Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

The document purports to be the collected notes from an 1897 conference in Switzerland, surreptitiously convened by this shadowy Hebrew organization. So a better translation of the title would be Minutes from the Meetings of the Zionist Chieftains. The book outlines an insidious Jewish plot for global conquest, which involves subverting whole cultures, manipulating world economic markets, instigating wars... pretty much your run-of-the-mill supervillainy. Precisely why we should believe that a group unable to control the distribution of their own meeting minutes would be capable of controlling international affairs, simply defies reason.

But who cares? It isn't like The Protocols is going to convert anyone. Its function is to provide a plausible excuse for a bigot to trade in his existing Jewphobia for overt racism. Most screwballs only tackle this monster after they've already plodded their way through The Turner Diaries and a few dozen photocopied hate tracts. For this reason, it doesn't matter that The Protocols was and is a pathetic hoax. Once a nutjob decides to believe the book is genuine, nothing you can say will ever change his mind. He wants to believe.

For the record, The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion was proven to be a fake as far back as 1921. That year, a newspaper article in the London Times traced the meat of the book back to a plagiarization of a plagiarization of a work whose original target was Napoleon Bonaparte. The ultimate source, published in 1864, was titled Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavelli et Montesquieu ("Discussions Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in Hell"). The book was a satirical commentary on Napoleon's insatiable lust for world domination. No Jews whatsoever appear in the story.

That work was just plain ripped off in 1868 by German novelist Hermann Goedsche, who took out all of the Napoleon references and replaced him with the Jews. His book, To Sedan, contains a chapter called "The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel." It describes a centennial meeting between the Devil and the upper echelons of world Jewry. This section was extracted in 1891 and repackaged as a nonfiction essay titled "The Rabbi's Speech," which became the primary source for The Protocols.

The end product was cobbled together in 1895 by an officer of the Russian secret police, Pytor Ivanovich Rachovsky. The book was conceived as propaganda, calculated to rally the Russian citizenry behind the Czar as he took whatever steps would be necessary to fend off the ubiquitous Jewish-Masonic threat.

Which is why, even when amongst only each other, the Zionists cannot help but compare themselves disfavorably to their enemy:

The people under our guidance have annihilated the aristocracy, who were their one and only defence and foster-mother for the sake of their own advantage, which is inseparably bound up with the well-being of the people.

Or how about:

The aristocracy, which enjoyed by law the labour of the workers, was interested in seeing that the workers were well fed, healthy and strong. We are interested in just the opposite—in the diminution, the killing off of the goyim.

Printed copies did not surface publicly until 1905, courtesy of freaky publisher Sergei Nilus. Once the book hit the public, it became a sensation. American industrialist Henry Ford adapted an English translation and distributed thousands of copies nationwide. And needless to say, it was a big hit in Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler was a true believer, and vouched for the book's authenticity in his best-selling autobiography Mein Kampf:

To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. . . . Anyone who examines the historical development of the last hundred years from the standpoint of this book will at once understand the screaming of the Jewish press. For once this book has become the common property of a people, the Jewish menace may be considered as broken.

But despite its age, its thoroughly-debunked origins, and most of all its completely preposterous tale, this lousy fake is still popular the world over. Recently, the book has become a sensation in the Arab world. In 2002, Egyptian television broadcasted a 41-episode miniseries called "Horseman without a Horse." This late-19th-century period piece follows the courageous Arabs who discover The Protocols and, despite Zionist opposition, translate and circulate the book to the rest of the world. Egyptian TV broadcasted the episodes daily throughout the month of Ramadan, thereby capitalizing on a huge captive audience.

If you read just one classic work of Jew-baiting propaganda this year, make it The Protocols.

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