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“

I don't think that the way to correct a spin from the left is to try to impart a spin from the right.... [A]n information flow distorted from the right would be just as much a disservice as distortion from the left. What we really should be after... is accurate information. And I don't see what any conservative or anybody else for that matter has to fear from accurate information.

”

-M. Stanton Evans, “Can Conservatives Change the Media?” Heritage Foundation Resource Bank lecture, August 7, 1990

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was a bourgeois political pamphleteer, polemicist and propagandist, credited as co-founder (with Friedrich Engels) of communism and specifically of Marxism. According to Don Ross, co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics, "the Marxist system as a whole is not regarded as economics by the mainstream." Economist Thomas Sowell, an ex-Marxist, agrees:

“

[T]he Marxian contribution to economics can be readily summarized as virtually zero. Professional economics as it exists today reflects no indication that Karl Marx ever existed... [T]he development of modern economics has simply ignored Marx. Even economists who are Marxists typically utilize a set of analytical tools to which Marx contributed nothing... In professional economics, Capital was a detour into a blind alley...

”

William Coleman of the Australian National University actually identifies Marx as an "anti-economist." Ross concurs, labeling Marx "the most influential anti-economist of all." Even Michael Harrington, a well-known Marxist, in his book, The Twilight of Capitalism, devoted an entire chapter to Marx "The anti-economist." Nevertheless, men and women of zeal, often well-meaning but without understanding of economics, ravaged the 20th century reifying Marx's economic illusions—in the process killing more people than all the century's wars combined.

Early life

Marx was born "Carl Marx" in the Rhineland city of Trier, then in the Kingdom of Prussia (now in the Federal Republic of Germany), the son of Heinrich Marx and Henriette Pressborck. Marx's father was a successful lawyer and owner of several Moselle vineyards. Philosophically, he was a liberal who “knew his Voltaire and Rousseau by heart.” After the Prussian Edict of 1812 effectively banned Jews from public office and the professions, he converted from Judaism to the Evangelical Church (established in 1817 as the state church of Prussia), changing his name from Hershel Mordechai to Heinrich Marx. In 1824, he had his seven children, including six-year-old Karl, baptized.

Marx the Christian

Marx was confirmed at age 15. As a student at the Royal Frederick William III gymnasium, he was to all appearances a Christian. When Marx graduated in 1835, his diploma read, under the category “Religious knowledge”: “His knowledge of the Christian faith and morals is fairly clear and well grounded; he knows also to some extent the history of the Christian Church.” Yet even then Marx betrayed a tendency to substitute man for God as the primary and ultimate object of Christian love and sacrifice. In an 1835 senior thesis, the 17-year-old Marx wrote that in union with Christ, "we turn our hearts to our brothers whom He has closely bound to us, and for whom also He sacrificed Himself... Therefore union with Christ bestows... a heart which is open to love of mankind..." Likewise, in another senior thesis written at the same time, Marx wrote that "religion itself teaches us that the ideal being whom all strive to copy sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind, and who would dare to set at nought such judgments?" Marx, a descendant of famous Talmudic scholars and sages on both sides of his family, apparently studied Greek and French, but not Hebrew. He would put this education to strange uses: "Many of Marx’s dogmas were not original," writes economist Mark Skousen. "They came from the Bible, which he twisted and changed to suit his purposes."

Bonn University

However, Marx's Christianity had little staying power. Barely a month after starting the study of law at Bonn University in October 1835, Marx seems to have embraced atheism. Heinrich disapproved, warning his son:

“

[A] great support for morality is pure faith in God. You know that I am anything but a fanatic. But this faith is a real [require]ment of man sooner or later, and there are moments in life when even the atheist is [involun]tarily drawn to worship the Almighty... for what Newton, Locke and Leibniz believed, everyone can [...] submit to.

”

Marx was not academically successful, and proved to be a disappointment to his parents, confirming his father's opinion “that in your heart egoism is predominant.” As a leader of the Trier Tavern Club, a group of students “whose main ambition was to get drunk as frequently and riotously as possible,” Marx began playing cards, getting into drunken brawls, and was even wounded in a duel. He spent 24 hours in jail “for disturbing the peace by rowdiness and drunkenness at night.” His father tried to dissuade the young Marx from such vices, warning his son that “youthful sins in any enjoyment that is immoderate or even harmful in itself meet with frightful punishment.”

His father's warning had no discernible effect. Years later, in London, Marx went on “many a pub crawl.” On one of these, accompanied by Wilhelm Liebknecht and Edgar Bauer, Marx drank in no less than 18 different pubs. In one of these, Marx's “inebriated comments” that Germany “would yet outclass all other nations” nearly got them, once again, into a fight. They fled into the street where, according to Liebknecht, “we broke four or five street lamps.” When he participated in this crime, Marx was a husband and father himself, nearly 40 years old.

