Left Anti-Semitism. Ron Coleman with Gary Gindler: Transcript

ColemanNation Podcast – Episode 195

RC (@RonColeman): Hello! Today, joining us is Gary Gindler. I frequently tell you this is one of my oldest friends on the internet, and it’s great. Gary and I are strangers. We know each other from X, and it came to my attention that he wrote a book, “Left anti-Semitism,” and I don’t think he means that anybody has Left anti-Semitism. So I wanted to talk about his book, which is coming out in 10 or so days from when we recorded this, so you’ll be able to get it on Amazon. I think you probably could order it now. Yes. Savings, pre-order, price guarantee. So, Gary, welcome to the program. Nice to meet you.

GG (@Gary_US): Nice to meet you, Ronald.

RC: Gary, what’s your story? Where do you come from? You don’t sound like me, with a Brooklyn accent.

GG: I was born in Ukraine, but lived most of my life in Russia. I got a PhD in theoretical physics in 1988. I am a physicist by trade. I came to the United States legally. I am a small business owner. After living in the United States for quite a few years, I switched to being a conservative columnist for outlets like American Thinker, then abandoned that and started writing books.

RC: What other books?

GG: I published two, and the third is coming. The reason I abandoned writing articles and started writing books is a mess I found in my American friends’ heads. It’s a complete mess to the degree that I was not able to speak freely with my neighbors, with my friends, with my relatives who came to the United States before me or after me. So, I decided to approach the political and ideological situation in the United States from the theoretical physics perspective. That means…

RC: Is that your background educationally?

GG: Yes. I am a physicist by trade.

RC: Everyone from Russia is a physicist, right? Or an engineer.

GG: Some of them are mathematicians [laughter] or philosophers. Now I am a physicist-turned-philosopher, and my approach is to apply axiomatics to political terms to make sure we are on the same page, because I am constantly bombarded with: “Hitler is a left-winger or a right-winger.” I am just tired of having to explain what happened. When I got completely tired, I wrote a book about the subject to definitely prove who he was: a socialist or right-wing conservative. In order to achieve that, I had to go back to the real foundation of political philosophy: who are the Right, who are the Left.

Well, everybody knows where they came from, but nobody realized that they evolved. They evolved over the two centuries. And we have to trace that evolution. That evolution ended when Joseph Stalin came to power in Soviet Russia. What did he do? He was also tired of all this mess in the heads of the followers, useful idiots, and political opponents. He decided to reestablish, once and for all, who is the Right and who is the Left. What he did was put himself at the center of the political universe. So, if you slightly deviate from Papa Stalin to the Left, you are ultra-leftist.

RC: So Trotsky was a left deviationist, right?

GG: Absolutely. Yes.

RC: Kamenev was the right deviationist.

GG: Yes. That’s why these Left and Right deviations came to be. Well, originally it was used for the internal intra-communist struggle in Soviet Russia, and then it spilled into the West. It all happens in the 30s. But what happens in 30s is also in parallel with all these events in the Soviet Union: Frankfurt School of Socialism packed their luggage and moved to the United States, and most of them were Stalinists, left-wing Stalinists, and they brought that idea that Stalin is at the center of the political universe.

RC: I’m sorry for interrupting you, but why would they do that? Because that was the official position of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and therefore of the World Communist Movement.

GG: Yes. And everybody knew what would happen if you deviated from that official position, especially in the Soviet Union, especially if you’re a Jew. So, I’m not going to describe in detail all these twists and turns, but here we go. Yes, Hitler was a left-winger and right-winger at the same time. It sounds like a paradox, but it’s not. Everything depends on the frame of reference.

Frame of reference is a term from physics, right? But I apply it to political philosophy. Everything has to be measured against a certain frame of reference. And in physics, there are two major frames of reference, relative and absolute. So, relative to Stalin, Hitler was a right-winger.

RC: It’s that simple.

GG: That’s simple. But relative to other points of view, he was a left-winger.

RC: So people appreciate how much of inter-regime and inter-party discourse in the Third Reich involved invocations of comradeship and political questions. In other words, the politicization of administrative or policy matters. And you know they used German terms that welded the racial component to the socialist component. They would refer to national comrades. But it was still this idea of comrades of the people. You know, they always said Stalin loved the people but hated people.

GG: Yes. That’s their standard left-wing lexicon. Nazis and fascists were not a deviation from the overall Leftist vector of development. It was a logical continuation of the Leftist development that began in prehistoric times and was emphasized by Karl Marx.

Anyway, to conclude this introduction of who the Left are and who the Right are, I have to state with pretty much mathematical, axiomatic precision that both opposites, Left and Right, are totalitarian in nature. However, the difference is that the Left argues for total government control over the population. The Right argues for total control of the population over the government. That’s the difference. And what I just said, I describe in my first book as the individual-state paradigm or man-state paradigm. And when I published it, there were a lot of discussions. I was invited to a lot of podcasts, and one of the smart guys said, “Okay, Gary, that’s very interesting, but it’s pretty much cornered into the academic world. What is the relationship with the real world, with the real problems, your abstract definitions of Left and Right? What about the application of your idea in the real world?”

