Old Myths Don't Die

Judeo-Bolshevism from Boris Brasol to Candace Owens

I initially decided against commenting on my recent interaction with Candace Owens, but after being contacted by a reader with new information I figured it was worth sharing some findings for those interested. After going over a few things about Candace, the post investigates some interesting dynamics behind the dissemination of Judeo-Bolshevism in the West.

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As many reading this will already know, about a month ago Candace Owens shared some surprisingly bold words about Jews and the Bolsheviks on X. Over the course of a lengthy conversation with Breitbart editor Joel Pollak, she ran through all the familiar allegations of Jewish control of the Soviet government, anti-Christian sadism, plundering of Russian booty, masterminding of the gulags and the Holodomor, etc., even going so far as to suggest Joseph Stalin himself was secretly Jewish. It was surreal to see. While these aren’t recently acquired beliefs, the fact she decided to share them publicly signaled a dramatic break with her otherwise careful rhetorical strategy.

The thread I put together in response ended up surpassing her in likes — a shock to me — and things have remained that way ever since. Even her reply, which accused me of deceiving the American public and promised a prompt rebuttal, was drowned out.

As it stands, she still hasn’t released this much awaited debunking, nor has she changed any of her views in the time since.¹

I assume the only reason these highly provocative comments attracted such little attention was that soon after my thread started getting noticed, Candace redirected the focus with several emotionally charged posts about the 1913 case of Leo Frank, unambiguously invoking the blood libel along the way.²

As a side note, I’ve been meaning to cover this case for ages. One reason it’s such a difficult subject to broach is because of the exact kind of thing Candace did when people began disputing her conclusions.

It always goes like that: the people who couldn’t tell you even the basic facts of the case will insist you’re a “racist, lying, pedophile-apologist” for disagreeing with them. Candace describes Jim Conley as an “illiterate janitor” despite the fact that his literacy — more specifically his having written the two notes found under Mary Phagan’s corpse after lying about being illiterate — was a highly significant part of the trial.³ 

That she holds these views isn’t all that surprising to those who have been following her lately. Back in February, still at the Daily Wire, she dedicated an episode of her show to the Bolsheviks, or the “Christian Holocaust,” highlighting exclusively Jewish figures and linking them to Zelensky. On several other occasions, she’s described Zelensky as a “Bolshevist” who “has shut down churches [erm] and is intentionally dragging Christian men to the slaughter.” She’s also displayed interest in a weird kind of WWII revisionism, portraying the Allies as mysteriously anti-Christian and insisting we shouldn’t have ever gotten involved. Generally she says all this with the most frustrating layer of plausible deniability, which makes these more recent remarks all the more significant. 

I don’t want to speculate much about what’s behind all this, although one could easily point to things like her long-time friendship with Ye⁴ or more recent involvement in traditional Catholic communities.⁵ What’s clear is that she now interprets everything through the lens of Christian/anti-Christian and has become deeply interested in conspiracies and “hidden truths.” The special appeal of Bolshevism in this regard should be obvious.

An Unresolved Issue

The thread itself was unfortunately somewhat rushed but got the job done. Most of the claims were fairly standard myths that could be addressed with screenshots of my previous post on the topic. One part of the interaction, however, bugged me: her repeated claim that 447 of 545 “Bolshevik commissioners” were Jewish. I too hastily attributed this to Robert Wilton’s propaganda since his “lists” of Bolsheviks are the most widely proliferated online⁶, not noticing my screenshot had the figure instead at “457 of 556” as some pointed out in the replies.

That it’s false is evident, but where does it come from? A few days ago Michael Zigismund emailed me some of his research into the question. Accordingly, the earliest trace we have of this figure is found in a 1920 pamphlet titled Who Rules Russia? (reproduced in Russian here) and printed by “Unity of Russia,” the Russian émigré organization of Boris Brasol. The pamphlet was reviewed in 1921 by The Spectator, cited in 1922 by the Jesuit Civiltà Cattolica, as well as a few other Catholic publications from there.

