At the very point that countries such as India and China are increasingly nationalistic and are increasingly inculcating their youth with militaristic and nationalistic values [Is the BJP altering textbooks to promote Hindu nationalism? By Murali Krishnan, DW, 25^th May 2022], we are infantilising our own people. The newly published The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic Mental Illness, by New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, finds that Generation Z essentially suffer from arrested development. They are super-cautious — they lose their virginity later, learn to drive later, move out later, are less likely to drink, and even become anxious when they must order food in restaurants — because they have been served and mollycoddled all of their lives. There is no more obvious example of this nurse-maiding than “Trigger-warnings.” And the worst thing is that research has found that they don’t actually work.

Trigger-warnings have become so widespread in recent decades that they moved far beyond warning television viewers that “the following report contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.” Viewers must now be specifically told that the report contains the pixelated image of a “dead body,” or that a movie includes scenes of, or even discussions, of “suicide.” This ruined an episode of the Korean series Squid Game for me, because it told me how it would end.

Such warnings are also tailored to specific groups, as in: “This article discusses sexual assault. If you are a survivor of sexual misconduct, BYU has extensive resources to help.” Some of them even advise you on what action to take: “If you do not wish to view these works, you may exit through the video gallery at right” [see, A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings, and Content Notes, By Victoria Bridgman et al., Clinical Psychological Science, 2023]

Novels now require trigger warnings, because they were written many decades ago, and therefore reflect unacceptable attitudes which may deeply traumatise overindulged modern readers. The British 1924 novel A Passage to India, about colonial life under the Raj, requires a trigger warning, in its US edition, due to “offensive” language and “attitudes of this time” [Trigger warning added to EM Forster’s A Passage to India by US publisher, By Craig Simpson, The Telegraph, August 19, 2023]. Gone With the Wind, similarly, requires a trigger warning, due to its “harmful . . . racist and stereotypical descriptions” [Gone with the Wind is slapped with trigger warning by its own publisher . . ., By Stewart Carr, Mail Online, April 2, 2023].

But do trigger warnings actually work? Do they really psychologically prepare people for something that they might find upsetting and, in doing so, reduce the extent to which they get upset? According to a recently published meta-analysis of the studies on this the answer is, “No. They don’t.” If anything, they make things worse. So, really, they do little more than contribute to a culture of hypersensitivity where trigger-warnings become ever more ubiquitous due to a competitive desire to seem sensitive by including them ever more frequently.

The study — A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Trigger Warnings, Content Warnings, and Content Notes — published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science in August last year should be sobering reading to those who increasingly insist on placing “trigger warnings” on just about everything. The meta-analysis of previous studies on trigger-warnings, led by Victoria Bridgland of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, really does need to be widely read among broadcasters and publishers.

Advocates for trigger warnings argue that they help people to psychologically prepare for emotionally difficult material — to “brace themselves” — such that they respond less strongly to it. This is known as “Response Effect.” However, according to their results, studies on this matter, overall, find that the trigger warnings have no discernible “response effect.” They do not reduce a person’s negative feelings in response to that which it is assumed may trigger them. The authors summarise:

“A total of 86 effect sizes across nine articles measured the effect of trigger warnings on affective response to material presented after the warning. Effects were coded such that a greater effect size signified that warnings increased negative affect (e.g., distress, fear, anxiety) relative to the control condition. Overall, our random-effects omnibus analysis suggested that warnings had a trivial effect on response affect.”

The authors suggest that the warnings don’t work in the desired way because most people simply aren’t very good at emotional preparation. They need to be given techniques via which they might prepare themselves emotionally; not simply be told that they should do so.

Another supposed purpose of trigger warnings is “avoidance.” If sensitive people are informed that something triggering is about to appear than they can look away from the screen or leave the room. However, the meta-analysis found that people simply don’t do this to any significant degree: “. . . warnings had a negligible effect on avoidance.”

In fact, trigger warnings can induce the opposite effect. The warning makes people more interested in watching the “triggering” content, presumably because they are attracted to the sensational and to the slightly forbidden. In one study:

“Rather than randomizing to a single-warning or no-warning condition, in this study, participants were asked to choose between four article titles, two with trigger warnings and two without. Although this experimental strategy was distinct, standard mean differences could still be computed between participants who received a warning for Article A vs. no warning for Article A and so forth. Bruce and Roberts (2020) found that a given article was selected more often when it carried a warning (a decrease in avoidance).”

According to the authors: “These findings likely reflect the Pandora effect, which suggests that people have a general tendency to approach rather than avoid stimuli that has been marked aversive and uncertain.”

“Anticipatory Effect” is the idea that the warning itself will increase your distress: You will become distressed after hearing the warning but before viewing the triggering content. If this is what happens, then trigger warnings are worse than pointless. They simply upset people who are already prone to easily becoming upset. This is exactly what the authors found:  “. . . warnings increased anticipatory affect, with effects ranging from very small to medium to large.”

Finally, the authors discovered that warnings have no impact on people’s comprehension of the triggering material. Warnings are supposed to foster a “safe space” in which trauma survivors, for example, can prepare for distressing material, thus improving educational outcomes for them. However, the warnings don’t achieve this. They have zero impact on comprehension.

So what is the ultimate conclusion of this meta-analysis? Nobody could put it better than the authors, who are refreshingly direct for academics making their way through such a political minefield:

“Existing research on content warnings, content notes, and trigger warnings suggests that they are fruitless, although they do reliably induce a period of uncomfortable anticipation.”

In other words, they are worse than useless; they induce anxiety in people; they contribute to the culture of anxiety that Jonathan Haidt sets out in The Anxious Generation. This being so, “trigger warnings” are really just virtue-signalling. They are a way of signalling, and competitively signalling as they spread, to the Woke mob that you, too, are concerned about sensitivity and feelings and you are submissive to the mob’s demands.

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After the elements examined so far, such as networking, press influence, cultural and political movements, and finally the question of the acquisition of power and Jewish activism, it is worthwhile to look more closely at these, in particular, the question of identity, which is a recurrent focus of those who want to dismiss the responsibility of Jewry. According to the narrative, if certain individuals did not declare to the whole world that they were Jewish, they were not Jewish, because according to this infantile logic, it is a matter of choice or proclamation. In reality, identity manifests itself on multiple planes—and then there is also the importance of ethnic traits.

The principle outlined above, however, is not considered by these commentators to be applicable in other cases: for example, if a seemingly White person hits a gypsy, logically one should wait for both persons to declare their identity because it might be that a Hungarian with a gypsy identity hits a gypsy with a Hungarian identity, so to complain about anti-gypsy racism would be premature. Even in the case of the so-called Jewish Holocaust, those who argue in this way accept that the actual, legally protected number of victims, is the real number, regardless of how many of them may not have had a Jewish identity (remember: internationalists can’t be Jews, following a similar logic), showing the highly cynical and biased nature of this tactical nihilism. This postmodern view is thus absurd: while the role of one’s identity is important, there are several aspects to a person’s motivations, inclinations, or needs.

Aspects of the Dynamics of Internationalism and Tribal Networking

We sometimes hear that the Republic of Councils of Hungary (i.e., the Kun regime) was anti-Jewish. In contrast, Jewish ethnic activism was quite free, both in Hungary, and elswhere under early Bolshevism. Although two Jewish leaders in Budapest wanted the Jews to be regarded as Hungarians with Jewish religion by the new Kun regime, other Jews formed a Jewish National Council (Zsidó Nemzeti Tanács), with the permission of the Minister for Nationalities, Oszkár Jászi (1875–1957; Jewish), who “recognized that Jewish national organization was legitimate,” recalls Géza Komoróczy (2012, 354) in his comprehensive work of over 1200 pages, The History of the Jews in Hungary. We also learn that several anti-Jewish events were the result of Jewish infighting, mostly between religious Jews, Zionists, and secular Bolsheviks. Oszkár Jászi, in his emigration to Vienna in 1920, described the Commune as the first revolution in world history in which “Jewry was able to assert itself without any restraint or limit, and thus to freely develop the forces and tendencies that had been dormant within it for centuries” (quoted in ibid., 358).

