Re Tobias Lang don’s current TOO article on the nature and origins of Wokism, I went through Chapter 3 of The Culture of Critique (the current state of the revision) using ‘revenge’ as a search term and copying and pasting the passages in which it appears. It leaves little doubt that the motives of the Jewish left had nothing to do with instituting a reign of equality.
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While Stalin favored the Georgians, Jews had their own ethnic scores to settle. It seems likely that at least some of the Bolshevik mass murder and terror was motivated by revenge against peoples that had historically been anti-Jewish. Several historians have suggested that Jews were motivated to join the security forces to get revenge for their treatment under the Czar (Rapoport 1990, 31; Baron 1975, 170). Similarly, Jews were placed in charge of security in Ukraine, which had a long history of anti-Semitism (Lindemann 1997, 443) and became a scene of mass murder in the 1930s.
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Shafarevich reviewed Jewish literary works during the Soviet and post-Soviet period indicating hatred toward Russia and its culture mixed with a powerful desire for revenge. Reflecting the cultural domination theme of anti-Semitism, Shafarevich claimed that Jews have had more influence on Russia than perhaps any other country, but that discussion of the role of Jews either in contemporary Russia or even in the theoretically more open United States results in intense hostility and reprisals. Indeed, in a comment that is quite similar to neoconservative claims that the interests of the U.S. and Israel dovetail completely (see Ch. 4), Shafarevich stated that any possibility that Jewish interests conflict with the interests of others cannot even be proposed as an hypothesis.
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My personal experience at the University of Wisconsin during the 1960s was that the student protest movement was originated and dominated by Jews and that a great many of them were “red diaper babies” whose parents had been radicals. The intellectual atmosphere of the movement closely resembled the atmosphere in the Polish communist movement described by Schatz (1991, 117; see below)—intensely verbal pilpul-like discussions in which one’s reputation as a leftist was related to one’s ability in Marxist intellectual analysis and familiarity with Marxist scholarship, both of which required a great deal of study. There was also a great deal of hostility to Western cultural institutions as politically and sexually oppressive combined with an ever-present sense of danger and imminent destruction by the forces of repression—an ingroup bunker mentality discussed in MacDonald (1994/2002, Ch.7) that I now believe is a fundamental characteristic of Jewish social forms. There was an attitude of moral and intellectual superiority and even contempt toward traditional American culture, particularly rural America and most particularly the South—attitudes that are hallmarks of several of the intellectual movements reviewed here (e.g., the attitudes of Polish-Jewish communists toward traditional Polish culture; see also Chs. 6 and 7 on Jewish attitudes toward populism). There was also a strong desire for bloody, apocalyptic revenge against the entire social structure viewed as having victimized not only Jews but non-elite gentiles as well—reflecting the revenge theme of many commenters on Jewish motivation.
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Antipathy toward the Gentile Social Order: Revenge, Displacement, and Domination. Again, there is the strong suggestion that social criticism and feelings of cultural estrangement among Jews have deep psychological roots that reach far beyond particular economic or political interests. As indicated in Chapter 1, a critical psychological component appears to involve a very deep antipathy to the entire gentile-dominated social order, which is viewed as anti-Semitic—the desire for “malignant vengeance” that Disraeli asserted made many Jews “odious and so hostile to mankind.” Recall Lipset’s (1988, 393) description of the many Jewish “families which around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is.” These families clearly perceive themselves as separate from the wider culture of the United States; they also view conservative forces as attempting to maintain this malignant culture. As in the case of traditional Judaism vis-à-vis gentile society, the traditional culture of the United States—and particularly the political basis of cultural conservatism that has historically been associated with anti-Semitism—is perceived as a manifestation of a negatively evaluated outgroup—and as such it warrants a motive of revenge.
As noted above in the example of Jews in the communist security forces in post-World-War-II Poland, this antipathy toward gentile-dominated society was often accompanied by a powerful desire to avenge the evils of the old social order. Norman Cantor (1996. 364):
The Bolshevik Revolution and some of its aftermath represented, from one perspective, Jewish revenge. During the heyday of the Cold War, American Jewish publicists spent a lot of time denying that — as 1930s anti-Semites claimed — Jews played a disproportionately important role in Soviet and world Communism. The truth is until the early 1950s Jews did play such a role, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. In time Jews will learn to take pride in the record of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It was a species of striking back.