Boris Brasol

The tract may not have been as influential as Wilton’s books, but Brasol undoubtedly had a much more active career as an antisemitic agitator. Back in Russia he’d been involved in the failed blood libel case against Menahem Beilis. After serving in the Imperial Russian Army in WWI, he was sent to America where he remained among other anxious monarchists after the Tsar was overthrown. He soon got busy publishing the first English translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to land on American shelves, becoming acquainted with and later working for Henry Ford before entering the circles of Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh and ultimately involving himself with the Nazis.⁷

Yet all Brasol really had to offer apart from his Russian credentials was cheap antisemitic propaganda. In a confirmed letter to another émigré, he actually boasted that “[w]ithin the last year I have written three books, two of which have done the Jews more injury than would have been done to them by ten pogroms.”

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One question is where Candace’s number ultimately comes from, another is where she learned it from. The main point in her reply to me was that while I relied on “neo-history-Wikipedia and Google entries” (?) she had “actual British and American government files.”

The thing is she’s probably right, about the second part at least. As is documented extensively in Bendersky’s The Jewish Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army, the files of the day’s Military Intelligence Division were in fact rife with the wildest conspiratorial interpretations of Bolshevism, Zionism, and world Jewry, including “a separate investigative classification for the Protocols: File 99-75.” Why was this so? Partly because of the frenzied atmosphere of American entry into WWI and the Russian Revolution; partly because virtually the only sources available about the latter were “a coterie of émigrés from Imperial Russia.” 

Before the end of the Great War, “State Department and military officers abroad began informing Washington of Jewish-German-Bolshevik collusion.” One 1918 report, penned by confidential source “B-1” and entitled “Bolshevism and Judaism,” forged a link between Jewish bankers — mostly American, all of German origin — and Jewish revolutionaries, quoting liberally from the “Secret Zionist Protocols” and providing spurious lists of Bolsheviks. In an argument later to feature prominently in Nazi propaganda, the class differences between the two groups were allegedly trumped by ethnic solidarity and a common conspiracy for dominion over the gentiles of the earth. “Bolshevism and Judaism,” distributed to officials at the Paris Peace Conference and then leaked to the press, also originated the oft-repeated myth that Jacob Schiff funded Trotsky during his visit to New York.⁸ The document is still on file — tagged “861.00/5339” according to Antony Sutton — and occasionally continues to be cited as “proof” straight from American intel.

But who was B-1? According to Bendersky, it was none other than Boris Brasol. Like many other diaspora Russians put out of work by the Revolution, Brasol found employment with Western intelligence agencies hungry for any and all information on the events of the East, and by 1918 “had become a confidant of [Marlborough] Churchill,” head of the MID. This must explain why by 1920 there were “long-circulating MID claims that among the 545 ‘functionaries who really govern Russia, only 30 were really Russians as opposed to 447 Jews.’”

Some agents dismissed “Bolshevism and Judaism” as “a jumble of opinions formed by an ill informed, suspicious and biased individual.” Eventually, “Captains Edwin P. Grosvenor, Carlton J. H. Hayes, and Nathan Isaacs” launched an internal investigation into Brasol. But they were ultimately ignored, the justification being that Brasol was useful to have if only to check against other sources. And as long as these other sources, too, were for the most part deeply antisemitic émigrés with loyalties to the Tsar and ties to the White Army, the narrative of the Bolshevik Revolution as a Jewish Revolution appeared unassailable. So is this where Candace was drawing from? It’s possible.

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On the other hand, I also discovered the same list published in 1921 by the then-deceased Russian correspondent for The Morning Post, Victor Marsden, who incidentally had published his own translation of The Protocols in Britain. (A Russian version of the pamphlet survives, at least.) Like Wilton, it’s impossible to overlook the man’s partisanship.⁹

One recent author has written that Marsden compiled the list back in 1918 which, if true, means it wasn’t invented by Brasol and the actual origin probably goes back to someone in Russia. Furthermore, its contents actually match those given by Robert Wilton in his infamous 1921 edition of The Last Days of the Romanovs, meaning that contrary to the beliefs of some, Wilton wasn’t personally fabricating names either, merely relaying them. (Why he went on to put the total at “457 of 556” instead is anyone’s guess.)

At any rate, this “list of the names of the 447 Jews of the Soviet Government” on which Candace thus relies not only wildly conflicts with the official sources but contains identifiable errors that have already been scrutinized by others, starting with John Spargo back in 1921.¹⁰ This claim, too, can be put to rest. And it doesn’t matter whether she got it from some shady MID document or YouTube comment section, either.