So, I started thinking about it, and the first thing that came to me was anti-Semitism. I decided to split the entire anti-Semitic world into the Left camp and the Right camp. And to my big surprise, Ron, [laughter] unbelievable surprise, I found that the right-wing anti-Semites are a minority. They do exist, but they are treated as a marginal group among conservatives. But on the left-hand side, anti-Semitism was and is and probably will be mainstream.

That’s why I called my book “Left anti-Semitism.” It covers maybe 90-95% of all acts of anti-Semitism in the world. And I understand if some Leftists are watching us right now, it’s not pleasant to observe and to understand, but that’s the reality of it. Yes, most of the people who promote, cherish, and practice anti-Semitism in the modern world are left-wingers.

RC: What’s it about, Gary? Why? What is it? Why does it work for them?

GG: Okay, it’s not just work for them. It’s one of the most lovable tools that they invented. See, anti-Semitism existed through centuries, and then all of a sudden, in 1879, German socialist Wilhelm Marr offered the term anti-Semitism. The term had been used in linguistic studies before. He didn’t invent it, but he took the term and reformulated it as part of the political strategy. At that time, left-wingers in Germany were fighting for their survival. They lost elections. Their previous generation of leftists lost everything. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels lost everything. They were not at the tip of the iceberg.

So, they had to do something to create, first, reliable voting blocks. Second, win the elections. In my book, I provide a very interesting parallel, Ron, between Wilhelm Marr’s “invention” of anti-Semitism as we understand it and Thomas Edison.

RC: Edison, who invented the light bulb?

GG: Yes. Edison invented the light bulb in the same year as anti-Semitism was “invented.” We know that Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. He made it practical. Wilhelm Marr didn’t invent anti-Semitism. He made it a practical tool for political struggle. That’s what he did.

RC: That’s very good.

GG: And I trace how it all happened. A big portion of the book is a description of 19th-century German socialists Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels, Wilhelm Marr, and others who contributed to the development of the idea that anti-Semitism should not be considered a primitive hatred of everything Jewish. No. What did Marr actually write and think about it? He said, “Okay, you spit on a Jew, you burn a Jewish house, you rape a Jewish woman, you kill a Jew. Good. Excellent. I like it.” He said, “But don’t forget that these actions will not increase the bank account of the perpetrator, will not help us to win the election. It’s all fruitless.” So, he said—and that is his contribution, which is cherished by the left-wingers to his present day—anti-Semitism, in his world, has to have two steps.

First step—attack a Jew, but keep in mind that we have to gain tangible benefits from that attack. We must always look forward. Brainless attacking of Jews will not lead us anywhere. A countless number of Jew haters existed throughout history, and they have gained no political power. That was his argument. And when this argument was laid out for 19th-century socialists, they said, “Aha, we found something we can run on,” and they continued to run on that idea.

So, my book is not just an encyclopedia of Jewish grievances. There are so many books on the subject. If you or any of our viewers go to Google and type “anti-Semitism,” I bet you will get millions of links, thousands of books, and hundreds of thousands of research papers. Why? Because there is an army of historians who are working on the subject.

But my book is not a chronicle of Jewish suffering. It’s better to say what my book is not about than what it’s about. My book does not answer the question “What happened?” There is an army of historians who answer that question. My book doesn’t answer the question “When did it happen?” and “How did it happen?” No, as I said, thousands of researchers have access to archives and have uncovered how it happened.

My book, on the contrary, answers the simple, rarely asked question: “Why?” Why did it happen?

RC: So, let me ask you a question. If Marr was the one who made anti-Semitism pay, made it practical, how do we reckon the fact that so many expulsions of Jews involved stripping them of their wealth? Certainly, you know the expulsion from Spain, from numerous German city-states. I don’t know if that was a characteristic of Muslim anti-Semitism, but help me help me understand how those are different.

GG: Okay. As I said, political anti-Semitism (it’s a rarely used term, “political anti-Semitism,” because anti-Semitism is by definition political) has two steps. First, attack a Jew. Second, gain the benefit, political benefit for the Gentiles. How to distinguish between a primitive Jew hatred and anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism? If a spear of attack is on a Jew and ends with a Jew, that’s a primitive, vulgar Jew hatred. It doesn’t lead to any benefit. But if the aim of the attack is a Jew, but the actual target is a non-Jewish population that needs politically organizing, that’s anti-Semitism.

That’s what they do. Wilhelm Marr and, after him, Adolf Hitler were classical socialist political organizers. Well, in the United States, we also have political organizers.

