Two days ago, I wrote a post titled “A Controversial History Lesson,” as a response to antisemitic comments that I regularly see on BitChute. Admittedly, I was a bit ruffled, so I didn’t include everything that I wanted to, and set it to private after only a day (I never delete anything). Some of these commenters suffer from genuine Jew Derangement Syndrome (JDS), a particularly entertaining form of antisemitism, but most are just trolls. The problem, as I see it, is that the issue is so polarising that discussion is nearly impossible, and the subject so taboo that even entertaining a certain side of it is… risky, to say the least. However, I’m going to go back to the very beginning, and perhaps shed some light on the root of antisemitism, and why it’s not going away any time soon.
After the destruction of their temple in 70 AD, when Jerusalem was sacked, the Jews found themselves without a homeland, and were forced to live a nomadic lifestyle. Judaism, being the origin of Christianity, was viewed with the same amount of contempt throughout the Roman Empire, at least until Christianity replaced Greco-Roman polytheism as the state religion. After that, Jews were still second-class citizens at best, while Christians were no longer. The reasons are purely theological, as Jews point out (correctly, I might add) that Jesus of Nazareth did not fulfill any of the prophecies pertaining to the messiah in the old testament. Therefore, according to the Jews, the messiah has not yet come, and we are not living in the “end times,” as Christians believe. I should probably mention that Muslims hold the exact same belief – both Abrahamic religions maintain that Jesus was just another prophet. I don’t believe either one, since I don’t believe any of the scriptures to begin with, but I know what they say.
Fast forward to Medieval Europe, which was a Christian theocracy, for the most part. Though kings ruled over their own nations, they weren’t absolute monarchs, owing to the complicated system of feudalism, and also the supreme authority of the Roman Catholic Church. In addition to prescribing scriptural interpretation, the Church was also a multi-tentacled socio-political monster, and dictated law to all of “Christendom.” That last word is in quotes, because until 1066, it didn’t include England, which was already Christian (but not Catholic) long before the Norman Conquest, and neither did it include the Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Empire nor the various territories that eventually united into the Tsardom of Russia. Anyway, back to the Catholic Church. For much of its history, it held the practise of usury, which is the charging of interest on a loan, as a capital offense – for Christians. There were many restrictions placed upon Christians that were not imposed upon Jews, not because Jews enjoyed a higher status in society, quite the opposite. Jews were relegated to the tasks that Christians were supposed to perceive as “unholy.” Likewise, there were privileges that Christians enjoyed that Jews did not, such as owning property. As a result, Jews were forced to live a nomadic lifestyle, working as travelling merchants, entertainers, and money-lenders. Curiously, there is another ethnicity known for a nomadic lifestyle, and having a reputation for swindling people: Gypsies. This fact will be relevant later in this article, so keep it in the back of your mind for now.
Thanks to their odd lifestyle, strange religion (comparatively), and unsavory occupations, Jews were viewed with extreme suspicion throughout Europe. Any time something bad happened, someone would, inevitably, blame the Jews (yes, JDS existed even back then). That’s not to say that Jews were entirely innocent yet convenient scapegoats. Jews are just like any other ethnic group; some are nice, some nasty, some are smart, some stupid. Regardless of who was in the right, whenever tensions arose between Christians and Jews, the king’s usual solution was to simply expel the Jews, since they were a tiny minority, and many were accustomed to living on the road already. Strangely enough, when it came to religious persecution, European Jews probably had it easier than Christians after the Protestant Reformation. I have noticed, in my studies of ideological conflicts, that similar ideologies tend to have much more violent struggles than dissimilar ones, as if both groups are thinking “you’re so close, why won’t you take that last step and join my side?” In fact, the single bloodiest religious war that I know of is the Thirty Years’ War, fought between Catholics and Protestants, which claimed more lives than any of the Crusades, and judging by the sizes of the armies involved in the latter, I think it’s safe to say that the Thirty Years’ War probably killed more people than all of the Crusades, despite the latter lasting six times as long. Catholics and Protestants were so quick to call each other heretics because of their slightly different doctrines, whereas Christians tended to have a much more mystified attitude toward Jews and Muslims. Apparently, being a heretic or apostate is much worse than being a heathen or infidel.
