Jewish Bolshevism
Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism, is an antisemitic and anti-communist conspiracy theory that claims that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a Jewish plot and that Jews controlled the Soviet Union and international communist movements, often in furtherance of a plan to destroy Western civilization. It was one of the main Nazi beliefs that served as an ideological justification for the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Holocaust.[1]
For the involvement of the Jews in Bolshevism and Russian Revolution, see History of the Jews in Russia.
After the Russian Revolution, the antisemitic canard was the title of the pamphlet The Jewish Bolshevism, which featured in the racist propaganda of the anti-communist White movement forces during the Russian Civil War (1918–1922). During the 1930s, the Nazi Party in Germany and the German American Bund in the United States propagated the antisemitic theory to their followers, sympathisers, and fellow travellers.[2][3] Nazi Germany used the trope to implement anti-Slavic policies and initiate racial war against Soviet Union, portraying Slavs as inferior humans controlled by Jews to destroy Aryan people.[4][5]
In Poland, Żydokomuna was a term for the antisemitic opinion that the Jews had a disproportionately high influence in the administration of Communist Poland. In far-right politics, the antisemitic canards of "Jewish Bolshevism", "Jewish Communism", and the ZOG conspiracy theory are catchwords falsely asserting that Communism is a Jewish conspiracy.[6]
Outside Nazi Germany
Great Britain, 1920s
In the early 1920s, leading British antisemite Henry Hamilton Beamish stated that Bolshevism was the same thing as Judaism.[51] In the same decade, future wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill penned an editorial entitled "Zionism versus Bolshevism", published in the Illustrated Sunday Herald. In the article, which asserted that Zionism and Bolshevism were engaged in a "struggle for the soul of the Jewish people", he called on Jews to repudiate "the Bolshevik conspiracy" and make clear that "the Bolshevik movement is not a Jewish movement" but stated that:
Works propagating the canard
The Octopus
The Octopus is a 256-page book self-published in 1940 by Elizabeth Dilling under the pseudonym "Rev. Frank Woodruff Johnson". In it, she describes her theories of Jewish Bolshevism.[59]
Europa: The Last Battle
Europa: The Last Battle is a 2017 neo-Nazi propaganda film which promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories, including claims that communism was a Jewish ideology.[61]