Marx's finances

Marx's youthful bacchanalia seem to have been riotously expensive; while he was still a student, there emerged what was to become a dominant theme of his life: his "grotesque incompetence" in real-world economics. On this score, the letters of Marx's long-suffering father tell a sorry tale:

• “Your accounts, dear Karl, are... disconnected and inconclusive. If only they had been shorter and more precise, and the figures properly set out in columns, the operation would have been very simple. One expects order even from a scholar, and especially from a practical lawyer.... I enclose a money order for 50 talers...”
• “I sent... 50 talers. With what you took with you, that makes 160 talers.... I am convinced that it is possible to manage with less... But no more under any condition... I enclose a draft on... the lottery office in the university building; you will get money there, as m[uch as] you need.”
• “You are receiving 100 talers herewith and, if you ask for it, you will receive the rest... You have not kept your word to me—you remember your promise... At the moment I could not send you any more. In the next few days you will probably receive 20 talers through Rabe.”
• “Please, dear Karl, write at once, but write frankly, without reserve and truthfully. Calm me and your dear, kind mother, and we will soon forget the little monetary sacrifice.”
• “For the time being I am sending you herewith 50 talers. You must at present be able to estimate approximately the amount you absolutely need each year, and that is what I should like to know.”
• “Enclosed a money order for 50 talers. If you prefer me to look for a firm there to make an arrangement with you, you must tell me approximately the monthly sum I should fix for you. By now you must be able to say what it amounts to with one thing and another.”
• "As if we were men of wealth, my Herr Son disposed in one year of almost 700 talers contrary to all agreement, contrary to all usage, whereas the richest spend less than 500."
• "...we are now in the fourth month of the law year and you have already drawn 280 talers. I have not yet earned that much this winter."

If the young Marx's money woes were due to immaturity, in this regard he he never grew up. "Marx was perpetually in debt, thanks largely to a disastrous combination of traits in his own character," writes Hugh Griffith: "an incorrigible hopelessness with money, together with a refusal to stop spending when it ran out." "Marx, the economist of the proletarian class," writes economist Yuri Maltsev, "was hardly what we would call a sound financial administrator."

In 1869, Marx told Engels he was £210 in debt, "of which 75 are for pawnshop and interest." That year, Engels sold his interest in the family firm and paid off all Marx's debts; in addition, Engels gave Marx a pension of £350 per year. According to Maltsev (using figures from an 1867 study presented to the Statistical Society of London), that put Marx's income in the top 2% of the British population—at the time the wealthiest in the world. Yet even this sum was not enough for Marx, who by his own admission was spending from £400 to £500 per year.

As a young man, Marx's financial irresponsibility "drove him into the hands of moneylenders at high rates of interest." This pattern continued into his middle age: "Marx was constantly borrowing money against his future income," writes Jerrold Seigal, professor of history at New York University, "and until 1863 against his family inheritance too...." By Marx's own admission he was paying interest rates as high as 50% in 1866, when he was 48 years of age. Perhaps not coincidentally, a "passionate hatred of usury was the real emotional dynamic of [Marx's] whole moral philosophy," argues historian Paul Johnson. "It explains why he devoted so much time and space to the subject" and, suggests Johnson, might be found "lying perhaps at the very roots of his hatred for the capitalist system."

Marx's anti-Semitism and racism

Among the money-lenders in London, Marx "made use of the Jews"—particularly "the Bambergers, Steifer and Spielmann," writes economic historian W.O. Henderson, "to raise small loans and to discount bills of exchange" from his editor—although he "became "furious when they pressed him to honour debts due for repayment," showing "his contempt by always referring to them as 'Jew (or little Jew) Bamberger' and 'Jew Spielmann.'" (Elsewhere, he called Bamberger a member of "the stock-exchange synagogue.") "His private letters are replete with anti-Semitic remarks, caricatures, and crude epithets," writes Marx's biographer, Saul K. Padover: "'Levy's Jewish nose,' 'usurers,' 'Jew-boy,' 'nigger-Jew,' etc." Marx "sprayed anti-Semitic insults at his enemies with savage glee," writes Francis Wheen: "The Jew Steinthal, with the bland smile"; "that pig... is a Jew by the name of Meier"; he called Max Friedlander "the cursed Jew of Vienna," Achille Fould a "stock-exchange Jew," and Joseph Süß Oppenheimer "the Jew Süß of Egypt;" he even called his doctor a Jew for pressing him for payment.

Marx's anti-Semitism was intertwined with racism. One one occasion when fellow socialist Ferdinand Lassalle (who regularly loaned Marx money) refused him a loan, Marx complained to Engels:

“

The Jewish nigger Lassalle... would sooner throw money down the drain than lend it to a ‘friend’, even though his interest and capital were guaranteed.... It is now quite plain to me—as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify—that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger).... The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.

”

Marx called Lassalle a "kinky-haired Nigger-Jew" (kraushaariger Nigger-Jude) and continually referred to him as "Isaac," "Baron Isaac," a "little Jew," "Ephraim the clever," "Braun Yid" and "Itzig," names commonly used by anti-Semites of the day. "[T]he exodus of the Jews from Egypt was nothing but... the expulsion of the 'leprous people' from Egypt. At the head of these lepers was an Egyptian priest, Moses," assterted Marx. "Lazarus, the leper, is therefore the prototype of the Jew, and so also of Lazare-Lassalle."

Marx's style was shared by his companions: his wife referred to Lassalle "the little Berlin Jew," while Engels called him a "greasy Jew."

Marx's disdain was directed not merely at people, but extended to Judaism itself: "the Israelite faith is repugnant to me," he wrote. Nor did Marx limit his disparagement to his creditors, but extended it to Jews in general, writing to Engels from Ramsgate that there were "many Jews and bedbugs hereabouts." In thus lumping Jews together with parasites, Marx prefigured a trope that would later figure prominently in the writing of Adolf Hitler.