Just as there have been schisms within Christianity and Islam, there have been schisms within Judaism. The most obvious split is between Orthodox Jews, of which there are many denominations, and reformed Jews, sometimes called secular Jews, many of whom are atheists. Since I don’t personally know any religious Jews (though one of my best friends was a self-described ex-Jew), I don’t know the exact history of these schisms, but I have a few suspicions regarding what happened. Jews are taught that they are “god’s chosen people,” per their holy scriptures, and that all others are inferior, those who do not bow down and serve the Jews must be destroyed. This is all in the old testament, by the way, you can read it for yourself if you don’t believe me. Of course, a doctrine of superiority doesn’t work too well for a displaced people that can’t own property and are relegated to performing tasks considered unsavory by the societies in which they lived. While plenty of Jews would get their digs in, as one might say, by swindling and cheating Christians at every opportunity, that’s no way to get along, and some Jews would rather get along with Christians than follow their own religious teachings. Therefore, the Jews who would rather get along with everyone else slowly discarded the trappings of Judaism, until one could no longer tell that they were Jews. Some changed their last names (Marx being a common one for Jews who wanted to abandon their Jewish identity), and these days, they get nose jobs. However, not all went this far. Some shed the trappings of Judaism in public, but still practised their religion in secret. In addition, the long tradition of money-lending probably contributed to the Jews’ reputation for being financially shrewd, even leading to “Jew” being used as a slur for obvious non-Jews who are good at making and managing money. This reputation was not unfounded, and during economic downturns, while large swathes of the population may end up penniless, the Jews always seem to do just fine. Eyes of envy naturally turn toward them…
Even when times weren’t particularly tough, antisemitism was still rife in both Europe and the United States well into the 20th century. However, there was a notable event that occurred in 1917 the American and European Jews alike cheered at: the October Revolution. Although Karl Marx was an atheist, he was born into a Jewish family, and was unable to truly shed his Jewish identity, leading to the proclamation by other Jews that “socialism is a Jewish invention.” I personally maintain that it is a German invention, but perhaps that’s just my own bias. Regardless, the destruction of the monarchy and the Russian Orthodox Church were seen as a great victory for Jews worldwide, and the fact that 447 of the 545 Bolshevik party members were Jews (apparently) was taken as a sign that Jewish supremacy might be achieved after all. Unfortunately for non-Russian Jews, the stories coming out of Russia were rather skewed at the time. First, the Russian Orthodox Church was declared an enemy of the state simply because it sided with the Tsar. Contrary to a belief just as popular today as it was in 1918, the Soviet Union did not outlaw Christianity. The Soviet Union simply replaced Christianity with communism as its state religion, and yes, communism is a religion according to Russians. In fact, on one of my discs of Soviet patriotic songs, the category listed is “религозные,” which, as you can probably guess, is the Russian word for “religious.” Second of these misconceptions is that the Soviet Union was even remotely friendly to Jews. This may have been the case in 1921, when Vladimir Lenin was still running the show, and Leon Trotsky, a Jew (but also a self-described atheist), was his heir apparent. However, a relatively well-known science fiction author named Yevgeniy Zamyatin made a prediction based on what he saw, and wrote a thinly-veiled allegory called “We.” In it, he described the Great Benefactor, with his “cast iron hands.” There was someone in the communist party who could go by that description, who was much more popular than Trotsky for a very simple reason.
Trotsky was much more ambitious than Lenin, and wanted to bring the revolution to the entire world. While communist zealots cheered, most Russians at the time didn’t care about communist ideology, they just wanted better treatment than they got under the Tsar. Nikolai II was an inept ruler who dragged his country into two disastrous wars, and his supporters continued to fight for three years after his summary execution. Trotsky promised more war, a never-ending war, in fact. However, he had a rival with a cult of personality forming around him, a man who promised peace and bread, to shut the rest of the world out and let it fend for itself: Iosif Stalin, whose last name literally means “man of steel.” In 1924, Lenin died, and Stalin came to power. Trotsky was exiled shortly thereafter, then deported, kicked out of almost every country he went to, and finally ended up in Mexico. Rather than keep his mouth shut, however, he kept trying to lead a revolution. Unfortunately for him, Stalin proved to be exceptionally skilled at two things: making people disappear, and keeping things quiet. The fact that Russians are naturally taciturn probably helped him with the latter. Stalin had his own ideas of how things ought to be run, and he wasn’t about to let anyone get in his way. He knew he would make enemies in the process, and being as paranoid as he was, he seemed to live by the saying “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” Contrary to popular belief, Stalin did indeed have friends – Kliment Voroshilov would not have been able to get away with as much nonsense as he did were he not Stalin’s friend. Of course, we all know that Stalin is infamous today for his purges (during which Soviet Jews were targeted with extreme prejudice), but while he was still alive, it wasn’t so. Lenin was no stranger to purges, either, and he was responsible for building the machine that Stalin put into high gear. As I mentioned before, however, Stalin was good at keeping things quiet, and American Jews continued to praise the Soviet Union well into the 1950s – though there was a brief period between the first and second “Red Scares” when everyone held their breath and said nothing.
