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    1 year ago

    From https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/01/12.htm :

    Anti-Semitism

    January 12, 1931

    Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States

    In answer to your inquiry :

    National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

    Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.

    In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.

    J. Stalin January 12, 1931

    First published in the newspaper Pravda, No. 329, November 30, 1936