Marx's anti-Semitism

"That Karl Marx was an inveterate antisemite is today considered a commonplace which is hardly ever questioned," wrote Shlomo Avineri, professor of political science at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Marxists and other socialists "are extremely coy about it nowadays, for obvious reasons," observes British writer Alexander Baron, but "the early socialists, including the Jewish-born Karl Marx, were more than a little tainted with that most ignoble of pastimes, Jew-baiting." Marx “was at best negative towards Jews in theory,” according to University of London historian David Cesarani; he was "a particularly caustic antisemite," wrote Flannery. Indeed, Marx's "entire theory of class was rooted in anti-Semitism," charges Johnson. Thus Sharan calls Marx an “anti-Semitic Jew,” while Albert S. Lindemann, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, University of California–Santa Barbara, dubs him “a self-hating Jew.” Likewise, Sir Isaiah Berlin diagnosed Marx's condition as "self-hate" and Marx's biographer Werner Blumenberg "self-hatred"; Raphael Patai pronounced Marx the "most influential of Jewish self-haters." Henderson and Manchester University historian W.H. Chaloner comment:

“

...Marx's anti-Semitism has been played down, or even ignored, in some popular socialist accounts of Marx's career and doctrines published in the West and intended for radical and socialist consumption.... There may not be exactly a conspiracy of silence but attention may be drawn to the fact that there is a difference between telling the truth and telling the whole truth. Deception by omission is still deception. Western commentators, too, with a few honourable exceptions, have tended to dodge the issue or to gloss over unwelcome facts. Scholars unfamiliar with the German language, who rely only upon English translations of the writings of Marx and Engels, may be led astray if they use selections compiled by Marxists who are prepared to suppress evidence which might display their hero in a somewhat unfavourable light.

”

A case in point is the Marxist Internet Archive, which bowdlerizes some of Marx's writings (including On the Jewish Question) and deletes others (including “The Russian Loan”) altogether. (See below)

"On the Jewish Question"

In his essay, "On the Jewish question," Marx makes it clear that he considered Jews "worshippers of mammon," writes Flannery. "The Jew of Marx's essay," agrees Lindeman, "worships money...." As Marx put it in that essay:

“

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his worldly God? Money.

”

Marx hammers the point:

“

Money is the jealous god of Israel, before which no other god may exist. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.

”

Judaism has only contempt, according to Marx, for non-monetary values:

“

"Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself... is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion."

”

Despite political disenfranchisement in Prussia, claims Marx, Jews have come to dominate politics through "the power of money":

“

The contradiction that exists between the practical political power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and the power of money in general. Although theoretically the former is superior to the latter, in actual fact politics has become the serf of financial power.

”

Marx claimed that the Jews had elevated "their greedy, exploitive spirit" into the reigning spirit of the age, writes Matthew Lange, director of the German program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As Marx put it, "The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world":

“

The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews."

”

It is "in North America," according to Marx, that the "practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world" has achieved what he calls "its unambiguous and normal expression." As evidence, Marx approvingly quotes one observer who writes of the "devout and politically free inhabitant of New England" that

“

Mammon is his idol.... In his view the world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is convinced that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbor. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other recreation than to exchange objects.... [He] talks only of interest and profit.

”

This theme, the "practical domination" of Judentum over America, would later be exploited by the Nazis, who would label the United States a "Jewish Dictatorship," claiming that Jews had "economic life in New York... entirely under their control," and through newspapers "controlled by the Jews" influenced American public opinion: "The question is whether the American people want to make the Jews happy by engaging in fruitless conflict with the German Reich and the German people." This argument has since been reclaimed by the left, with charges of Jewish influence once again leading America into war. This idea linking America and the Jews has powerful roots.

Marx ends with a call for "the emancipation of society from Judaism":

“

Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering and its preconditions—the Jew will have become impossible.... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism. [All italics Marx's]

”

Analysis

“To designate Marx as an anti-Semite is nothing but cold war propaganda,” argued the Marxist Erich Fromm. The idea that Marx was in any sense anti-Semitic is a “myth,” agrees Robert Fine, chair of the Sociology Department at Warwick University, arising in part out of what he calls a “deafness” to Marx's “ironic style.” The idea that Marx was an anti-Semite, concurs David Hirsh of the University of London, is "a standard misreading" of On the Jewish Question. Marx's claim that “Money is the jealous god of Israel,” contends Fine, is actually a “witty and deeply ironic” critique of that claim.

But Marx expressed similar contempt for Jews, not only in his letters, but in his other writings as well. In The German Ideology, Marx likens the bourgeoisie to Jews, whom he describes as criminals and hypocrites: “The attitude of the bourgeois to the institutions of his regime is like that of the Jew to the law; he evades them whenever it is possible to do so in each individual case, but he wants everyone else to observe them.” In The Holy Family Marx expands on the theme of "the material, mass-type Jews," arguing that "real secular Jewry, and hence religious Jewry too... finds its final development in the money system," concluding that "the task of abolishing the essence of Jewry is actually the task of abolishing the Jewish character of civil society... the most extreme expression of which is the money system."

Extreme as these German works were, Marx surpassed them in vituperation with an article he wrote for publication in America, where according to Marx the "practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world" had achieved what he called "its unambiguous and normal expression." "The Russian Loan," published in the New York Daily Tribune, did not just savage the Jews as capitalists, but specifically exploited the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as usurers:

“

Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew... [T]he cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not... a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.... [T]he real work is done by the Jews, and can only be done by them, as they monopolize the machinery of the loan-mongering mysteries.... The language spoken smells strongly of Babel, and the perfume which otherwise pervades the place is by no means of a choice kind.... Thus do these loans, which are a curse to the people, a ruin to the holders, and a danger to the governments, become a blessing to the houses of the children of Judah. This Jew organization of loan-mongers is... dangerous to the people.... The fortunes amassed by these loan-mongers are immense, but the wrongs and sufferings thus entailed on the people and the encouragement thus afforded to their oppressors still remain to be told.... The fact that 1855 years ago Christ drove the Jewish moneychangers out of the temple, and that the moneychangers of our age enlisted on the side of tyranny happen again chiefly to be Jews, is perhaps no more than a historical coincidence. The loan-mongering Jews of Europe do only on a larger and more obnoxious scale what many others do on one smaller and less significant. But it is only because the Jews are so strong that it is timely and expedient to expose and stigmatize their organization.

