SEASON ONE, BONUS: THE UR-CONSPIRACY THEORY

Note: This is a lightly edited version of the script Gecko used for our episode of the same name, reproduced here for easy searchability and access to references. You can listen to it on YouTube or Spotify. - Kat

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Hello, and welcome to Podcastodon. I’m a piece of construction material. Tonight we’re talking about the big one, the one it all comes back to. The ur-conspiracy theory. The holy grail of misinformation. It’s the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

What are the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? It’s a document, purporting to be the record of a meeting held by a secret cabal of Jewish elders discussing their plan to seize global control.

It’s also fake. It was mostly plagiarized from 1864’s Dialogues Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in Hell. People pointed this out as early as 1921.

And yet, the Protocols still affect us.

Many people still think the Protocols is a factual document.¹ It’s also a foundational text in conspiracy theorist circles, influencing everything from David Icke’s “reptilian humanoids” theory² to QAnon.³

Most hoaxes don’t last this long. They fall by the wayside once other, more interesting hoaxes come along.

When something sticks around for a century or more, it’s easy to assume it’s always been here. It’s just one of those things. Grass grows, birds fly, and intricately-detailed plans for world domination attributed to small cabals of Jews circulate our cultural consciousness, promoting religious hatred and destroying our social trust.

That’s not how things work. Everything comes from somewhere.

When it comes to thinking about antisemitism, most people automatically think back to the Nazis. This isn’t something to shame people over, the Nazis are probably the most famous antisemites in history by a country mile, but while they liked The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they didn’t come up with it. Neither did they have a monopoly on it.

That’s where this podcast comes in. We’re going to look at the origins of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, how it got popular, and how it ended up in America.

If we want to really get behind The Protocols, we need to start in late-Imperial Russia. It wasn’t a good place to live, especially if you were Jewish.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Russia was lagging behind the other Great Powers of Europe. Its technology was backwards and its industrial capability was real fucking small. The Empire was lead by the incompetent Tsar Nicholas II, a man as fanatically reactionary as he was unprepared to run one of the largest states on Earth.⁴ It was a time of troubles. The Russian state was so short on funds it couldn’t always pay its military, and 80 percent of its population were illiterate peasants. Under the guidance of the capable Russian finance minister Sergei Witte, the Empire turned to industrialization to solve its problems. His reforms successfully built up Russia’s industrial base, but it also brought trouble.⁵ Industrialization lead to labor unrest, as the new class of Russian factory workers began to look for a way to gain a bit of control over the new economic system. At the same time, Russia’s military defeat at the hands of Japan had rattled people’s faith in the Empire.⁶ As always when things get bad, people looked for someone to blame.

Late-imperial Russia was also a time of mysticism, especially among the aristocracy.⁷ Into this milieu of esoteric religion and social unrest came Sergei Nilus, with a book he’d written called The Great Within the Small. Appended to it was a manuscript called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.⁸ Nilus was a minor Russian landowner who’d lost most of his worldly wealth and blamed Witte’s economic policy. He’d had a mental breakdown, and became obsessed with the coming of the anti-Christ, which he thought was connected to the growing revolutionary forces in Russia and the Jews.⁹

Nilus and his book did well among the Russian elite, which was real eager for more mysticism and more antisemitism. The political climate in Russia at the time was overwhelmingly antisemitic. Anti-Jewish militants called the Black Hundreds carried out pogroms all across Russia with impunity, egged on by the propaganda of ultra-conservative politicians and Russia’s feared secret police, the Okhrana.¹⁰

It was as a weapon in this tumultuous political environment that the Protocols first saw political use. Its target was slightly different from the rest of the reams of antisemitic propaganda the Russian right was cranking out. Rather than just accusing the Jews of subverting Russia from within and spreading irreligiosity, it attempted to link Jewish conspiracy to the policies of Sergei Witte. Witte was unpopular with much of the Russian aristocracy for his new economic policy, and attacking him over connections to Jewish bankers abroad was a major point in their defamation campaign. Many of the steps in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’s outline of the Jewish economic takeover, like the implementation of the gold standard,¹¹ came directly from Witte’s economic program.¹²

The Protocols became popular in Imperial Russia because the Russian ruling class was extremely religious and needed to deflect blame. The conservative Russian government was totally unwilling to make any concessions to the growing Russian revolutionary movement, and sidelined reforming figures like Witte during the 1905 revolution. Rather than accept culpability for any of Russia’s problems, they deflected blame onto a group they already hated and mistrusted. Not for the last time in Russian history, right-wing Russians blamed a revolution on the Jews.¹³

As a document, The Protocols is fairly strange. Despite the full text first appearing in The Great and the Small, fragments of it had been published in the Russian newspaper Znamia a few months before, and the material is largely cribbed from Maurice Joly’s 1864 French political satire Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu¹⁴ and Herman Goedsche’s 1868 novel Biarritz.¹⁵ Joly’s work doesn’t even mention Jews. Its discussion of political authoritarianism is essentially grafted onto the grand Jewish scheme in Goedsche’s work to fill out the details of the conspiracy. The authorship of The Protocols is still unknown, but given the way the text was assembled, “author” might be the wrong word to describe them.

Maybe “book-necromancer?”

