yet further proof of our dire straits... nik.
www.hirhome.com The modern "Protocols of Zion"
How the mass media now promotes the same lies that caused the death of more than 5 million Jews in WWII
Historical and Investigative Research
25 Aug 2005, by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/mprot1.htm 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
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Genocides don’t just happen. The killers must think they kill in self defense. Which is to say that the victims of an extermination must first be perceived as a mortal danger. For this, a propaganda campaign will be necessary. The propaganda that got between 5 and 6 million Jews exterminated in WWII went by the name Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion. This series documents that this propaganda is once again being energetically spread by the Western mass media, just as it was in the prelude to WWII.
The next Catastrophe looms...
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Short Preface
How likely is a great anti-Jewish slaughter in the twenty-first century?
To answer this question is to make a forecast. Any kind of forecast requires the person making the prediction to evaluate patterns in the past in order to guess about the future. Thus, in order to get a feel for the likelihood of an anti-Jewish slaughter in the twenty-first century we examine the past to see whether such an event would be surprising, or else normal. As it turns out, it would be perfectly normal. For 2000 years in the Western world it has been more common than not for a century to contain at least one great anti-Jewish bloodletting. Unless otherwise specified, the items in the following list -- which is not complete, but which will suffice to make my point -- are culled from James Carroll's history of Western antisemitism, entitled Constantine's Sword:
1st century - Genocide of the Jews by the Romans (‘First Jewish War’)
2nd century - Genocide of the Jews by the Romans (‘Diaspora Revolt’ and ‘Second Jewish War’)
4th century - Following Emperor Constantine's Council of Nicaea (325), all sorts of imperial measures against the Jews, special taxes, prohibition on new synagogues, and prohibition of Christian-Jewish marriages.[00]
Church father Ambrose encourages burning of synagogues so as to abolish Judaism.
5th century - Atacks against Jewish communities during Holy Week, including the burning of synagogues.[00] A great massacre of Jews in Alexandria.
[There is a relative pause in anti-Jewish attacks, and relative tolerance toward Jews, due to the collapse of the political structure of the Roman Empire. Once the German aristocracies that conquered Europe converted to Catholicism, and the empire was reconstituted as the Germanic Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, the attacks are renewed.]
11th century - Crusaders massacre Jewish communities in the Rhineland.
12th century - Crusaders massacre Jews in Europe; persecution in Spain.
13th century - Forced conversions of Jews all over Europe.
14th century - Black Plague is blamed on Jews. Perhaps three hundred Jewish communities are wiped out. Jews in the Rhineland are exterminated. Jews in Seville are massacred, followed by widespread pogroms in Iberia.
15th century - Spanish inquisition. Many Jews are killed. More than 150,000 are expelled from Spain.
16th century - Inquisition becomes pan-European phenomenon.
17th century - Inquisition continues.
19th century - In 1827 the Russian Tsar began a process of slow-genocide against the Eastern Jews, by forced conscription into the Russian army for Jewish boys, starting at the age of eight. Somewhat later the rate of conscription for some populations of Jews was raised to 5 times higher than what was applied to any other population, and matching the rate of groups selected for special punishment. The terms of service in the Russian army were 25 years.[0]
19th century - Widespread pogroms against the Eastern Jews in the Russian Empire.[1]
20th century - Widespread pogroms against the Eastern Jews in the Russian Empire, and then a genocide by the German Nazis all over Europe.
The twentieth century massacres, still fresh, were especially bloody. One often hears the slogan “Never Again,” meaning never again a Holocaust such as was carried out by the German Nazis. The slogan is invoked almost as a magical incantation, as if its recitation had the power to prevent the next antisemitic mass atrocity. It does not. If practically every century there have been great massacres of Jews in the Western world, then the least risky prediction that a historian can make for the twenty-first century is that there will be another -- without even looking at the evidence for current trends. The burden of proof is therefore on those who believe this cannot happen again: they will have to document why the world is now different.
This is a burden they cannot meet.
