The Hostages Are Home and We Can Finally Dance Again
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The myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” falsely blames Jews for the crimes of communism. In reality, Soviet Jews were victims of oppression, not perpetrators of it.
The Jewish people suffered awfully under communism. From the Russian Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union, Jewish life under Communist rule in Russia can only be described as oppression. Synagogues were closed, Hebrew was banned, Zionism was suppressed, and Jewish leaders were arrested or exiled. There was a whole movement in the 1900s to free Soviet Jewry - to allow them to emigrate out of the iron grips of communism.
These facts make the antisemitic myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” even more repulsive. Judeo-Bolshevism is the theory that Jews or Jewish forces are behind Communism. The theory is mostly popular among white nationalists or Neo-Nazis. Antisemitic influencers on social media use this theory to rile up hatred against Jews, blaming them for past atrocities and crimes against humanity.
At its core, this is a form of scapegoating. Those who promote this theory claim that not only have Jews done terrible things in the past, but must be the cause of terrible things in the present.
Here are the facts.
Karl Marx, the founder of Communism, hated Jews and Judaism. Interestingly, his parents were ethnically Jewish but converted to Lutheranism before Karl was born. It is unknown if his parents’ Jewish lineage had any role in his animus. But his disdain for the Jewish way is evident in his work “On the Jewish Question.” Among the claims in this work are: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money” and “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”
Far from being a Jewish plot, Communism was a source of pain and suffering to the Jewish people.
On social media today, antisemites have propagated lies about the leadership of the Bolshevik movement in Russia. One of the claims is that 80% of the Bolsheviks leaders were Jewish. Let's set the record straight: Of the 21 members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, only 5 were Jewish. The most infamous, Stalin and Lenin, were not Jewish. Almost all of the Politburo, the policymaking arm of the Communist Party, were non-Jews.
The most prominent Jewish member of the Bolsheviks was Leon Trotsky, who also rejected his Jewish identity. He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and assassinated in Mexico on the orders of Stalin in 1940.
Other Jews who had positions of power in the early days of the Communist movement, like Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, were murdered in the Great Purges in 1936. The Great Purges were Stalin's attempt to root out Jews from the Bolsheviks. What a far cry from “Judeo-Bolshevism” that antisemites cry about.
Another specific figure who has trended on social media is Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. This man is claimed to have personally committed the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that caused the death of 5 million Ukrainians. Antisemites desire to redefine Jews as the perpetrators of mass murder, as opposed to the victims of it.
But it was Stalin who implemented the brutal grain quotas on Ukraine, resulting in the Holodomor. At the time, Genrikh Yagoda was only a deputy chairman of the Joint State Political Directorate. He was an enforcer of Stalin's policies, not the architect of them.
Jews in Ukraine’s shtetls also suffered starvation, like every other Ukrainian. Genrikh Yagoda, like Trotsky, had no personal Jewish identity. And like many others, he was a victim of the Great Purges and executed by Stalin.
As a whole, the USSR was an antisemitic nation. The Bolsheviks made empty promises of equality to the Jewish population of Russia during the Russian Revolution, but walked back on them immediately. The Yevsektsiya, the ethnically Jewish section of the Communist Party banned Hebrew, Zionism, and closed synagogues in order to assimilate the Jewish population into secular communism. A Soviet conspiratorial campaign called the Doctors’ Plot, which lasted from 1952 to 1953, falsely accused Jewish doctors of plotting against Soviet leaders. This created a media campaign of antisemitism, and almost resulted in the mass deportations of the Soviet Union's Jewish population to Siberia. This didn’t happen only because Stalin had a stroke and died.
The USSR’s relationship to the State of Israel reinforces the idea that Judeo-Bolshevism is absurd. Stalin initially thought that Israel would be a socialist-friendly state, and thus voted in the affirmative for the creation of the State of Israel. When he saw that Israel was going to be friendly with the West instead, the USSR decided to support the Arab states instead. It even had a hand in the formation of the PLO in 1964 and pushed the “Zionism is Racism” resolution at the UN. Soviet Jews were forbidden from emigrating as well. Natan Sharaksky, a famous refusenik, spent 13 years in prison for trying to leave the Soviet Union.
Judeo-Bolshevism is an absurd antisemitic myth. Anyone who does surface level research would know it’s a baseless hoax. The myth has been pushed in recent years to blame Jews for societal ills. But social problems can’t be solved by pushing the blame on the wrong person or group.
By learning about the oppression of Soviet Jews, from cultural erasure to the struggles of Refuseniks, we honor their resilience and reject scapegoating. And you can help stand against antisemitism by sharing these facts.
"Vladimir Ilyich Lenin" wa born Lev Bronstein. Was he not Jewish?
Wrong!
That was Trotsky.
Trotsky was a self-hating Jew.
He was completely indifferent to the fate of other Jews once he was in power.
Lenin, himself, was a Russian who hated the Tsar because the Tsar had ordered the death of his elder brother.
Lenin got his revenge by ordering the death of the Tsar and his family.
25% of Bolsheviks were Jewish. I’m almost positive that had they known that the Revolution would turn out the way it did, they would not have joined the Bolsheviks. Zinoviev was purged 12 years after the Revolution. Trotsky was exiled after he lost his fight with Stalin. We have no way of knowing what kind of leader he would have become, but I doubt he would have been as cruel as Stalin (who was Georgian).
What do you mean, "only" five out of 21? That's almost 25%. What was their percentage in the general population? Much less. So, this is a subject, at least.
Under the tzar antisemitism decrees resulted in pogroms made life awful for Jews in Russia resulting in mass immigration to the USA.Some who remained joined the Bolshevik movement way beyond their proportions of the total population. These were not observant Jews and like today when many Jews reject Judaism they still seek other "Messianic "isms to advance a more just society. In those days chabad Aish ha Torah and similar outreach organizations didn't exist and Jews who were not properly educated in a Torah thst spoke to them left the fold. Trotsky is but one example. In any case galut especially today when the Jewish State is a real viable option is no place for a Jewish future. Don't repeat the sin of the spies in last weeks Parsha. Of course communism turned on the Jews
Finishing my third point: The non-Marxist Socialists before him: St Simon and Richard Owen, and after him Social Democrats and British Methodists running the trades unions and Coops kept The Enlightenment assumptions of discussion and votes. The Marxists faced with repression of all Socialists took their cue from the police of Russia and Germany and the "Bloody Week" of the 1870 Paris Commune. They pursued the "romance of violence" captured by Delacroix's painting "Liberty on the Barricades Guiding the People" - but neglected the corpses at the foot of the picture. Lots of difficulties have been caused by the (often deliberate) blindness to the difference between the two streams. Most of the ten bullet points at the end of Ch 2 of the C'ist Manifesto have come about anyway.
1) Socialism is secularised Christianity's charitable works and universalism. It has Christian - and Moslem - animus to odd balls eg Jews and nationalists who wish to remain themselves.
2) The Lenin generation were cosmopolitan. They lived abroad, were polyglots and seriously saw nation(lism)s over economic class interests as "local government". The Stalin generation were Slavophiles sorting out Russia first with great suspicions of the fancy West. From 1648 (Westphalia Treaties) to Munich (1938), French was the international language, so new disruptive ideas, and the second language of all with education and money in Russia, and the rest of Europe.
3) Socialism appears after 1815 in discontents that the French Revolution sorted a lot of civil equalities but NOT economics.
If it weren’t blatantly untrue and also scary, it would be funny that half of our enemies blame us for communism, while the other half blame us for capitalism!