Jászi described Jewish activism in Russia as an ethnic, tribal movement. According to a lecture given by him to the Galileo Circle on January 28, 1911, the Russians, with their repressive measures, “created the bloodiest, most anarchistic Jewish nationalism … and the result was that this most internationalist people, which did not give much heed to racial and national aspirations, produced bloody nationalist movements” (Jászi, 1982, p.162). Jászi reiterated this on other occasions: the repressive characteristics of the tsarist order “created a suitable soil for the most extreme revolutionary ideas in Jewry. The result of all this was that a hitherto unknown strain of Jewish fanatic nationalism spread throughout the land of Russia” (Jászi, 1912, 139, emphasis in original). He did not specify who or what he meant, but in these years, in addition to the Zionists, the anti-Zionists (who rejected emigration) were openly Jewish and socialist Bundists who later supported the Bolsheviks; moreover, the Bolsheviks themselves were significant (one need only think of their bloody revolutionary attempt of 1905, with Leon Trotsky). In the early 1910s, the Bolshevik movement was already significant, so the adjective “revolutionary” must have been a reference to them and other Marxists. As Gerald D. Surh (2023) summarized in the introduction to his book, “[t]he defeat of Jewish revolutionary initiatives by the end of 1905 did not defeat their movement’s pioneering efforts. Jewish revolutionary socialism, largely created and emergent as a part of Russia’s 1905 Revolution, found a longer and more influential life in Palestine, Europe, America, and post-1917 Russia”—as it did in Hungary in 1918–1919.

Oszkár Jászi (source: szevi.hu)

Jászi (1982, p.69) admits in a speech to a public assembly on August 7, 1906, that “a very large role” in causing Hungary’s poverty is played by what he simply calls “Jewish usury.” In his view, the Jewish question is nothing more than “group antagonism complicated by racial frictions” (ibid., 263), not in a biological, but in a historical sense. As he points out, “haute finance and commerce are predominantly Jewish occupations, and the conflicts of interest inherent in these operations easily take on a sectarian or racial color” (ibid., 264). Jászi explains the differences between the two ethnicities, the Jew and the Hungarian, such as the excessive rationalism of the former, his alienation from nature, his crude, arrogant, pushy character, in contrast to the peasant character of Hungarian provincialism, which he believes naturally leads to antipathy. In his view, one of the causes of the “Jewish question” was to be found in the “overwhelming and pathological influence of Jewry” (ibid., 489). As is often the case when a Jew engages in a relatively honest analysis of the Jewish–gentile conflict, Jászi here comes very close to the views of the “anti-Semites”—in this case, to the summary of Hungarian grievances put forward by the Tharauds (2024, 160–163), which basically says the same thing about Jews and why they arouse antipathy.

Jászi is also quoted by the American-Israeli historian Ezra Mendelsohn, after pointing out that “the number of Jews who occupied prominent positions in Kun’s ill-fated one hundred-day regime was truly remarkable. According to one student of this period, of twenty-six ministers and vice-ministers of the Kun regime, twenty were of Jewish origin” (Mendelsohn, 1993, 894). He sums up the situation later: “Not only did Jews dominate the Bela Kun government, but they were also very prominent in the prewar ’Galileo Circle,’ the center of Budapest student radicalism, and in the prewar socialist movement” (ibid.). The author quotes Jászi as saying that “[t]he Hungarian people is much more rural, conservative, and slow thinking than the Western peasant peoples. On the other hand, Hungarian Jewry is much less assimilated than Western Jewries, it is much more an independent body within society, which does not have any real contact with the native soul of the country” (ibid., 895).

According to Mendelsohn, however, “the fact is that most Jews were patriotic Hungarians who were extremely hostile to Bolshevism”—a rather hyperbolic claim. But putting that aside, he greatly simplifies the issue: the animosity of Hungarians against Jews was the result of many factors, of which Bolshevism was only one. Hungarians noticed that Jews—as admitted by the very prominent Jászi above—formed an alien society within society, and given their enormously oversized presence in positions of influence, had a serious transformative effect on the nation as a whole. (As another source of hostility, recall Jászi’s acknowledgment from elsewhere that 90% of usury is practiced by Jews.) Indeed, the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, who was closely associated with the Galileo Circle, was not very fond of Bolshevism, and neither were some of his friends from the Circle (while others did participate in the Kun regime). And yet they had a very anti-traditional, corrosive influence on elite culture in Hungary. The conflict remains, whether Zionists, or non-Zionist Communists, perhaps Capitalists, landowners, merchants, journalists, artists, and a long list of different positions.

Identity, and Identity by Proxy

Considering the fact that the “explainers” are fond of repeating that Bolshevik Jews had no Jewish identity (which is demonstrably untrue, at least in some particular cases; see below), another point to raise here, therefore, is that of honesty. We don’t know how honest these characters were in their communications and expressions; therefore we should be cautious in assuming that the absence of something in communication proves an absence of that thing on a deeper level. A diaspora people developing proxies for group identity would not be a surprising tendency, especially during times of intergroup tensions: “Communism was, among other things, a form of assimilation” for Jews, opines Krajewski (2000), portraying them as longing to belong to a society while at the same time attempting to transform it into something very different. Yet this “seemed the most promising way” for them to assimlate. He notes, however, that “[w]hen they became rejected or just disenchanted they often ‘regressed’ to Jewishness.” This is more consistent with the possibility that Jews developed a mask for their Jewish self-image subconsciously (portraying themselves as mere socialists), or perhaps this was a consciously strategical, deceptive narrative, to appeal to masses—which returns us to the question of honesty. Indeed, for instance “[t]he idea that the victory of socialism depended on winning over the peasantry was to become one of the few political principles that [József] Pogány would continue to cling to over his entire career as a revolutionary” (Sakmyster, 2012, 30). Consciously avoiding manifestations of Jewish identification would also be consistent with the concern these Jews had about anti-Semitism—which was, indeed, the motivation behind their desire to portray their regime as less Jewish than it was (seen earlier in this study).

Appealing to peasants would not work under the flag of the Star of David, just as transforming society to cleanse it of anti-Semitism and render it safer for Jews—where Jews, indeed, would be the rulers—would not be important for a significant enough mass of people (it’s likely that they would oppose it, in fact). Using a mask—such as gentiles as leaders of a movement—to appeal to the broader gentile society is a well-known phenomenon among activist Jews (among psychoanalysts, leftist radicals, and Boasians, see: MacDonald, 1998, Ch. 2, 3, 4; Csonthegyi, 2023; 2024). Adopting proxies for the sake of “assimilation” (or perhaps for strategy), while remaining Jewish, might also remind us of the fifteenth-century Marranos, amongst whom we can also find this regression to Jewishness (MacDonald, 2003, Ch. 4). Regarding the pursuit of Jewish interests under the red, rather than the Jewish, flag, Jaff Schatz (1991, 230) notes notes that “[t]he activists were guided by an ambition to shape Jewish collective postwar life according to the content of their ethnopolitical vision. In this vision, Jewish secular culture would bloom under Socialist conditions.” Jews saw the triumph of Communism as “a remedy to anti-Semitism, backwardness, misery, and other Jewish problems in a changed Jewish occupational structure” (ibid.). We are thus again back at the transformation of host societies according to specifically Jewish perspectives.

