The Jews. Hilaire Belloc

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      The words "social revolution" were still but words in 1914 and men did not take them too seriously. But when in 1917 a socialist revolution was accomplished suddenly at one blow, in one great State, and when its agents, directors and masters were seen to be a close corporation of Jews with only a few non-Jewish hangers-on (each of these controlled by the Jews through one influence or another), it was quite another matter. The thing had become actual. The menace to national traditions and to the whole Christian ethic of property was immediate. More important than all, so far as the Jewish problem is concerned, many who had remained silent upon it on account of convention, avarice or fear, were now compelled to speak. From that moment, in early '17, it became the chief political problem of our time: coincident with, intimately mixed with, but in all its implications superior to, the great economic quarrel on to which it was now grafted.

      The story may be briefly told. The Russian State, ill-equipped for modern war, had passed during the end of the year 1916 through a strain which it had found intolerable. Russian Society, after the mortal losses sustained, was upon the eve of dissolution, and the formidable revolutionary movement which had for years left its direction and organization in Jewish hands broke out, for the third time in our generation: but this time successfully.

      After rapidly accelerating phases it settled into the situation which has endured from the early part of 1918 to the present day. In the towns the freely-elected Parliament was repudiated and a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" was declared. The workshops were in future to be run by Committees, in the Russian "Soviets," and similar organizations were to control agriculture in the villages, where the peasants had already seized the land and were streaming back from the dissolved armies to their homes.

      In practice, of course, what was set up was no proletarian Government, still less anything so impossible and contradictory in terms as a "dictatorship" of proletarians. The thing was called "The Republic of the Workmen and Peasants." It was, in fact, nothing of the sort. It was the pure despotism of a clique, the leaders of which had been specially launched upon Russia under German direction in order to break down any chance of a revival of Russian military power, and all those leaders, without exception, were Jews, or held by the Jews through their domestic relations, and all that followed was done directly under the orders of Jews, the most prominent of whom was one Braunstein, who disguised himself under the assumed name of Trotsky. A terror was set up, under which were massacred innumerable Russians of the governing classes, so that the whole framework of the Russian State disappeared. Among these, of course, must specially be noted great numbers of the clergy, against whom the Jewish revolutionaries had a particular grudge. A clean sweep was made of all the old social organization, and under the despotism of this Jewish clique the old economic order was reversed. Food and all necessities were controlled (in the towns) and rationed, the manual labourer receiving the largest share; and none any share unless he worked at the orders of the new masters.

      The agricultural land was in theory nationalized, but in practice the Jewish Committees of the towns were unable to enforce their rule over it, and it reverted to the natural condition of peasant ownership. But the Jewish Committees of the towns were strong enough to raid great areas of agricultural production for the support of themselves and their troops and of their dependants in the cities, who had come close to starvation through the breakdown of the social system.

      What followed later is of common knowledge: the attempts at counter-revolution, led by scattered Russians and other military leaders, all failed because the peasants believed that their newly-acquired farms were at stake and eagerly volunteered to defend them, the greatly increased misery of the towns, the slow decline of industrial production (in spite of the most rigid despotism, enforcing conscript labour), and the general deliquescence of society.

      If the motives of the men who thus brought the whole of a Christian State into ruins within a few weeks were analysed, we should, it is to be presumed, discover something of this sort: their main motive was the pursuit of the political and economic ideals of which they were the spokesmen and which already so many of their compatriots, the Jews, throughout the rest of Europe, had espoused—communism so far as property was concerned; the Marxian doctrine of socialist production and distribution; the Socialist doctrine imposed by arbitrary and despotic arrangements, favouring those who had in the past been least favoured. In this economic and political group of motives the leading motive was probably enough, the doctrine of Communism in which these men, for the most part, sincerely believed.

      To this must be added an equally sincere hatred of national feeling, save, of course, where the Jewish nation was concerned. The conception of a Russian national feeling seemed to these new leaders ridiculous, as, indeed, the conception of a national feeling must seem ridiculous to their compatriots everywhere; or, if not ridiculous, subsidiary to the more important motives of individual advantage and to the righting of such immediate wrongs as the individual may feel. The Christian religion they naturally attacked, for it was abhorrent to their social theory.

      They also had a certain crusading, or propagandist, ideal running through the whole of their action—the desire to spread Communism far beyond the boundaries of what had once been the Russian State. It is this which has led them to intrigue throughout Central, and even in Western, Europe, in favour of revolution.

      Though these were the main motives, other motives must also have been present.

      It is impossible that Committees consisting of Jews and suddenly finding themselves thus in control of such new powers, should not have desired to benefit their fellows. It is equally impossible that they should have forgone a sentiment of revenge against that which had persecuted their people in the past. They cannot but, in the destroying of Russia, have mixed with a desire to advantage the individual Russian poor the desire to take vengeance upon the national tradition as a whole; it has even been said—but denied, and I know not where the truth lies—that Jews were among those guilty of the worst incident which we now know in all its revolting details—the murder of the Russian Royal family—father, mother and girls, and the unfortunate sickly heir, the only boy. Further, it is impossible, with Jewish Committees thus in control of the Russian treasury and of Russian means of communication, that they should not have had some sympathy with their compatriots who were so largely in control of Western finance. However sincere their detestation of capitalism (for probably in most of them the opinion is held sincerely enough), it is in the nature of things that one of their blood and kind should, however misguided they may think him, appeal to them more than one of ours. And it is this which explains the half alliance which you find throughout the world between the Jewish financiers on the one hand and the Jewish control of the Russian revolution on the other. It is this which explains the half-heartedness of the defence against Bolshevism, the perpetual commercial protest, the continued negotiations, the recognition of the Soviet by our politicians, the clamour of "Labour" in favour of German Jewish industrialism and against Poland: all that has taken place wherever Jewish finance is powerful, particularly at Westminster.

      But, be this as it may, the tremendous explosion which we call Bolshevism brought the discussion of the Jewish problem to a head. The two forces which had hitherto held back the discussion of that problem were that Liberal fiction which had ruled for more than a generation, according to which it was indecent even to mention the word Jew, or to suggest that there was any difference between the Jew and those who harboured him; and, secondly, the fact that the Jews were erroneously regarded by most of the well-to-do people in the West—that is, by most of those who had the control of the Press and therefore of all public expression—as so controlling wealth that they were at once the natural guardians of property and so placed that an attack upon them jeopardized the wealth of the critic. The man who had gone into the City, or who had his life spent upon the Bourse in Paris, or who was negotiating any great capitalist enterprise, who had to do in whatever capacity with the running of the great banks or with the international means of communication by sea and land, even the man who got his precarious living by writing—each and all had hitherto felt that a public silence upon the Jewish problem was necessary to his private welfare.

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