RC: So, in other words, during the era of monarchy, you didn’t need this.

GG: Yes, you need it. I will give you an example, a classic example. 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain. Monarchy, Isabella and Ferdinand. They face the following situation. How much money does the kingdom have? Almost zero. They just defeated the last enclave of Muslims in Granada. It’s southern Spain. And they have no money.

On top of that, they have a terrible situation with their noblemen. Don’t forget it was the end of the 15th century. It was not the 16th or 17th century. Absolutism didn’t exist by that time. It will come later in the French kingdom.

Okay. And what they needed was to overcome the political influence of their noblemen. But confronting them head-to-head was impossible. They didn’t have anything to confront them with. So, what they devised to do was very clever. They attack their finances. They wanted to bankrupt them. And the way to bankrupt them is to bankrupt their financiers. And who were bankers for these noblemen in medieval Spain? Jews.

RC: But my point is that when I asked you, when I posed that as a challenge to your definition. I thought you responded that we’re talking about political benefit. You’re saying this was, although there was a payoff in the form of a financial benefit. I have seen it argued that people underestimate the extent to which the appropriation of Jewish wealth was a major driver of Hitler’s policies because his government was being run into the ground financially by his policies.

But Ferdinand and Isabella didn’t have that. Gold is good. We know how much the Spanish love gold, but they had a political problem on their hand too. Not in the sense of politics like electoral politics.

GG: No. It was court politics. It was not electoral politics. It was internal to the Spanish kingdom’s politics. Again, they gained tremendous political benefits by attacking Jews who, in turn, bankrupted their political rivals in court. What they did was gain pretty much what they wanted in terms of influence.

And, by the way, an additional note on why those two monarchs were very smart. They didn’t know what would happen after the Jews were expelled. They suspected a financial crisis. And they were right. So, what did they decide to do? They decided to give Christopher Columbus permission to go to the New World and bring New World riches to Spain, and that’s exactly what he did. So the Spanish crown was saved after the financial crisis with the absence of Jews by Christopher Columbus.

That’s what happened. And it shows you one interesting positive thing: nobody in Spain at that time hated Jews. The word “hate” does not apply. Likewise, it doesn’t apply to well-known anti-Semites like Napoleon. He was a real anti-Semite. However, he never hated Jews. He used Jews for his own political purposes. The same was Adolf Hitler. He never personally hated Jews, not particular Jews, nor abstract, collectivized Jews. No, he used Jews to reach his political goals.

RC: But wasn’t it so that Daniel Goldhagen argues that the Inquisition did hate Jews, and his argument, I think, is that the Inquisition was the first one with the idea of bloodborne evil of the Jews, that the racial purity.

GG: Yes. But that was the Inquisition. That wasn’t Ferdinand and Isabella. It was an Inquisition because many Jews decided not to leave and made a switch. They formally adopted Christianity, and they thought, “Okay, that’s over.” Well, that cleverness never worked out. Actually, some of them got imprisoned. Some of them were burnt at the stake. Some of them survived. But it never worked the way conversos (how they call them) intended. The Inquisition was designed not as a political or financial tool but as a religious tool to root out not real Christians. People who pretend to be Christians but practice Judaism or any other religion at home.

RC: Would you say that the Inquisition was an example of Jew hate, not anti-Semitism?

GG: No, it was not anti-Semitism. It was religious intolerance of anything but Catholicism.

RC: Okay. Nobody singled out Jews at that time. They single out everybody who is not Catholic, including Muslims, which a lot of moderns don’t appreciate, given that this is after the Reconquista. There’s a reaction to the centuries-long Muslim occupation of Spain.

GG: Yes. As a matter of fact, three weeks ago I visited Granada and the palace where the Expulsion decree was signed. The throne disintegrated from that time in 1492. So, it’s an empty space at the corner of the big palace. It was interesting. I took very interesting pictures over there.

RC: So, now let’s move up 600 years. What’s going on now?

GG: My book, again, emphasizes that many anti-Jewish events are simply Jew hatred. But anti-Semitism is not simple Jew hatred or harassment. It’s institutionalized enslavement of non-Jews. Think about it. It’s because Left, as I said at the beginning of this recording, aims at total control of government over the population. So, if they deploy this tool, they say, “Okay, it helps us to control the non-Jewish population.” See, it’s a very sick Machiavellian idea: target Jews to control non-Jews. That’s what they did, and it came only after realizing that the foundation of that thinking is a left-wing thing.

So, I trace all this stuff moving forward 600 years to Karl Marx. Marx was ethnically Jewish, but he was not raised as a Jew; it’s not the point. The point is that Leftists still consider Karl Marx as a prophet of justice. However, this prophet of justice wrote that money is the jealous God of Israel. Under Israel, he understood Jews. He criticized bankers because some of them were Jews, unfortunately for everybody who followed him and who didn’t understand the simple fact that he was not just criticizing Jews or bankers. He criticized the capitalistic way of life, the very idea of individual success, moral independence, and self-made identity. He was against it.