The hostile propaganda that got hundreds of thousands of Jews persecuted and/or killed in Tsarist Russia, and then between 5 and 6 million Jews exterminated in WWII, is once again being energetically spread by the Western mass media. The result will be the same: a great massacre of Jews. This piece will document what the mass media does and how it prepares the ground for the next genocide, which is right around the corner. Unless this is quickly understood by the millions of people who will either kill, abet, or silently watch, the great Jewish Catastrophe of our times will soon overtake us.
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1. Introduction: The "Protocols of Zion" in the broadest historical perspective.
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George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” What he meant was that problems have causes; if they are not examined, these causes cannot be recognized when they return, and we must suffer their consequences all over again. In the case of a disastrous, genocidal war, such as WWII, we are talking about problems that really ought to be avoided. Best to pay close attention to the causes, then.
So let us ask the question: What causes one people to exterminate another?
I think the answer is simpler than the multitude of hand-wringing disquisitions on the WWII massacres have led us to believe. Yes, of course, many people follow orders without asking why, and so forth. But still, extermination is the most extreme of all possible human behaviors; people will not do it unless they think they are defending themselves.
So let us call that my hypothesis.
What my hypothesis predicts is that exterminations will be preceded by massive propaganda efforts meant to convince large segments of population A that population B represents a catastrophic and imminent danger to population A, and hence must be destroyed -- in self defense. Do we have evidence of such a massive propaganda effort prior to WWII?
We do.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Russian Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, produced a hoax that accused ‘the Jews’ of controlling all of the governments of Europe, and the United States, in addition to leading all the revolutionary movements, plus the capitalist enterprises. The document was called The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and it pretended to be the minutes of a secret meeting conducted by a circle of super-powerful Jews who in secret controlled everything. These supposed Jewish elders absurdly represented themselves as evil in the document, and explained to each other how they were going to destroy ‘gentile [read: Christian] civilization.’ They were just up to no good. In producing this hoax, the Tsar’s people were trying to prevent the revolution that was brewing by distracting the oppressed Russian masses with the danger that this especially oppressed and destitute minority, ‘the Jews,’ supposedly posed for everybody. The revolution was not averted, but the hoax of The Protocols had for consequence a series of pogroms, which is to say episodes of vandalizing and sacking of Jewish communities in the Russian Empire, including widespread massacres that cost tens of thousands of Jewish lives.[1a]
The Protocols subsequently became a bestseller all over Europe and the United States, quite despite the fact that in 1921 Phillip Graves from the Times of London published a front-page demonstration that it was a cut-and-paste job from three works of fiction, but especially from Maurice Joly’s Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a political analysis of Napoleon III’s repressive regime that had absolutely nothing to do with Jews, one way or another. In order to show this, Graves put excerpts from Joly’s Dialogues in Hell and from The Protocols side by side so that readers of the Times could see that they were practically identical.[2] To no avail. The Protocols continued to sell madly all over the Western world thanks to the sponsorship of wealthy antisemites such as Henry Ford and many others.[2a] The anti-Jewish hysteria continued to grow, and when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany he made The Protocols required reading in German schools.[3] In this way, a large multitude of ordinary Westerners was made to believe that they were in mortal danger from ‘the Jews’: the so-called ‘Jewish Peril.’
This fearful hysteria prepared the ground for extermination.
Now, the various claims in The Protocols were completely contradictory and each of them alone quite implausible: Why would ‘the Jews’ simultaneously act as one to promote capitalism and to destroy it?; How could ‘the Jews’ control all the governments of Europe and the US when they were the most oppressed population in the West, mostly dirt poor, and many of them still semi-slaves?; Why would ‘the Jews’ allow themselves to live in such extreme disadvantage if they were supposedly so powerful? And once the killings started, another question was pertinent: Why weren’t ‘the Jews’ using their supposedly enormous power to counter the savagery of the Russian pogroms and of the Nazi Final Solution? But the targets of this propaganda campaign -- ordinary gentiles -- for the most part did not stop to ask these questions because they were heirs to a tradition going back two-thousand years in which ‘the Jews’ had been demonized by Christian religious authorities as powerfully ‘evil,’ and moreover out to get ‘the Christians.’
