How the Left Turned Against Its Jewish Alter Ego

For a new-born state, the quest for identity means a relentless struggle against a rival victimhood. This can be called a pursuit of “negative identity,” requiring the demonization of the Other and a quasi-necrophiliac fixation on its own dead rather than its own living. No people or nation willingly cedes its dead to the competing death toll of another tribe or nation. A prime example is Jewish identity, uniquely enshrined in Western academia and mainstream media since 1945. It is now under significant strain.

The surreal accounts of World War II atrocities increasingly echo the actions of the Israeli military (IDF) in the Palestinian-inhabited Gaza Strip. Contemporary Israelis are now denounced as “fascists” or “Nazis” by the very groups whose attitudes on Jews as eternal victims were shaped for decades by their Jewish academic tutors. From the Marxist-inspired Frankfurt School to anti-apartheid advisors to Nelson Mandela, from confidants of Martin Luther King Jr., to prominent legal advocates of the Civil Rights Act and frontmen of the 1968 student upheavals in the U.S. and Europe, there runs a long tradition of Jewish involvement in progressive and revolutionary causes. Yet, the “negative dialectics” once critiqued by Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno are now backfiring on Jews themselves.

Many leftists, antifa activists, and liberal commentators, along with Western politicians feigning outrage over what they call genocide in Gaza, fall prey to their own flawed reasoning. They equate Israeli military operations in Gaza with the persecutions of Jews in National Socialist Germany, ignoring that Israel’s actions align fully with the same antifascist logic deployed on a far more destructive scale by antifascist Allied forces during World War II when European and Japanese cities were firebombed into democratic submission. Thus, labeling Israel a “Nazi” or “racist” state is a contradiction in terms because it requires a mindless repetition of the antifascist and philosemitic rhetoric shaped in the wake of World War II.

As the Liberal System—colloquially called the “Deep State”—nears collapse, it grapples nervously with the Jewish Question in a context in which the Jewish collectivity has become symbol of absolute moral virtue. Over a long period, Jewish leftist, liberal, and antifa activists in the U.S. and EU have justified their existence by resorting to their own negative identity, that is, by branding White dissenters as “fascists” and “antisemites.” Jewish activist groups like the ADL and SPLC aligned themselves with these other virtue signalers and have basically followed up on tactics of the communist judicial practices in post-1945 Eastern Europe. For instance, Yugoslavia’s communist regime (1945–1990), in order to gain international legitimacy, widely encouraged by liberal outlets such as The New York Times, fabricated a perpetual “Croat fascist Ustasha threat.” Nowadays, U.S. and EU media and leftist pundits continue hunting for “neo-Nazis,” antisemites, and “white supremacists” — even when there are none in sight. As a young boy in Zagreb, Croatia, in the early 1960s, I recall a local joke: “When a fly farts at the foot of the nearby Sljeme Mountain or when a summer storm hits Zagreb, the Yugoslav media and its kangaroo courts will blame the proverbial “Croat fascist Ustasha.” Such communist-demonizing rhetoric, now adopted by Western judiciaries, reflects a policy of “negative legitimacy,” as seen in the recent lawfare against President Donald Trump and the January 6 Capitol trespassers.

The EU’s political class, burdened by Europe’s historical stigma of fascism and colonialism, must parrot U.S.-imported “ethnic sensitivity training” while simultaneously staging obligatory atonement pilgrimages to Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. “Never again,” originally a Jewish-inspired antifascist slogan, meant to shield Jews from criticism, now carries little weight under the inconvenient reality of the Gaza’s dead and starving. Israel’s actions in Gaza are disrupting the leftist pastoral image of a benevolent, always suffering Jewish nation. Therefore, the U.S. and E.U. system must navigate a delicate balance: a cautionary condemnation of the IDF while preserving philosemitic rhetoric created in the post-1945 international order.

E.U. politicians couldn’t care less about Palestinian suffering, just as they didn’t care much about Jews’ plight before and during World War II. However, with Europe’s non-European Muslim population surging—over 10 million in the U.K. and France combined, and 20 million across the continent, totaling 40 million with the Balkans included —they must tread a fine line. Beside a mandatory ritual consisting of the regurgitation of feigned philosemitic phrases, they must also feign sympathy for Muslim newcomers. Hence the reason that both the U.K. and France, scared of popular unrest from their Muslim populations, recently endorsed the ill-defined Palestinian state—to Israel’s dismay.

“Nazis,” Socialists, and National Socialists

As noted in TOO on many occasions, precise definitions of words and their historical context are vital to understanding the notion of the political. This is especially true for terms like “Fascism,” “National Socialism,” “genocide,” and “antisemitism.” The trendy term “Nazi” has become a trivialized pejorative, stripped of descriptive value and weaponized against political adversaries. Israeli PM Netanyahu labels his Lebanese and Iranian critics “Nazis,” while leftist protesters on U.S. and E.U. campuses accuse him and his IDF of “Nazi-like behavior.” Even President Trump is branded a “fascist” by home-grown virtue signalers.

