Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

by David Aaronovitch

  This was a full three years after the public unmasking of the Protocols, and Kania was no country peasant, yet there isn’t even a hint of qualification in his words. During the same period, a Jewish writer attempted to comprehend what was going on in the minds of his fellow countrymen. “In Berlin,” he reported, “I attended several meetings which were entirely devoted to the Protocols. The speaker was usually a professor, a teacher, an editor, a lawyer or someone of that kind. The audience consisted of members of the educated class, civil servants, tradesmen, former officers, ladies, above all students, students of all faculties and years of seniority . . . I observed the students. A few hours earlier they had perhaps been exerting all their mental energy in a seminar under the guidance of a world-famous scholar in an effort to solve some legal or philosophical problem.” Now, the writer observed, they were angry, irrational, and bloodthirsty. He concluded sadly, “German scholarship [has] allowed belief in the genuine-ness of the Protocols and in the existence of a Jewish world conspiracy to penetrate ever more deeply into all the educated sections of the German population, so that now it is simply ineradicable.”32

  We can speculate that the educated classes were partly seduced by the neo-romanticism of the Protocols and their pseudo-intellectual content. But time and again we return to that phrase of Ford’s: “They fit.” And what these absurd forgeries appeared to fit was a world in which the middle classes, the salaried, the educated, the people who had something to lose, found themselves under threat—from communism, from industrialization, from uncertainty. These were the social classes who had exercised power and influence, and they were seeking some explanation for why everything was all now at hazard.

  What Happened Next

  However ridiculous the Protocols might have seemed to a Swiss judge, their propagation led to acts that ranged from the appalling to the unspeakable. In 1918, during the Russian Civil War, thousands of copies of the Nilus version were printed under the auspices of the White general Denikin in the Ukrainian city of Rostov and handed out to his troops, presumably to motivate them. Between 1918 and 1920, these same forces were responsible for the executing or massacre of up to 120,000 Jews before Denikin’s eventual defeat. In Germany, there was the Holocaust.

  Norman Cohn, in his book Warrant for Genocide, quotes the postwar testimony of SS captain Dieter Wisliceny, who was tried and executed in 1947 for his part in killing Hungarian, Greek, and Slovak Jews. A straight line, said Wisliceny, ran from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the precepts of the Nazis, and from there to the attempted murder of a race. The straightness of this line is evident from the activities of the Nazi academic Professor von Leers, last seen propagating the “Rabbi’s Speech” at the University of Jena, but by 1942 publishing The Criminal Nature of the Jews. As the Holocaust moved from improvisation to industrial organization, von Leers wrote, “Not only is each people morally justified in exterminating the hereditary criminals—but any people that still keeps and protects Jews is just as guilty of an offense against public safety as someone who cultivates cholera germs.”

  Von Leers, with whom we haven’t finished yet, was an extreme case. Most Germans were not involved in extermination and, even before the war, would not have described themselves as anti-Semitic. Can it be argued that, had there been no zur Beek and no Nilus to disseminate the Protocols, people would have behaved differently? At the very least, argues historian Richard S. Levy, they created a gulf between Jews and other Germans, so that when disaster struck, “the Protocols helped render Jews ineligible for rescue by the great majority of their fellowmen.”33 They also helped Adolf Hitler to believe that the war he himself had caused was actually the fault of the Jews, and that this justified the attempt to liquidate them.

  Carmen Callil’s 2007 book Bad Faith shows how the fabulist and spendthrift boulevardier Louis Darquier de Pellepoix (de Pellepoix being yet another of Darquier’s inventions) was helped into becoming Vichy’s commissioner for Jewish affairs and playing an active part in the delivery of French Jews to their wartime deaths by his complete belief in the authenticity of the Protocols. No wonder that after the war and the Holocaust, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, in a reflexive echo of Mein Kampf, argued that the provenance of the Protocols was not its main significance. “The chief political and historical fact of the matter is that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is a forgery.”34

  Nor did the Protocols entirely die as a consequence of the Second World War. Idi Amin promoted them in his mad Ugandan fiefdom. New translations were produced in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Croatia. No less than twelve editions of the Protocols were published after 1945 in Argentina, which had (and has) both sizable Jewish and German populations. In the 1970s, there was a sudden rash of conspiracy stories in the Argentinian popular press, in which it was claimed that a “Chief Rabbi Gordon” of New York City was involved in a plot to create a second Jewish state, this time in Patagonia, to be called Andinia. The tale sparked a dozen books elaborating on this conspiracy, many carrying direct excerpts from the Protocols. Needless to say, there was no Rabbi Gordon and no plot.35 In 1994, a car bomb went off outside the Jewish Argentine Mutual Association in Buenos Aires, killing eighty-five people. It was not only the worst terrorist outrage in Latin American history, it was the worst act of anti-Semitic terrorism since the death of Hitler.

  The Protocols and the Middle East

  Gaza City, when I visited it in May 2003, was a terrible place: its beach a parody with smashed concrete and rusting iron, the city a warren of unfinished houses and tangled electric cables. On three sides, and overhead, were the Israelis, penning a population of more than a million Palestinians into a narrow strip of dust. The strongest political and social association among the Palestinians had come to be the group known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. That spring, I was there to see one of the leaders of Hamas, and to ask him about a most extraordinary aspect of his group’s program.