Leading Jewish communists, like founder of the Mensheviks Yuli Martov, who became a close associate of Lenin and Trotsky, made a point of recalling his childhood experiences of Russian and Ukrainian anti-Semitism. The 1881 Odessa pogrom was his “first taste of primitive Russian anti-Semitism,” and Martov was “shaken to the depths of his being by the pogromist barbarity of Tsarist Russia.” The event left a “permanent mark on his impressionable mind,” and he later underlined the connection between this experience and his subsequent revolutionary career, posing the question: “Would I have become what I became if the Russian reality had not imprinted her coarse fingers on my plastic, youthful soul in that memorable night and carefully planted under the cover of that burning pity which she aroused in my childlike heart, the seeds of a redeeming hatred?” (Wistrich 1976, 178)—a hatred that justified the murder of millions.
Similarly, for many Jewish New Leftists, “the revolution promises to avenge the sufferings and to right the wrongs which have, for so long, been inflicted on Jews with the permission or encouragement, or even at the command of, the authorities in prerevolutionary societies” (Cohen 1980, 208). Interviews with New Left Jewish radicals revealed that many had destructive fantasies in which the revolution would result in “humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors” (Cohen 1980, 208) combined with the belief in their own omnipotence and their ability to create a nonoppressive social order—findings that are reminiscent of the motivating role of revenge for anti-Semitism among the Jewish-dominated security forces in communist Poland discussed above. These findings are also entirely consistent with my experience among Jewish New Left activists at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s (see above) and with Mark Rudd’s (2005) “Why Were There So Many Jews in the SDS? (Or the Ordeal of Civility”:
But World War II and the holocaust were our fixed reference points. This was only twenty years after the end of the war. We often talked about the moral imperative to not be Good Germans. Many of my older comrades had mobilized for the civil rights movement; we were all anti-racists. We saw American racism as akin to German racism toward the Jews. As we learned more about the war, we discovered that killing Vietnamese en masse was of no moral consequence to American war planners. So we started describing the war as racist genocide, reflecting the genocide of the holocaust. American imperialist goals around the world were to us little different from the Nazi goal of global conquest. If you really didn’t like somebody—and we loathed President Lyndon B. Johnson—you might call him a fascist.
Ultimately, Jewish radicalism, whether in the post-1917 Soviet Union or the English faculty at Columbia, there is a strong element of a desire for displacement and domination. The displacement of what Rudd called “the air of genteel civility” at Columbia—and the institutional structure of the United States—since the 1960s is largely complete. Recall the Jewish radicals who fled the shtetls of Eastern Europe and, instead of going to Ellis Island, became dominant elite in the USSR after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. These Jewish radicals were able to actually carry out in the USSR the fantasies the New Left Jewish radicals in the US—i.e., the “humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors” mentioned above. Since the 2020 election we are seeing increasing calls for limiting speech, including calls for canceling mainstream conservative outlets like Fox News, and the Department of Homeland Security has declared that the most important threat facing America is “domestic extremism,” and in particular, “white supremacists” (Miroff, 2021).
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Jewish ethnic background was particularly important in recruiting for the internal security service [in post-World War II Poland]: The generation of Jewish communists realized that their power derived entirely from the Soviet Union and that they would have to resort to coercion in order to control a fundamentally hostile noncommunist society (Schatz 1991, 262). The core members of the security service came from the Jewish communists who had been communists before the establishment of the Polish communist government, but these were joined by other Jews sympathetic to the government and alienated from the wider society. This in turn reinforced the popular image of Jews as servants of foreign interests and enemies of ethnic Poles (225).
Jewish members of the internal security force often appear to have been motivated by personal rage and a desire for revenge related to their Jewish identity:
Their families had been murdered and the anti-Communist underground was, in their perception, a continuation of essentially the same anti-Semitic and anti-Communist tradition. They hated those who had collaborated with the Nazis and those who opposed the new order with almost the same intensity and knew that as Communists, or as both Communists and Jews, they were hated at least in the same way. In their eyes, the enemy was essentially the same. The old evil deeds had to be punished and new ones prevented and a merciless struggle was necessary before a better world could be built. (Schatz 1991, 226)
The utopian end thus justified the means, no matter how vicious.
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