Such accusations had produced many anti-Jewish massacres in the past. Analyzing the full list given at the top would keep us here too long, but the example of the fourteenth century is dramatic and instructive, because it bears a very close structural similarity to the Tsarist accusation: when 23 million europeans died in the Black Death of the fourteenth century, an imaginary Jewish conspiracy was blamed for it all, producing anti-Jewish slaughters in Europe and, in some places, exterminations.
These days we know that the Black Death was a plague epidemic originating probably in Central Asia which then spread to China, India, Egypt, all of Asia Minor, and reached Europe by 1346 or so. But the mediaeval Europeans didn’t know that. All they knew was that everybody was dying around them, and that they hated the Jews. So a rumor was circulated that all this dying originated in a Jewish scheme to poison the European drinking wells. As James Carroll explains in his history of Western antisemitism:
“. . .survivors in the cities [devastated by the plague] thought they knew the cause: a well-poisoning conspiracy of Jews. . . A masterly rumor identified a native of Toledo, one Jacob Pascal, whose name suggested Passover, as the initiator of the plot. A cabal (a word we have from ‘Kabbalah’) of Iberian Jews was the supplier of poison to Jewish agents elsewhere in Europe -- a first international conspiracy. Jews in Geneva, under torture, confessed that the rumor was true, which was all it took. As had been the case during the Crusades, the first major conflagration of anti-Jewish violence took place in the Rhineland, where Jews were slaughtered in large numbers. One chronicler reported that twelve thousand were put to death in Mainz -- an echo of [the Crusade of] 1096. . . .‘By the time the plague had passed,’ [historian] Barbara Tuchman observed, ‘few Jews were left in Germany or the Low Countries.’”[4]
The Jews also suffered as direct victims of the Black Death, of course, but the enraged Christians who thought they were defending themselves by exterminating the Jews did not stop to ask themselves why the Jews would poison themselves. Later, neither would Europeans in the twentieth century stop to examine the absurdities in The Protocols of Zion. The general similarities between the two cases are so striking that it is impossible not to see a causal chain at work: one accusation lays the ground for the next.
Even by the standards of the time, the Black Death accusations against the Jewish people were spectacularly absurd. Consider only that “About half of Norway’s population died when the Black Death (a plague epidemic) struck in 1349-50,”[5] so Norway suffered about as badly as England did.[6] And yet it should have been obvious to everybody that ‘the Jews’ had no opportunity to poison wells in Norway.
“Norwegians converted from paganism to Christianity in the course of nearly 100 years, largely as a result of coercive measures. In the year 1000, all non-Christians were banned from Norway in an effort to institutionalize Christianity as the national religion. Although the ban was presumably targeted at pagan adherents, it also put Norway out of bounds for Jews for over 800 years.”[7]
There were no Jews in Norway in 1349.
So this raises the question: Even if European Christians hated the Jews, still, how could they defy all logic to believe anything so ridiculous as the accusation that the Jewish people were responsible for the Black Death? Simple: ‘the Jews’ were supposed to be powerfully, and even supernaturally, ‘evil.’ After all, weren’t Christians hearing from their religious authorities every Sunday that ‘the Jews’ had killed G-d? If they were capable of that, then what wouldn’t -- and what couldn’t -- ‘the Jews’ do?
That first and most dramatic accusation (‘deicide,’ the killing of G-d), which appears in the canonical gospels, is false. Whether or not you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was G-d incarnate, the historical fact is that Jesus was executed by the Romans, something that even the gospels make clear. Of course, the gospels represent the Roman governor in Judea, Pontius Pilate, as reluctantly executing Jesus because he was threatened by ‘the Jews,’ who angrily demanded Jesus’ crucifixion. But there are several reasons why that particular claim is absurd.
First of all, the Jewish people were one of the largest populations in the Roman Empire, and they were spread out all over the Mediterranean and beyond.[8] More than 99.99% of the Jewish population, therefore, simply could not be present at Jesus’ execution. The only people who could have been there were a small fraction of the Jerusalem Jews. So it is impossible that ‘the Jews’ -- as a people -- killed G-d even if we assume that Jesus was G-d incarnate and that the account in the gospels is reasonably historical.
