Fact-Checking Europa: The Last Battle | Part 1

Moses Hess; Marx's origins; Churchill on Zionism

In recent years Europa: The Last Battle has become a surprise underground sensation. The 2017 film is made by Tobias Bratt, a Swedish activist. It’s ever-increasing popularity is due entirely to word of mouth and shares on social media, as censorship has banished it to the far-corners of the internet. It’s popularity is an interesting phenomenon, as it promotes pretty radical views on things like Jewish influence, historical revisionism and National Socialism. A lot of people cite it as their major red pill, but I’ve seen some dismiss it as “meme history” and a propaganda piece.

Since it’s so popular, I’ve decided it might be worth giving it a serious treatment and fact-checking its claims as I watch it. I think most people that like the documentary probably don’t care much about the veracity of the individual claims, but it could still be an interesting way to look at some of the history covered in the documentary. Additionally, as someone who has been in dissident right circles for years now, I must admit to noticing a real decline in the intellectual quality of what’s being presented regarding the topic of Jewish influence (which is inevitable as it reaches a wider audience), as well as the spread of what I consider historically indefensible apologetics for National Socialism. So as much as this documentary isn’t a serious intellectual piece, I suppose I do feel some obligation to engage with something like this and try and offer a correction to some of these tendencies, even if it might fall on deaf ears

The full film is over 12 hours long, so I probably won’t cover the whole thing. This section alone consists of over 1,500 words, and that’s only on the first ten minutes. There are 6 ten minute segments in an hour, and 12 hours in the documentary, which would mean I would write 72 of these, or over 100,000 words, if I continued at this pace. I have included timestamps to make it easy to follow along while watching the documentary, which is available in full here.

So without further ado, fact-checking Europa: The Last Battle.

Moses Hess called Christianity “the religion of death” (03:40)

This is a real quote from page 76 of Hess’ Rome and Jerusalem. But when writing this, Hess was not taking an adversarial position against Europeans, but predicting the decline of Christianity would awaken more virile European nationalisms. For example, on the same page Hess writes that “On the ruins of Christian Rome there rises a regenerated Italian people.”¹ Hess also wrote favourably of Christianity as a stage in human development in his early philosophical writings.²

Moses Hess predicted a race war in Europe involving Germany and Italy (03:45)

Hess had a heterodox view as a communist in holding an ethnocentric view of human history that saw racial conflict as a driver of history more than class struggle. He predicted Italy would unify, triggering German unification, and that the growth of nationalism would lead to conflict.

However, the point of this quote in the documentary seems to be to suggest he predicted a great racial conflict between the Germans and Italians against Jews, which obviously proved to be WW2. Although he did expect the rise in nationalism would increase antisemitism he didn’t make this kind of grand prediction. And he advocated a kind of European cultural unity that he predicted would come with the decline of the church:

Europe does not need to have imposed upon it one law, one form of government, one belief or any other one external coercive measure before it would feel unified and strong. Europe is already unified through its history and its culture. . . . The European nations are so near to each other in an essential way, that all one needs is the disintegration of these shallow powers which still exist on the surface— the external state and church— in order to bring about the emergence of the internal unity of the peoples of Europe. [Even] a general European war would lead to a general European alliance.³

Hess wasn’t hoping a European war would destroy Europeans, but that it would unify them.

Hess converted Marx and Engels to Communism and assisted them with the Communist Manifesto — This proves that socialism, communism, Marxism and Zionism have the same roots (4:00)

Hess first met Marx in 1842 and spoke fondly of him; he collaborated with him on writing The German Ideology in 1845; and he introduced Engels to communism. Hess was indeed involved with the original writing of the Communist Manifesto. However, in the final version of the manifesto Marx disparages the “utopian socialism” of Hess.

Marx likely would have been a communist without Hess. His intellectual origin was in the milieu of the young Hegelians, and he and Hess first came into contact while Marx was submitting articles for Rheinische Zeitung, which Hess edited. Marx was influenced early on by French socialist ideas, before developing his dialectical materialism through his materialist inversion of Hegel. Certainly, Marx didn’t adopt the ideas of the centrality of race and nation that Hess did, instead believing the rise in European nationalism was a transient, bourgeois creation. After 1848 they drifted further in their politics. Despite their relationship, Hess doesn’t belong alongside names like Hegel and Feuerbach as a major influence on Marx’s thought.

Karl Marx’s real name was Moses Mordechai Levy and he was descended from a long line of Rabbis (4:30)

Karl Marx’s real name was Karl Marx. His birth certificate spells it as “Carl”, which was the common spelling at the time, but in his adult life he always signed his name as Karl. Moses Mordechai Levy was the name of Marx’s grandfather. So yes, he was born to a long line of Talmudic scholars on his father’s side. Karl’s father Heinrich converted to Christianity around 1816, but likely as a way to circumvent Prussian laws that affected Jews.