I wrote in my book that for Marx, the Jew was not a person. He was a metaphor for capitalism itself.

RC: Absolutely.

GG: To destroy capitalism, Marx had first to destroy a Jew, and then he started the ball rolling. He never emphasized structurally what anti-Semitism should look like. He was more on a primitive hatred. He was an equal opportunity hater. He hated everybody: Jews, Protestants, Muslims, he hated everybody. After Karl Marx, August Bebel, and other leaders of the left-wing movement decided to use it. And when they met, by the way, Karl Marx and Wilhelm Marr, they didn’t establish a good relationship because both understood that they were aiming at the very top of the socialist movement in the world. There is only room for one at the top of the socialist Olympus. They didn’t establish good relationships, and they exchanged, you know, pretty harsh words against each other because they were enemies on the way to the top.

Moving forward another 200 years, Israel was established. And what happened? It happened right after World War II. And the same Joseph Stalin contributed to what we currently call anti-Zionism. Zionism is a special word for Jewish nationalism. All other nationalisms don’t have a special name. German nationalism doesn’t have a special name. It’s called German nationalism. British nationalism doesn’t have a special name.

RC: People are supposed to be loyal to their class, right? I mean, the Great Patriotic War had thrown off that ideological principle, nationalism in general. I mean, you have all the nations that were part of the Soviet Union. Hence, nationalism in general was something that Stalin was suspicious of Right?

GG: He was suspicious. But what I’m talking about is a different nationalism. If a special word exists for the Jewish nationalism called Zionism, which actually existed for thousands of years without having a name, that’s very important. If a name is not assigned, if a term is not defined, it doesn’t mean that the event or phenomenon doesn’t exist. Typical example: the electron was discovered at the Cavendish Laboratory at the end of the 19th century. Question is: “What about these other electrons? Did they exist before they got [laughter] discovered?” Of course.

So, Zionism also existed. Theodor Herzl assigned it the name Zionism. Immediately after Zionism was popularized, anti-Zionism came to the picture in the same manner as British guys propagate their British nationalism. Anti-British nationalism appears right away. Zionism was not invented but asserted at the end of the 19th century, and anti-Zionism, as anti-Jewish nationalism, kicked off right away.

Well, here is a situation similar to all other terms in science. It appeared, and then it died. Yes, I’m telling you quite a paradoxical thing. Anti-Zionism has died. An original one, because nobody at the moment attacks Jews as nationalists. Everybody attacks Jews, meaning something else. And that something else was created under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, because a new science, or rather pseudoscience, was invented in the Soviet Union after World War II and after the creation of Israel. It’s called Zionology. They apply the prefix anti to this Zionology, and then they come up with anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism we know today has nothing to do with Jewish nationalism or opposition to it. It means simple rejection of the state of Israel. Simple like that.

And of course, it has a lot of pre-requirements. I always hear: “You say it’s anti-Zionism or anti-Semitism, but it’s primitive hatred.” Nobody hates the State of Israel in the same manner as hating another entity or other people. They hate Israel for quite different reasons because they want to gain political benefits by educating their population to hate that distant object, the size of New Jersey, where we live. Hate it and organize around this unified idea. That’s what they do.

For them, Israel is a phenomenon used for internal political battles. Another explanation: in order to hate somebody, you need an object of hate, right? You cannot hate something abstract and non-existent. You cannot hate planet Mars because it’s somewhere. There are many countries where Jews don’t exist, but anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism proliferate. Take Pakistan. No Jew ever stepped on that soil [laughter]. Yet they practice that day and night. They live by that. They’ve won elections by that.

They have to keep the population under control, and I understand them. I understand rulers of all those “stans”— “stan” means country—they are presiding over an inbred population. There is scientific research that says what percentage of the population is inbred. I believe Pakistan is leading, and Gaza is in second or third place. Keeping the inbred population under control requires extraordinary methods. You cannot reason with those people. They don’t understand reason. You can only coerce them. That’s why, in the seventh century, a new religion was invented to keep the inbred population—unmanaged, uncontrolled—under control.

Islam accounts for approximately 15% of religious teachings. In other religions, the percentage is quite different. In Judaism, it’s quite the opposite. It’s like 80% of Judaism is dedicated to the relationship with God and only 20% deals with day-to-day life, you know, all those 613 rules, whatever, you know the rules. Islam is quite different. I calculated approximately, by analyzing the Quran, that about 5/6 of Islam is secular and about 1/6 of Islam is religious, which teaches its followers to deal with God, obey God, love God, and understand God.

But most of their so-called religion has nothing to do with God. It’s a manual on how to keep a bandit camp under some semblance of order. Muhammad himself was the raider, attacking caravans. So, he had to keep his bandits under control. And Islam was a perfect way to keep unmanageable people manageable.

