitude infestation in capitalism. We ALL see the "pay up or lose your wellbeing" Chicago mob-like felony extortion widespread within capitalism. We ALL see the "join or starve" felony extortion done to the 18 year olds… by this ugly competer's church called capitalism. We ALL see how forcing competer's religions onto 18 year olds, and/or LURING them into it with bling-dangling and promises of empowerments… kills membership in the cooperator's church (Christianity/socialism). We ALL understand that AmWay (American Way) (New World Order) got "the exclusive" (legal tender) on the TYPE of survival coupons (money) accepted in supply depots (stores) and leverages 18 year olds into the organization via that felony activity. (It puts AmWay-coupon slaving requirements called price tags… on all the survival goods). We ALL understand how sure-to-collapse farmyard pyramids work… from our childhoods. Upper 1/3 are "heads in the clouds" while the kids on the bottom ALWAYS GET HURT from the weight of the world's knees in their backs. And, we ALL see how such systems are illegal, immoral, and just plain sick.

    We American Christian socialists are patiently awaiting the natural fall of the pyramid-o-servitude, or the busting of the free marketeers felony… by the USA Dept of Justice. We Christians are VERY CLOSE to issuing a cease and desist order until the servitude and inequality goes away… which means it turns into a commune. Commune is a word we LOVE when used in the word "community"… but its one the caps HATE when used in the word "commune-ism". Go fig. PROGRAMMED!!

    Do a Google IMAGE SEARCH for 'pyramid of capitalist' to see a full color picture made way back in 1911, when capitalism was first discovered to be a con/sham instigated by the Free Masons/Illuminati. Folks sure bought into the thing… hook, line, and sinker just the same. The caps didn't even check if a string was attached! Now THAT'S easy fishing, eh?

    Time to level the felony pyramid scheme called capitalism. Abolish economies and ownershipism worldwide, and hurry. Economies just cause rat-racing, and rat-racing causes felony pyramiding. BUST IT, America! Look to the USA military supply/survival system… (and the USA public library system) for socialism and morals done right. Equal, owner-less, money-less, bill-less, timecard-less, and concerned with growth of value-criteria OTHER THAN money-value. Quit doing monetary discrimination immediately, and make it illegal. There are MANY measurement criteria of "value"… not just dollars. Try morals, efficiency, discrimination-levels, repairability, etc etc. Economies are cancerous tumors, and to cheer for their growth… is just insane. Profiting causes inflation, so if caps LIKE inflation, and if they LIKE a terrible time in afterlife when they meet the planet's ORIGINAL OWNER before caps tried to squat it all with ownershipism, then keep it up with the felony pyramiding. I dare you. While us Christians are finally bulldozing that pyramid scheme back to level, lets make servitude and "join or starve" (get a job or die) illegal in the USA, and lets level the architecture seen in USA courtrooms, too. Right now, USA courtrooms are church simulators or "fear chambers", by special design. Sick.

    Isn't that back-of-the-dollar pyramid… a Columbian freemason symbol? And WHERE is the USA gov located? District of Columbia? (Not even part of the USA!) How much more blatant can ya get? The "Fed" runs a pyramid scheme called the free marketeers. If you're using the "federal reserve note" certificates, or using no-other-living-thing-on-the-planet entitles of ownership, you're bought into a servitude/slavery con/sham… called capitalism. Pyramiding 101.

    Larry "Wingnut" Wendlandt
    MaStars – Mothers Against Stuff That Ain't Right
    (anti-capitalism-ists)
    Bessemer MI USA

    • PhillipGaley

      Actually, because there is no counsel against The L0RD, in true definition, as capitalism is a strength of any community, it can never fail; for, it consists in capital or principal investments in tools, knowledge, materials, place, and people, and combining and using those things such that, that wealth may be increased.
      Contrarywise, there are those democrat wealth re-distributive types and spinners of shadowy conspiracies, perennial complainers and accusers—and, many times violent—who cannot but play into and augment the poverty and sadness of any community because, they are without knowledge, or any appearance of manual and social skills by which they might engage with others to use tools and materials for wealth appreciation and conservation of capital, . . .