But we cannot assume that the passion account in the gospels is reasonably historical. All the ancient documents we have making reference to Pontius Pilate, outside of the gospels, are consistent: Pontius Pilate was a monster who executed Jews for fun, and who delighted in provoking them.[9] He hardly needed to be threatened by an angry mob in order to execute a Jew who made trouble for Rome.
And Jesus made trouble for Rome.
“All the High Priests [of the Jerusalem Temple] whom we see in the gospel narratives,” as historian Fergus Millar explains, “were Roman appointees,” which means the Temple was at this time a center of Roman collaboration.[10] The Romans naturally needed to prop up the prestige of the Temple against the intellectual and physical attacks of Jewish revolutionaries, the better to wield the Temple’s authority for Rome’s benefit. Therefore, if Jesus was arrested for causing a commotion in the Temple, as the gospels assert, then Jesus was making trouble for Rome; Pilate, who enjoyed killing Jews anyway, cannot have been reluctant to execute Jesus.
Finally, consider that crucifixion was a sacrilege to the Jews, and a symbol of the oppression of the Romans against them, which was extreme. Why would a Jewish mob demand the crucifixion of a fellow Jew? Here, for context, is another passage from James Carroll’s history of Western antisemitism:
“In the year 4 B.C.E., which also happened to be the year of Jesus’ birth, Herod the Great died. His death left a temporary power vacuum, which caused violent outbreaks among forces loyal to various pretenders to succeed Herod as Rome’s client king and among the followers of messianic movements who sought to seize an opening against Rome. The Romans smashed every rebellion and, with those legions pouncing from Syria, restored direct imperial rule. As summed up by the scholars Richard Horsely and Neil Asher Silberman: ‘The Roman armies swept through many of the towns and villages of the country, raping, killing and destroying nearly everything in sight. In Galilee, all centers of rebellion were brutally suppressed; the rebel-held town of Sepphoris was burned to the ground, and all its surviving inhabitants were sold into slavery.’ Thousands of Jews were killed. Villages in Galilee were laid waste. In Jerusalem where rebels had briefly taken charge, the Romans showed the lengths to which they were prepared to go to maintain control by swiftly executing anyone even suspected of collusion with the rebellion -- Josephus puts the number at two thousand. The Roman means of execution, of course, was crucifixion, and Josephus makes the point that indeed the victims were crucified. This means that just outside the wall of the Jewish capital, crosses were erected -- not three lonely crosses on a hill, as in the tidy Christian imagination, but perhaps two thousand in close proximity. On each was hung a Jew, and each Jew was left to die over several days of suffocation, as muscles gave out so that the victim could no longer hold himself erect enough to catch a breath. And once squeezed free of life, the corpses were left on their crosses to be eaten by buzzards.”[11]
Believing that an angry Jewish mob in first-century Judea demanded of Pontius Pilate that Jesus be crucified is exactly like believing that an angry Jewish mob in twentieth-century Germany demanded of Adolf Hitler that a controversial rabbi be sent to Auschwitz. This is not even remotely plausible, no matter what controversy had been sparked by the rabbi.
The accusation that ‘the Jews’ had killed G-d, once much of the eastern Mediterranean had begun to convert to Christianity, helped the Romans carry out an anti-Jewish extermination in the first and second centuries that can only be compared to the Nazi Final Solution, and which may have outdone it in relative terms. James Carroll writes:
“. . .in the climactic war of 66-73 C.E. [the first ‘Jewish War’], . . .Jerusalem was laid waste and hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed (Josephus and Tacitus put the number of Jewish dead in this first war at around 600,000; in the second ‘Jewish War’ sixty years later, the tally for Jewish victims is put at 850,000). . . [T]he vast number of victims were killed without the mechanized methods that make modern warfare so lethal, which is why analogies between Rome and the worst of twentieth century dictators [i.e. Adolf Hitler] may not be misplaced here. …if the [Roman] legions had had machine guns, bombs, railroads, and gas at their disposal, who is to say that any Jew would have survived the second century?”[12]
That looks bad enough, but in fact Carroll neglects to mention the ‘Diaspora Revolt,’ a genocidal installment that took place between the two ‘Jewish Wars’: “Historians estimate that many hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed by the Romans and Greeks during the ‘Diaspora Revolt’ of 115-17 C.E..”[13] The sum total is that the pattern of absurd accusations followed by anti-Jewish exterminations began early, some two thousand years ago. Each accusation has made the next one seem plausible.