Schatz reflects on this as well when he describes a specific type of Jewish Communist: “[r]ooted in a Jewish prewar world, they shared the activists’ vision of combining socialism with the preservation and cultivation of a secular Yiddish culture, without sharing the latter’s Machiavellian sophistication” (ibid., 237). The main leaders of the Red Guard of the Kun regime (with the exception of Ferenc Jancsik) were all Jews: Ernő Landler, Dezső Bíró, Ernő Seidler, Ferenc Rákos, Ede Chlepkó, Mátyás Rákosi. Ignác Schulz was “a former deputy commander of the Budapest Red Guard” (Simon, 2013, 61). Sándor Garbai, president of the Kun regime, recalls about Schulcz—who participated in the 1918–1919 revolutions and later moved to Czechoslovakia, still being active, but later lived in Israel, where he died—and that he followed traditional Jewish customs: “I myself have seen, and in many cases observed, that there are only Jews in Ignác Schulcz’s circle of friends and surroundings. This does not happen by chance. Schulcz still lives correctly inwardly, in the spirit of the ghetto. He observes all the injunctions of Jewish tradition, from the enjoyment of kosher cuisine to the exact observance of the long day [Yom Kippur]” (Végső, 2021, 232). This further illustrates that being an internationalist Communist-Socialist was able to coexist with a Jewish identity, refuting philosemitic mainstream tropes about this supposed impossibility. (Recall also Oszkár Jászi’s view on revolutionary Jewish nationalism.)

Some members of Po’alei Zion in Łowicz, 1917

We should also take note of the historical existence of specifically Jewish-identified Socialist groups, like the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, the Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party also in Russia, or the Marxist-Zionist Po’alei Zion (“Workers of Zion”) movement at various places in the Pale of Settlement. Moses Hess, clearly with a Jewish identity, as one of the pioneers of Zionism—and specifically of Labor Zionism—was himself a socialist. As the Enyclopaedia Judaica (2007, 704) reminds us: “An outstanding figure of the British socialist movement was Eleanor Marx-Aveling (1855–1898), Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, who felt a close affinity with the Jewish people and affirmed that ’my happiest moments are when I am in the East End of London amid Jewish workpeople.’” We can see again that being a Communist was consistent with a Jewish self-image, despite its internationalism, and this activism can be seen in their interests as Jews. Around the time of the 1905 revolution in Russia (with Leon Trotsky as a prominent figure and in which the Jewish Bund “played an extremely important role,” Bezarov [2018, 1083]), The New York Times quoted a Jewish preacher in a January 29, 1905 article with the headline “End of Zionism, Maybe”—as saying that, in the case of a successful revolution “a free and a happy Russia, with its six million Jews, would possibly mean the end of Zionism” (quoted in Heddesheimer, 2024, 20). In other words, with the victory of the revolution, Jews would have no reason to emigrate to Palestine to build Israel.

Moreover, Mirjam Limbrunner’s examination of the Bund explicitly identifies it with Jewish nationalism: “Jewish socialists would soon realize that the popular socialist movements did not address many of the challenges the Jewish masses were facing and therefore saw the need to come up with a Jewish version of Socialism” (Limbrunner, 2019, 64). The result of this desire for group-oriented forms of politics was that “Socialism and Jewish nationalism began to merge into political movements such as the General Jewish Labor Union, in short, the Bund, which was founded in 1897 in Vilna and which would have a profound impact on the Socialist Zionists in Palestine in later years” (ibid., 64).

Limbrunner also details the work and influence of Ber Borochov (1881–1917), an important figure who developed a blend of Marxism and Jewish nationalism. Borochov’s work shows the superficiality of dismissing ethnic identity among internationalists, socialists, Marxists, or Bolsheviks. Such narratives are likely dishonest. This dishonesty was often rather explicit: if we look at the Bolsheviks of Russia under Lenin, we find a specifically Jewish section of them, with the name Evsektsiia (or Yevsektsiya; Евсекция), officially recognized “as a Jewish Communist organization,” in the study of Baruch Gurevitz (1980, 29). The role of this Jewish group was to gather the more ethnocentric Jews, carefully keeping them under the Bolshevik umbrella (and thereby weakening the Zionist movement), while allowing them to remain Jews (in a secular Bolshevik way), and continue to network with the many other Jewish groups. As Gurevitz notes, the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks ordered “the Ukrainian Communists to admit the Jewish Farband and to set up an Evsektsiia in accordance with the policy being implemented in Moscow,” and as a result, they “found Jewish sections on the local level as well as a central Evsektsiia” (ibid., 33). A similar situation occurred in Belorussia as well, but Gurevitz presents many more examples of officially permitted Jewish activism within the framework of Communism—to the embarrassment of those who still pretend that this is an impossibility. (Also recall the Jewish National Council under the supervision of the Kun regime’s Oszkár Jászi, outlined earlier.) That some Jews accused the Evsektsiia of being traitors, or even as “anti-Semitic,” because of their anti-religious and anti-Zionist stance, should be viewed as an example of tribal in-fighting that is of secondary importance to us here. Thus, while gentile nations were supposed to “wipe” their “slate clean,” Jews were active within this socialist-Yiddish-Jewish identity.

Indeed, Israeli historian, Inna Shtakser argues in her book, The Making of Jewish Revolutionaries in the Pale of Settlement, that these revolutionary Jews developed a new Jewish identity, which, however, remained a Jewish identity:

The Jewish community was the place where Jewish revolutionaries felt most comfortable. Lena, a prospective revolutionary, chose to join the Social Democrats — rather than the Socialist Revolutionaries — whom she supported politically since she assumed that in the urban-oriented Social Democratic Party she would be able to propagate her ideas among Jews rather than among peasants whom she assumed would reject her due to her ethnicity. In a Jewish setting, revolutionaries did not feel the need to pretend to be non-Jewish, and to some extent could count on communal solidarity against the authorities. (Shtakser, 2014, 128)

Here we may notice that even according to Shtakser, some Jews felt the need to present themselves as non-Jews, which brings us back to the narratives used to obfuscate the responsibility of Jews (as not even being Jews), which we have already dealt with.

Shtakser also notes that these “young revolutionaries had to make compromises regarding their internationalist identity and make it clear that they were responsible for all the Jews,” and that “[f]or a short period during the revolution, the Jewish community accepted revolutionaries and even their leadership” (ibid., 129). During these tumultuous times “they did not abandon the Jewish communities when these were threatened” and “they also took responsibility for the community and expected to be treated as insiders rather than as strangers. Militants expected to be supported and to provide support against the common enemies – the tsarist regime, which discriminated against all the Jews, and the pogromists” (ibid., 130). Shtakser concludes:

Even though young revolutionary Jews had mixed feelings about the Jewish community, it was clear that only within that community did they feel secure in their social status as revolutionaries. Whereas non-Jewish revolutionaries saw the actions of the ‘Black Hundreds’ as part of a longer political battle that they were fighting, the Jews felt that the very basis of their activism was threatened, the space where they felt secure. Their subsequent struggle against the Black Hundreds was not just a struggle for the Jewish community, but also a defence of their identity. (Ibid., 130)

Abigail Green (2020, 34) also notes that “[t]he fact that early forms of Jewish internationalism were structured by liberal preoccupations — civil and religious liberty, humanitarianism, civilizational discourse, liberal imperialism — made it possible for secular Jewish liberals to engage in collective Jewish action in the international sphere.” And Ben Gidley (2014, 62) remarks that historians tend to downplay “the extent to which these migrants had any connection to the Jewish world”; in fact, Jewish migrants had “a major impact on the development of British Marxism.” He points out how this results in contradictory perspectives: “Paradoxically, such historians have often taken at face value the radicals’ profession of an internationalism that disavows any possibility of ethnic belonging, while at the same time, they have been keen to portray the radicalism that they cherish as indigenous to English soil and not transplanted from foreign lands” (ibid., 62–63).

Even earlier, the 1905 revolution already showed that Jews perceived the revolutionary movement as in the interest of their grouIt is, therefore, not a surprise that Jews were strongly motivated. Bezarov (2021, 132) notes that “The processes of formation of the organizational and personnel structure of the Russian Social-Democracy continued during the First Russian Revolution. Jews took an active part in these processes. Their role in the organization of [the] Russian social-democratic movement and in its staffing is difficult to overestimate.” This was not just due to individual Jews playing “extremely important” roles; rather, this essentially developed into a group-identity for many—a secular form of Judaism, as Bezarov comments: “Eventually, the Jewish origin of Marx, the founder of scientific” socialism, canonized his doctrine in the mass consciousness of the urban Jewry of the Russian Empire, which awaited a new messiah who would ’brin’» them out of the ghetto of the Jewish Pale” (ibid.).