Marx was related to the Rothschilds, who funded Marx (4:30)

Marx was a third or fourth cousin of Nathan Mayer, Lord Rothschild.⁴

However, there is no evidence the Rothschilds ever provided funding to Marx. Marx, for his part, “vilified the Rothschilds as a quintessence of capitalist evil.”⁵

“Jewry is the mother of Marxism” — quote from Le Droit De Vivre on May 12, 1936 (5:00)

There is no May 12 edition of the magazine. It had weekly editions on May 9 and 16, but neither contain this quote or anything like it.

The Communist Manifesto is arguing for Jewish control of media and banking (5:40)

The Communist Manifesto doesn’t mention control of the media at all. It’s obviously the interpretation of the maker of the documentary that centralised control of the financial system was to empower monopoly bankers, but that certainly isn’t in the manifesto, and Marx’s theory predicted the final stage of communism as a stateless, moneyless society. So a centralised state-backed banking cartel definitely isn’t part of the vision.

The Communist Manifesto argued women should not focus on family or children anymore (5:47)

To support this, the documentary quotes “Communism aims to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.” The placement suggests that the quote is talking about ending women as instruments of production of babies, but that’s not what’s being argued. Rather, they are arguing against the indignity of women being turned into instruments of capitalist production.

Marx encouraged genocide of Slavs and called them “racial trash” (6:25)

Marx is quoted as saying “The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life must give way. They must perish in the revolutionary Holocaust”. The citation is wrong, and this is actually a mashup of two quotes. One is from an 1853 article by Marx: “The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.” The other is from an Engels letter from 1849 where he writes that aside from a few European groups like Germans, Poles and Magyars “All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm.”

Marx and Engels did hold racist views of slavs (as was common in Germany at the time) and did predict the dissolution of their “petty nationalisms”, which they viewed as counter-revolutionary, as well as the elimination of “entire reactionary peoples” by future war. Engels termed these people Völkerabfälle, which has been translated as racial trash as the documentary suggests. It was Engels who described these people as “residual fragments of peoples” who had been swallowed up by more powerful countries in the progressive development of history. South Slavs were used as one example, but also “in France, are the Bretons, the supporters of the Bourbons" and “in Scotland, are the Gaels, the supporters of the Stuarts from 1640 to 1745.”⁶ So this designation wasn’t necessarily biological when used by Engels, rather designating these as people in a more primitive stage of development left behind by the historical process.

The documentary suggests they argued for a targeted genocide of Slavs on racial grounds in a way they never did.

Winston Churchill argued international Jews would use communism in tandem with Zionism to achieve a one world communist government (9:10)

This is such a complete misinterpretation of Churchill’s argument in Zionism versus Bolshevism that it practically turns it on its head. Churchill’s argument was that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement, but that Zionism was the antidote and positive alternative for the Jewish people. In the essay, Churchill calls Jews “the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world”, and rather than seeing them as part of it, called on Zionist Jews to help thwart the global Bolshevik conspiracy.

In 1829, the Rothschilds “purchased Jerusalem” (9:30)

The source for this quote is indeed accurate, coming from the Niles Weekly Register in 1829

There is a report that the Rothschilds have purchased Jerusalem! We see nothing improbable that the Rothschilds should purchase the ancient capital of their nation . . . They [the Rothschilds] might instantly, as it were, gather a large nation together, soon capable of defending itself, and having a wonderful influence over the commerce and condition of the east, rendering Judea again the place of deposit of a large portion of the wealth of the ancient city.⁷

But this report, which the Register never sources, was obviously false. Jerusalem was under Ottoman control and remained so until after WW1, almost a century later. The Ottomans selling an entire city to a British-based banking family (however that would work) would have been pretty significant and probably reported elsewhere.

“It is believed that he (Rothschild) is the richest man in the world” (9:50)

Not sure who the man speaking here is, but although this is a common trope of conspiracy theory content, there is no evidence any Rothschild is close to being the richest person in the world.

“The wealthy Jews rule the world. In their hands lies the fate of governments and nations. They start wars between countries and, when they wish, governments make peace. When the wealthy Jews sing, the nations and their leaders dance along and meanwhile the Jews get richer.” — Theodore Herzl (10:40)

This is a real quote!⁸

End of part 1

Part 2

1. Hess, Moses. Rome and Jerusalem: a study in Jewish nationalism. Bloch Publishing Company, 1918. Pg. 76

2. Hess, Moses. "The philosophy of the act." Socialist thought. A documentary history (1964): 260-270.

3. Sorin, Gerald. "Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism." (1987): 120-123.

4. Gelles, Edward. The Jewish Journey: A Passage Through European History. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

5. https://time.com/archive/6734131/books-a-power-unto-themselves/

6. https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1849/01/13.htm

7. Fein, Isaac M. “NILES’ WEEKLY REGISTER ON THE JEWS.” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 50, no. 1 (1960): 3–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43059103.

8. https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/theodor-herzl-founder-of-zionism-not-quite-what-you-might-imagine/