”

In On the Jewish Question itself, writes Dennis K. Fischman, assistant professor of social science at Boston University, "Marx seems fairly to bristle with anti-Jewish sentiments." The views Marx expressed in that essay "were part of the classic repertoire of anti-Semitism," according to Gertrude Himmelfarb, professor of history at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. It is “almost a classic anti-Semitic tract,” agrees Johnson. It is "without any question an anti-Semitic tract," admits "eco-socialist" Joel Kovel. Indeed, concurs Lewis, it has become “one of the classics of anti-Semitic propaganda.” This essay was "reprinted, widely quoted, and praised," adds Himmelfarb, "and became the exemplar of a classic genre of socialist anti-Semitism."

"Much of the essay seems simply to borrow from standard anti-Semitic fare," writes Lindemann. Coleman identifies this work as "perhaps, the most condensed identification of Jews with self-interest." Marx exploits the stereotype of Jews “linked in the popular imagination with usury, sharp dealing, and ruthless cunning,” writes Stephen J. Greenblatt of Harvard. He uses the “widespread antisemitic caricature of Jews as inveterate moneylenders and hucksters along with the use of the term Judentum [Jewishness, Judaism] as a metaphor for commerce,” writes Larry Ray, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. Not only are Judaism and capitalism "described as basically the same," according to Lindeman, but in Marx's view, Jews are "responsible for capitalism," writes Lewis. Marx considered Jews "the very soul of the corrupt capitalism he fought," wrote Flannery. The essay, writes Johnson, is “based upon a fantasied Jewish archetype and a conspiracy to corrupt the world.”

Marx expresses “a sharp, even hysterical, denial of his religious background,” writes Greenblatt, as well as “extreme [rhetorical] violence” and “utter separation of himself from the people he excoriates....”

“

[T]he tone of the attack on the Jews rises to an almost ecstatic disgust at the moment when Marx seems to be locating the Jews most clearly as a product of bourgeois culture; it is as if Marx were eager to prove that he is in no way excusing or forgiving the Jews.

”

"Marx argues that the Jew will have to cast off his 'Jewishness'—that is, his mean and grasping ways," writes Lindemann, "in order to become fully human." Marx expresses a "bitter grudge against Judaism which borders on the desire to see it destroyed," wrote long-time Haaretz editor Moshe Glickson. “Marx’s position is essentially an assimilationist one," according to Ray, "in which there is no room within emancipated humanity for Jews as a separate ethnic or cultural identity.” "Jews, Marx seems to be saying, can only become free when, as Jews, they no longer exist," observes Fischman. Marx's "solution of the Jewish question was not very different from Adolf Hitler's," comments Marx's biographer Robert Payne, "for it involved the liquidation of Judaism...." Indeed, Marx's anti-Semitic rhetoric “may have contributed mightily to the bloodshed and the fire to come,” writes Max Geltman. "[T]he net result of Marx's essay is to reinforce a traditional anti-Jewish stereotype," concludes Wisrich, "the identification of the Jews with money-making—in the sharpest possible manner." Marx "did not hesitate to besmirch the traditions of the Jewish people and to place a sword in the hands of its enemies," writes Glickson. Even Kovel, former Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, concedes, "No attempt to read these pages as a play on words can conceal the hostility which infuses them, and is precisely directed against the identity of the Jew." Of this essay, Gérard Lyon-Caen, professor of labor law at the University of Paris, concludes:

“

To say that it was at the origin of modern anti-Semitism would very certainly be excessive. But to put forward the theory that it encouraged certain anti-Semitic currents in capitalistic countries or even in countries which were freed from capitalism seems hard to dispute.

”

Left-wing anti-Semitism

Moreover, anti-Semitism was more the rule than the exception in mainstream leftism: although many leftists try to deny it, “modern, political anti-Semitism is a creature of the left as well as the right,” admits Fine. There were “strong anti-Semitic currents on the European left in Marx’s time," he adds; "[T]here is a strong tradition of anti-Semitism on the Left.” In France, writes Göttingen historian Karlheinz Weissmann, many on the left saw the Jews not merely as representing "German–Marxist internationalism," but "as the embodiment of capitalism." One "need not venture far into the pre-1930 literature of anti-economics before encountering conspicuous anti-Semitic effusions," observes Coleman. "One may say that, before about 1930, anti-economics and anti-Semitism existed in striking conjunction." He adds that "the conjunction was not accidental... [A]nti-economics and modern anti-Semitism shared some leading ideological contentions."

From the outset, according to French historian Marc Crapez, European racism and socialism were closely affiliated. In addition, "anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism were deeply intertwined," writes George L. Mosse, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "[I]n fact, they had been connected since the middle-ages." "For centuries, Jewish economic success led anti-Semites to condemn capitalism as a form of Jewish domination and exploitation," writes Columbia University history professor Jerry Z. Muller, "or to attribute Jewish success to unsavory qualities of the Jews themselves.

“The Marxist, postmodern and post-Zionist pseudo-liberal views on democracy lead back to the totalitarian democracy of the French Enlightenment, in which anti-Semitism formed an essential ingredient,” writes Shlomo Sharan of Tel Aviv University. At that time, "the Jews symbolised the distressing symptoms of modernity ushered in by capitalism and political liberalism," writes Christian Wiese, professor of Jewish history at the University of Sussex. “[T]he sudden prominence of a few Jews who benefited from economic liberalisation provoked a backlash from the Left.” Voltaire denounced the Jews as ""the greatest scoundrels who have ever sullied the face of the globe". The Jews, he wrote, "deserve to be punished," for it is their "destiny." "The Jewish nation dares to display an irreconcilable hatred toward all nations, and revolts against all masters," wrote Voltaire, "always superstitious, always greedy for the well-being enjoyed by others, always barbarous—cringing in misfortune and insolent in prosperity."