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Whoever was personally behind it — it’s irrelevant either way — was part of an apparatus with a vested interest in manufacturing all the myths that endure to this day. According to Budnitskii’s Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites:

antisemitism became a kind of “surrogate” for White ideology. The leaders and ideologues of the Whites proved incapable of coming up with convincing and effective slogans on their own. This was probably due in no small part to their lack of concrete goals. “Let’s get rid of the Bolsheviks, then form a Constituent or National Assembly, which will then decide which path Russia should take” was hardly a statement that would inspire the masses. The Whites instead found that antisemitic slogans were much more effective in mobilizing the semi-literate and illiterate masses.

But the propaganda they churned out of course wasn’t solely for domestic consumption or rallying the troops. It was also exported abroad via intricate networks of émigrés in an effort to convince the West of the righteousness of the White cause. And in the context of an intolerable information vacuum, it quickly found receptive audiences among both the general public and elite circles, indeed governments.

As we’ve seen, one major part of this campaign was the printing of The Protocols. The fabrication had until then been lingering in Russian society; the Revolution finally brought it westward, dispersing its eventual translators and seemingly giving it more credence and urgency. Whether their authenticity was genuinely believed by these agitators is one thing — and Brasol would later deny ever taking them seriously — their obvious practical utility in establishing the prototypical “Jewish plot” through which to interpret world events is another. Through the efforts of Brasol and others, early access was granted to members of the Wilson Administration and eventually to Woodrow Wilson himself, who “ordered that the document be further investigated.”

And another important part was obviously the dissemination of these kinds of conclusive-looking lists (not unlike what you see today). Budnitskii:

One of the most typical forms of antisemitic propaganda at the time was to distribute lists of names of Bolshevik or revolutionary leaders of Jewish heritage. Occasionally non-Jewish names would be added in order to demonstrate how other leaders (including everyone from Kerensky to Antonov-Ovseenko) were in league with the Jews.

Given how ludicrous all this might look to modern eyes, it can be difficult to appreciate just how successful these efforts were in shaping public opinion. But this was indeed a highly impactful narrative that would eventually serve as one of the most immediate justifications for the Holocaust; nowadays, it’s kept alive by psychotics on the Internet and occasionally regurgitated by people like Candace Owens. The Whites may have been defeated in the end, but they succeeded in leaving us with tenacious myths that have long outlived their maker.

1. Just recently the Bolsheviks were brought up on Jimmy Dore’s show, revealing she doesn’t even know so much as when the Russian Revolution took place, saying the Bolsheviks assassinated the Tsar in 1880 and then “took over” in 1910. Clearly her interest in the subject isn’t matched by her knowledge of it.

2. "...during Passover no less?" The theory that Leo Frank committed a blood sacrifice does exist and as far as I can tell is about as popular as the one that Stalin was Jewish. Candace had already generated controversy after liking a post accusing Rabbi Shmuley of being "drunk on Christian blood," of course calling the suggestion that she endorsed the blood libel myth absurd. No idea why the media picked up on this interaction but has been basically silent ever since.

3. And of course Candace stresses Mary's assumed Catholicism. While she certainly has Irish heritage (at least from her biological father who died before she was even born), her funeral was presided over by a pastor at Marietta's Second Baptist Church.

4. She after all helped ignite Ye's 2022 controversies, wearing the infamous "White Lives Matter" shirt with him and originating the lie that he was de-banked over antisemitism. Increasingly she's come to parrot his rhetoric, not only about subversive Jewish industry insiders but also about the importance of Christianity.

5. Nothing against traditionalist Catholicism itself, but there’s a well-known history of antisemitism in many of those spaces, as will be touched on later.

6. To find it, just google one of its mythical names like “Schillenkuss.”

7. Brasol’s involvement with the Nazis is detailed in Kellogg’s The Russian Roots of Nazism.

8. Kenneth Ackerman, Trotsky in New York (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2016), 319–321. In reality, Schiff had been pro-Kerensky and wasn’t in New York at the time.

9. Sharman Kadish, Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1992), 39.

10. Essentially, it invents people who never existed, certain committees and commissariats that never formed, misidentifies gentiles as Jews, and otherwise includes real Jews who served as specific commissars at one point to the exclusion of gentiles who’d held the same title.