This fits with Oszkár Jászi’s perception of Jewish activism in the first decade of the twentieth century as a form of “nationalism”—even if under the flag of internationalism—and we can accurately describe the activism of Jews in Hungary at that time, whether in the psychoanalytic movement, the Galileo Circle, or Bolshevism, as activism motivated by perceived ethnic interests. To bring about change; a transformation of society to a new one, where Jews are less restricted, or threatened, and can obtain more power—a competition for resources that should not surprise those who view history through the lens of evolutionary processes, with ethnic character taken into account.

 “Vote for the United Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party” –  Ukrainian election poster in Yiddish from 1917 (Ne Boltai Collection)

A key to understanding the link between being an internationalist and still possessing a particular national (ethnic) identity, is through the lens of this ethnic competition, especially from the perspective of minorities: by advocating the destruction of restrictions, the minority groups advocating for a new order where they have more freedom and access to power, engage in the pursuit of their group interests. How much of an advocacy of that sort is cynical and deceptive, and how much is genuinely believed, is often hard to know, but in the case of the latter, the phenomenon of self-deception is well-understood in the relevant literature: von Hippel & Trivers (2011, 1; see also MacDonald 2003/1998, Ch. 8) argue that “self-deception evolved to facilitate interpersonal deception by allowing people to avoid the cues to conscious deception that might reveal deceptive intent.” And Mijović-Prelec & Prelec (2010, 238) conclude that “[l]ike ordinary deception, [self-deceptoin] is an external, public activity, involving overt statements or actions directed towards an audience, whether real or imagined.”

A remark from the “non-Jewish Jew” Marxist historian, Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967) provides an interesting perspective on self-deception (assuming he is not being outwardly deceptive): “Religion? I am an atheist. Jewish nationalism? I am an internationalist. In neither sense am I therefore a Jew. I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated” (Deutscher, 2017, 50). Here Deutscher is identifying with his own group, but gets there not in a way he finds objectionable. Instead, he rationalizes a Jewish identity as the result of a humanitarian, moral stance. But Deutscher would not, and did not, identify as a Palestinian because of all the persecution and ethnic cleansing that this specific group was subjected to around the same time (and ever since); he did not identify as a Russian or Hungarian because of the persecution those people faced under Communism, neither did he identify with any Asian or African people who endured persecution, oppression or mass murder on a large scale. His humanism appears highly selective and he, it so happens, ends up feeling solidarity with his own people for humanitarian reasons, as a foundation of his consciously accepted identity and ethnocentrism. Deutscher then goes on to note that “I am a Jew because I feel the Jewish tragedy as my own tragedy; because I feel the pulse of Jewish history,” and concludes the remark by expressing a desire to “assure” a real “security and self-respect of the Jews” (ibid.).

Gerald Surh (2023) has explored this aspect of Jewish activism in terms of perceived or real security, summarizing in the introduction to his book that “[a]mong Jews, a post-1881 generation began breaking with the quietism and passivity of the elders and traditional leaders. Just as Gentile anxiety and anger against Jews in 1905 was conditioned by more than antisemitism, transformations among Jews since the 1880s were due to more than resistance to antisemitism, however compelling the anti-Jewish threat.” He points out that “[t]hey organized Jewish political parties for the first time and, in response to the shock of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, adapted them to pro-active self-defense efforts. The Jewish parties which gained a footing among Jews by defending them against pogroms in 1905, went on to play a substantial role afterward, both in Russia’s ongoing revolution and in the diaspora abroad.” Thus we return to the Jewish activism that Jászi saw, which included Bolshevism as another Jewish identity in the revolutionary era.

An argument is often made that, although Jews were heavily over-represented among the Bolsheviks and Communists, the majority of Jews as a whole did not support this. Even if one assumes that, depending on the situation, the Bolsheviks did not have more than 50% support in Jewish circles—that does not mean that Bolshevism in Hungary, in 1919, for example, was not a Jewish phenomenon. (This argument is also meant to suggest that other Jews were somehow patriotic, although, if there are several anti-national movements to choose from, one cannot proclaim this merely on the basis of the support of one branch.) The distribution of Jewish votes at the time—related to Surh’s insight above—is revealing, for example, in an analysis of 1917 data from Russia, summarised by Simon Rabinovitch (2009, 216): “The large number of Jewish parties vying for Jewish votes in 1917 reflected ideological divisions among the most politically active segment of the Jewish population. This political fractiousness, however, for the most part did not carry over to the Jewish masses, who overwhelmingly voted for Jewish national coalitions favouring Jewish civil equality and collective rights within a generally liberal framework.” The author adds about the coalition that received by far the most votes: “To vote for the Jewish National Electoral Committee or the Jewish National Bloc in 1917 meant to vote for a list of Jewish candidates whose priority in the All-Russian Constituent Assembly would be Jewish advocacy and defence, not merely civil equality for all (such as the Kadets) or class struggle (such as the socialists, Jewish and otherwise)” (Ibid., 217). Which is to say, political activism for Jewish interests, which is understandable, but the suggestion that “not all Jews” supported the Bolsheviks does not imply identification with the host nation, only different strategic perspectives within a Jewish framework. And finally, it doesn’t account for the fact that there was a major shift toward much greater Jewish support of the Bolshevik regime after it came to power (e.g., Slezkine 2004; Bemporad, 2013).

Under the red flag, we find Jewish identity and activism elsewhere, too. Demonstrating a strong Jewish identity among Communists, this time in the United States of the 1930s, Bat-Ami Zucker (1994, 175) details how “the ’Jewish Bureau’ was not autonomous but an integral part of the Communist Party and, as such, subject to its Central Committee, it nonetheless expressed a Jewish identity, which led—albeit indirectly and unintentionally—to the development of a unique Jewish leftist culture.” Zucker presents examples of these Communist Jews attempting a strategy in which they rejected a “national” and “Jewish” perspective, instead, they phrased it as being “Yiddish” (a mild case of identity by proxy). This changed after a few years, however:

The new positive attitude toward Jewish culture was manifested in several well-planned programs. The Jewish communist publications started promoting Jewish culture and Jewish heritage, using for the first time—though with reference to Jewish masses—the term “Jewish people” applying a positive connotation. Instead of earlier miserable attempts to justify the use of Yiddish, Jewish culture was granted a prominent role. (Ibid., 180)

Zucker quotes Moissaye Joseph Olgin, a Communist from Soviet Russia, who participated in the 1905 revolution, but ended up a journalist in the United States, as saying that “the main objectives” of these new Jew-friendly Communist policies “were to defend the Jewish people and its culture, to promote Jewish culture and to spread it among the Jewish people” (ibid., 181). These new policies included “the institution of a ’World Alliance of Jewish Culture—IKUF,’ the creation of local branches under an international committee, and the founding of a special periodical dedicated solely to Jewish culture—Yiddishe Kultur” (ibid.). This was not done merely by Communists, but achieved by specifically Jewish activism, as Zucker clarifies: “the separate organization of the American Jewish communists and especially its press, educational network, and social and cultural activities led in the 1930s, to the creation of a unique Jewish culture. Though they considered themselves loyal communists and adhered to communist beliefs, they never let go and kept proclaiming that they belonged to the Jewish people” (ibid., 182).

Shifting our attention to a different region and era, regarding the period after the Second World War, Anna Koch (2022, 111) notes that in the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) “Jewishness continued to play a role” even in the lives of Jews who were not close to their Jewish background anymore, not to mention other Jews who “had always seen their Jewishness as an integral part of their self-understanding and had turned to leftist politics to battle antisemitism, perceiving their antifascism to be intertwined with their Jewishness” (ibid., 111–112). As she notes: “In contrast to much of the literature that brushes aside the Jewish origin of these German Communists as being of little relevance, this chapter highlights the myriad ways in which they positioned themselves in relation to it” (ibid., 112). Koch includes in her analysis those who did not (at least explicitly) identify as Jews, but regardless, they were also motivated Jewishly.

