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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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Bela Kun was Jewish. And even still, you at people in Stalin’s circle: [not only] Trotsky; Bronstein; Genrikh Yagoda; you had quite a lot, who were part of the administrative apparatus of the dictatorship.

If you look at his main period of dominance (1930-1953), there's really only Kaganovich. Everyone else got purged. And then he instituted a bunch of antisemitic campaigns like the attacks on 'rootless cosmopolitans' or the Doctors Plot.

I guess comparing scientific advancement with 'communism' isn't really a fair comparison. The science thing has a clear mechanism. The Askenazim are extremely intelligent and therefore contribute disproportionately to scientific progress. But there's no gene for communism. And even if you argue that there's something about Jewish culture that predisposes them to communism (doubtful when looking at extremely right-wing Israel), almost all the examples of Jewish communists are atheists who have no real attachment to their ethno-religious identity, including Marx himself. The only reason anyone cares is because antisemites seek out things to blame on their hated outgroup.

Don’t know if you’ve read K-Mac’s work on the Culture of Critique series, but he performs an analysis of why so many Jews are overrepresented in leftist causes and social movements in the west, spanning across the 20th century up to today. One thing he points out is there’s an operational difference to be distinguished between Jews who ‘happen to be’ involved in various causes, and Jews who are expressly found promoting different causes as part of an attempt to “advance a Jewish interest,” as an identity. His work’s been assailed over the years, but there’s also a lot of support for the framework of his analysis. Multi-level selection hasn’t garnered widespread scientific acceptance over individual selection, but it’s still a fairly hotly debated topic in the realm of evolutionary biology.