ZGram - 7/20/2002 - "Book Review: "The 'Jewish Threat'" - Part II

irimland@zundelsite.org irimland@zundelsite.org
Thu, 18 Jul 2002 15:31:55 -0700


ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

July 20, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This is Part II of a lengthy book review of The "Jewish Threat": 
Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army by Joseph W. Bendersky. New 
York: Basic Books, 2000, xvii + 539 pp.  The reviewer is Kevin 
MacDonald, Department of Psychology, California State University at 
Long Beach, California. 

[START]

Jews and Bolshevism: The "Jewish Threat" shows that the commonly held belief
of a strong association between Jews and Bolshevism was based on a very wide
range of official and unofficial sources spanning a great many countries
over the entire period from World War I into the Cold War period after World
War II. This information thus buttresses scholarly accounts from other
sources of the predominant role of Jews in leftist radicalism (see
MacDonald, 1998/2002). While prone to exaggerations at times - as expected
on the basis of psychological theory - the attitudes of U.S. Army officers
were basically sound.

Nevertheless, Bendersky ascribes any special attention given to Jews as
revealing "the conservative, racial, and nativist perspective of the
officers" (p. 51). For example, an agent in Paris reported in 1919 that
among Jews there was "a remarkable unanimity of opinion in favor of the
Russian Bolshevist movement".  Jews were "dazzled by the sudden access to
power of their race" (p. 48). Such reports - and there were many like them,
should be taken at face value given that Jewish policy - engaged in by
numerous mainstream Jewish activist organizations since at least 1880 - was
to topple the Czar. Jewish celebration over the success of the revolution is
not in the least surprising, if only because the revolution ended czarist
anti-Jewish policies, and it is well attested by other sources, including
some cited by Bendersky (e.g., Szajkowski 1974). For example, in 1907 Lucien
Wolf, a leader of the Jewish community in England, wrote to Louis Marshall
of the American Jewish Committee that "the only thing to be done on the
whole Russo-Jewish question is to carry on persistent and implacable war
against the Russian Government" (in Szajkowski 1967, 8). "Western Jewish
leaders actively participated in general actions in favor of the liberal and
revolutionary movements in Russia both during the revolution and after its
downfall" (Szajowski 1967, 9).

In the same way, when Bendersky (pp. 109, 114) reports that MID agents in
Riga and Berlin commented that the Soviet embassies were staffed primarily
by Jews, I am inclined to believe the agents, not Bendersky's assumption
that all of the masses of similar data are the paranoid ravings of racist
military officers. Such a finding fits well with the general finding that
Jews were massively overrepresented in the early Bolshevik governments.

Bendersky also makes it appear that MID reports of Bolshevik atrocities are
fantasies. Reports stated that Bolshevik methods included not only seizure
and destruction of property but also "barbarism and butchery" (p. xii).
Included in the intelligence reports were photographs of  "naked bodies with
butchered flesh, hanging upside down from trees, while 'the Bolsheviki
soldiers were laughing and grinning and standing about'" (p. xiii).
Bendersky writes as if such claims are unworthy of being rebutted, yet there
is more than enough evidence that such things did happen. Indeed, the
recently published Black Book of Communism not only documents the horrific
slaughter of some 20 million Soviet citizens, the widespread torture, and
mass deportations and imprisonment in appalling conditions, but reproduces
the photos from 1919 of a naked Polish officer impaled through the anus
hanging upside down from trees while Bolshevik soldiers are laughing and
grinning and standing about (Courtois et al. 1999, 202-203).

Bendersky acknowledges that large numbers of immigrant Jews flocked to
leftist movements but faults the MID for not making subtle distinctions
among leftists. However, his own findings show that MID placed considerable
importance on the fact that American socialist groups, including the
Socialist Party, "expressed jubilant support" for Bolshevik Russia (p. 123).
Bendersky acknowledges that the great majority of radical leftists were
immigrants but states, without support, that the concentration of the MID on
Jewish neighborhoods was unwarranted (p. 124). However, MID based their
estimates on the numbers of radical meetings in particular ethnic
neighborhoods and on their observations at these meetings. The findings of
the MID fit well with the general finding that Jews were the only immigrant
group that developed an important and influential radical sub-culture, that
in fact, the immigrant Jewish community in the U.S. from 1886 to 1920 can
best be described as "one big radical debating society" (Cohn 1958, 621; see
also MacDonald 1998/2002).

The idea that the Bolshevik Revolution was part of a coordinated conspiracy
is more problematic, but it rested on the widespread intelligence reports
that wealthy Jews were important financiers of revolutionary movements - a
belief that Bendersky assumes is complete fantasy but for which there is
good evidence. In fact, American Jewish capitalists like Jacob Schiff did
finance Russian radical movements directed at overthrowing the Czar and may
well have had considerable impact (Goldstein 1990, 26 - 27; Szajkowski
1967). Schiff, who had already distinguished himself by leading efforts to
abrogate a trade agreement between the U.S. and Russia and had financed the
Japanese war effort against Russian in 1905, was repeatedly identified in
MID reports as behind the international collusion among wealthy Jews and
Jewish revolutionaries. Even then, officers were often remarkably judicious
in their appraisal of claims by informants and agents that there was an
international Jewish conspiracy, as in the case of a senior officer who
responded to such claims by noting, "I am rather in doubt as to whether the
conclusions drawn by this agent are based on observations sufficiently wide
to be valuable. However, I am myself convinced that the subject would bear
closer investigation and while I am not ready to subscribe entirely to these
conclusions, still I am convinced that there may be more than a modicum of
truth in them" (p. 49).

[END OF PART II]

(REF:  The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. I(2), 2001.)

Tomorrow:  PART III