  The Hamas Covenant is about twenty pages long and made up of thirty-six articles. It is a mixture of political manifesto, historical observation, and exaltation to the faithful. It begins with a quotation from the 1920s founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna—“Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it has eliminated its predecessors”—and sets out the nature and duties of the membership, who must be good and pious Muslims.

  Article Seventeen is about “the role of Muslim women” but contains a digression concerning the enemies of Hamas, who will use every effort to further their cause, including education curricula, movies, and culture, “using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist organizations which take all sorts of names and shapes such as: the Free Masons, Rotary Clubs . . . and the like . . . Those Zionist organizations control vast material resources, which enable them to fulfill their mission amidst societies, with a view of implementing Zionist goals.”

  By the time the reader reaches Article Twenty-two, “On the Powers That Support the Enemy,” the scale of this malign mission has expanded.

  This wealth [allowed the Zionists to] take over control of the world media . . . They used this wealth to stir revolutions in parts of the globe . . . They stood behind the French and Communist Revolutions . . . They stood behind World War I so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate . . . They obtained the Balfour Declaration and established the League of Nations . . . They also stood behind World War II . . . and inspired the establishment of the United Nations . . . There’s no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it.

  And if you think you have heard all this somewhere before, Article Thirty-Two, “The Attempts to Isolate Palestinian People,” confirms it. “Zionist scheming,” the Covenant claims, “has no end, and after Palestine they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates . . . Their scheme has been laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their present cond
uct is the best proof of what is said there.”

  It is like one of those novels in which the hero encounters an archaic or ancient legend which has somehow managed to survive, still potent, to the modern day. So, a Palestinian child in a Gazan class at the beginning of the twenty-first century may well be hearing things written by a Parisian lawyer about Napoleon III 140 years earlier, falsified by a Russian spy three decades later, and used as a pretext for racial mass murder in Germany.

  Inside one of these concrete houses in Gaza, its walls and stairs bare, I met the man who was then Hamas’s number two. Abdel-Aziz Rantisi wore tan slacks and one of those ubiquitous checkered shirts that are the new uniform for men in the Middle East. A serious-looking man with dark eyebrows, he had once been a pediatrician, his radicalization dating from a period he spent exiled to a no-man’s-land on the Lebanese-Israeli border with four hundred others. Here in Gaza, in a room with curtains closed against spying eyes, containing a child’s model of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and a picture of al-Banna, we conducted a short interview. He spoke partly in English and partly in Arabic.

  Toward the end, I asked him directly about the Protocols and what they were doing in the Hamas Covenant. Rantisi frowned. “You know,” he said, “when I first heard about this document, I didn’t want to believe it. But then I saw what was happening in Palestine and I could see that it was genuine.” It fitted then, it fits now. Reality provides the best commentary. Hamas was then the second-largest organization among all Palestinians, and was growing fast as hope for peace receded. Rantisi, however, was dead within a few months. The second attempt on his life by a helicopter gun-ship succeeded. He was by that time the leader of Hamas, having replaced the assassinated blind Sheikh Yassin some weeks previously.

  What I learned on that journey was that invocations of the Protocols and other manifestations of European anti-Semitism were rife in the Arab and wider Muslim world. Take just one example, from the “Political National Education” page of the Palestinian Authority daily newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadida (January 25, 2001). There it claimed that “disinformation has been one of the bases of moral and psychological manipulation among the Israelis . . . The Protocols of the Elders of Zion did not ignore the importance of using propaganda to promote the Zionist goals.” And it directly quoted our old friend Protocol Twelve, though leaving out any archaic references to the god Vishnu.

  The Palestinians are few in number and the nature of their grievance against some Jews is well understood. The tensions in the Middle East also exemplify the danger that the Protocols still represent. At the time of this writing, there is considerable concern that the Islamic Republic of Iran might be developing a nuclear weapon. As the prime target for such a weapon, Israel might seek to take preemptive action—action which could lead to a wider war—as it did in 1981, when it bombed the first Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.

  In April 2004, an Iranian TV station broadcast a documentary series titled Al-Sameri wa al-Saher. The series’ purpose was to explain to Iranians how the Jews control Hollywood. For example, Funny Girl—starring “the ugly Jewish actress Barbra Streisand”—was one of a number of movies designed to depict the Jews favorably. Tootsie was another. Yentl “ dealt with the Zionists’ wish to benefit from feminism.” The Matrix was a “meeting point between Hollywood and Jewish Zionist fundamentalism”; Lawrence of Arabia was an attempt to “infantilize the Arabs”; and Alien was designed to demonize non-Westerners. All of this, a narrator claimed, was “in total compliance with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

  But just in case the Iranian viewer of the early twenty-first century was not fully versed in the story of the Protocols, the documentary carefully outlined the story of the Basel Congress of 1897, with its own new twist. In this version, some Russian policemen set fire to the congress hall while the delegates were inside. Terrified, “the Jews fled, and the policemen went inside and gathered up all the documents and sent them to Moscow.” Among these writings they found what was later called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “The Protocols were divided into twenty-four parts,” the narrator claimed, “and included the Satanic Jewish ideas of taking over the world using a Jewish government, after destroying all of Orthodox Russia, Catholic Europe, the pope’s reign, and Islam.”