The term “Nazi” was never used in official German documents or academic journals from 1933 to 1945; the correct term was “National Socialism.” Informally, the word “Nazi” did appear in casual settings, often as a playful shorthand. Young German National Socialist party members sometimes referred to their older colleagues as “Altnazi” (“old Nazi”), akin to “old fart” in American slang—a term of endearment, not disrespect. In his half-satirical travelogue, “Ein Nazi fährt nach Palästina” (“A Nazi Travels to Palestine”), published in the respected German literary journal Der Angriff in 1934, Leopold von Mildenstein, a National Socialist author and prominent official in charge of the Jewish Question, chronicles his journey to the British Mandate for Palestine.[i]

The piece, light and picaresque, barely touches on political tensions between Palestinians, British authorities, and Jewish settlers. I do not intend to probe into Mildenstein’s ties with his close associate Adolf Eichmann and their Zionist connections. I solely want to highlight that the word “Nazi” was rarely used in National Socialist Germany, and when it was, it carried a colloquial, context-dependent tone.

Unlike Europe, where socialism historically aligned with class struggle, “socialism” remains a bad word among American right-wingers, who often equate it with communism. As German sociologist Werner Sombart, a disciple of Max Weber, noted in his book Why Is There No Socialism in America?, early twentieth-century European immigrants in the U.S. dreamt more about their social advancement than how to stage class warfare. Sombart observes that “the history of ‘third’ parties in America is a sad history of continued defeats that leaves little hope for the future.”[ii]

The American labor movement, shaped considerably by the racial awareness of workers and the myth of the promised land, made it hard for socialism to gain traction among the majority of White American immigrants. However, Sombart gives more credit to American workers, adding that unlike in submissive Europe, “the groveling and crawling before the ‘higher classes,’ which is so unpleasant in Europe, is completely unknown in America.”[iii]  In passing, it is worth noting that the word “socialism” had high standing in all countries affiliated with or sympathetic to National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy—before being usurped by the Soviet Union and left-wing parties which provided it with a multiracial and international meaning.

President Trump’s populist rhetoric carries some socialist veneer that resonates well with American workers and the lower middle class, though it’s viewed with anger by the American financial elites. Despite his pro-Israel stance, Trump garners ironically more support among European hardline nationalists than with his MAGA home base. He is certainly not ignorant of the ADL’s shady rhetoric but needs to make some compromise, however bad it looks to outsiders. One should remember how the popular French King Henry IV (1589–1610), in order to fast-track his ascension to the throne, converted promptly from Protestantism to Catholicism, with his short pragmatic phrase: “Paris is well worth a mass.”  (“Paris vaut bien une messe”).

Trump’s crackdowns on Antifa and communistic campus activists have already had a positive ripple effect in self-censored Europe. However, with nearly 50% of the U.S. population of non-White origin, MAGA’s vision may sound like a distant pipe dream.  Multiracial societies, such as the present U.S. or the E.U. are highly dysfunctional, as diverse racial groups vie for victimhood status at the expense of another group. The Holocaust, once a sacrosanct segment of the Liberal System, is now losing its victimological monopoly as other groups—Armenians, Timorese, Tamils, Tajiks, etc., and millions of victims of communism, or relatives of millions of killed ethnic Germans, and dozens of other ethnic groups worldwide, who perished before, during and after World War II—are eagerly waiting to be added to the long commemoration list.

An ethnically segregated system may be the only path to stability in the U.S. and E.U., reducing   fears of one group weaponizing its victimhood status against another. To counter the breakup of the country, Trump’s administration is well-advised to overhaul the education system first: eliminate Freudo-Marxist scholasticism, remove affirmative action, and end DEI-based faculty appointments. “Ethnic studies,” a conceptual misnomer, should be scrapped. Mandatory IQ testing, courses in sociobiology and behavioral genetics, Latin, and Greco-Roman classics should become the curriculum for students of European descent.

The collapse of Yugoslavia, a failed communist DEI showcase, serves as a cautionary example why multiethnic states do not last long. Ongoing ethnic conflicts like Ukraine-Russia or Serb-Croat tensions only give credence to leftist and communist arguments that nationalism can have equally disastrous results.

The haunting question must be raised: Are White nationalists  interested in preserving their identity based on their race, or will they continue to fight among themselves over their often-mythologized histories and their exaggerated cultural narratives? At present, the influx of millions of non-European migrants poses a far greater danger to White Americans and the native peoples of Europe than their millennia-long, and ultimately futile, debates over their historical and cultural memory.

Segregation and walls foster political stability. One could learn at least one thing from Israel: Fences, borders, barbed wire and a triple-locked door often make good neighbors and promote mutual understanding.

Notes

[i] Leopold („Lim“) von Mildenstein, „Ein Nazi fährt nach Palästina“, Der Angriff (Oct., 5-9, 1934), pp. 5-11.

https://digipres.cjh.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE9813662

[ii] Werner Sombart, „ Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus?“ (Tübingen: Verlag

von J. C.B. Mohr,  1906), p. 58 (In English, „Why is There No Socialism In the United States“, (‎NY:  International

Arts & Sciences Press, Inc., 1976).

[iii] Ibid. p.128.