I used to drive an old friend of mine –and by old, I mean someone who was actually a beatnik – to the Veteran’s Administration in South Orange, NJ. He (let’s call him K.) required constant medical care for injuries he suffered during the Korean War. Once, we were on needles and pins when these ancient war wounds, suffered over fifty years earlier, came close to doing him in.*
If you asked him to talk about his most defining experience in the military, it wouldn’t be the mortar blast that continues to plague him to this second. Rather, it was an incident in basic training. He woke up in the middle of the night, and saw the soldier in the next bunk staring intensely at him.
“What’s wrong?” asked K.
“You’re Jewish, ain’t ya?” asked the stranger.
“Yeah, so what?”
“We learned that Jews have horns, tails and cloven hooves,” he explained. “That they come out when you’re asleep.”
“Oh,” K. responded in his best deadpan. “We don’t show them to the goyim.”
Before he had joined the Army, K. had come across whispered gossip concerning blood libel, But a guy staying up all night because he really thought my friend would turn into Beelzebub? That struck me as utterly daft. I mean, we’re talking about 1951, for crying out loud. You’d think that people wouldn’t be so ignorant by the mid-Twentieth Century.
As it turns out, much of that same ignorance persists well into the Twenty-First Century. After the events of 11 September 2001, and the subsequent attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, the anti-American sentiment espoused by some Middle East Muslims became almost inextricably linked to anti-Israeli rage. This led to the belief that Jews were manipulating the US to commit atrocity after atrocity against innocent Muslims.
This anger found expression in the re-emergence of a nineteenth-century literary tract. It’s original author had written it as a joke, a sharp commentary on political power and corruption, Later authors would plagiarize the initial satire and present it to the public as fact. Although discredited and thoroughly debunked over the years, it has once again become a universally revered text for those who hate Jews.
According to many sources, among them the Holocaust Museum “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion made its first appearance as such sometime between 1897 and 1903. Its author, Pyotr Rachovsky, served as the chief of foreign intelligence in the Okhrana, one of the most brutal spy agencies that ever existed. The book purported to be the actual minutes of a meeting of an 1897 international Jewish congress that met in Russia. Supposedly, these elders met to discuss their plans for taking over the world.
Rachovsky stole the bulk of his material from other sources, among them Hermann Goedsche’s 1868 novel Biarritz. Admittedly fiction, this book contained a chapter titled “At the Jewish Cemetery at Prague,” in which twelve elders, each representing a Hebrew tribe, meet in a graveyard to discuss plans for global dominion. Goedsche in turn ripped off several other sources. The first was the 1848 Alexandre Dumas Sr. novel Joseph Balsamo. The second was an 1797 letter circulated by a French Jesuit, Abbe Barruel, who blamed the French Revolution on a Masonic conspiracy, and nebulously connected the subsequent political tolerance of Jews by Napoleon III to the plot.**
The third source is one that also heavily influenced Rachovsky, and is considered by virtual consensus to be the most direct ancestor of the Protocols. Satirist Maurice Joly wrote The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in 1864 to poke fun at the stupidity of realpolitik. One can easily notice parallels between the Joly novel and Rachovsky’s work. In fact, some passages are almost verbatim. For example, the following, appears in the Joly work:
From there, a number of Russian papers began to report on or serialize the tract, in each instance characterizing it as fact; as if this 1897 Jewish congress on world domination actually happened.
As you probably have surmised by now, the malleable nature of the villains’ identities became one of the more horrific attributes of “Protocols.” This was a point not lost on Dr. Umberto Eco (Humanities, University of Bologna), who in his 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum noted that someone had arbitrarily introduced Jews as the masterminds behind Joly’s tongue-in-cheek plot, most likely to divert attention from real conspirators.***
The malleability doesn’t end there, either. While the main focus in the “Protocols” has been the international Jewish conspiracy since 1903, copious textual changes have cropped up over the years, each demonizing various political outliers as useful idiots, or harbingers of the plot’s success. Indeed, most versions of the “Protocols” one can find on the web bear little resemblance to the direct 1920 English translation done by Victor Marsden.**** For example, one passage that one finds in online editions:
And it gets worse. A passage in the original, “This task [of crushing benign, caring monarchies and other autocracies] is infected with the idea of freedom, so-called liberalism,” often appears as “using liberalism,” or in some cases “using socialism,” or “using leftism” as a means of weakening a population. Here, the implication is stark. Such writers deliberately omit the extent to which the original equates liberalism (a despised concept among contemporary “Protocols” fans) to freedom (a principle they highly cherished). In doing so, propagators of this tract can create boogeymen out of people they see as ideological enemies.
That’s not to imply that the original is any less insidious. At the same time, it does show just how reactionary, adaptive and manipulated this text is.
