In the 2015 film Look Who’s Back, Adolf Hitler, upon shooting himself, finds that he is not dead but transported 70 years into the future. As the Führer explores the new Germany, he becomes a popular sensation with everyone believing him to be a man trying to make a statement. When asked which of the current parties he would support, Hitler replies that it would be the Green Party, much to the audience’s amusement.
Perhaps this was not so far-fetched. Feda Shahin, a candidate for the Green Party of England and Wales, claimed that before the Holocaust, during the Bolshevik Revolution, Zionists killed 20 million Christians and that the “committee” that decided this was made up of 500 people, 480 of whom were “Zionists.”
[T]here is more to this link between the modern far left and National Socialism. Despite the ideological differences, a similar Weltanschauung can be detected in the two.
None of that is true. The leading Bolsheviks who were Jewish (Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev) all denounced their Jewish heritage. Another one, Karl Radek, told a German friend that he wanted to “exterminate” the Jews. None of the Russian Zionist groups had any military power. Lenin dismissed their idea of a Jewish nation, and as his power solidified, the Soviet government increasingly harassed Zionist groups. Shahin’s assertion was nothing less than a repacking of the “Judeo-Bolshevik” myth, that the Bolsheviks were virtually all Jews, with Zionist simply being a substitute for Jew.
This was not the only such incident of a Leftist-Nazi connection. Actress Helen Mirren was accosted on the streets of London and labeled an “evil Zionist B#t@h.” The man who said this was identified as Tom Carrol, a self-described “Corbynista,” affiliated with an account called Anti-Fascist Action UK. Despite this, Carroll’s social media contained numerous posts praising Hitler and casting doubt on the Holocaust.
Across the Western world, there has been a growing adoption of antisemitic and Nazi talking points on the far left. With only the briefest of glances, one can find all the usual tropes: the Jewish (Zionist) World Conspiracy, the sexual predator preying on children, the greedy capitalist, etc.
Shortly after entering Congress, it was discovered that Rep. Rashida Tlaib followed on Instagram, free.palestine.1948, a noxious account that compared Jews to rats, blamed them for 9/11, and repeated the blood libel; an antisemitism so crass that it could have come from the pen of Julius Streicher himself. That a sitting congresswoman was following the Instagram equivalent of Der Stürmer garnered no outrage.
Another Green Party candidate, Tina Ion, raged that “Jewish Nazis … the money-grubbing THIEVES have built mountains of money over centuries that they use to buy their way in the world through the lowest and most corrupt individuals in high places.” Leaving aside the fact that political Zionism only came about in the 1880s and thus is less than two centuries old, this quote bares remarkable resemblance, if lower intellectual caliber, to one by German General, and early partner of Hitler, Erich Ludendorff in 1922: “The leadership of the Jewish people … win for the Jews in Palestine a state territory and recognition as a nation, and to win for themselves in Europe and America suprastatal and supracapitalist hegemony.”
In another post, Ion said, “Israel must be eradicated. Even if it means killing every single Zionist.” After calling Zionists “vermin,” she continued, “And vermin must be eradicated so they can’t harm children.” The account Ion wrote this under was called “thereal.anne.frank” with its profile pic being Frank wearing a keffiyeh. Poor taste, given that one of the major leaders of the Palestinians, while Frank was alive, Grand Mufti al-Husseini, knew and actively supported her and all the other little Jewish girls of Europe being shipped to Auschwitz, Chelmno, or Treblinka.
As Ion’s point shows, this uttering of Nazi propaganda neatly corresponds to an increase in comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany or the purported Nazi-Zionist “connection.” While the connection is largely the product of Cold War Soviet propaganda, it also follows one of the claims of the infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that Jews engineer persecution and violence against other Jews to gain international sympathy; note the numerous conspiracy theories that the Bondi Beach massacre was a Zionist false-flag.
Another prime example was when the controversial far-left streamer Hasan Piker engaged in a form of Holocaust revisionism during an interview by claiming that some Jews participated in the “Nazi command structure.” This “claim” centers around three men: Emil Maurice, Field Marshal Erhard Milch, and General Helmuth Wilberg. All three men under the Nazi classification were part Jewish. However, none of them acted or considered themselves Jewish, let alone Zionists. None, besides Milch, were high-ranking officials, and none were involved in the Nazi’s extermination policies. As with later comments about Albert Einstein, Mr. Piker received no pushback from the interviewer after he made these comments.
In this telling, not only are the Zionists (Jews) the new Nazis, but also that the Nazis were right about them. To the average person, these two claims are incongruous, but to focus on that is to misunderstand the point. As Dr. Goebbels put it, “It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.” Just as the dialectic of antisemitism allowed that Jews created both capitalism and communism to ferment unrest and conquer the world, it allows the Jews to now be the Nazis and for the Nazis to have seen the true nature of the Jews.
While there is the inherent irrationality of antisemitism, there is more to this link between the modern far left and National Socialism. Despite the ideological differences, a similar Weltanschauung can be detected in the two.
Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism provides keys to understanding this phenomenon. While she focused on the similarity between Stalinism and Nazism, Arendt discusses a wider totalitarian mindset in which people are forced to not just denounce the enemy but also prove that they themselves are not one. Take, for instance, the people who insist that the increase in antisemitism is the fault of people who conflate Jews with Israel or Zionism. It is not simply going after Zionists but forcing all Jews to prove they are not a Zionist. Engaging in their own version of “Power Propaganda,” they assert that Jews will only be safe when they all renounce Zionism.
Then there is the contempt displayed toward the current world order. The Nazis scorned the modern liberal nation-state, instead envisioning a world empire. Hitler privately dismissed German nationalism, instead speaking of an “Aryan people” that would rule. A perverse inversion of this thinking can be detected in the Third Worldists, who likewise disdain the nation-state and international borders, with race being the true dividing line. The scorn that many harbor for the two-state solution and Israel’s right to its 1967 border (that the international community recognizes) provides further strength to this analysis.
Once the Nazis achieved power, there was a noticeable tendency for Communists to join the party, leading to the term “Beefsteak Nazis.” Brown on the outside, red on the inside. We should now coin another term: “Avocado Leftists.” Green on the outside, brown on the inside. With the shocking rise of Nazi talking points and antisemitism, one is reminded of the Führer’s final line in Look Who’s Back.
“I can work with this.”
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