Extract from Podcast interviewing Paul Hanebrink“The Judeo-

Bolshevik Myth”
https://srbpodcast.org/2019/05/24/the-judeo-bolshevik-myth/

What is Judeo-Bolshevism?

Judeo-Bolshevism is one variation on the age-old notion of a global Jewish conspiracy. There
is an international conspiracy among Jews to get global power. Judeo-Bolshevism is the
variation that says that Bolshevism, or Communism, was created by Jews as a collective. It’s
not about this person was Jewish, or that person was Jewish, it’s about the collectivity of
Jews.

Creating Communism was a tool or as an instrument to achieve that kind of world power.
According to this myth, communist parties, communist movements, and communist
ideology were tools and instruments of Jewish power. Therefore, the crimes that communist
regimes committed are the fault of the Jews. The Jews, in fact, are to blame for them.

Of all the different ethnic groups in Central and Eastern Europe, even in Western Europe,
why do the Jews take on this image as the leaders or organizers of this vast conspiracy?

I think that has to do with the ways in which certain kinds of anti-Semitic tropes that have a
very old history that predates the 20th century get re-purposed and reinvested with a new
kind of significance. If you look at the history of communist parties in various places, there’s
always concern that one particular ethnic group, or another is exercising more power, more
influence, at a particular moment. You can find those kinds of debates about the role of
ethnic Hungarians and the remaining communist party, etc.

The issue with Jews really gets at some of these older tropes about Jewish power which you
can trace back to the Middle Ages. Jewish power as being a kind of illegitimate power used
to illegitimate ends. The idea of Jews in power conjures up an imagination of a dystopia. It’s
the world turned upside-down. When people talk about Jews in charge of communist
parties, it really allows these fantasies of an inverted world, a world in which order becomes
disorder. It really can have free play in a way you don’t get when you have other kinds of
ethnic conflicts within communist parties in various places.

How does the Judeo-Bolshevik myth find its way into Nazi ideology, and how was it
articulated?

I think it finds its way into Nazi ideology very early on. I write at the beginning of one
chapter that Judeo-Bolshevism made Hitler. What I mean by that is that Hitler had his own
anti-Semitic views well before the Russian Revolution, but the general anxiety about Jews
and communism, especially in Munich where he was located, allowed him to come to
political prominence very early on. He was able to use that issue and those general anxieties
to create a party and movement.
It’s a central element—not the only element—of Nazi thinking about the world and Nazi
thinking about Jews. In that early period, I don’t know if there was very much in Judeo-
Bolshevism that distinguished it from the ways that association and that stereotype worked
in other places. So I don’t know if there was anything particularly German or Nazi about it in
its origins. But what does become crucial for thinking about the 1940s is that it gets grafted
onto Nazi thinking about hegemony in Europe and about creating an empire. This
distinguishes Nazi Judeo-Bolshevism from a place like Hungary or Romania that never had
this sort of ambition to control all of Europe.

When Hitler is making a bid in the 1930s to be the leading anti-communist power, which he
announces in various addresses in the Nuremberg party rallies in 1935 and 1936 and in 1937
during the Spanish Civil War, the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism is presented as a threat that Nazi
Germany can help the rest of Europe defend itself against. So when Nazi Germany goes to
war against the Soviet Union in 1941, right-wing nationalists, who have been using this
language on their own to address very specific concerns of their own, figure out how to link
their own vision of Jews and Bolshevism to Nazi ideology.

Regardless of whether they were going to be completely on the same page or whether there
was going to be any sort of slippage between the two, there’s this linkage in which they all
get caught up in this Nazi drive to dominate the continent. So that’s how I see the
transformation. It’s a Europeanization of it.