released 07 aug 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* Wil Eisner was one of the godfathers of American cartoonistry when he died at age 87 in 2005; the comic industry award, the "Eisner", is named after him. His last work, a graphic novel titled THE PLOT, is subtitled THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION. For those who haven't heard of the PROTOCOLS, it is a tract claiming to have been written by Jews detailing their plans for world domination. Mr. Eisner, who was Jewish, wanted to learn the facts and make them known.
THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION has a complicated history, going back to 1848, when much of Europe underwent a wave of revolutions. King Louis Philippe of France abdicated, to be replaced by a democratically-elected president, Louis Napoleon, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1852, Louis Napoleon betrayed the nation by leading a successful coup d'etat and installing himself as Emperor Napoleon III.
Napoleon III managed to keep the public generally complacent, but there were people who fought back against him and his authoritarian state, one being a lawyer and classic hothead radical named Maurice Joly, born in 1821. He wrote several tracts attacking Napoleon III, one of them being THE DIALOGUE IN HELL BETWEEN MACHIAVELLI & MONTESQUIEU, which he had printed in Brussels in 1864 and then smuggled into the country. The tract imagined a debate in which Machiavelli outlined plans for seizing and maintaining authoritarian control of a nation. Napoleon III was not mentioned specifically, but it was only too clear who Joly's Machiavelli was speaking for, and Joly ended up being thrown behind bars. He'd been there before; he would be again.
Napoleon III's reign ended in 1870, when France was humiliatingly defeated by Prussia, leading to a public uprising in Paris. The Paris Commune was ruthlessly crushed, but Napoleon III's regime had been discredited, and he died in exile in England in 1873. The French wanted no more emperors. Joly, for whatever reasons, committed suicide in 1878 and would have been forgotten, except for an accident of history.
In the late 19th century, Russia was in a state of unrest, with a backwards imperial regime led by Tsar Nicholas II torn between conservatives and reformists. A faction of conservatives, wishing to turn the Tsar against the reformists, worked with the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, to fabricate a document to convince the Tsar that Jews were conspiring against his regime and that the reformists were part of this conspiracy. They approached Mathieu Golovinski, born in 1875 in Russia, to do the job for them.
Golovinski was an opportunist who often produced authentic-sounding forged documents for the authorities. He apparently liked to play both sides, a practice which had the downside of making him lots of enemies when the wind shifted and took away his cover. He was exiled to France in 1896, where he made some money working for the Okhrana, feeding propaganda to French publications.
In 1898, a representative of the conservative faction met Golovinski in Paris and requested that he produce a document to demonstrate the existence of a Jewish conspiracy. Golovinski was on a tight schedule, so he simply took Joly's DIALOGUE, then largely forgotten, and used it as a template for his own tract, THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, rewriting the DIALOGUES but retaining their organization and thinking -- even borrowing the same text here and there when Joly's comments seemed particularly sharp.
How much influence the PROTOCOLS had on the Tsar is difficult to say, but a Russian priest and antisemite named Sergius Nilus picked up the document and proceeded to publish several editions, apparently in somewhat different forms with various titles. In the meantime, the Russian state slid into World War I and then revolution. Golovinski, always the opportunist, signed up with the Bolsheviks, ironically becoming an aide to Leon Trotsky, the most prominent Jew in the new regime. Golovinski died in 1920.
The PROTOCOLS resurfaced after World War I, the first publication outside of Russia taking place in 1919 in Germany. To antisemites, obviously the new Bolshevik state that had taken over Russia and talked of world revolution was a front for the Jewish conspiracy outlined in the PROTOCOLS. By 1920, the document had spread all over Europe, and the American industrialist Henry Ford was publishing elements of it in his local newspaper, the DEARBORN INDEPENDENT, under the title of THE INTERNATIONAL JEW (the PROTOCOLS have had a tendency to pop up again and again in different forms and under different titles, mutating somewhat in the same way as urban legends). Ford's series was published in book form and printed in 16 languages.
It even infected a British politician named Winston Churchill, though he assumed that it represented an underground conspiracy of one Jewish faction behind Bolshevism, working against a legitimate faction behind Zionism. The TIMES of London, having read an English translation of the PROTOCOLS titled THE JEWISH PERIL, was dubious, neither accepting the document nor denouncing it as a fraud, and suggesting further investigation was in order.
In 1921, a Russian expatriate in Constantinople named Mikhail Raslovev contacted a TIMES reporter there named Philip Graves. Raslovev had discovered Joly's DIALOGUES and neatly outlined the parallels between it and the PROTOCOLS, showing resemblances and outright borrowings far too strong to possibly be coincidental. The TIMES paid Raslovev 300 pounds for his work and then, having found another copy of Joly's DIALOGUES in the British Museum for confirmation, prominently announced that the PROTOCOLS were a fake.
The TIMES articles were influential and destroyed any credibility the PROTOCOLS might have had in respectable society. In 1926, Henry Ford, faced with libel suits, completely recanted, detailing major falsehoods in the THE INTERNATIONAL JEW and abjectly begging forgiveness. However, among the not-so-respectable, the PROTOCOLS thrived. Not only did Adolf Hitler absorb them as part of his case against the "vile Jew", but the PROTOCOLS were printed all over the world in great numbers.
In 1934, the united Jewish communities of Switzerland raised a libel case in court against Nazis who were distributing the PROTOCOLS in their country. The judge asked both sides to produce expert witnesses; the Jewish lawyers were able to produce several, the Nazis weren't able to bring forward one, leading to a postponement of the trial to April 1935. The plaintiffs crushed the Nazi defense, with the TIMES articles and Henry Ford's recantation being important elements. The Swiss court concluded that the PROTOCOLS were "trash", "ridiculous nonsense", and slapped a fine and a cease and desist order on the Nazis.
* Hitler's antisemitic regime remained alive and well, however, at least long enough to unleash a devastating world war, finding time during the conflict to rob, enslave, and murder a large proportion of Europe's Jews. Hitler's Reich was crushed and discredited, but the PROTOCOLS outlived him, with the document continuing its seedy dark existence on the antisemitic fringe. Arab states, to absolutely no surprise, like to print it and distribute it. It was even published in Japanese in 1987, and despite the fact that the number of synagogues in Nippon might be thought to be counted on the fingers of one hand at best, surprisingly the document said to have a following there -- not among antisemites, but among Japanese ultranationalists who think the PROTOCOLS have a lot of good ideas for Japan to emulate. The PROTOCOLS can still be found on the Internet on antisemitic websites.
In 1964, the US Senate judiciary committee issued a report denouncing the PROTOCOLS, with a Russian court doing the same in 1993. In 1999, the Paris L'EXPRESS published research by a Russian scholar named Mikhail Lepekine, who had access to old Tsarist Okhrana files and was able to detail the creation of the PROTOCOLS. Still, the document lives on, as much a prop to antisemites as the swastika.
* I found THE PLOT a quick, entertaining, informative if somewhat heavy-handed read, but though I find debunkery interesting, it's mostly as an amusement. THE PLOT basically preaches to the faithful, since nobody who didn't already believe everything in the PROTOCOLS would take it seriously for an instant. The PROTOCOLS less fills me with outrage than weariness, "deja moo": I have heard this BS before.
Sure, the PROTOCOLS and its like have to be answered if simply as a form of vaccination to keep the nonsense from spreading, but aside from some useful data, the major appeal is self-flattery: after seeing some of the things people will believe, I feel like I'm not doing so badly for myself after all.