Since European Jews were accustomed to being pariahs wherever they lived, the election of a highly vocal antisemitic chancellor in Germany came as no surprise in 1933. However, most German Jews didn’t take Mein Kampf seriously at the time. They had seen all this before – or so they thought. Since all of Europe, not just Germany, was in a massive depression brought on by World War I, most people were on hard times – except for the Jews, who are good at managing money and getting through tough times. When Adolf Hitler came to power, Jews were already scapegoats in Germany, but after 1933, the country had a leader who fully endorsed such an attitude. Jews from all over the world knew that something was different this time, as Hitler was blaming the Jews for all Germany’s ills, but he wasn’t expelling them. “Get out now,” was the frantic message that German Jews were receiving from their relatives who realised that Mein Kampf wasn’t hyperbole. Of course, when Hitler shut the borders to keep his own people in, that’s when everyone knew who was right. We all know the rest of that story.
In the 1930s, during the first Red Scare, the Soviet Union was already funding American communist groups, such as the Communist Party of the USA, which was founded in 1919. Communism was already seen as a threat back then, and the people who joined it, the dispossessed, including American Jews, were seen as the enemy of capitalist America. Henry Ford and many other prominent industrialists praised Hitler for actively doing what America was apparently too afraid to (never mind the fact that FDR hated the Japanese and wasn’t afraid of deliberately provoking them into attacking Pearl Harbor, but that’s a story for another time). Of course, both the left and right ended up having the wind taken out of their sails as soon as they heard about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. Hitler and Stalin? Allies? Well, they were both socialists, after all!
Nazism is short for “National Socialism.” It’s a derivative of Fascism, which is the invention of Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was originally a socialist, but after studying the Soviet Union and the various tweaks that were made to the Soviet system, Mussolini came to the conclusion that socialism doesn’t work as advertised, hence the sentiment in his autobiography that “socialism is a fraud, a phantom, and a blackmail.” Socialism isn’t sustainable, and Lenin himself figured out quite quickly that a police state is necessary to keep such an economic system going. Mussolini came to the exact same conclusion, and the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany copied his idea. The difference is that, rather than the state seizing all means of production by default, the state would dictate what each factory is to produce – only failure to meet the state’s requirements would result in the state seizing the means of production. Industry was still controlled by the state, it just wasn’t owned by the state, at least on paper. Recall when I said “similar ideologies tend to have much more violent struggles than dissimilar ones,” and instead of applying that sentiment to different denominations of Christianity, apply it to different derivatives of socialism. There is a reason for the saying “the left eats itself,” and despite his alliance with Stalin, Hitler was quite happy to throw self-described German communists in concentration camps.
Although most people today will dismiss Hitler as a “right-wing extremist,” his economic policies were anything but. The Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany all had left-wing authoritarian governments. The only reason “right wing” gets applied to the Nazis is simply because of the religious aspect – Nazis believed that they were doing “god’s work” by ridding the world of the Jews. Hitler himself was a Catholic, and most Germans at the time were either Catholic or Lutheran. Although the eradication of the Jews was central to Hitler’s war effort, rather than separate from it, as many people believe today, neither had anything to do with Hitler’s economic reforms. Of course, modern Christians, especially American Christians, will deny that the Nazis were “true Christians,” “good Christians,” or even Christians at all, until their faces turn blue. However, there is a strange aspect to American Christianity that is responsible for this sentiment, which ties in directly to the foundation of the modern nation of Israel. According to the new testament (Revelations, I think, but it might be mentioned earlier), the “end times” will begin when god gives Israel back to the Jews. Never mind the problems with the prophecy itself, while Israel does exist, and it is now under firm control of the Jews, it is as much a Jewish nation as the United States is a Christian nation. In the context of demographics, strictly, Israel is just as Jewish as America is Christian, but neither country is a theocracy – both are secular republics. God doesn’t get the credit for founding Israel. However, evangelical fervour has worked quite well in Israel’s favour, since evangelical Christians will gladly do whatever they think is necessary to keep Israel from being taken over or destroyed by the surrounding Arab nations. Israel can do no wrong, as far as the evangelicals are concerned, but not as far as the rest of the world is concerned. It should come as no surprise that Israel has many more Christian supporters than Jewish supporters, but it may come as a surprise that nearly all criticism of Israel that I’ve heard (in person, not on the internet) has come from Jews. As surprising as that may be, there’s a good reason for it.