"It was in those days that the complaint arose that Jews were 'unproductive middle men,' 'economic parasites,'" wrote Edward H. Flannery, a professor at the Institute of Judeo-Christian Studies at Seton Hall University. "It was shaped for the most part by socialist writers and became a favorite theme with later racist antisemites of a socialist stripe." Among the French Left, observes Weissmann, were "numerous individuals and groups who considered class struggle and race struggle as one and the same thing—especially with reference to the Jews...." “Socialist anti-Semitism is indeed almost as old as modern Socialism,” writes historian Edmund Silberner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Pierre Leroux, who coined the word "socialism", “identified the Jews with the despised capitalism, and regarded them as the incarnation of mammon, who lived by exploiting others.” He condemned what he called "the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce, of speculation, in a word, the banker spirit." In his comprehensive survey of of French socialist literature from 1820 to 1920, historian Zosa Szajkowski found not a single word on behalf of Jews. When the bourgeois Victor Hugo, a cultural Catholic, defended Alfred Dreyfus, falsely imprisoned by the anti-Semitic French government, the French socialist press published a manifesto calling for non-participation in the "Dreyfus Affair" on the grounds that Jewish capitalists would use the rehabilitation of a single Jew to wash out "all the sins of Israel." The socialism of Fourier, Proudhon, Bakunin and Beatrice Webb was inseperable from this crude and vicious anti-Semitism, portraying Jews as exploiters, leeches and parasites.

During the 19th century, the center of left-wing anti-Semitism gradually shifted from Paris to Vienna, where the "radical-democratic and nationalist left wing" was headed by German Liberal Party leader Georg von Schönerer, one of a group of "left-wing German liberals" who demanded "the exclusion of Jews from the new movement and as far as possible from public life"; Hitler would later ascribe to Schönerer "the wisdom of a prophet." In late 19th century Germany, a popular critical view held that capitalism was a product of Jewish culture. Adolf Stöcker, leader of the left-wing Christian Social Party, wrote, "I see in unrestrained capitalism the evil of our epoch and am naturally also an opponent of modern Judaism on account of my socio-political views." Meanwhile, Adam Müller, leader of the anti-capitalist right, said, “The Jewish messiah, the Antichrist, has come to earth in the guise of the steam engine, and this in order to speed up the end of the world.” According to Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University:

“

German writers picked up on earlier anti-Enlightenment theories of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy to rule the world. During the French Revolution, the Jews, along with the Masons, were identified as forces for liberalism, secularism, and capitalism. German writers quickly found the Jews to be a more popular target than the Masons, perhaps because they were more visible or more different. The originally Judeo-Masonic theories eventually discarded the other conspirators, such as the Templars and the Illuminati, and focused on the Jews.

”

According to Henry L. Feingold, director of the Jewish Resource Center at Baruch College, "socialism contained the seeds to become the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals of the Left." In the 20th century, those seeds took root and grew into a forest bearing poisonous fruit: Stalinist Russia, East Germany, the Tupamoros-West Berlin, the Red Brigade Faction, the Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen) and the Sandinistas. In the 21st century it has festered into full flower, with the embrace of Islamist anti-Semitism by the Left.

Fascism and the New Deal

"Both Stalin's Russia and Mussolini's Italy influenced the New Deal enormously," writes Amity Schlaes, author of The Forgotten Man. "[T]he New Deal was often compared with Fascism," according to cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. “The slogan into which the Nazis condensed their economic philosophy, Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz (i.e., the commonweal ranks above private profit) is likewise the idea underlying the American New Deal,” wrote Ludwig von Mises.

"Dictatorial powers"

Roosevelt presented the New Deal in militaristic terms of "discipline," sacrificing individual rights for "leadership" promising a greater good. His first inaugural address contained an exhortation that could have been made by Mussolini or Hitler:

“

If we are to go forward we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because, without such discipline, no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good.

”

Meanwhile, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt “lamented that the nation lacked a benevolent dictator to force through reforms." Soviet intelligence source Walter Lippmann told Roosevelt, "The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers"; in his influential column, Lippmann added that the use of "'dictatorial powers,' if that is the name for it—is essential." The New York Herald Tribune approved the inauguration with the headline "FOR DICTATORSHIP IF NECESSARY." A Hollywood movie was released about a President of the United States who "revokes the Constitution, becomes a reigning dictator," and employs "brown-shirted storm troopers,"—by means of whom he not only "declares martial law," but “dissolves Congress, creates an army of the unemployed, and lines up his enemies before a firing squad.” This movie was made not by a conservative such as Frank Capra, but by Walter Wanger, a "liberal Hollywood mogul"; in the film, the dictator ("an FDR lookalike") is not the villain, but the hero, who by such dictatorial means "solves all of the nation's problems." Roosevelt enjoyed the movie and saw it several times. Most chilling, FDR wrote that he thought this film “would help the country.”

Contemporary reporting and commentary

The mood in Washington at FDR's inauguration was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan” reported The New York Times. “America today literally asks for orders.” The Roosevelt administration, reported the Times, “envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.” Progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.” George Soule, editor of the pro-Roosevelt New Republic magazine, wrote, "We are trying out the economics of Fascism without having suffered all its social or political ravages." "We in America,” wrote liberal journalist Mauritz Hallgren, “are being forced rapidly and definitely into Fascism..."