    • nina

      Oh, how I woud have liked for you to spend a year in Soviet Russia.. Of course, it doesn't exist anymore. But perhaps North Korea would do as well? Because China is much more kapitalist. But the pure air of North Korea with its republic for the working peope would be just the ticket for you. Then you would talk differently. You see, you and many Americans are spoiled brats. They have it so good, that they want even better. And they think the foolish nonsense which you are spewing would save the world. A little experience in the country I suggested, woud cure you and your ilk of this sickness of mind.

    • responder

      Actually God instituted ownership. Yep. Read the Bible, its there. Getting rid of money, hard work, and exploitation wont happen until Jesus Christ comes back. You should know that too… if you are a "Christian."

  • steven l

    They all share fundamental and visceral jealousy towards the Jews.
    The Jews have what they do not nave.
    "Intelligence!"

  • samantha

    Is it our intelligence or our success in varied fields that brings the hate? Only in part, I think it is our belief in the one thing Marxists, Socialist & Co. hate the most, G-d. They want to destroy G-d and to destroy the Jews, in their mind would destroy G-d.

    • mlcblog

      Amen.

  • Attila the Hun

    Why so much hate against the Jews? The answer is simple
    Individual survival is anathema to the collectivist. . Since The Jews are the only people
    in human history who survived against all odds It is natural for the collectivist to hate us. The Jews not only survived they thrived and prosper while their homeland ransacked, destroyed and demolished again and again. When finally we are back at home the anti Semites still can't and won't accept reality. Unfortunately we must fight to stay a live.

    • mlcblog

      so much hate against the jews…Jesus said they would hate us….I think it's the belief in God that offends them. That's what he said would happen.

  • Michael,Canada

    Understanding better Obama.(13th imam)

  • Sam B.

    Bakunin, Kropotkin, Rousseau–all anti-semites, These enlighted woners. Rousseau would grant (French) citizenship to the Jews–if they stopped

  • Sam B.

    To complete the sentence of my previous note, which stopped at "stopped".____…if they stopped being Jews.

  • Jim_C

    So is next week going to include an article about anti-semitism among the capitalists?

    Or will it be on "semitic" socialists?

  • Jim_C

    I'm very curious as to which words set off the site admin review. It seems verious "-isms" do it.

  • Maxie

    I have to question the whole concept of "the Jews" as if it was a monolithic entity. This raises the question of what is the core definition of being "a Jew" and therefore what's required to be an anti-Jew? I have a formerly nominally Christian acquaintance who converted to Judaism. What was he required to do to get into this allegedly hated group and now call himself a Jew?
    As part of the goyim myself I read Sylvia Barack Fishman's book "The Way into the Varieties of Jewishness" to get some answers. An excellent book but I'm still confused.

    • Daniel Greenfield

      It's a complicated question. One definition used is Religious Civilization.

      But defining the Anti-Semitic side isn't hard, because it doesn't have a working definition of Jews, except that they represent everything they hate.

      So for Marx, Jews were Capitalism, for Hitler they were Conscience, etc

  • http://whenfallsthecoliseum.com/author/kwatson/ megapotamus

    I got a little whiplash at: they legitimized socialism by associating it with anti-semitism. Yow! But of course that is true. I was dimly aware of Wells but hadn't really seen it in the original. Yow, again. Although never hostile to Israel it is only in the last decades that I have become a real Zionist. All the claptrap about the Jews being the keystone to modernity actually turns out to be more or less so. Hang in there, Israel. We're hanging in over here.

    • Daniel Greenfield

      It made sense, still does. One reason the left in Europe, which needs Muslim votes is so fired up over Israel.

  • UCSPanther

    Antisemites, especially those of the neo-nazi crowd, like to yell and holler that Marx was Jewish, but what they neglect, or more likely are ignorant of, is that he was a self-loather.