RC: Gary, I’m really enjoying listening to this because clearly, you’ve really thought through these issues, and I’m definitely going to order the book. I regret that I wasn’t able to read it before we spoke. When we talked about having you on the show, you were very eager, and we want to, plus Passover’s coming. Any ideas for dealing with what we’re seeing in 2025, 2026?

GG: Well, the second part of my book deals with two subjects. First, definition of anti-Semitism because proper definition does not exist. I approached that program with the same axiomatic precision as the previous book; second, how to deal with anti-Semitism, how to defeat anti-Semitism.

As for the definition of anti-Semitism, I emphasize 10 points that it must address. Two of them are unusual. For example, the definition of anti-Semitism must include Jewish anti-Semitism.

RC: Yes.

GG: Unfortunately, this phenomenon exists, and we cannot ignore it.

RC: So, the definition must not center on non-Jews. It has to center on everybody who uses anti-Semitism for political purposes.

GG: Absolutely. Second, the definition of anti-Semitism has to open the door for the eradication of anti-Semitism. If you truly uncover its essence, it shows you how to get rid of it. So, my definition of anti-Semitism is (and I am reading from the book): “Anti-Semitism is a political weaponization of animosity toward the superposition of Jewish achievements of the past, present, and future.”

That definition is radically different from existing definitions, and I understand that. Keep in mind that gatekeepers of the publishing industry, gatekeepers of many universities in the world, are left-wingers, and they don’t allow the Holocaust to be treated as a left-wing enterprise. They would like to isolate the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, and Anne Frank as the only things that happened from 1933 to 1945. Why? Being isolated allows them to distance themselves from the events. They say, “Oh, it was done by Nazis,” without realizing that there are many people like me and you who understand that Nazis means National Socialists.

RC: Right.

GG: By the way, Germans themselves called National Socialists “Nazi-Sozi.” But it was too long, and they dropped “Sozi” and started calling them Nazi, and it spread. Thus, the socialistic motives of the Nazis were abandoned, forgotten, unfortunately.

That definition, as I said, opens a potential door for eradicating anti-Semitism. Again, eradicating anti-Semitism means, in my world, depriving non-Jews acquiring political benefits of attacking Jews. My approach is: we should not concentrate on stopping attacks on Jews. That’s a fight we will lose because the number of Jews in the world is too small.

However, what we can do is prevent non-Jews from acquiring tangible benefits of attacking Jews. And there are multiple ways to do that. One unexpected supporting case came from Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. He gave a lecture at one of the universities in Australia, and said that the major problem we have to solve is that we have to make sure that bad people make good decisions. He said, “The way to solve problems is to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.” Dealing with anti-Semitism must follow a similar recipe.

Again, it’s easy to say how to approach that. I have to revert to my definitions of Left and Right. If anti-Semitism we are dealing with today is primarily on the Left, we have to distance our society from the Leftist ideology, and we have to move to a society with more freedom. Free societies do not require anti-Semitism because it’s a free society by definition. It doesn’t require isolating a group against which everybody else will unite. Free society does not require that. Only unfree societies or people who aim to create unfree societies want to use anti-Semitism.

RC: I think that says it all. Freedom is good for everyone. Freedom, as we say, is good for the Jews.

GG: It’s good for everybody, including the Jews.

RC: That’s the book “Left Anti-Semitism.” Gary, great talking to you.

GG: Nice to talk to you, and I am very glad that you invited me.

RC: Well, you know, nice to meet a neighbor, and I wish you success with the book and with whatever your next project is, and a sweet and meaningful Passover.

GG: Thank you. You too.

RC: Thanks for culminating, folks.

От Ленина – к Маркузе и Антисионизму

В начале 1907 года Владимир Ленин опубликовал обвинения в том, что некоторые меньшевистские организации «продают места во Второй Думе кадетам» (конституционным демократам). Иными словами, он обвинил меньшевиков в сговоре с либеральной буржуазной партией вместо того, чтобы допустить к участию кандидатов от рабочих. Меньшевики подали официальную жалобу, что привело к тому, что Ленин предстал перед партийным судом (Контрольной комиссией) по обвинению в клевете. Суд состоялся непосредственно перед открытием Пятого (Лондонского) съезда российских коммунистов (Российской социал-демократической рабочей партии, РСДРП), где Ленин выступил с пространной устной защитой.

В своей защитной речи Ленин чётко очертил границы допустимого и недопустимого поведения в ходе политических дискуссий внутри коммунистического движения. Он утверждал, что полемика внутри партии должна оставаться в определённых рамках: личные оскорбления, «отравленные стрелы» и преувеличения нежелательны, поскольку они наносят ущерб партийному единству.