The degree to which “Protocols” has influenced contemporary conspiracy culture is small, but (admittedly) significant. A minuscule sampling of researchers will actually refer to such thing as ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government), or the “Jewish banking conspiracy. More will refer to anti-Semitic in more coded, generic ways such as “The Israel Lobby,” “The Rothchilds,” or “The Illuminati/Masonic conspiracy.” And some will broadly deny that the vast majority of Jews have anything to do with the “International Jewish Plot,” but they believe in that plot all the same.
The reason why I brought this topic up is several-fold. For starters, it’s an invalid argument that can gum up any legitimate queries by dumbing down the underlying mechanics of power to a highly isolated group of meanies. Second, it’s useful in rationalizing the bigotry that many have held against Jews for (literally) millennia.
Third, it ironically negates a core belief within anti-conspiracism.
____________
*Relax. He’s fine at the moment. That reminds me, I have to get back to him on our fantasy baseball league..
**In a 1993 paper titled “Commentary on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Dr. Daniel Keren points out that the bulk of French royalty and nobility were themselves Freemasons at the time of the Revolution.
***And no, Eco isn’t serious about there being actual conspirators. He just wanted to show how identities in such tracts can change back and forth to whomever one hates.
**** As I said in the previous post, I really don’t want to link to these sites, many of which are supported by Klan, fundamentalist Christian and Nazi groups and leaders. But in order to verify the comparison, you can find the one alluded to in the above passage here http://www.iamthewitness.com/books/Protocols.in.Modern.English.htm#protocol1.
If you asked him to talk about his most defining experience in the military, it wouldn’t be the mortar blast that continues to plague him to this second. Rather, it was an incident in basic training. He woke up in the middle of the night, and saw the soldier in the next bunk staring intensely at him.
“What’s wrong?” asked K.
“You’re Jewish, ain’t ya?” asked the stranger.
“Yeah, so what?”
“We learned that Jews have horns, tails and cloven hooves,” he explained. “That they come out when you’re asleep.”
“Oh,” K. responded in his best deadpan. “We don’t show them to the goyim.”
Before he had joined the Army, K. had come across whispered gossip concerning blood libel, But a guy staying up all night because he really thought my friend would turn into Beelzebub? That struck me as utterly daft. I mean, we’re talking about 1951, for crying out loud. You’d think that people wouldn’t be so ignorant by the mid-Twentieth Century.
As it turns out, much of that same ignorance persists well into the Twenty-First Century. After the events of 11 September 2001, and the subsequent attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, the anti-American sentiment espoused by some Middle East Muslims became almost inextricably linked to anti-Israeli rage. This led to the belief that Jews were manipulating the US to commit atrocity after atrocity against innocent Muslims.
This anger found expression in the re-emergence of a nineteenth-century literary tract. It’s original author had written it as a joke, a sharp commentary on political power and corruption, Later authors would plagiarize the initial satire and present it to the public as fact. Although discredited and thoroughly debunked over the years, it has once again become a universally revered text for those who hate Jews.
According to many sources, among them the Holocaust Museum “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion made its first appearance as such sometime between 1897 and 1903. Its author, Pyotr Rachovsky, served as the chief of foreign intelligence in the Okhrana, one of the most brutal spy agencies that ever existed. The book purported to be the actual minutes of a meeting of an 1897 international Jewish congress that met in Russia. Supposedly, these elders met to discuss their plans for taking over the world.
Rachovsky stole the bulk of his material from other sources, among them Hermann Goedsche’s 1868 novel Biarritz. Admittedly fiction, this book contained a chapter titled “At the Jewish Cemetery at Prague,” in which twelve elders, each representing a Hebrew tribe, meet in a graveyard to discuss plans for global dominion. Goedsche in turn ripped off several other sources. The first was the 1848 Alexandre Dumas Sr. novel Joseph Balsamo. The second was an 1797 letter circulated by a French Jesuit, Abbe Barruel, who blamed the French Revolution on a Masonic conspiracy, and nebulously connected the subsequent political tolerance of Jews by Napoleon III to the plot.**
The third source is one that also heavily influenced Rachovsky, and is considered by virtual consensus to be the most direct ancestor of the Protocols. Satirist Maurice Joly wrote The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in 1864 to poke fun at the stupidity of realpolitik. One can easily notice parallels between the Joly novel and Rachovsky’s work. In fact, some passages are almost verbatim. For example, the following, appears in the Joly work:
Like the god Vishnu, my press will have a hundred arms, and these arms will give their hands to all the different shades of opinion throughout the country.This corresponds to the following passage from “Protocols”:
These newspapers, like the Indian god Vishnu, will be possessed of hundreds of hands, each of which will be feeling the pulse of varying public opinion.The Joly book didn’t mention Jews at all. It instead consisted of a dialogue between the title characters. The machinations discussed wasn't attributed to Jews, but to power in general. In that light, one can see Joly as insightful with respect to how the ruling class sees the rest of us. And in some ways the story’s reminiscent of Antonio Gramsci’s analyses of power. The problem here is that in his retelling of Joly’s novel, Goedsche replaced the abstract notion of scheming aristocracy with a specific Jewish plot. Yet, Goedsche didn’t claim that the work reported an actuality. That was done by Rachovsky, who depicted these tales as real sometime around the turn-of-the Twentieth Century.
