Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History Read Online Free PDF Page B

within it the missing link between the events that had turned the world upside down and the Jews who seemed so prominent in upending it. It was what would now be called the smoking gun.
    What were the Protocols ? They consisted of eighty pages or so of instructions and observations with the amibitious goal of destroying all existing powers—empires, kingdoms, churches—and establishing a new world empire ruled by a supreme Jewish autocrat from the House of David. Getting to this hyperexalted point required the fomenting of class hatred, the provoking of wars, the incitement of revolutions, the discrediting of national institutions, and the promotion of liberalism to undermine traditional values and loyalties. This would lead to socialism, then Bolshevism; states would die and eventually the world would cry out for order. And when it did, guess who (with the help of the Freemasons) would be ready? The true, supreme—and Jewish—government of the world.
    Set out under twenty-four headings, the Protocols now read like a series of lectures given to a senior management team by a very determined CEO, and much of what is said is couched in lofty abstraction. Toward the beginning of Protocol One, for example, we are told, “It must be noted that men with bad instincts are more in number than the good, and therefore the best results in governing them are attained by violence and terrorisation than by academic discussions.” You can almost imagine a number of the supposed plotters nodding along, and some of the more conscientious or junior elders noting it all down on the paper provided.
    Taken together, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion amounts to the ultimate election manifesto. There are sections on foreign policy, security, armaments, monopolies, the press, tax policy, and education. But this is a manifesto expressly designed to be hidden from the electorate. It is relentlessly Machiavellian in tone, calculating how to use the weakness of men for the ends of the would-be rulers. Take Protocol Twelve, on the control of the press. As the speaker says, “Literature and journalism are two of the most important educative forces, and therefore our government [the Jews] will become proprietor of the majority of the journals . . . This, however, must in nowise be suspected by the public.” But how do you divert such suspicions?
All journals published by us will be of the most opposite in appearance, tendencies and opinions, thereby creating confidence in us and bringing over to us our quite unsuspicious opponents, who will thus fall into our trap and be rendered harmless . . . All our newspapers will be of all possible complexions—aristocratic, republican, revolutionary, even anarchical . . . Like the Indian pagan god Vishnu, they will have one hundred hands and in each shall beat the pulse of a different intellectual tendency. 5
    There is also a call, not made even by the most liberal Swedish or Dutch party today, for more pornography. “Senseless, filthy, abominable literature” should be disseminated by the conspirators, so as “to provide a telling relief by contrast to the speeches and party programs, which will be distributed from exalted quarters of ours.” So the pill of seriousness will be sweetened by the honey of smut, a kind of infernal Reithianism.
    But if the Protocols were indeed born out of a meeting or a series of lectures, who exactly delivered them, when, and where? The German editor of the edition in circulation in 1919 was one Gottfried zur Beek—the pen name of a seventy-year-old former army officer, Captain Ludwig Müller von Hausen, who had dedicated the work “To the Princes of Europe.” In the introduction to his edition, zur Beek explains how he came by the text. History records that in August 1897, in the Swiss city of Basel, the First Zionist Congress was held. What wasn’t recorded, he says, was that alongside the official plenaries, which were open to all and which discussed the question of