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letter he made it clear that he had no use for an Aryan Society: "Races,
like nations, seem an unfortunate class of units to identify with moral
ideas."
Hitler, as we know, thought otherwise. Like Marx, Hitler invoked
science to support a political program that would end the supposed
reign of materialistic Jews. But if Marx's program was based on revolu–
tion, Hitler's program came to be based on extermination. Hitler had
much more in common with Lenin, whom he admired, than Marx. Like
Lenin, Hitler stressed the importance of leadership. Both thought that a
ruthlessly disinterested leader with an iron will was necessary to create a
new political order.
Is Hitler the satanic conclusion to almost two hundred years of an–
timaterialist anti-Semitism? Yes and no. True, he courted Germany's
traditional conservative anti-Semites by speaking ofJews as alien materi–
alists who did not belong to the German community. But in many ways
Hitler's anti-Semitism is very different from traditional antimaterialist
anti-Semitism. In Hitler's scheme of things Jews were much worse than
un-German; they were subhuman. As such, it was not enough to exclude
them from the German community; they had to be eliminated alto–
gether. Thus the Nazis were obsessed - to the detriment of their war ef–
fort - with killing millions of Jews who had nothing to do with things
German and very little to do with modern values. These Jews were
materialist only insofar as they had "Jewish blood."
Racial anti-Semitism probably ended with the collapse of Hitler's
regime, but traditional anti -Semitism - equating Jews with materialism -
certainly did not disappear, and in fact may be experiencing a resurgence
in Western Europe and the Soviet Union. In Western Europe there has
been some increase in the kind of literature that was popular at the turn
of the century - Jews being described as materialist outsiders bent on
world domination - but it is in the Soviet Union where the most viru–
lent form of cultural anti-Semitism has reared its head. The Russian
ultranationalists who belong to an organization called Pamyat have
taken to quoting from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a turn–
of-the-century forgery that speaks of an international Judeo-Masonic
conspiracy to rule the world - in order to support their contention that
Jews are responsible for all that is wrong with Russia in particular and
the Soviet Union in general. How many Russians endorse this extreme
version of Russian nationalism, however, is a matter of conjecture.
In the postwar era antimaterialism has been associated less with anti–
Semitism than with anti-Americanism. Many writers in Western Europe
