https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/05/the-essential-anti-semitism-of-the-socialist/
In matters pertaining to all aspects of society, socialists like to present themselves as righteous priests of the moral high ground. The record of socialism in practice, however, has shown it has rarely matched the rhetoric of its followers.
Despite claims to promote peace, equality and liberty, socialists have been in the vanguard of violent demonstrations, demonising anyone who disagrees with them and, wherever possible, suppressing human rights. Far from being the advocates of social reform and advanced thinking, socialist governments invariably embrace a conservative statism in which individuals have neither freedom nor peace.
The equality “enjoyed” by them results from having had their moral and material standards reduced to that of the lowest common social denominator. Socialists invariably confuse equality with sameness.
They also believe the socialist movement sprang from the Enlightenment. This is true, but not in the way they like to imagine. Socialism was a reaction to the Enlightenment, a counter-movement, based on an ideology that scorns rational thinking.
Nevertheless, the Left cling to the term “scientific socialism”, believing it gives a veneer of rationalism to their ideology. It is actually an oxymoron.
The phrase “scientific socialism” was coined in 1840 by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first self-proclaimed anarchist, in his dissertation “Property is Theft”, and was used later by Karl Marx in Das Kapital.
Underlying a socialist veneer of rational thought is a set of prefabricated rules and directives in which science, reason and empirical evidence play no part. It is a pseudoscience that led Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, to write, “Thus scientific socialism is not a social technology, it does not teach the ways and means of constructing social institutions.” (Popper, K. The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol Two: Hegel and Marx. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. 2002, 95)
In the practice of socialism, history and truth are mangled in any way that fits a Marxist mould. Failure to do this would reveal that Marx’s analysis of history and predictions, in respect of the future course of capitalism, were sloppy and selective.
In addition, socialism is riddled with contradictions. One in particular has been its attitude to Jews. On the one hand it recognised them as a down-trodden minority—the type of group that feeds the Left’s predilection for victims; at the same time, it condemned Jews as capitalists who are responsible for creating an impoverished under-class—the all-but vanished proletariat.
Nineteenth-century France was the cradle of socialism. It was there that Pierre Leroux, who coined the term “socialism”, was the first person to describe Jews as “Christ-killers”. He wrote of the Jewish spirit as “the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce, of speculation, in a word, the bankers’ spirit” (Quoted in Edmund Silberner. ‘Pierre Leroux’s Ideas on the Jewish People.’ Jewish Social Studies Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct. 1950). Indiana University Press, 367-384).