Однако в полемике против политического противника (или бывших членов партии, отколовшихся от неё) эти ограничения перестают действовать. Никаких формальных «партийных правил», сдерживающих коммунистов в таких дискуссиях, не существует. Ленин заявил: «Такая формулировка рассчитана не на то, чтобы убедить, а на то, чтобы разложить ряды противника, не на то, чтобы исправить ошибку противника, а на то, чтобы уничтожить его, стереть его организацию с лица земли».

Иными словами, вступая в полемику с политическим врагом коммунистов, а не с членом собственной партии, коммунисты не стремятся к установлению истины. Ленин предложил, чтобы коммунисты вели полемику, которая не рассчитана на воздействие или убеждение оппонентов. Это объясняется тем, что конечная судьба оппозиции совершенно безразлична коммунистам. Вместо этого коммунисты стремятся к уничтожению оппозиции.

По правде говоря, полемика коммунистов направлена не на самих оппонентов, а на более широкую аудиторию. Ленин отстаивает необходимость «уничтожения вражеской организации путём возбуждения в массах ненависти, отвращения и презрения к этой организации». Таким образом, от коммунистов ожидается провоцирование отвращения у аудитории по отношению к своим противникам — потенциально ещё до того, как публика полностью усвоит аргументы самих коммунистов.

Наконец, Ленин рассмотрел гипотетический случай отделения Бунда (еврейских несионистских социалистов Российской империи) от РСДРП. Он заявил: «Мог ли бы тогда кто-нибудь серьёзно поставить вопрос о недопустимости брошюр, рассчитанных на то, чтобы внушить бундовским рабочим массам ненависть, отвращение и презрение к их руководителям и изобразить этих руководителей в виде буржуа в маске, в виде людей, продавшихся еврейской буржуазии и пытающихся с её помощью провести своих людей в Думу и т. д.?» Вывод заключается в том, что евреи (или любая другая подгруппа партии) должны пользоваться самым глубоким уважением, но только пока они следуют партийной линии. Однако, как только они выходят из партии, все ставки снимаются.

Эта линия рассуждений представляет собой логическое продолжение мировоззрения левых, адаптированное для «цивилизованной» политической дискуссии. По сути, Ленин предложил принцип асимметричной терпимости и асимметричной вежливости: терпимость (и нормы дискуссии) применяются исключительно внутри определённого сообщества «правильной линии партии». За пределами этого сообщества полемика превращается в инструмент политического уничтожения, но не физического истребления. Однако спустя десять лет, когда большевики пришли к власти в России, нетерпимость распространилась и на физическую сферу. В основе ленинского инструментального подхода лежит приоритет революционной эффективности над универсальными нормами приличия.

Существуют заметные концептуальные параллели (которые коренятся в более широкой марксистско-ленинской традиции) между подходом Владимира Ленина и эссе Герберта Маркузе «Репрессивная терпимость» (1965). Оба мыслителя отстаивают избирательное применение либеральных и демократических принципов для продвижения революционных целей. Оба оправдывают нетерпимость или жёсткую риторику по отношению к врагам «освобождения рабочих». Эта общая логика отражает приверженность авангардизму, при котором просвещённое меньшинство направляет (или подавляет) массы против «реакционных» сил.

Маркузе прямо утверждал, что подобные действия могут включать подавление свободы слова, которая поддерживает «реакционные» структуры власти, тем самым создавая пространство для «прогрессивных» изменений. Маркузе настаивал на «отзыве терпимости ещё до действия, на стадии коммуникации в слове, печати и изображении. Такое крайнее приостановление права на свободную речь и свободные собрания действительно оправдано лишь в том случае, если всё общество находится в крайней опасности. Я утверждаю, что наше общество находится в такой чрезвычайной ситуации и что она стала нормальным состоянием дел».

Несколько ключевых особенностей ленинско-маркузеанского подхода напрямую привели к возникновению «культуры отмены», преследования евреев и двойных стандартов, применяемых исключительно к Израилю. Во-первых, избирательное применение норм по принципу «свой-чужой». Во-вторых, авангардный элитизм. В-третьих, они дают рациональное обоснование подавлению оппозиции. Эти особенности проистекают из общего марксистского наследия, однако Маркузе — представитель критической теории Франкфуртской школы — адаптировал их к условиям Запада после Второй мировой войны.

В результате Ленин и Маркузе создали конструкцию, в рамках которой современный дискурс о евреях и Израиле — особенно на левом фланге — стал крайне асимметричным, морализаторским и часто эксклюзивным.

Когда после 1948 года (особенно после 1967 года) Советский Союз повернулся против сионизма, эта ленинская модель сформировала весь дискурс. Сионизм был переопределён как враждебная идеология, приравнен к расизму, империализму и колониализму и, следовательно, выведен за рамки допустимой дискуссии. Советские СМИ, академическая среда и пропаганда были мобилизованы не для спора с сионистами, а для дискредитации и полной делегитимации сионизма — «истребительной полемики» в ленинском смысле.

