The Replacement Theology of Marxism

In the Ukraine in the first half of the 1940’s, there were two forces who took the Jewish stetl-dwellers to their deaths: the invaders from west, the Nazi Germans, aided by the local Ukrainian populace. The former were driven by an intellectual, scientific-sounding idea having great acceptability at the time, the racist ideology of Nazism. The latter were traditional, religious, believing Eastern Orthodox Christians, driven by their church’s long-held stance toward the Jews. The Ukrainian peasants often murdered the Jews outright, sometimes “only” gave the Nazis a helping hand in putting them on the trains. In both cases, they were repaying the “Christ-killers”, and in both cases the identification of the Jews as descendants of those described in the Ukrainians’ own scriptures as G-d’s nation of priests carried no weight.

Replacement Theology is a name given relatively recently to the Christian doctrine that the Jews are no longer G-d’s chosen people. It is a recent name because the repudiation of it is recent, dating to 19th-century Protestant theologians in Britain and the United States of America, and officially condemned by the Catholic Church only after the Holocaust. Physically, replacement theology has been the cause of much mistreatment of Jews by Christians, as described above; spiritually, in Jewish eyes, it is a blasphemous teaching, for it means G-d goes back on His promises. Today, replacement theology is thankfully on the wane; you will find that its existence among present-day Christians coincides with Christian dhimmitude. It is no surprise to see bishops like Naim Ateek (of Sabeel Ministries) and Riah Abu El-Assal both advocate replacement theology and declare, contrary to traditional Christian doctrine, Muslim suicide bombers to be recipients of eternal life. But the very fact that such deviants cause onlookers to sit up is testimony to the phasing out of replacement theology in the Christian world.

As I said before, it is a hallmark of the left-wing Jews of today to focus on past dangers and ignore the present ones. The way they speak of the danger of Christians and [Neo-]Nazis, you’d think we were still in the 1930’s, literally. While Christian anti-Semites and Neo-Nazis are real, their threat to the Jewish people is blown out of proportion, whereas those who truly fill their roles to day are ignored at best, or their exposers silenced in the worse case, or some Jews are actually members of their groups at worst. The role of the Nazis today is, without doubt, filled by the Muslims, who from Ismail Haniyeh to Hassan Nasrallah to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Mahathir Mohammad (may they all go to hell soon, amen) have never minced words about their intentions to do a recap of the Holocaust on the soil of Israel (G-d forbid). As for the role of the Christian aiders and abettors of the Nazis, this is filled by the Marxists. The Marxists, like the Christians of then, are driven by their own version of replacement theology.

“Replacement theology in the ideology whose founder called religion the opiate of the masses?!”—that is the question I hear begging to be asked. Obviously I mean the word, “theology” metaphorically, but there is more to it than that: the line between religion and politics has never been clear-cut, not in the past, and not even now. Marxism has its religious aspect of being based on unquestionable dogma, intellectually rationalized but never proved, sacred scriptures such as the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, missionary fervor to convert the whole world, and of course its eschatological vision of the New Man living in the messianic Dictatorship of the Proletariat; and Islam is all about political domination of the world, subjugation of it all to shariah law. It could be said Marxism is a religion masquerading as a political ideology and Islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion, but that brings us to the truth that the border between religion and political ideology is quite a blurry one.

So it is that I come to the replacement theology Marxism teaches regarding the Jews. First off, I should note that it does not go all the way back to Karl Marx himself, or indeed to the 19th-century socialist theorists. There was plenty of Jew-hatred among them, but it was of the regular 19th-century kind, the kind in which Hitler’s brand was incubated. Marxist replacement theology can be traced to the aftermath of the Six-Day War (1967), when the Soviets rushed to construe Israel’s pre-emptive war as proof against its being a “plucky underdog” (remember, brothers: rolling over and dying will give you all the sympathy from the anti-Semites you could possibly get. And even that’s not certain). Then, interacting with the Muslims’ “Palestinian nation” fabrication, the picture was painted of the Jewish people having “betrayed” their chosen role by no longer adhering to “their mandate of social justice”. The Marxists had a very particular idea as to what being a light unto the nations entails, and when the Jews had failed to conform to that idea, they considered their chosenness expired.

