re: #302 Salamantis

Jews were not attacked in the Soviet union so much because of their Jewishness as because of their capitalist tendencies. In fact, Karl Marx, who wrote the communist bible, was himself Jewish.

You really, really need to go read what Karl Marx actually wrote. He was without a doubt a raging antisemite with Daddy issues. A significant body of his work dealt with the ‘emancipation’ of the Jews.

That is, the destruction of ‘Jewishness’, and the promotion of the idea that Jews were culturally suited to a bourgeoisie niche and prided themselves as superior competitors against their Christian neighbors. That Judaism was the pinnacle of Capitalist society and Judaism only existed as a thumb in the eye of a greater collectivist harmony.

Marx’s theories in particular stand out among the anti-Semitic diatribes of his day, in that they put forward the idea that Judaism wasn’t the driving issue in dividing society (among Jewish/Christian lines). That you could strip Jews of their religion and their customs and their Jewish identity and they would still necessarily be Jews because Jewish culture was bourgeoisie culture. That even if you destroyed all religion as his fellow Young Hegelians were fans of promoting, you would still have Jews as a distinct group apart from society as a whole. As long as you had class distinction, you would have Jews. Capitalism was a Christian societal pursuit of Judaism. In a lot of early 20th century Marxist literature you might as well be able to read bourgeoisie as code for Jew.

Marx was a landmark commentator in that period that worked at deflecting the Judenfrage away from being a question ideology or religion, and a promoter of the idea that you couldn’t find a solution to the Jewish Question by reforming either Jewish or mainstream culture to be more tolerant of each other, or assimilating into each others culture.

Pointing out that Karl Marx was Jewish, and therefore there Marxism doesn’t suffer from Jewhate in a bad way simply isn’t cool. He’s a seminal antisemitic thinker of the highest order because of the wide proliferation of his worldview today.