The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

It's a genuine first edition of a genuine fake document.

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The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a fabricated booklet that may have been written by Mathieu Golovinski, a French-Russian Okhrana (tsarist Russian secret police) operative. As a textbook example of black propaganda, it purports to detail the agenda for a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, including how to control the media, the banks, and the government. The Protocols have been the basis for innumerable anti-Semitic tracts throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, most notably Henry Ford's The International Jew and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. The Nazis heavily promoted the booklet to justify oppression of the Jews and the Holocaust, and paradoxically (yet not surprisingly) acted much like the Jews depicted in Protocols in plotting and enacting the exploitation and abuse of nearly anyone not a German in good standing — albeit with even more brutality.

Hoax[edit]

Despite being shown to be a hoax as far back as 1921,^[1][2] it is still distributed and believed by people who swallow whatever fiction fits with their racist views.^[3] In addition to its exposure as a fabrication by journalist Philip Perceval Graves of The Times in 1921, a pamphlet containing three essays by Lucien Wolf called The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs, which debunked the Protocols, was released in the same year.^[4] In 1935, a Swiss judge ruled the pamphlet to be a forgery in a case known as the Berne trial.^[5]

Origin[edit]

The text of the book that now circulates was originally plagiaristically cobbled together from three sources:^{[6]:97[7]:47,114}

1. The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, an 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly that did not mention Jews
2. A chapter from the antisemitic 1868 novel Biarritz by Hermann Goedsche
3. Der Judenstaat, an early Zionist tract by Theodor Herzl (1896)

The earliest known publication of the Protocols was when it was serialized in the Russian newspaper Znamya in August–September 1903; however, the Protocols itself was first mentioned in 1902.^[8]

Current use[edit]

Anti-Semitic groups have been pushing the book, and it is still in print, even promoted by such conspiracy-minded folks as Texe Marrs (who wrote an introduction to his own edition, with comments by Henry Ford),^[9] and (until his imprisonment) Kent Hovind.^[10]

On his album Extremist Won, Carl Klang (1953–2019), self-described as "America's #1 Patriotic Singer", recorded the song "The News Behind the News" which deals with the Protocols, calling them "the blueprint to the downfall of our nation".^{[note 1]}

David "Thelizardsdidit" Icke (described as a "fucking loon" by Cracked)^[11] "declared that the Protocols of Zion is evidence not of a Jewish plot, but of a reptilian plot of Illuminati lizards".^[12] We would ask how the hell he's getting lizards out of this document, but…

The Protocols are also regularly used as evidence of a Jewish conspiracy in the Islamic world: Hamas, for example, cited the text in its 1988 charter.^[13]

It has three stars on Amazon,^[14] which all most sane people would regard as three stars too many.^{[note 2]}

The last completed work of Will Eisner (1917–2005) was The Plot: The Secret History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Told in comic strip format, it details the origins and promotion of the forgery.^[15]

See also[edit]

• Behold a Pale Horse: Chapter 15
• Blood libel
• Explanatory Memorandum
• Goy — The plural form is used repeatedly throughout the book, and depending on the edition, every single use of the word may be followed by "(non-Jews)" for some bizarre reason. Why does a supposed handbook for a Jewish conspiracy need to repeatedly define a basic Hebrew term?
• Henry Ford - A devoted fanboy of the book.
• Illuminati
• International Jewish Conspiracy
• New World Order
• QAnon — part of the conspiracy map
• Zionism

External links[edit]

• Translation of the Protocols by Victor Marsden
• Dialogue in Hell online text (English)
• Protocols Project page at UC Santa Barbara

Sources[edit]

• Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. London: Serif, 1996.

Notes[edit]

References[edit]