Fascists on the New Deal

Mussolini was convinced that the New Deal was copying Fascist economic policies. "Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices," wrote Mussolini in a review of FDR's book Looking Forward. "Without question, the mood accompanying this sea-change is reminiscent of Fascism." Mussolini wrote that the book New Frontiers, by FDR's Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, was "just as 'corporativistic' as the individual solutions put forth in it... The book leaves no doubt that it is on the road to corporatism..." On a visit to New York, Mussolini said to Grover Whalen, Chairman of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's Committee on Receptions to Distinguished Guests, "You want to know what Fascism is? It is like your New Deal."

Nazi Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht declared that Roosevelt had the same economic idea as Hitler and Mussolini; the official Nazi Party organ, Völkischer Beobachter, applauded “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,” commenting, "Many passages in [Roosevelt's] book Looking Forward could have been written by a National Socialist."

Hitler himself admired FDR’s approach, saying, “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt because he marches straight toward his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.” Hitler likewise congratulated Roosevelt for "his heroic effort in the interest of the American People." He added:

“

The President's successful struggle against economic distress is being followed by the entire German People with interest and admiration. The Reich Chancellor is in accord with the President that the virtues of sense of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline must be the supreme rule of the whole Nation. This moral demand, which the President is addressing to every single citizen, is also the quintessence of German philosophy of the State, expressed in its motto "The public weal before private gain."

”

But Hitler's admiration for Roosevelt gave way to contempt upon the opening of hostilities. With the German declaration of war against the United States, Hitler would deprecate Roosevelt, not as a tool of the socialists or Bolsheviks, but as "the candidate of a Capitalist Party."

New Dealers on fascism

Roosevelt’s economic adviser, Rexford Tugwell, the “most prominent of the Brain Trusters and the man often considered the chief ideologist of the 'first New Deal' (roughly, 1933–34),” was "open in his respect for Mussolini's economic policies." Of the Fascist system he wrote, "It's the cleanest, neatnest [sic], most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious." Tugwell, "the most left-wing member of Roosevelt's brain trust," said, “I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary... Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has. But he has the press controlled so that they cannot scream lies at him daily.”

Roosevelt was also a secret admirer of Mussolini, writing to his friend John Lawrence, "I don't mind telling you in confidence, that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman." FDR also wrote to U.S. Ambassador to Italy Breckinridge Long about Mussolini, "I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble." FDR privately acknowledged that “what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way.”

Fabian socialism

Tugwell was deeply interested in the ideas of the Fabian Society (which "set up the banner of Socialism militant"), particularly those of George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Referring to Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, Tugwell commented, “Miss Perkins was literate in the Fabian tradition, and so were some of the rest of us.” Roosevelt himself, observed Tugwell, “had a good Harvard education when Fabianism was developing, and he probably knew quite well the work of Wells and Shaw. But as John T. Flynn, who had supported Roosevelt in the 1932 election, observed, "the line between fascism and Fabian socialism is very thin. Fabian socialism is the dream. Fascism is Fabian socialism plus the inevitable dictator." One Fabian socialist from the 1920s and '30s, Oswald Mosley, went on to found and lead the British Union of Fascists, in which role he was lauded by Shaw, who also admired both Mussolini and Hitler.

Shaw had contempt for freedom. Mussolini, Hitler and other dictators, he wrote, "can depend on me to judge them by their ability to deliver the goods," rather than by what Shaw dismissed as "comfortable notions of freedom." Shaw thoroughly endorsed the Nazi doctrine of "life unworthy of life" (Lebensunwertes Leben). In the BBC's weekly magazine, he made a 1933 "appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. Deadly by all means, but humane not cruel..." His appeal would shortly come to fruition in Nazi Germany. Asked what Britons should do if the Nazis crossed the channel into Britain, Shaw replied, "Welcome them as tourists."

H.G. Wells expressed similar opinions. In a 1932 speech at Oxford University, Wells exhorted his audience, “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.” Two years later Roosevelt and key members of his “Brains Trust” met with Wells, who judged FDR “the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order... He is continually revolutionary in the new way without ever provoking a stark revolutionary crisis.”

Keynesian economics

Perkins commented that, "Combined with the relief program and with public works," the the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the centerpiece of the New Deal, "constituted an effective demonstration of the theories which John Maynard Keynes had been preaching and urging upon the English government," adding:

“

[Keynes] pointed out that the combination of relief, public works, raising wages by NRA codes, distributing moneys to farmers under agricultural adjustment, was doing exactly what his theory would indicate as correct procedure. He was full of faith that we in the United States would prove to the world that this was the answer.

”

Keynes had been involved with Fabian socialism since at least his student days at Cambridge. Mosley had been a Fabian socialist in 1930, when Keynesian economics was the "officially accepted Fabian line," notes Zygmund Dobbs. Mosely went on to found the British Union of Fascists, which "at first was modeled after Mussolini’s example but later became patterned after Hitler. Through all these tergiversations, Mosley never had to abandon his Keynesist principles." As a leading Fascist propagandist noted (in a book with a preface by Mussolini):

"Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.... All this is pure fascist premises."

As Communist Party General Secretary William Z. Foster commented, "The Nazi fascists were especially enthusiastic supporters of Keynes." Former Trotskyite Dobbs recounted that Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter observed that in Nazi Germany, "A work like Keynes’ General Theory could have appeared unmolested—and did." In the introduction to the 1935 German edition of his treatise, Keynes himself suggested that the total state that the National Socialists were then building was perfectly suited for the implementation of his investment schemes. Moreover, Keynes was at least an ambivalent anti-Semite. He called Albert Einstein "a naughty Jew boy... that kind of Jew... who have not sublimated immortality into compound interest." This he contrasted with

“

the other kind of Jews, the ones who are... serving devils, with small horns, pitch forks, and oily tails. It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains.