Following Koch’s focus on the GDR, and proposing to show “how Jewish leaders rendered Communist antifascism Jewish,” David Shneer (2022, 156) elaborates on this theme: “even after the postwar purges of Communist Jews from the leadership of GDR Jewish institutions in 1952–1953, there still existed a global Communist Jewish community. Before World War II, communicating usually through Yiddish, this community played a central role in shaping modern Jewish life as it advocated for a Marxist approach to injustice and for the liberation of all peoples, including Jews, from structural systems of domination like fascism and colonialism” (ibid., 154). These Jews “found political and cultural space in the GDR in general, and in East Berlin in particular” as “GDR’s Jews inserted Jewish culture and memories of the war into the GDR’s memorial culture, thereby ensuring that Jewish memories of the war were invoked in the state’s public antifascist culture” (ibid.). Schneer then looks into the networking of these Jews, that he calls “transnational,” mostly focusing on the GDR, Hungary, and the United States—indeed, he notes that “Hungary served as a primary node of Judaism in the Communist Jewish world,” partially because “Budapest maintained the only rabbinic seminary in Communist Europe, the Budapest Rabbinic Seminary” (ibid., 163). These Jews in the GDR “were integrated into transnational and global networks that helped them maintain a sense of Jewish community through Communist networks. These other Jews created community through an older Communist tradition of Jewish universalism that had been popular before World War II, primarily but not exclusively through Yiddish culture” (ibid., 168). Robin Ostow’s interview with a woman who left Germany in 1933, but moved back from Soviet Russia to the GDR later, also details her explicit Jewish identity together with her professed Communism (Berliner, 1989).

Staying for a moment with the volume that features the essays from Koch and Shneer, and within this, with Hungary, it is worth mentioning the work of Kata Bohus, who analyses Jewish activism in the János Kádár era (1956–1989) and presents the narrative that was emerging at the time in the context of the Magyar Zsidó Jewish publication, quoting that “[t]he Jewish question is actually a Hungarian question. The question of the democracy, tolerance, openness and moral standards of Hungarian society, the question here is whether the contradictions of our society can be resolved freely, without aggression….” (Bohus, 2022, 247) This is the framework within which mainstream historiography is currently living: the crimes and responsibility of the Jews are to be attributed to the Hungarians, because of their intolerance, as we have seen earlier.

We will, however, stick to the Jewish character of the Jewish question, and thus turn our attention to the victims of the Jewish terror: we will put the complications of the “Jews were just as much victims of Bolshevism” narrative under the magnifying glass, and the blurring of Jewish responsibility for the Lenin Boys, in the concluding part of our study.

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Go to Part 1.

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The restlessness of the Jews in Hungary, especially after the “emancipation” of 1867, took on increasingly radical forms because, while some of them saw a future in Zionism, others saw an opportunity not in the creation of Israel, but in the transformation of their host society according to their own needs. As a result, by the end of the nineteenth century, and especially in the early twentieth century, a number of subversive trends, defined in opposition to traditional Hungarian values and character, attracted Jews as a bloc. These included the psychoanalytic movement, Bolshevism, or so-called civic radicalism, with the Galileo Circle as one of its flagship movements, or in artistic areas, for example, the avant-garde Eights (Nyolcak; seven of the eight were Jewish). It was really just anti-traditionalism, thus to call it liberalism would be a mistake, since (as we have seen before and will see below) it had good connections to dictatorial and dogmatic Communism. It is not surprising, then, that the Bolsheviks of Béla Kun simply came to power with the help of such “Social Democrats” and Galileists.

In connection with the manifestation of liberal, or then patriotic, posturing among Jews, Győző Istóczy (1842–1915), a member of the Diet, explained in 1875 what was at stake decades before the Galileists presented themselves as progressive while working with the Bolsheviks: “The greatest self-mystification, therefore, is to believe seriously in the liberalism of the Jews. It is the caste-like element which, by its compact advance, crowds out and eradicates all foreign elements from all the spaces in which it has been able to establish itself—which, by its angular habits, erects an impenetrable Chinese wall between itself and the other elements, habits which, at the same time, express, in most cases, a deep contempt for other elements . . . which, claiming for itself the most extreme demands of tolerance, is itself the most intolerant element imaginable—and which uses liberalism as a means of turning its caste into an agrarian oligarchy” (Istóczy, 1904, 4–5). He added: “by waving the banners of liberalism and democracy, he entrenches himself in all circles where the interests of his caste are in view, and once warmed up in those circles, he begins the operation of driving out the foreign elements” (ibid., 9). Later, on March 11, 1880, he said: “it is my conviction that the Jews will only feign attachment to the Hungarian state spirit and the Hungarian nation as long as the Hungarian element in this country is supreme. Let us lose this, and Jewry will immediately turn its back on us, and even turn against us, as it turned its back and turned against us when the national cause was lost in 1849” (ibid., 80). He was boldly prophetic.

Hungary Transforms

The authors of When Israel Is King, the book at the heart of our present study, the Tharaud brothers, reach the Aster Revolution of 1918–1919 in their story: “Under the auspices of Count Karolyi, a National Council had been formed at Budapest, which claimed to have taken the place of the regular government. This council decided in a secret sitting that it would rid itself of the only man capable of opposing its designs,” and then, with József Pogány-Schwartz (1886–1938) in the lead, “they waited for a favorable opportunity. During the night from October 30th to the 31st, 1918, the revolution prepared by Karolyi and his friends broke out at Budapest” (Tharauds, 2024, 53–54). Pogány-Schwartz  (AKA, John Pepper, was an ethnically Jewish communist who later became an administrator of the Comintern in the USSR.

In connection with the shooting of Prime Minister István Tisza (1861–1918), the brothers mention that “[o]f the five ministers who had taken part in the Imperial Council of July 7th, 1914, he was the second to die by the hand of an assassin. Count Stürgkh, prime minister of Austria, had fallen before him, shot by [Friedrich] Adler, the socialist Jew. Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin (1862–1911) had a similarly Jewish assassin in 1911, in the person of the anarchist-socialist Dmitry Bogrov (1887–1911), and later the Tsarist Romanov family was executed under the command of the Jew Yakov Yurovsky (1878–1938). Although Tisza’s murderers were probably not Jewish, he was also carried away by a revolutionary fervor that was, to a great extent, Jewish.

In the meantime, a group of Bolsheviks was waiting in the wings, eager to take advantage of the “civic” class as a battering ram. As András Simor (1976, 23–24) outlines in his work, on March 24, 1918, a Hungarian Communist group was formed in Soviet Russia, working alongside the Central Committee of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of Russia. The leaders were Béla Kun-Kohn, Tibor Szamuely-Szamueli, Ernő Pór-Perlstein and Endre Rudnyánszky. Through Farkas Lebovitz and Ernő Bresztovszky, Szamuely then established contacts with Ervin Szabó-Schlesinger, thus giving a foothold to Leninist Bolshevism in Hungary. The people named here were almost all Jews, with the probable exception of the Freemason Bresztovszky and Rudnyányszky. They had to wait a little longer for their time, but they had every reason to be optimistic, as the Tharaud brothers point out:

In this setting, the Russian revolution appeared as the dawn of that great evening which Israel has awaited for centuries. Tentative as it still was, Kerensky’s revolution opened up prodigious horizons for those Jewish imaginations, who only understand working at a gallop. With the knowledge they possessed, placed in direct contact with their Russian brothers by that long river of Judaism, which passing from Petrograd, by Bielostock, Vilna, and Lemberg, comes down to Budapest, they knew well that it was only a beginning, that the movement would not end there and that in the northern plains unheard-of upheavals were preparing, of which the effect, overflowing the Russian frontiers, would extend to the whole of Europe and upset the entire existing social order from top to bottom. At least, that was what they hoped. (Tharauds, 2024, 68)

The French brothers recall that Károlyi’s seizure of power (with Jews behind him) had carved a revolutionary crack in the Hungarian establishment, and they were already preparing to use this crack to tear down the walls completely: “The next day [late October] there began to appear on the walls enormous posters, imitated from Russia, which, under the Bolshevik regime, were to cover the whole town with bloodred color and with outrageous symbolism” (ibid., 79). Here the Jewish artist movement took its share of the responsibility for the visual part of Bolshevik propaganda, for example, by some of the members of the Nyolcak (Eights) group, of whom Bertalan Pór, Róbert Berény, Béla Czóbel, Dezső Orbán, Dezső Czigány, Lajos Tihanyi and Ödön Márffy were all Jews, the exception was only Károly Kernstok. The Kun regime supported the group, and had they had the time, they would presumably have included the Jewish group in their cultural policy (Rockenbauer, 2018); after all, they financially supported the Berény’s school which was committed to Bolshevism (Barki, 2018).

