A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism
Paul Hanebrink
Harvard University Press, 2018.
The writing and discussion of Jewish historiography in contemporary mainstream academia requires a sublime choreography. It’s basically a series of evasions resembling dances, in which facts are presented and parried, and flamboyant narratives are advanced which everyone knows to be false but which emerge repetitively and shamelessly. My attention was first drawn to Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism by Christopher Browning’s recent glowing review, titled “The Fake Threat of Jewish Communism,” in the New York Review of Books. Browning is an establishment historian with a record of legally assisting Jews — for the right price. As well as receiving over $30,000 from Deborah Lipstadt to testify against David Irving, Browning has testified against a significant number of European ex-soldiers at war crimes trials. Although his most notable work, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), contains the less than remarkable thesis that war turns ordinary men into killers, Browning’s dedication to the Jewish narrative has led to his becoming a true guru of Jewish victimology. Having received awards and funds from organizations including Yad Vashem and the USC Shoah Foundation Center and copious promotion in mainstream media and academia, Browning’s certificate of praise in the field is potentially career-making. Evidently, he has chosen to bestow his magic touch on Paul Hanebrink. In this essay I want to explore the approach of both Browning’s review and Hanebrink’s text as exercises in the manufacture of duplicitous histories.