”

New Deal programs

National Recovery Administration

Just as Roosevelt expressed to Ambassador Long his admiration of Mussolini, Long in turn reported to Tugwell regarding Fascist economics, “Your mind runs along these lines.... It may have some bearing on the code work under N.R.A.” The NRA—“the New Deal’s attempt to bring to America the substance of Mussolini’s corporativism”—was established by the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which was “similar to experiments being carried out by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in Italy and by the Nazis in Adolf Hitler's Germany,” according to John A. Garraty, president of the Society of American Historians. As one NRA study concluded, “The Fascist principles are very similar to those which have been evolving in America and so are of particular interest at this time.”

"There was hardly a commentator who failed to see elements of Italian corporatism in Roosevelt's managed economy under the National Recovery Administration, the institution formed in 1933 to maintain mandatory production and price 'codes' for American industry," wrote Schivelbusch. Even "intellectual observers of economics and social policies who were otherwise Roosevelt allies... saw a Fascist element at the core of the New Deal."

The Italian Fascist Party journal of political theory Gerarchia (Leadership) characterized the NRA as "bearing a Fascist signature" and as "corporatism without the corporations." Progressive journalist Robert Shaw agreed, "The NRA... was plainly an American adaptation of the Italian corporate state." When Roosevelt referred to the industrial cartels established by the NRA as "modern guilds," writes Schivelbusch, he was making "reference to the corporatist system associated with Fascism." FDR's own economics instructor at Harvard concurred, identifying the NRA as "essentially fascistic."

Just as Mussolini “organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state supervised trade association” that “operated under state supervision and could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards, etc.,” the NRA “forced virtually all American industry, manufacturing, and retail business into cartels possessing the power to set prices and wages, and to dictate the levels of production.”

Hugh Johnson

As head of the NRA and thus “FDR’s leading bureaucrat,” the President appointed General Hugh Johnson, who was granted “almost unlimited powers over industry.” According to economist Thayer Watkins (who teaches economic history at California’s San José State University), Johnson was “an admirer of Mussolini’s National Corporatist system in Italy and he drew upon the Italian experience in formulating the New Deal.” Walker F. Todd, research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, agrees that Johnson “did admire greatly what Mussolini appeared to have done,” identifying the NRA as a “thoroughly corporativist” idea.

According to Jonah Goldberg, Johnson displayed a portrait of Il Duce in his NRA office and actually “distributed a memo at the Democratic Convention proposing that FDR become a Mussolini-like dictator.” In his retirement speech, Johnson invoked what he called the “shining name” of Mussolini. Johnson was said to carry around with him a copy of Raffaello Viglione’s pro-Mussolini book, The Corporate State, and presented a copy to Perkins.

Agricultural Adjustment Administration

Roosevelt appointed Johnson’s former business partner George Peek to head the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). Both men had “worked with the War Industries Board, the agency that regulated American production during World War I, and they believed their experience of managing an economy almost totally sealed off from the world market would suit the country now.” They had long advocated a policy of expanding tariffs to keep foreign agricultural products out of the United States, a policy that would have again rendered the U.S. economy “almost totally sealed off from the world market”—a fair approximation of “autarky,” an economic policy particularly but not exclusively “associated with Nazi economic organization.” Indeed, the AAA was analogous to the Reich Food Estate, which had been established in Germany by the Nazis to similarly dictate agricultural production quotas and prices. Like the AAA (and Mussolini's "Battle for Grain") the Reich Food Estate promoted agricultural protectionism in pursuit of autarky.

Civilian Conservation Corps

"The German Labor Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst—RAD) arose from a party organization set up in 1931 and known as the NS-Arbeitsdienst for the purpose of easing unemployment," "like its New Deal equivalent, the Civilian Conservation Corps [CCC]," which would be established two years later. According to Garraty, both

“

were essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt described work camps as a means for getting youth ‘off the city street corners,’ Hitler as a way of keeping them from ‘rotting helplessly in the streets.' In both countries much was made of the beneficial social results of mixing thousands of young people from different walks of life in the camps. Furthermore, both were organized on semimilitary lines with the subsidiary purposes of improving the physical fitness of potential soldiers and stimulating public commitment to national service in an emergency.

”

As early as 1933, the manifesto of the first United States Congress Against War and Fascism "pointed to the NRA, the CCC, and the other policies of the Roosevelt administration as indications of America's preparedness for war and Fascism," according to FDR's Attorney General Francis Biddle.

National Youth Administration

The National Youth Administration (NYA) was conceived as a New Deal “alternative to the Hitler Youth,” designed to hold young people “to their patriotic loyalties.” Harry Hopkins told the the NYA's Advisory Committee, “we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.” Hopkins had hired the Communist lawyer Lee Pressman back into the government immediately after he was "purged" from AAA. According to Pressman, Hopkins told him, “The first time you tell me I can’t do what I want to do, you’re fired. I’m going to decide what I think has to be done and it’s up to you to see to it that it’s legal.” Among his other hires was Eleanor Roosevelt's close friend Lorena Hickok, whom Hopkins brought into the government on Mrs. Roosevelt's recommendation. Hickok wrote, "If I were 20 years younger and weighed 75 pounds less, I think I'd start out to be the Joan of Arc of the Fascist Movement of the United States."

