ZGram - 7/21/2002 - "Book Review: "The 'Jewish Threat'" - Part III

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

July 21, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This is 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. 

Part III

[START]

Officers were also skeptical about the notorious forgery, Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, but were intrigued by it, not because of evidence for its
authenticity, but because the Protocols seemed to describe actual Jewish
behavior. For example, an officer who doubted the authenticity of the
Protocols stated that "it is a fact that the present activities of Lenin,
Trotsky and other Bolsheviks in Russia so correspond to the system as
outlined herewith as to lead one to believe that this is actually the basic
plan upon which the Bolshevik control functions" (pp. 64 - 65).
Nevertheless, there were examples among the officers of "going too far" in
suppositions of Jewish collusion, including fantastic tales of international
intrigue among Zionist organizations, Lenin, Jewish media figures in the
U.S., Jewish infiltrators of the British Secret Service, etc. (p. 136). This
"going too far" in finding conspiratorial links among different Jews is a
fairly common theme of anti-Semitism (see MacDonald 1998, Ch. 1) but in no
way invalidates the strong factual basis of Jewish involvement in Bolshevism
and radical leftism generally.

Anti-Semitism. Bendersky touches on all of the themes of anti-Semitism
characteristic of the 20th century. Among the most prominent is that Jews
are interested only in what's good for Jews and are only loyal to the
countries they reside in to the extent that Jewish interests coincide with
national policy (p. 37 - 38). In fact there is a great deal of evidence that
Jews have often been disloyal to the people they have lived among, beginning
in the ancient world right up to the current fashionableness of dual loyalty
of American Jews to Israel. For example, during World War I, the MID had
information that Russian Jews favored the Germans (p. 53) - hardly a
surprise given their hatred for the Czar. Indeed, Russian beliefs that
Jewish subjects favored Germany in the war effort resulted in eviction of
Jews from the zone of combat (Pipes 1990, 231).

Bendersky repeatedly implies that MID should not have had U.S. interests at
heart but Jewish interests. For example, after the Bolshevik revolution, the
U.S. saw Poland as a bulwark against Soviet expansion. But from the Jewish
point of view, the Polish government was anti-Jewish, and American Jewish
leaders opposed recognizing or giving assistance to the Polish regime until
it guaranteed minority rights. The MID was informed that Polish Jews were
sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, and this new issue was mixed in with
traditional Polish-Jewish animosity related to Jewish separatism,
clannishness, economic domination, and disloyalty - all of which have a firm
foundation in reality (see MacDonald 1998, Ch. 2). When the Soviet army was
expelled from Vilna in 1919, the Poles attacked Jews who were accused of
collaborating with the Soviets and shooting at Polish soldiers. Jewish
organizations rallied to the defense of Polish Jews, while the U.S. tilted
toward Poland. The MID had reports, often from multiple sources, that Jews
welcomed Soviet troops with flowers or bands, that Jews refused to fight in
Polish armies, that Jewish Bolshevik leaders engaged in "unspeakable
barbarity", that foreign Jews had stirred up anti-Polish propaganda in
Jewish-controlled newspapers by exaggerating the extent of violence against
Jews, etc. In fact, these allegations were substantially true. Polish Jews
did welcome the 1919 and 1939 Soviet invasions of Poland, because of
perceptions of Polish anti-Semitism combined with favorable opinions about
the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union - that in fact Jews were an elite
group in the USSR (Checinski 1982; Schatz 1991).

[END OF PART III]

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

Tomorrow:  CONCLUSION