Why do fascists hate Jews so much?
The German Nazis were the world’s most powerful and influential fascist organisation, and they were also the most anti-Semitic. Their Jew-hating world view was remarkable because it was so irrational, yet it became the official ideology of a modern, powerful state.
They believed their own lies so fervently that even as their empire was being blasted into rubble, Nazis stretched their supply lines and diverted military resources to a campaign of genocide using the most advanced industrial methods. They thought a global Jewish conspiracy was behind anything new, any intellectual or cultural advance, any discontent of modernity, any military or political rival to the Third Reich: from Roosevelt to Churchill, by way of Stalin, Trotsky, suffragettes and cubism. The pathetic insanity of the world view went hand in hand with the extremity of its violence.
At the time, socialists marvelled that the apparently primitive, superstitious Jew baiting was promoted by such a technologically advanced state. But in the decades since the defeat of the Nazis, their form of anti-Semitism has come to look like a historical curio, a relic of an ancient European culture that had yet to rid itself of all its medieval prejudices.
Jewish political culture has changed almost beyond recognition since the time of the Third Reich. Between them, Hitler and Stalin nearly wiped out European Jewish revolutionary socialism. Fewer diaspora Jews live in Yiddish-speaking concentrations. The national identity of Jews is now linked to a nuclear-armed, imperialist nation-state. Israel’s government is a faithful friend to right-wing nationalists around the world.
Read the article by Daniel Taylor in Red Flag.