Trying to discredit powerful political myths with mere facts, as we know all too well today, is a frustrating endeavor. Thus Hanebrink seeks instead to understand the historical background and the “cultural logic” of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—how it functioned and morphed through different phases. Ultimately Judeo-Bolshevism embodied, in the form of “Asiatic barbarism,” an imagined threat to national sovereignty, ethnic homogeneity, and Western civilization conceived as traditional European Christian hegemony. It fused, in short, political, racial, and cultural threats into a single “specter haunting Europe.”
Hanebrink notes that amid the exhaustion, defeat, and political dissolution of many European countries at the end of World War I, the threat of the spread of Bolshevik revolution from Russia into Europe caused not only widespread fear and loathing but fear and loathing that identified Jews as the real cause of Bolshevism. He is correct, I think, to point out that this pervasive identification required more than the prominence of Jewish revolutionary leaders, and that Judeo-Bolshevism was constructed from the “raw materials” of earlier anti-Semitism. For Hanebrink the “three venerable pillars” of anti-Jewish thought were the attributions to the Jews of social disharmony, conspiracy, and fanaticism, which made Judeo-Bolshevism both a coherent idea and a ubiquitous, self-evident assumption. [...]
Atrocities against Jews led to Jewish appeals to the Allies and the subsequent imposition of minority rights treaties on Eastern European nations. In a vicious circle, these regimes in turn resented Jews as the cause of this infringement on their sovereignty, which they saw as further evidence of Jewish disloyalty. They insisted even more vehemently on the Judeo-Bolshevik connection to justify their past mistreatment of Jews and successfully exploited the Allies’ desire for a cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe to prevent the further spread of Bolshevism. For instance, the Polish army received crucial military aid to help it resist the Soviet invasion of 1920 even as it interned many of its own Jewish soldiers. All of this, it must be emphasized, took place before history’s most notorious purveyor and champion of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism had emerged from obscurity on the streets of Munich. [...]
The Allied occupation, the war crimes trials and denazification, but above all the division of Germany and the onset of the cold war led to the emergence in Western Europe of an anti-communism that was pro-democratic, pro-American, and not anti-Semitic. Underlying this transformation were two concepts. The first was that of totalitarianism, by which discredited and defeated fascism was equated with communism. The German churches in particular—previously highly nationalistic, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic, and thus all too often fellow travelers of the Nazi regime’s campaigns against liberalism, Marxism, and Jews—now portrayed themselves as resisters to and victims of that regime, which like the Soviet Union had manifested the evils of the secular, materialistic, ungodly state run amok. West Germany’s new self-image of Christian Democracy pitted against totalitarianism dovetailed with the second concept—the American notion of Judeo-Christian values as the basis of both democracy and Western civilization in its cold war opposition to godless communism. By embracing the cold war, assimilationist American Jews finally severed the old identification between Jews and Bolsheviks, but at the cost of giving priority to anti-communism over Holocaust memory. It was not until the late 1970s that the Holocaust began to obtain the position it currently holds in American consciousness.
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