Eventually another Russian revolution came around, and once again, the Russian establishment needed a scapegoat. The Russian White Army’s intelligence unit OSWAG featured a large number Black Hundred supporters who blamed the Jews for Bolshevism, land seizure, and both revolutions. They set about distributing The Protocols as much as the could.¹⁶ Soon copies of The Protocols were circulating White Army units in huge numbers.¹⁷ The Protocols became a staple of anti-Bolshevik agitation during the Russian Civil War.¹⁸ Jewish conspirators subverting the empire was a story people were familiar with. It was easier to communicate than a detailed refutation of the Bolshevik platform.

From Russia, The Protocols jumped to the rest of the world via the growing global anti-Communist movement of the 1920s. In America, the man who provided the link was Boris Brasol. Brasol was a Russian attorney, First World War veteran, monarchist, and committed anti-Semite who had the fortune of being outside of Russia on a diplomatic mission when the Bolsheviks took power. Rather than going back to Russia to face some grim fate under the Bolsheviks, Brasol settled in the United States and got a job in American military intelligence. It was there that he made contact with Dr. Harris A. Houghton.¹⁹

Dr. Houghton was another military intelligence officer, and his primary interest was chasing subversive Jews. How did he define a “subversive Jew?” Well, he ordered his subordinates to “investigate any Jew so long as he was prominent.”²⁰ When his personal assistant Natalie de Bogory received a Russian copy of The Protocols from Brasol, he saw an opportunity. Miss de Bogory translated the book into English,²¹ and soon this three-person group was working to distribute copies to the Department of Justice and their old employer, the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division.²²

This didn’t pan out, so Brasol went public. He was one of three different people to publish an English translation of The Protocols in the year 1920,²³ and from there things took off. In the UK and America, press went wild over the book’s tale of global Jewish conspiracy. Papers like The Spectator, the Morning Post, and the Christian Science Monitor all treated it as a true document and called for more investigation into this great threat to global peace and freedom.²⁴

Despite some success in Britain, Brasol’s translation sold poorly in the United States.²⁵ He had a different success in America: partnering with auto magnate Henry Ford. Brasol provided Ford with material on Russia for Ford’s new project The International Jew.²⁶

Henry Ford’s newspaper The Dearborn Independent published a series of articles called The International Jew, which revised and expanded the contents of The Protocols for a mass audience. Rather than exploiting the alleged Jewish-Bolshevik connection, The International Jew tied the idea of a global Jewish conspiracy into American concerns about the disintegration of their culture. The series blamed the Jewish conspiracy for the rising “Coney Island” culture of crime, drunkenness, moral laxity, and Jazz music that was sweeping America, as well as financial panics, liberalism, and lack of respect for the proper authorities.²⁷

The International Jew got popular enough to bring on a series of high-profile lawsuits and a Jewish boycott of Ford products. Ford apologized for the publication of The International Jew in 1927, claiming that he’d been focused on managing the Ford Motor Company and hadn’t exercised any kind of editorial control over The Dearborn. In a 1930 German interview Ford claimed that in the past he’d been sure The Protocols were true, but didn’t think so anymore.²⁸

We’ve now reached the 1930s, and at this point any discussion of The Protocols becomes a discussion of their relationship to Second World War and Nazi Germany. Instead, we’ll reflect on why The Protocols became so influential:

The narrative The Protocols presents is intricate. This isn’t some vague pamphlet that just says that the Jews are subverting our nation and we need to fight them, this is an elaborate multi-step program showing exactly how they’re gonna to take over the world. Not only does the presence of an actual plan you can read make the thing feel more real, it allows people to point to specific things happening in the real world and say: “This is part of the plan! The Protocols are real!”

The other thing about The Protocols that hooks people in is its ability to play on the fear of change and modernity.

The things it claims are part of the plan: the spread of irreligion, the destruction of public morality, gaining power over land and the economy, all play into the basic fears many people have as the world moves around them and they feel their lack of control. It looks at the problems of its readership and says “Yes, this is exactly as sinister as it feels.” The beauty of this is that it’s malleable. As we’ve seen, the sweeping social change The Protocols identify as a key sign of the conspiracy can be anything from the economic policy’s of Sergei Witte, to communist revolution, to Jazz music. Because the conspiracy’s goals involve altering all levels of public and political life, every change is equally a sign of the plan.

You can see this reflected in modern conspiracy thought, with contemporary subjects of terror like COVID-19, the increasing role of technology in our lives, and the opaque and cliquish nature of American politics becoming part of one New World Order narrative in which all global events are part of one shadowy conspiracy’s master plan to control the world. The only difference is that the secret organizations in modern conspiracy theories are no longer always Jewish.

They’re still sometimes Jewish.

In short, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a work of impressive storytelling. The fact that the main sources of its text are two explicit works of fiction makes sense, because like good fiction it creates a compelling premise, expands on that premise with thought and detail, and explores timeless themes which keep its message relevant across the generations. The fact that its message is evil and most of its text comes from other places doesn’t change this.

All disinformation is storytelling. A story that speaks to people will take you far.

Sometimes the places it takes you aren’t worth going to.

Next time we need a bonus episode: World War 2 and how the Protocols reached the rest of the world.