When I said “we all know the rest of that story,” referring to the Holocaust, I’m assuming that everyone knows it as the extermination of nearly six million Jews from all over Europe, including the Soviet Union, in Nazi death camps. However, there is more to it than that. Jews represent only one third of the people who died in the camps, either from poison gas, starvation, disease, or being worked to death. The Nazis targeted several other groups, most notably homosexuals, cripples, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Gypsies. Of course, the single greatest number of casualties came from Soviet citizens, and there is some overlap with the Jewish population of victims as well. Roughly 5,7 million Soviet civilians died in Nazi death camps, not counting the 1,3 million Soviet Jews, as well as an additional 3 million Soviet POWs and 1,8 million Polish citizens (again, not counting Polish Jews). Keep in mind that Hitler saw Slavs the same way that Orthodox Jews see gentiles, or “goyim” as the Hasids would say; they are to be enslaved, and those who resist are to be destroyed. The reason for Hitler’s downfall was simply this: the Slavs fought back, and they outnumbered the Nazis. Of course, hardly anyone talks about this part of the Final Solution. Most people remember Hitler as “that guy who tried to exterminate the Jews,” and how the Holocaust was “that thing where six million Jews died,” never mind that Hitler killed twice as many Slavs as Jews, but that seems to be just the way that the Israeli government wants it. In fact, the Israeli government has been severely criticised for barring ethnic Gypsies from dedicating their own memorial at Auschwitz (and I will add a citation as soon as I find it, since Wikipedia has removed that entire section of their Holocaust article). “No, you can’t have a monopoly on victimhood” was the reply. “Jews just don’t learn, they have to make everyone hate them” was another interesting sentiment that, although not new, became rather prominent at the time. Of course, this “Holocaust monopoly” nonsense wasn’t being pushed by all Jews, it was the Israeli government, which reformed Jews and Orthodox Jews alike criticise to no end, but for different reasons. As true as the “Jews don’t learn” sentiment may be, Jews don’t have a monopoly on that, either. “Religion is relentless, and they think they’re in a culture war” to quote Aron Ra, and although he was referring to evangelical Christians when he said that, it could be applied to nearly any ideology.
As long as people continue to engage in identity politics, prominent bad actors will be held up as examples of an entire group, despite the fact that no group is a monolith. Of course, with large groups, a majority can easily come forth and say “this individual does not speak for us.” However, Jews are such a tiny minority that this simply won’t work for them. Most Jews find that it is simply easier to walk away, and I don’t blame them. Then again, any time someone has the sense to walk away from their religion, it makes me happy. The problem that Jews face is that, to the rest of the world, it is impossible to walk away from Judaism. “Once a Jew, always a Jew, including one’s descendants,” seems to be the policy that the SS abode by, and the Israeli government holds the same policy in response, as if to say “if the Nazis would have called you a Jew, you are welcome here.” After all, a hatred of Jews is called “antisemitism,” referring to the fact that ethnic Jews are the only surviving “pure” (in quotes because I don’t believe in the notion of racial purity) Semitic race left, other than Arabs, though hatred of Arabs is called “Islamophobia” for some reason. Unfortunately for most Jews, they have overwhelmingly attached themselves to left-leaning political parties, which are increasingly relying on divisive identity politics. Well, what happens when identity politicians try to protect [insert minority here], for example, only for [insert minority here] to turn around and attack Jews? Oh, that’s right, no-one says anything, and it’s 1939 all over again. If the Jews truly are in control of everything, as JDS-sufferers seem to believe, then they aren’t very good at holding on to that control. These truly are interesting times that we live in.
Kaja's Kreations 