Posters of Bertalan Pór-Pollacsek, János Tábor-Taupert, Mihály Bíró-Weinberger and Róbert Berény-Bakofen for the Soviet Republic on May 1, 1919. (Published in Rockenbauer, 2018)

It took only a few months for the Bolshevik Jews to simply take the keys to the door of power from the “social democratic” and “civic” Jews without any specific struggle. As Dávid Ligeti (2019, 30) points out, “in essence, there was no turning back since November 1918: the Bolshevization of the country had already begun.” These Bolsheviks were in direct contact with the Soviets, and the government “became a satellite of the Moscow party centre in the strictest sense of the word,” Ligeti (ibid.). Ligeti  also emphasizes that this was foreign to Hungarians: “Without the social and economic crisis caused by the Great War, the establishment of the Soviet Republic would have been unthinkable. The majority of society was not Bolshevized. In fact, the new state power was based on a relatively narrow, mainly urban population. The fact that the regime wanted openly and completely to abolish the old social order met with open opposition, especially among the peasant classes, so it is no accident that the more important counter-revolutionary cores were established in the countryside.” (Ibid., 31) Traditional Hungarians, on the other hand, were the opposite of metropolitan, urban Jewry, broadly speaking.

The Tharauds touch upon this process also:

When they had finished drawing up this manifesto, Kéri [Kramer Pál] and Kunfi [Kohn Zsigmond] returned to Karolyi. He had with him his two special secretaries, Simonyi [Henri] and Oscar Gellert [Oszkár Gellért], both of them Jews. Whether it was due to the nonchalance of a great seigneur, or on account of a conscientious scruple, or a supreme regret for his loss of power, Karolyi did not himself put his signature at the foot of the document. Simonyi signed it for him. It was these four Jews who put an end to the Hungarian Republic and stifled the last efforts of Karolyi’s ambition. (Tharauds, 2024, 119)

Cécile Tormay described it as follows:

In the ceremonial hall of the Hungarian parliament, Lenin’s aide could comfortably unfurl the flag of Bolshevism, sound the alarm of social revolution and proclaim the coming of the world revolution, while outside in the Parliament Square, accompanied by Oszkár Jászi, Márton Lovászy and Dezső Bokányi announced to the people that the National Council had proclaimed a republic. Mihály Károlyi also gave a speech at the resting place, on the stone steps. And down on the square, Jenő Landler, Jakab Weltner, Manó Buchinger, Vilmos Böhm and Mór Preusz praised the Republic. … There was not a single Hungarian among them. And that was the confession of everything! Above, the mask: Mihály Károlyi, below, the real face: an alien race that made its dominance known. (Tormay, 1939, 182)

Lajos (internationally, Louis) Marschalkó (1903–1968), an expert on the influence of Jewry, reacts to Tormay’s comment in his classic work, Országhódítók: “And indeed, it was no longer Bolshevik, Socialist or Marxist rule, but alien racial rule over Hungarians,” and he adds:

Because what happens after March 21, 1919, is not Marxism, not Communism, but a new form of occupation on a “Socialist” basis. But the people who are carrying out this conquest, while proletarians from Dob Street, Nyíregyháza or Kolozsvár, but they are just as much Jews as Ferenc Chorin or József Szterényi. Yes! They will intern the “big Jew” as a hostage if they have to, but the aim is still domination of the Hungarian people. Not in the form of Capitalism, but in the form of “Socialist” world redemption. (Marschalkó, 1975, 180)

The March 21 resolution proclaiming the merger of Social Democrats and Communists was signed by Jenő Landler, Jakab Weltner, Zsigmond Kunfi, the above-mentioned József Pogány-Schwartz, and József Haubrich on behalf of the “democrats”—all Jews, except Haubrich, who is also said to have been a Jew, but it is not certain. The signatories representing the Communists were: Béla Kun, Béla Szántó, Béla Vágó, Ferencz Jancsik, Károly Vántus, Ede Chlepkó, Ernő Seidler, József Rabinovits (Böhm, 1923, 248–249). Jancsik was not Jewish, Vántus was rumored to be, but I know of no proof of this. According to this, of the 13 signatories 10 (perhaps 12) were Jewish—76.9% (or 92.3%). However, similar proportions are found not only for the signatories, but also for powerful establishment figures, as will be seen…

Ágnes Szokolszky (2016, 27. ) concludes that “[r]adical intellectuals, many of them of Jewish origin, were attracted to social reforms and became leaders in the liberal and the communist governments,” and that “Jewish involvement in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic was significant: the great majority of people’s commissars (ministers of the communist government) were of Jewish descent — among them Jenő Varga, an economist and psychoanalyst, who was commissar of finance, and philosopher György [Georg] Lukács, who was commissar of culture.

Measures were taken with an iron fist, including  hostage taking from the civilian population and daily executions by revolutionary tribunals to prevent counterrevolutionary attempts.” The author also points out, in the context of the second Communist regime later, that “[t]he majority of the communist leaders, including the secret police, were of Jewish origin, including Mátyás Rákosi himself. On ground that the Jewish population was exempt from the infection of fascism, people of Jewish origin were trusted by the Rákosi regime and were often put in leading positions.” (Ibid., 38). (Rákosi was a prominent commissar in the Kun government and led the Hungarian government from 1947–1956).  The latter point is revealing, and it is worth recalling what Rákosi himself said in connection to this, for he believed that many Jews joined them not because of their commitment to the Communist principle, but rather because they wanted to gain power: “A new danger is the emergence of Jews who are returning home, who were previously in the workers’ regiments and are now returning home. They are pretending to be born anti-fascists, joining our party. Almost without exception, they have no idea of Communism, but they are intelligent, skillful and soon they are gaining a leading influence in the villages and small towns and in the police.” (quoted in Pünkösti, 1992, 215). Rákosi worries that this threatens the system, and complains that they are considered anti-Semitic because they sometimes expelled Jews who are not partisan enough, but what is important for us here is what this shows: power, not principle, is what drove many Jews.

A newspaper celebrates the new “Hungarian” Bolshevik government, whose personnel kept changing, but in this installation, 14 of the 19 are Jews – 73.6% (gentiles: Garbai, Nyisztor, Vantus, Dovcsák, Bokányi)

The Tharauds (2024, 105) then portray Béla Kun: “sometime after Kerensky’s revolution he became a friend of the famous propagandist Radek, whose real name was Zobelsohn, now a great personage in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs at Moscow, and who was at that time employed to make Bolshevist propaganda among the prisoners.” They describe that Kun was sent to Hungary with money and other supplies to incite the revolution, and that Böhm and Kunfi later visited Kun in prison, after he was arrested: “Böhm and Kunfi went to visit Bela Kun and the other incarcerated Communist leaders in their place of arrest. Laszlo, Korvin-Klein, Rabinovitz, etc., were among the number, all Jews. They caused their friends to be appointed directors of the prison so that the prisoners presently found themselves in fact the masters.” (Ibid., 111) About the establishment of the Bolshevik government, the brothers also write:

Bela Kun conferred the presidency of it upon Alexander Garbaï, an entirely obscure personage, but who had, in Bela’s eyes, the advantage of being a Christian and so masking the Semitic character of this Communist movement. Of twenty-six commissaries, eighteen were Jews: an unwarrantable number, if one considers that there are only 1.5 million Jews among the twenty million inhabitants of Hungary. These eighteen men took the direction of the Bolshevist government into their own hands; the others were mere figureheads. (Ibid., 120)

They bitterly add that “[a]fter the dynasty of Arpad [Árpád], after St. Stephen [István] and his sons, after the Anjous, the Hunyadis, and the Hapsburgs, there was a king of Israel in Hungary today.” (Ibid.) But here we have hit on an important point: Garbai’s appointment was indeed made to be window dressing for an essentially Jewish regime—a common tactic in Jewish intellectual and political movements (MacDonald 1998/2002).