    Another self-loather I know of is William Potter Gale. He is not well-known, but he is a stark example of a such a beast. Gale ran with white supremicist crowd from the 1950s until his death in the mid '80s, and he was a prominent leader in the antisemitic "Christian" Identity movement, a cult founded in 1925 by Wesley Swift, a Ku Klux Klanner. Gale was a virulent antisemite who had considerable influence over the white supremicist fringes, with many eagerly drinking the koolaid that he dished out with his short-wave radio broadcasts. Ironically, Gale's father originally fled to the USA at the beginning of the 20th century to escape antisemitic persecution in his native Russia at that time.

    In fact, Norman Finkelstein in my mind is a left-wing version of William Potter Gale, considering his origins as well…

    • Daniel Greenfield

      I'm not sure Marx even qualified as a self-loather. I think he was more in the Soros crowd, contemptuous of most everyone and filled with hate.

      Finkelstein is mentally unstable, much like Shamir and some others.

  • Maxi

    Read the book "United In Hate" by Jamie Glazov. It explains a lot. I've heard that Marx was Jewish and I've heard Marx was Christian. With history being re-written on a continuous basis in books and Wikipedia it's hard to know what's the correct information. Best bet is to read history books written as close to the era in which it happened as possible.

  • NappieRed

    Daniel is a brilliant writer. So glad he is a Fellow. I am kvelling.

    • Daniel Greenfield

      Thank you.

  • Morty Zuckerbaum

    Oh, I think that it's wondahful that you've managed to expose the truth that radical leftist politics in the late 19th and early 20th century were purely the domain of wicked, hate-filled goyishe anti-Semites. If we hadda few more brilliant boychicks like you in the anti-Semitic newspapers, us Jews would not be so powerless and oppressed.

  • scum

    The difference is simple: Islam is an explicit marker of Religion; 'Jewish' is a confused marker occasionally denoting Religion, sometimes ethnicity/culture, sometimes Race. Apples and Oranges…

    • Chezwick_mac

      Wrong. Both denote a people, a culture, and a history. One is dynamic and pluralist. The other is stultifying and monist.

  • ObamaYoMoma

    I often wondered how and why leftists could side with the worse serial human rights violators in the world and the worse perpetrators of crimes against humanity the world has ever seen and at the same time without due diligence accept their taqiyya against Israel as being credible and then turn around and use it to incite hatred and violence against Jews. Now I know, the leftists are just as fanatically obsessed with destroying the Jewish state as the Islamic world.

    It’s also why leftists claim they are not anti-Semites but anti-Zionists. They believe the Jewish state of Israel must be destroyed because it is not only an impediment to world peace but also to the creation of the New Socialist Utopian World Order.

  • Liberty

    In order to get the sheep to follow the wolf, he must convince them that they have enemies and that only he can protect them. Even the sheep that occasionally disappear in the middle of the night are the result and proof of the enemy. The wolf's biggest fear is all the sheep getting their own guns.

  • mlcblog

    Informative article. Thank you.

  • David

    Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed, and thrown on the waste-heap of Europe, for what they were considered: money-Jews. Finance capital and the banks, the hard core of the system of imperialism and capitalism, had turned the hatred of men against money and exploitation, and against the Jews. . . . Antisemitism is really a hatred of capitalism.

    —Ulrike Meinhof, left-wing German terrorist of the 1970

    http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=359

  • http://zenithwatchesusa.com simon bottom

    I’m pleased that I am not a News Corp, shareholder! With all the on going problems it is facing in the UKwith the now closed, News of the World newspaper. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp based in Delaware; is also facing a legal challenge from its shareholders. These shareholders, including investment funds, labor and municipal pension funds are accusing Murdoch of misusing News Corp assets, by treating the company like a family candy jar, which he raids whenever his appetite strikes. It looks like the trouble are just starting!

  • Karl

    Jews start all the wars in the world and wonder why everyone hates them. Jews think they're better than non-Jews. Jews created communism and capitalism. Jews make non-Jews suffer in any way or shape or form that they can! Jews control, run and rule (not in a good way) the world! And I'm a Socialist!

  • Silk

    Marx was NOT anti-Semitic. He was anti-Christian, but NOT anti-Semitic.