  In May and June 2008, the Iranian television news channel IRINN showed a series titled The Secret of Armageddon, in which various academics and “researchers” testified to the truth of the Protocols. The narrator concluded the series by tying the old conspiracy to new ones:

  Today, there are many indications that the “hidden hands” of world Zionism were involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack. According to a large group of Western intellectuals, the Zionists are the real rulers of the United States. According to irrefutable documents published by independent American media outlets, the Zionists used intelligence agents and spies, with the full cooperation of agencies with[in] the country, to carry out this terrorist operation in full view of the world, in order to prepare the ground for taking over Afghanistan and Iraq, and to realize the dream of a greater Israel.

  The thread from Goedsche to the present day has never properly been snapped. Johann von Leers died in 1965, incidentally, but not in prison or in Germany or even in a South American hideaway. Somehow he had fled to the Middle East, lain low, converted to Islam under the name of Omar Amin, and then resurfaced in Egypt as an adviser on propaganda to the Arab nationalist government of President Nasser. One of Nasser’s practices, while von Leers was with him, was to hand out, to those who wanted them and those who didn’t, copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

  2. DARK MIRACLES

  The Communist Party is based on the principle of coercion which doesn’t recognize any limitations or inhibitions. And the central idea of this principle of boundless coercion is not coercion by itself but the absence of any limitation whatsoever—moral, political, and even physical. Such a party is capable of achieving miracles

  —GEORGY PYATAKOV, CONVERSATION WITH NIKOLAI VALENTINOV1

  On January 23, 1937, a trial began in central Moscow, the second of three great Soviet judicial events that were to shock the world. Under the high ceiling of a room that had been, in pre-revolutionary days, part of the fashionable Nobles’ Club, seventeen senior members of the Communist Party confessed to having done everything they could to undermine the new Soviet Union and to bring about its collapse. For a week, during morning, afternoon, and evening sessions, an audience composed of party members, selected “workers,” representatives of the diplomatic corps, and foreign journalists listened with growing consternation and bewilderment as the seventeen confessed to a secret campaign of deliberately sabotaging Soviet industry. And as if this weren’t diabolical enough, the conspirators agreed that they had done this in collaboration with the Soviet Union’s greatest enemies, the German National Socialists—all at the behest of the renegade exile, Leon Trotsky. The story that came out at the trial went like this.

  In August 1931, Georgy (Yuri) Leonidovich Pyatakov, chairman of the Central Administration of Chemical Industries of the USSR, traveled to Germany on an official visit for discussions with local civil servants and industrialists. However, these legitimate contacts were not the only people he met. He also had a meeting that was well outside the official itinerary. In fact, the encounter was top secret, even from the Soviet security apparatus.

  This clandestine rendezvous, arranged through intermediaries, took place at the restaurant Am Zoo just off Berlin’s fashionable Kurfürstendamm. Waiting for Pyatakov at a small table was a young, dark-haired man whom Pyatakov would have known immediately—though he hadn’t seen him for a number of years—as Leon Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov.

  Now Pyatakov, who in the 1920s had been one of Trotsky’s most fervent supporters, was no longer an ally of the exiled leader, having on a number of occasions made clear his later allegiance to Trotsky’s successful nemesis, Stalin. Nevertheless, he sat down with Sedov and listened to what the yo
ung man had to say. Apparently, Sedov had come at his father’s urgent behest.2 There may have been a recent lull in Trotsky’s never-ending campaign against Stalin, but according to Sedov, the struggle was now being resumed. Except this time Trotsky had allies, big allies, at the heart of the Communist Party itself. The followers of two other major leaders, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, were going to join with Trotsky’s acolytes in an all-out attempt to remove Stalin from power. “Trotsky asks,” said Sedov, “do you, Pyatakov, intend to take a hand in this fight?”

  As the waiters cleared away the dishes around the two Russians and as other customers sipped their coffees, Pyatakov gave his consent: he was in. Sedov was delighted. His father, he said, had never had any doubt that, despite their earlier falling-out, Comrade Pyatakov would step up to the plate when he was needed. Then the son outlined the plan. It was Trotsky’s view that there was no way to get rid of Stalin by anything as noble as a mass movement of the workers and peasants. Only a strategy of “wrecking” was likely to work, in which the achievements of the rapidly industrializing socialist state were systematically undermined through sabotage and terrorism. But it had also been concluded that such wrecking was insufficient on its own. The plotters would require the help of countries antagonistic toward the still youthful Soviet Union. A betrayal of all Bolshevik values though this might seem, it was necessary to get the job done. “Whoever tries to brush these questions aside,” said Sedov, passing on what Trotsky had told him, “signs his own testimonium pauperatis.”3 Pyatakov didn’t demur.