Sándor Garbai’s Compass for Posterity

Thus Sándor Garbai was chosen because he could comfortably fit behind the real leader. In the minutes of the Revolutionary Governing Council, at the beginning of the regime, Vilmos Böhm suggests, openly speculating, that three non-Jews should be appointed to the administration of the capital: Ágoston, Bokányi, and then “a third, an iron worker, should be appointed also; if we form this leadership in this way, we would have a body which is also Jew-free” (quoted in Imre & Szűcs, 1986, 277).

Sándor Garbai (1879–1947) was used only as a mask, and the originally social-democratic politician later looked back on the Bolshevik period rather bitterly. István Végső, a historian, examined the 1172 pages of memoirs written by the former Shabbos goy, who was living in France at the time, for a planned biography and compiled a selection of them a few years ago, focusing on his memories and comments about the Republic and Jews. As Végső (2021, 33) points out, “Garbai was already suspected of having anti-Semitic views between the two world wars. In addition to anti-intellectualism, Vilmos Böhm also sensed ’not without reason’ anti-Semitism in Garbai’s post-1919 manifestations,” and that “1918–1919 was a watershed period in Garbai’s thinking. Apart from a few cases, his thinking before 1918 clearly diverges from that after the Soviet Republic” (ibid.). Indeed, Végső also notes that “[i]n the text, prejudice not only appears but is a constant feature. Its anti-Communist and anti-Jewish sentiments are blatant in the context of the labour movement” (ibid., 44), so Garbai’s insight outlined below is automatically “anti-Semitic” according to the historian, even though it often expresses positive and concerned feelings towards Jewry. Presumably, without such value judgments the collection would not have been published. As Végső points out, “[i]n a good part of the world, political parties after 1945 clearly refrained from anti-Semitic statements, but Garbai’s attitude remained unchanged” (ibid.).

Finally, Végső describes how Garbai recalled why he was appointed President in 1919: “The Board of Governors moved to appoint the President of the Board of Governors. Béla Kun stood up and proposed me as chairman. The reason was that Garbai was a worker, non-Jewish, a social democrat, experienced in the presidency. We communists also support him.” (Quoted in ibid., 104) Later, Garbai notes: “After the Governing Council was formed, Kunfi objected to the fact that there were many Jews among the People’s Commissars. This, he said, gave a bad impression on the Hungarian community. This proportion should be reduced, because 20 of the 28 Commissars are Jews. Kunfi’s comment caused consternation, but the majority argued that this aspect could only be honored later. For the time being, let the work begin with those appointed” (ibid., 106). The majority therefore thought that the large number of Jews was not a problem and that the programme should go ahead. 105 years later, we now know the result of this.

Sándor Garbai (1) with Béla Kun (2) on March 23, 1919.

Writing in Paris on April 6, 1946, Garbai recalls the first days of his regime, and in it the former president shares important observations with posterity:

In the evenings, we often went downstairs to the restaurant where we had dinner and watched the new functionaries who were looking after the cause of Hungary and the fate of the Hungarian people. I must confess, I was amazed at the mass of people that surged up and down the hall. Every day, nearly three hundred people gathered here, whom I hardly knew individually or collectively, although I individually knew the Budapest party functionaries in the Social Democratic Party. Of these people who swarmed here, 90% came from a group of young Jewish intellectuals who had set out to establish their careers with Visegrád Street Communist Party membership cards. I was struck by a shocking sight. I could not have imagined the extent of personal neglect, the unshaven, dirty, muddy looks that I witnessed here. The workers also appeared tired and shabby in the trusted men’s [i.e., Jews] seats, and yet there was something acceptable about them, something generalized, a willingness to be clean. They tried to keep themselves tidy and approach a human standard. The opposite happened. These people wanted to document their belonging to the proletariat by being dirty and neglected.

Béla Kun himself noticed this horse stable standard and loudly warned some of his followers that soap and razors were invented for the people.

My friend Henrik Kalmár and I discussed all aspects of this sad phenomenon. Kalmár told me that he has lived in the Hungária hotel from the beginning and sees this disgusting phenomenon every day. I am also Jewish, Kalmár said, I grew up in the Bratislava ghetto, but I am afraid of becoming an anti-Semite if this continues.

It’s good that it is not seen by others, only us. The mass rush to this power is to the detriment of the times and of the precious Jewish intelligentsia. It is absurd to believe that in a country like Hungary, where 63% are Catholic, 30% Reformed and 5% Jewish, this Jewish intelligentsia, which now sees the time as right to rise to power in the name of the worker, can remain in power. In this country, there was no obstacle to the Jews’ advancement. They could do whatever they wanted. They could be lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, industrialists, merchants, craftsmen and workers. But they could be no ruling class. There were few of them for that. The ruling class everywhere, and therefore also in our country, made up of the whole people, and it is against this law of evolution that the Jews now want to seize political power by means of revolution. I am afraid, said Kalmár, that many innocent Jews will pay the price for this hunger for power. For if this fails, an anti-Semitic wave will sweep the country the likes of which we have not seen before. (Ibid., 119–121)

Garbai then says to Kalmár: “The differences must disappear, because an undesirable situation could arise in which a life-and-death struggle between the Jewish and Hungarian intelligentsia would start, yes, in order to maintain their position of power. The effect of this will be that, instead of efforts to improve the situation of the working people, bloody battles will be fought under the slogans ’revolutionary’ and ’counter-revolutionary,’ to decide whether the Jewish or the Hungarian intelligentsia will lead the Hungarian people into the framework of the socialist world to come” (ibid.). All this is in line with the basic thesis of my analysis—although, it should be noted that Garbai wrote this 27 years after the events, so it is not known to what extent it is accurate. Nevertheless, it is in sync with the known past, and in the absence of contrary evidence, there is no good reason to doubt the memoirs of such an important figure. Equally disturbing—and very much in line with my thesis—is the following passage from April 20, 1946 (Paris):

Rabinovits also took over the leadership of the party’s agitator training school, where he enrolled young party members and trained them to carry out organizing tasks.

Party secretary István Farkas noticed that Rabinovits was only enrolling Jewish boys in the school, and questioned him. He said that if he did this knowingly, he would be forced to report to the party leadership because he could not take responsibility for this one-sidedness.

József Rabinovits told István Farkas, with peace of mind, that he was looking after the interests of the revolution when he did this. Only a Jew can be a reliable revolutionary, he said, because he does not belong to any existing organization. He has no national roots, his position is international. World revolution requires such men of international feeling as the Jews are. And the Hungarian proletarian dictatorship is an important link in the chain of the world revolution, and therefore this revolution can only carry out its historic task safely and irrevocably under the leadership of the Jews. Not otherwise. This is also the case in Russia. It must be the same here. (Ibid., 130; my emphasis)

Garbai then recalls how he complained about this to Rabinovits, considering this practice “dangerous” because it “places an excessive responsibility on the Jews.” He continued: “It would mean the emergence of a new ruling class under the aegis of international trust, from which all those who were born and live within a national framework and have national roots would fall out. Do not forget that the nationality of Jewry is in the accentuation of internationalism because the state of dispersion has made this necessary. But I also consider it necessary, in the interests of Jewry, that you do not follow this method, however tempting it may be. If the leadership of the workers’ movement is overrun by Jewry, it will lead to anti-Semitism” (ibid., 147).