"Friendly Fascism"

Even some New Dealers have come to see the essential similarities between their ideology and fascism. For example, according to Friendly Fascism, by left-wing political science professor Bertram Gross, a leading architect of liberal social policy under presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Carter:

“

I sought solutions for America's ills... through more power in the hands of central government.... In this I was not alone. Almost all my fellow planners, reformers, social scientists, and urbanists presumed the benevolence of more concentrated government power. Big Business-Big Government partnerships ..., were the central facts behind the power structures of old fascism in the days of Mussolini, Hitler and the Japanese empire builders.... I see Big Business and Big Government as a joint danger.... Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of this creeping fascism.... In America, it would be supermodern and multiethnic—as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile.

”

While writing his book, Gross dreamed that he was searching through a huge, empty house for "friendly fascists."

“

I flung open one of the doors," Gross writes. "And there sitting at a typewriter and smiling back at me, I saw myself."

”

Myths

Several myths have formed around the Great Depression. Among these are the myth that the Depression was brought to an end by the New Deal, or by the "wartime prosperity" of World War II. Neither of these is true. One study found that New Deal policies actually prolonged the depression by about seven years. In fact, Americans' personal consumption did not rebound to 1929 levels until 1941. "[T]he consensus among historians today," writes Schivelbusch, is "that the United States completely emerged from the Depression only with its entry into World War II." Although the conscription of some 20 million young men into the armed forces reduced the civilian unemployment rate during World War II, the standard of living in the U.S. actually declined during the war. Using the Friedman-Schwartz price index, economist Robert Higgs found that real personal consumption per capita declined by more than 6 percent during 1941-1943, and did not recover to the 1941 level until 1946.

Joe McCarthy

The Army's Special Counsel Joseph Welch had a problem: his assistant, Frederick Fisher, whom Welch had brought to Washington from Welch's New York law firm to work on the Army-McCarthy case, was a former member of the National Lawyers Guild, U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, which operated under the control of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Under the Truman loyalty order, such a background could have disqualified Fisher from Federal employment; to have such a person working on the Army's legal team—on a case involving Communist infiltration of the Army, during a war in Korea in which Communists had already killed tens of thousands of Americans—could ruin Welch's case.

According to Cohn, Welch had him agree "not to bring up Fred Fisher in return for Welch's promise not to explore Cohn's military record." Hollywood liberal George Clooney, director and co-writer of the 2005 anti-McCarthy movie Good Night and Good Luck, suggests that this was actually a veiled blackmail threat to “out” Cohn as a homosexual on national television if he mentioned Fisher. As Clooney put it, Welch told Cohn, “you leave this young lawyer at my firm alone [by not calling him a Communist], and we'll leave this [homosexual] issue out.”

After Senator John McClellan, a segregationist Democrat, pressed Cohn on whether there was something “unusual” in his relationship with Schine, according to Herman, “Welch had his sport with him.”

Welch had earlier badgered McCarthy staffer Jim Juliana, an ex-FBI agent—insinuating that Cohn had cropped a photograph of Schine and Stevens—asking Juliana where the photo had come from. Juliana told him he didn't know, upon which Welch asked, "Did you think this came from a pixie?”

When McCarthy asked Welch to define “pixie,” Welch replied pointedly, “a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.”

The camera panned to Schine, Cohn and McCarthy. The whole audience burst into laughter. Obviously furious at Welch's blatant gay-baiting, according to LBJ advisor Eric F. Goldman, Cohn's lips “hardened into angry lines.”

“Shall I proceed, sir?” said Welch. “Have I enlightened you?"

Welch was now continuing in this vein, toying with Cohn: “May I add my small voice, sir, and say whenever you know about a subversive or a Communist spy, please hurry,” he taunted. “Will you remember these words?”

It was this taunt that finally provoked McCarthy to come to the defense of his 26-year old subcommittee counsel, saying, “in view of Mr. Welch's request that information be given once we know of anyone who might be performing work for the Communist Party, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher...”

McCarthy outlined Fisher's background in the NLG,

“Mr. Welch talks about this being cruel and reckless,” said McCarthy. “He was just baiting; he has been baiting Mr. Cohn here for hours...”

Welch turned to Cohn: “I did you, I think, no personal injury, Mr. Cohn?’ Cohn replied: ‘No, sir.’

Cohn later confessed that in fact he found Welch's remark "malicious," "wicked," and "indecent." Even former Soviet agent Michael Straight admitted in the New Republic: “As law the comment was improper; as humor it was unjust...” “That was Welch's technique,” according to radical, left-wing filmmaker Emile de Antonio, whose cinematic attack on McCarthy predated Clooney's by decades.

In researching his movie, Clooney boasted, “we had to go back to the actual initial footage of the Army-McCarthy hearings and watch them all the way through. And we did, all of them, 36 days' worth.” From these 36 days of hearings, Antonio cherry-picked the 97 minutes of footage that put McCarthy in the worst light for Point of Order, a documentary that became the main source of the principal surviving image of McCarthy. (This film in turn was edited still further into a 47-minute version, Charge and Countercharge, for exhibition in public-school classrooms—thus forming an entire generation's view of McCarthy.)

Bursting into tears, Welch fled the Senate caucus room to the applause of the reporters and cameramen packing the gallery. Tears still coursing, according to liberal pundit Nicholas Von Hoffman, Welch winked at reporter John Newhouse, best known today as the author of Imperial America: The Bush Assault on the World Order. Once safely beyond reach of the TV cameras, Welch turned to his assistant and asked, 'Well, how did it go?'”

McCarthy had “already gone after the Army and accused 'em of being traitors,” according to Clooney. “So Secretary [of the Army Robert T.] Stevens and those guys were like, [Expletive deleted] you, we're going to get you any way we can.” (Italics in original.)