Go to CounterPunch, to Common Dreams, to Daily Kos, to any Progressive Jewish website and there is a clear doctrine there that the Jewish people’s chosenness is in their role not as a nation of priests of the One True G-d, but as a social example for all nations to behold and follow. They don’t care if the Jews observe the kashrut laws or keep the Sabbath or even avoid gossip; they expect the Jewish people to be the paragon of social equality, fairness and justice, with no poverty, no class distinctions, no oppression and no “acts of imperialism”. A high standard indeed. But not G-d’s standard.

For the Progressive Jews, except to far-out self-deniers like Gilad Atzmon, activism consists in “bringing the Jewish people back to their purity”. For the non-Jewish Marxists, however, there is no interest in doing such, because it is not themselves they are concerned with. Most of them are already of the conclusion that the Jewish people irrevocably forfeited its chosenness when the state of Israel was set up involving “stealing the lands of another nation living on them and engaging in acts of ethnic cleansing”. Zionism is their problem, and there is no return of the Jews to chosenness, there is only atonement for past wrongs by doing away with the “ethnocratic character of the Jewish state”—doing away with Zionism, in other words.

The Marxists [claim to] revere the Hebrew Bible for its messages of social justice. They see those messages as being precursors to the real message of social justice: Socialism or Marxism. For them, as it is for the Christians, the Hebrew Bible is the Old Covenant; but the New Covenant is Marxism. Marxism, in which there is no Jew or Arab, just as “there is no Jew or Greek” in the epistles of Paul. Marxism, which calls for cosmopolitanism and for all nations to go down the melting-pot (or melting-gulag, more like). Marxism, which elevates its own, human-conceived morality above that of the Creator of the heavens and the earth and all that is in them. There can be no room for a Jewish state, for a Zionist state, in Marxist doctrine; it is, to them, an abomination against the forces of historical materialism for a nation to retake their land after 2,000 years of being dispersed among all other nations.

All the proposed “solutions” by Marxists to the Israel/“Palestine” conflict have one thing in common: the desire to “correct” the “mistake” that was made, not in 1967, but in 1947. The Marxists know full well that all those proposals like the “Palestinian Right of Return” and the bi-national state would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Do they care? Of course not, for they either say the concept of a chosen people is anachronistic, or they hint that the Jewish people cannot be considered chosen, now that it has moved from being oppressed to being “an oppressor, no better than the ones who oppressed them in the recent past”.

The Marxists would comment on a Second Holocaust (G-d forbid) with something like, “Harsh and cruel, but you know what they say, ‘Thus always to tyrants’”. Or something like, “You can’t go on living forever on ill-gotten gains without being accorded justice”. For the Marxists, unless the Jews convert to the New Covenant of the Socialist Gospel, they are the most condemned of all people. Thus it is no wonder to find Leftists saying, quite openly, that the suicide bombings in buses and shopping malls are the Israelis’ own fault because of the “continued occupation”; and in view of this, I consider a great many of the writers and commenters on CounterPunch, Huffington Post, ZNET and Daily Kos to be capable of giving Jews to the hands of their would-be Muslim exterminators just as the Christian Ukrainians did to the Nazis. I am sure readers will take issue with this judgment of mine, but I stand by it, for experience—collective Jewish as well as my own—has taught me never to underestimate human capacity for evil.

I know which side takes care to target only those who are known to be terrorists. And I know which side has ended up with 100 million dead in the name of “social justice”, and which side raises its own children on the heritage of suicide terrorism. The Zionist state does not need lessons in morality from either of them. Better it would be for them to heed G-d’s eternal word.