Это определило официальный язык: сионизм изображался как «агрессивная расистская идеология», а не как легитимное националистическое движение евреев. Еврейские голоса, выражавшие инакомыслие внутри Советского Союза, рассматривались не как партнёры по диалогу, а как предатели или агенты империализма. Иными словами, ленинское правило асимметричной полемики предоставило интеллектуальное разрешение на отказ от диалога, на кампании, направленные на уничтожение самой легитимности противоположной точки зрения. Именно поэтому и по сей день левые демонизируют сионистов и гуманизируют антисионистов. Международные левые силы следят за тем, чтобы каждая победа Израиля воспринималась исключительно как поражение.

Израиль всё чаще классифицируется как угнетатель — «государство поселенцев-колонизаторов» и «режим апартеида». Поэтому речь в защиту Израиля рассматривается как вредная, реакционная и нелегитимная — не просто ошибочная, но и опасная. Результат: кампании по деплатформированию, движения бойкота (BDS: Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) и риторический климат, в котором сионистские позиции считаются выходящими за рамки приемлемого дискурса. Всё это предстаёт современным эхом призыва Маркузе к «нетерпимости по отношению к движениям справа». Это классическая маркузеанская логика: терпимость обусловлена эмансипаторным потенциалом, а не нейтральной процедурной справедливостью.

Собранные вместе, ленинская полемическая беспощадность и маркузеанская избирательная терпимость создают мощную основу для антиеврейской и антиизраильской риторики. Если первая поставляет агрессивный язык (например, «сионистский геноцид» как неоспоримая истина), то вторая оправдывает замалчивание контрдоводов как «репрессивных». Этот гибрид глубоко повлиял на левые движения начиная с 1970-х годов, что особенно заметно в радикальных левых кругах Европы (где антисионизм перетекает в антисемитизм) и на американских университетских кампусах, где кампании BDS апеллируют к маркузеанской нетерпимости для делегитимации Израиля.

В сегодняшних поляризованных дебатах — после 7 октября 2023 года — эти идеи лежат в основе призывов к «неплатформированию» сионистов, сочетая революционный пыл с культурой концлагеря, часто в ущерб нюансированному диалогу о еврейском самоопределении. Этот ленинско-маркузеанский подход глубоко укоренился в левых эхо-камерах, где ленинское «истребление» инакомыслия встречается с маркузеанской «освободительной» репрессией.

Статья адаптирована и переведена из книги «Левый антисемитизм».

From Lenin to Marcuse to Anti-Zionism

Lenin and Marcuse created a framework in which the modern dialogue about Jews and Israel—particularly on the Left—became highly asymmetrical, moralizing, and often exclusionary.

In early 1907, Vladimir Lenin published accusations that some Menshevik organizations were “selling seats in the Second Duma to the Cadets” (Constitutional Democrats). In other words, he accused the Mensheviks of colluding with a liberal bourgeois party rather than letting workers’ candidates run. The Mensheviks filed a formal complaint, prompting Lenin to face slander charges before a Party Court (Control Commission). The trial took place just before the opening of the Fifth (London) Congress of the Russian Communists (Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, RSDWP), and Lenin delivered a lengthy oral defense.

In his defense speech, Lenin clearly delineated the boundaries of permissible and non-permissible behavior during the communists’ political debates. He maintained that polemics inside a party must remain within certain bounds—personal insults, “poisoned weapons,” and exaggerations are undesirable because they harm party unity.

However, for polemics against a political enemy (or former party members who break away from the party), these limits no longer apply. There are no formal “party rules” constraining communists in such discussions. Lenin says, “Such wording is calculated not to convince, but to break up the ranks of the opponent, not to correct the mistake of the opponent, but to destroy him, to wipe his organization off the face of the earth” (Lenin [1907] 1977, p. 425).

In other words, while debating a communist’s political enemy, rather than a member of our own party, communists do not seek to uncover the truth. Lenin proposed that communists must conduct polemics that are not designed to affect or convince their opponents. That is simply because the ultimate fate of the opposition is utterly indifferent to communists. Instead, the communists strive to destroy the opposition. Truth be told, the communists’ polemics are not aimed at their opponents but at a larger audience. Lenin advocates for “destroying the enemy organization, by rousing among the masses hatred, aversion, and contempt for this organization” (Ibid., p. 428). Thus, communists are expected to provoke disgust in the audience towards their opponents, potentially even before the public fully understands the communists’ arguments.

Finally, Lenin discussed the hypothetical case of the Bund (Jewish non-Zionist socialists of the Russian Empire) seceding from the RSDWP. He states, “Could anyone then seriously raise the question of the impermissibility of pamphlets calculated to instill in the Bundist working masses hatred, aversion and contempt for their leaders, and describing these leaders as bourgeois in disguise, as those who had sold themselves to the Jewish bourgeoisie and were trying to get their men into the Duma with the latter’s assistance, etc.?” (Ibid., p. 429). The conclusion is that Jews (or any other Party subset) must be treated with the utmost respect if they follow the Party line. However, once they are out, all bets are off.

