Pierre Leroux, a rogue Saint-Simonian, authored an article in 1846 entitled “Jews, the Kings of the Epoch,” in which he espoused his antisemitic creed. “It is quite evident,” he wrote, “that when we speak of Jews we mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, gain, the spirit of commerce, speculation — in a word, the banker spirit.” Leroux then dredged up the perennial charge of deicide, holding all Jews past and present collectively responsible for the murder of Christ. “Whence comes this frenzied attachment to earthly goods in the Jew, an attachment which has made his name a synonym for greed and avarice?” he asked. “Shall we say with the theologians that by a terrible predestination, the Jew has deserved to fail to recognize its Savior and Messiah, the Savior of all men, since it failed indeed to recognize Him and stupidly put Him to death? No doubt.” Eugen Dühring, the titular object of Engels’ ire in Anti-Dühring, was another famous socialist who was an avowed antisemite.
It is therefore unsurprising that the eminent Marxist August Bebel would quip, in the 1880s, that “antisemitism is the socialism of fools” [der Antisemitismus ist der Sozialismus der dummen Kerle].
Yesterday I published a translation of Il Lato Cattivo’s “Letter on Antisemitism,” from 2014, which covers much of this same ground. Along with this text, I included a few excerpts by the Duponts taken from the Insipidities blog. One line in particular captures the dynamic discussed here. “Within the arrangement of leftist awareness there exists a preconscious responsiveness to the subjective agency of Jews, which corresponds to the tendency to anthropomorphize institutional power as the outcome of the conspiracy of the powerful,” one states. “That is to say, even though individuals on the Left are personally opposed to antisemitism, their argumentation — the procedures, propositions, inferences, deductions — is structured to find archetypal personifications at the heart of what it opposes. One of these figures, perhaps the most discernible and significant, is the Jew.” Precisely this propensity to anthropomorphize a misanthropic system of domination leads to popular outcry against the “banksters,” those in charge of the Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG) or New World Order (NWO).