From there, a number of Russian papers began to report on or serialize the tract, in each instance characterizing it as fact; as if this 1897 Jewish congress on world domination actually happened.
As you probably have surmised by now, the malleable nature of the villains’ identities became one of the more horrific attributes of “Protocols.” This was a point not lost on Dr. Umberto Eco (Humanities, University of Bologna), who in his 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum noted that someone had arbitrarily introduced Jews as the masterminds behind Joly’s tongue-in-cheek plot, most likely to divert attention from real conspirators.***
The malleability doesn’t end there, either. While the main focus in the “Protocols” has been the international Jewish conspiracy since 1903, copious textual changes have cropped up over the years, each demonizing various political outliers as useful idiots, or harbingers of the plot’s success. Indeed, most versions of the “Protocols” one can find on the web bear little resemblance to the direct 1920 English translation done by Victor Marsden.**** For example, one passage that one finds in online editions:
The people who make up society (voters) are lame-brained numskulls who never achieve anything. They spend their time following astrology charts and football. They obviously can’t think logically.“The Protocols” as originally written and translated by Marsden don’t actually contain the character string “lame-brained numskulls.” There aren’t any references to astrology or football, either. Obviously, this is a means by which writers have “updated” the cultural context of the original. But in doing so, they clearly changed it. Likewise, some items that can loosely translate as the same thing, can become even further distorted by the addition of editorial comments that don’t appear in the original. For example, the above cite quotes the “Protocols” as saying:
3. People are basically evil by nature. The bad people in this world far outnumber the good. So the best form of government is not one that holds reasoned discussions with its people, but one that uses tyranny.The original says:
It must be noted that men with bad instincts are more in number than the good, and therefore the best results in governing them are attained by violence and terrorization, and not by academic discussion.Note that the original doesn’t have bulleted or numbered points, as do the later editions. Second, the addition of the line “People are basically evil by nature” is an extrapolation that again doesn’t appear in the original. Also, you’ll find the term ‘academic discussion’ replaced by ‘reasoned discussions,” which is especially meaningful when you realize that many who hold these beliefs today are at the core anti-intellectual. In the US and Europe, they tend to also be quite right-wing, and use the “Protocols” to rally a bigoted political base to support neo-conservative agendas.
And it gets worse. A passage in the original, “This task [of crushing benign, caring monarchies and other autocracies] is infected with the idea of freedom, so-called liberalism,” often appears as “using liberalism,” or in some cases “using socialism,” or “using leftism” as a means of weakening a population. Here, the implication is stark. Such writers deliberately omit the extent to which the original equates liberalism (a despised concept among contemporary “Protocols” fans) to freedom (a principle they highly cherished). In doing so, propagators of this tract can create boogeymen out of people they see as ideological enemies.
That’s not to imply that the original is any less insidious. At the same time, it does show just how reactionary, adaptive and manipulated this text is.
The degree to which “Protocols” has influenced contemporary conspiracy culture is small, but (admittedly) significant. A minuscule sampling of researchers will actually refer to such thing as ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government), or the “Jewish banking conspiracy. More will refer to anti-Semitic in more coded, generic ways such as “The Israel Lobby,” “The Rothchilds,” or “The Illuminati/Masonic conspiracy.” And some will broadly deny that the vast majority of Jews have anything to do with the “International Jewish Plot,” but they believe in that plot all the same.
The reason why I brought this topic up is several-fold. For starters, it’s an invalid argument that can gum up any legitimate queries by dumbing down the underlying mechanics of power to a highly isolated group of meanies. Second, it’s useful in rationalizing the bigotry that many have held against Jews for (literally) millennia.
Third, it ironically negates a core belief within anti-conspiracism.
____________
*Relax. He’s fine at the moment. That reminds me, I have to get back to him on our fantasy baseball league..
**In a 1993 paper titled “Commentary on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Dr. Daniel Keren points out that the bulk of French royalty and nobility were themselves Freemasons at the time of the Revolution.
***And no, Eco isn’t serious about there being actual conspirators. He just wanted to show how identities in such tracts can change back and forth to whomever one hates.
**** As I said in the previous post, I really don’t want to link to these sites, many of which are supported by Klan, fundamentalist Christian and Nazi groups and leaders. But in order to verify the comparison, you can find the one alluded to in the above passage here http://www.iamthewitness.com/books/Protocols.in.Modern.English.htm#protocol1.
