Very few people realize just how deeply rooted Jew hatred is in Marxist theory.
It was so much so that Hilter, (a heretical Marxist) once quipped :
“How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-semite?” The point was widely understood, and it is notable that no German socialist in the 1930s or earlier ever sought to deny Hitler’s right to call himself a socialist on grounds of racial policy.
(H/T: George Watson)
The German Left’s Undeclared War on Israel
The historian Jeffrey Herf’s profound new book shows that German-animated left-wing terrorism targeting Israel was not a tactic but rather part of a long-war strategy to destroy the Jewish state. Academic study and journalism on the now-defunct East German Communist state and radical West German groups hitherto failed to delve into their ongoing war against Israel (and against the United States, one could argue).
Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left 1967-1989 is the title of Herf’s monumental study. To understand the German Democratic Republic, one must understand its opposition to the founding philosophy of the Jewish state, namely, Zionism. “The East German dictatorship was a different kind of dictatorship from its Nazi predecessor, but, albeit for different reasons, it became the second dictatorship to regard Zionism as an enemy,” writes Herf.
Herf repeatedly dissects the great irony in the empty anti-fascist rhetoric of the GDR and radical West Germans. The regime’s leaders, many of whom fought the Hitler movement, internalized the lethal anti-Semitism of the Nazis, which led inexorably to their desire to dismantle Israel. The GDR brings to mind the playwright Bertolt Brecht’s famous line—”The womb he crawled from is still going strong.”
Herf supplies exhaustive evidence of the GDR’s secret military deliveries to Israel’s enemies in the Middle East—including the bellicose Hafez al-Assad regime in Syria, which was a strategic partner for East Germany.