A cultural inertia.
Now, since there have been anti-Jewish massacres in Europe for a long time, and since, in modern times, they have been preceded by absurd accusations of super-powerful Jewish conspiracies, one would expect modern, educated people to be ready to identify the next such absurd accusation. Worryingly, they are not.
Today the world is awash with the twin rumors that Israel supposedly controls the lone superpower’s hated foreign policy, and that ‘the Jews’ supposedly control the mainstream Western media. Few people seem to think that there is anything too alarming in such beliefs, despite their having the same basic structure as the Black Death accusation which led to anti-Jewish exterminations in the fourteenth century, and despite being practically identical to the Protocols of Zion accusations, which led to anti-Jewish exterminations in the twentieth century. The Jewish people certainly do not appear to think that they are on the eve of another catastrophe, just as they also didn’t want to believe the worst prior to the Nazi genocides in which 5 to 6 million European Jews were annihilated. But from the historical perspective the current climate should be alarming in the extreme.
In 2003, Mahathir Mohammed, the former prime minister of Malaysia, said the following:
“We [Muslims] are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people [the total Muslim population] cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.
. . .They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also.”[14]
The ‘evil’ Jews, says Mahathir, invented human rights and democracy because they thought they had a right to equality with others, and so that persecuting Jews would appear wrong. Are you following this argument? Mahathir blames the Jews for inventing human rights and democracy.
Mahathir is a fascist.
Mahathir obviously agrees that in the past the Jewish people have been persecuted and did not enjoy equal rights (which he defends). This means that, in his view, ‘the Jews’ were not controlling the world when “Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million.” But according to Mahathir matters are different today, for ‘the Jews,’ he says, “have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power.” And ‘the Jews’ are going to use this secret world power to do…what? Why, to wipe out the Muslims, says Mahathir! But Muslims shouldn’t just stand still and wait for this to happen: “We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. . .”
The above are just two excerpts from a speech in which Mahathir hammered away at the same point in a million different ways: ‘The super-powerful Jews are out to get us, and we need to defend ourselves before it is too late.’ The speech opened the 10th Organization of the Islamic Conference Summit, attended by every Muslim head of state in the world.
Mahathir got a standing ovation.
This is clearly designed to whip up hysterical fear of the Jews, just as Adolf Hitler’s identical accusations also were, with disastrous results. And Mahathir’s effort is not an isolated one. The old Tsarist hoax, The Protocols of Zion, is a bestseller in the Muslim world (and elsewhere) today. Consider only that state-owned Egyptian TV recently created a 40-part series entitled Horseman Without a Horse that has been viewed all over the world, and which is a dramatization of The Protocols of Zion.[15] And yet educated people are by and large not rushing to point out that an imminent anti-Jewish massacre is being prepared by such high-profile -- and widely agreed upon -- accusations, which are not radically different from the constant refrain heard in the West: that Israel and ‘the Jewish lobby’ supposedly control US foreign policy, and that ‘the Jews’ supposedly control the Western mass media (and all the banks!).
About the climate in the West, consider only what US presidential candidate Ralph Nader said in 2004, during the presidential campaign:
“The days when the chief Israeli puppeteer comes to the United States and meets with the puppet in the White House and then proceeds to Capitol Hill, where he meets with hundreds of other puppets, should be replaced.”[16]
Nader is supposedly a leftist, but what he says is indistinguishable from what the ultra-right-wing neo-Nazi websites write.[17]
It seems, therefore, that we are well on our way to proving George Santayana correct, once again. If these baseless and hysterical beliefs are once again allowed to run amok without contest, we are headed for another catastrophe.
So I will contest them.
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