This line of thought is the logical continuation of the Left’s worldview, adapted for “civilized” political debate. In fact, Lenin proposed the principle of asymmetric tolerance and asymmetric civility: tolerance (and debate norms) only applied within a defined “community of the correct line.” Outside of this defined community, polemics become a tool for political annihilation rather than physical destruction. In ten years, however, when the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, intolerance also entered the physical domain. Basically, Lenin’s instrumental view prioritizes revolutionary efficacy over universal decorum.

There are notable conceptual parallels (rooted in the broader Marxist-Leninist tradition) between Vladimir Lenin’s approach and Herbert Marcuse’s essay, “Repressive Tolerance” (1965). Both thinkers advocate for the selective application of liberal and democratic principles to advance revolutionary goals. Both justify intolerance or harsh rhetoric toward perceived enemies of “liberation.” This shared logic reflects a commitment to vanguardism, where an enlightened minority guides (or suppresses) the masses against “reactionary” forces.

Marcuse was explicit that such actions might involve suppressing speech that sustains “reactionary” power structures, creating space for “progressive” change. Marcuse insisted on the “withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs” (Marcuse 1965, pp. 109-110).

There are several key features of the Lenin-Marcuse approach that led directly to the “cancel culture,” Jewish persecution, and double standards applied uniquely to Israel. First, the selective application of norms for “Us vs. Them.” Second, vanguard elitism. Thirdly, they provide a rationale for suppressing opposition. These features stem from a common Marxist heritage, but Marcuse—a critical theorist from the Frankfurt School—adapts them to the post-World War II West.

As a result, Lenin and Marcuse created a framework in which the modern dialogue about Jews and Israel—particularly on the Left—became highly asymmetrical, moralizing, and often exclusionary.

When the Soviet Union turned against Zionism after 1948 (especially after 1967), this Leninist model shaped the entire discourse. Zionism was redefined as a hostile ideology, equated with racism, imperialism, and colonialism, and therefore outside the bounds of permissible debate. Soviet media, academia, and propaganda were mobilized not to argue with Zionists but to discredit and delegitimize Zionism entirely—an “exterminative polemic” in Lenin’s sense.

That shaped the official language: Zionism was portrayed as an “aggressive racist ideology,” not a legitimate nationalistic movement of Jews. Jewish voices who dissented inside the Soviet Union were treated not as dialogue partners but as traitors or agents of imperialism. In other words, Lenin’s asymmetric rule for polemics provided the intellectual permission structure for non-dialogue, for campaigns aimed at destroying the very legitimacy of the opposing view. That is why, to this day, the Left demonizes Zionists and humanizes anti-Zionists. The International Left makes sure that every Israeli victory is a defeat.

Israel is increasingly classified as an oppressor—a “settler-colonial state,” and an “apartheid regime.” Therefore, speech defending Israel is treated as harmful, reactionary, and illegitimate—not simply wrong but dangerous. The result: deplatforming campaigns, boycott movements (BDS: Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), and a rhetorical climate in which Zionist perspectives are considered as outside the boundaries of acceptable discourse. It comes off as a modern echo of Marcuse’s call for “intolerance toward movements from the Right.” It is classic Marcusean logic: tolerance is conditional on emancipatory potential, not on neutral procedural fairness.

Together, Lenin’s polemical ruthlessness and Marcuse’s selective tolerance create a potent framework for anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric. If the former supplies the aggressive language (e.g., “Zionist genocide” as an unquestionable truth), the latter justifies silencing counterarguments as “repressive.” This hybrid profoundly shaped Leftist movements from the 1970s onward, evident in Europe’s radical Left (where anti-Zionism spills into anti-Semitism) and U.S. campuses, where BDS campaigns invoke Marcusean intolerance to delegitimize Israel.

In today’s polarized debates—post-October 7, 2023—these ideas underpin calls to “no-platform” Zionists, blending revolutionary zeal with cultural gatekeeping, often at the expense of a nuanced dialogue on Jewish self-determination. This Lenin-Marcuse approach entrenches itself into Leftist echo chambers, where Lenin’s “extermination” of dissent meets Marcuse’s “liberating” suppression.

References

Lenin, V. ([1907] 1977). Speech for the Defence (or for the Prosecution of the Menshevik Section of the Central Committee) Delivered At the Party Tribunal. In Collected Works (4th ed., Vol. 12, pp. 421-432). Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marcuse, H. (1965). Repressive Tolerance. In B. M. Robert Paul Wolff, A Critique of Pure Tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press.

[Originally published in American Thinker]