Sándor Garbai

Also in Paris, on August 10, 1946, Garbai once again spoke with stark clarity. Historians have been studying the topic for decades, but almost none of them have the courage to put the following obvious fact on paper in such a roundabout way. Rather, an elderly man who was soon to die had to:

It [the revolution] was for a theory [Bolshevism] whose components nobody knew, only the Jewish intelligentsia, the vanguard of the industrial workers, were enthusiastic about it, because they saw in it not only the success of the social revolution but also its own rise to power. It was the rise to power that was the main goal. This was manifested in the fact that the industrial workers were led to believe that they would come to power through change and that they would be the holders of power. The industrial workers, under the influence of party discipline, could not consider that after the change they would still have to do the work, often under worse conditions than before, but the administration of the state was taken over in the name of industrial workers by the Jewish intellectuals and they were the main beneficiaries of the revolution. And anyone who challenged their rights was a counter-revolutionary. The Jews, especially the young element of Jewry, strove with unprecedented tenacity to take power, and lost sight of the double revolutionary direction of the Hungarian Revolution, because of its distorted structure: the liberation of the industrial workers and the coming to power of the Jews, the country cannot bear, one will drag the other down with it, into the abyss, into ruin, into destruction. (Ibid., 216–217)

Garbai also illustrates the anti-Hungarian nature of the Judeo-Bolsheviks with Ignác Schulcz (1894–1954), in connection with his activism in Czechoslovakia:

But Ignác Schulcz demanded that his followers vote against the use of the Hungarian language. He put party discipline above the interests of the Hungarian minority. He didn’t even care that the Hungarian community boycotted the traitors of the Hungarian language, and Hungarian voters turned away from the Social Democratic Party. This anti-Hungarian Social Democratic policy could only develop alongside the Jewish mentality of the political line that Ignác Schulcz represented in the party. (Ibid., 234)

There are plenty more remarks like the above in István Végső’s collection. Garbai’s conclusions about the history he witnessed in the midst of the events are thus extremely devastating, especially as regards the role and attitude of the Jews. While the charge of ’bias’ may seem justified, the same can be said of all the protagonists of history (and of today’s analysts) to some extent. The diary entries, memoirs and manifestations of the protagonists of events are among the most important elements of historiography, but in Garbai’s case, according to mainstream historians, it all comes across as something esoteric and strange, the focus being on the author’s “prejudice,” rather than his “post-judgmental” experience, so to speak.

By contrast, Garbai’s style of writing, and his thoughts on paper, show a clear mind, his criticisms are logical and—as my analysis here is intended to show—entirely justified. Given the blatant extent to which the legally protected narrative of the so-called Jewish Holocaust is based on conjecture and circumstantial accounts (or statements made under pressure, perhaps torture), to brush off the insights of one of the most insightful and active participants in the events as the anti-Semitic grumblings of an old man is, from a historiographical point of view, brazenly arrogant. Perhaps the real bias should be found here (e.g., to accuse Jews of anti-Hungarianism and tribal ethnocentrism—as Garbai does—is anti-Semitism according to mainstream scholarship today, while to accuse Hungarians of anti-Jewishness and ethnocentric motives is the most natural thing to do). Be that as it may, while historians and pundits come and go, Garbai’s writings will remain a compass for posterity.

Bloodshed in the Countryside

In the case of Tibor Szamuely (1890–1919), the Tharaud brothers (2024, 140) give the following account: “He was one of three children of a Jewish family from Galicia that had emigrated into Hungary a short time before and had acquired some degree of affluence in one of the northern counties. He, like Pogany, Bela Kun, and the greater number of the commissaries of the people, belonged to the category of intellectually discontented men who considered that society did not sufficiently recompense their talents.” The nature of the executions is described as follows: “whence news was brought that the peasants had cut a telegraph wire, attacked some Red Guards, or refused to deliver up their cattle and corn. He arrived in the village surrounded by his leather-clad men, who held bombs in their hands. The peasants denounced by the local Soviets were brought one after another before this revolutionary tribunal, composed of a single judge, round whom were grouped Szamuely’s companions. He himself, seated on a chair, his legs crossed carelessly one over the other, and smoking a gold-tipped cigarette, joked and laughed.” (Ibid., 145).

Tibor Szamuely speaks on recruitment day in Heroes’ Square

They also introduce Árpád Kohn-Kerekes (1896–1919), who was Szamuely’s partner in the killing spree and describe some of the executions, which were typically sadistic. Lajos Marschalkó also later quoted “the report of Imre Fehér, Colonel of the Red Army, sent by him to József Haubricht, the commander of the Italian army and the Italian military mission, on the actions of Samuelly’s [sic!] terrorists,” in which he said:

We accuse Samuelly and the terrorists of the following crimes: they have executed many innocent people in excess of their powers. The accused had no right to defend themselves and were executed without interrogation. Their procedure, which mocked any humanism of the slightest pretension, was as follows:

The terrorists, as soon as they arrived in a village, immediately rounded up and beat the male population. Samuelly selected 10 or 15, perhaps more, of them and, without saying a word to the unfortunates, handed them over to the Lenin Boys. The Lenin Boys, like wild animals, rushed at the unfortunate victims and began to beat them with rifles, hand grenades and stabbing them with blades. Blood gushed from the bodies of the men. A great many had their arms and waists broken, and then, standing them on chairs under a tree, they hung a rope around their necks and ordered them to kick the chair out from under them. If the unfortunate martyr was too frightened to do so, they stabbed him with knives until he was dead. (Quoted: Marschalkó, 1975, 182–183, Italics in original)

Marschalkó then refers to the work of the Tharauds: “We cannot take it amiss if Jenő Molnár [reporting the above] did not say what the Tharaud brothers later wrote, that it is so everywhere: ’Where Israel is king.’” (ibid., 188). Péter Konok describes the role of Lenin Boys in this way: “the official and semi-official terror groups (the term they themselves used) of the Soviet Republic were primarily focused on ’defending proletarian power.’ The aim was twofold: on the one hand, to ensure the Red Army’s effectiveness at the front and, on the other, to put down the growing counter-revolutionary rebellions and conspiracies in the rear. On April 21, the Revolutionary Governing Council set up the Committee Behind the Front, which also functioned as a tribunal” (Konok, 2010, 75). Its chairman was Szamuely, and “Political cases were handled by the Political Investigation Department of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs headed by Ottó Korvin on the one hand, and by the Behind the Front Committee and the Court of Imprisonment, which were independent of it on the other” (ibid., 77). Dávid Ligeti (2019, 33–34) also recalls that “the case of György [Georg] Lukács, who ordered the shooting of eight people as a political commissar of the 5th Division at Poroszló on May 2, is well known.”

Photograph ripped to pieces and thrown away at a headquarters portraying some of the Lenin Boys with their victim (source: Tormay, 1923)

Ligeti also notes that “the role of the three-member panels in the imposition of death sentences was particularly perverse: here the victims had neither the possibility of appeal nor of effective legal defence” (ibid., 32). Szamuely and his associates also expropriated the property of the Hungarians after their massacres. Instead of leaving their property to the possible survivors, or distributing it among the poor, they transported hundreds of cows, bulls, oxen, pigs, sheep and poultry to Budapest by train, as reported in a telegram from Szamuely to Kun on June 10, 1919 (in: Bizony, 1919, 72).

The Bolshevik Jews believed that after Russia, and now Hungary, other countries would be swallowed up one country after another, so there was no such thing as too much cruelty. This belief is exemplified, for instance, in the official Bolshevik newspaper, the Vörös Ujság, issue of April 9, 1919, which wrote: “What is happening in Hungary today is, if possible, of even greater significance than the revolution of the Russian people. We are bringing the proletarian revolution to Western Europe.” (quoted: Chishova & Józsa, 1973, 221). Pravda, in Russian, on April 12, 1919, in its second issue, stated that “[t]he present events mean neither more nor less than that we are carrying the socialist revolution into the sphere of the proletariat of Western Europe, since we are convinced that the proletarian revolution will triumph only if the whole of Europe is on our side.” (Quoted: ibid., 225).

With all that behind us, next we will analyze the manifestation and role of identity, as well as ethnic character, further figures and data, and then misleading historical manipulations will also be answered.

Go to Part 3. 

References

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