Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

"Norman Cohn was by training a medieval historian rather than a modern historian, but he served in World War II and after the war he was prompted to ask himself how Germany, this advanced, apparently civilized modern nation, had degenerated into this incredible barbarism and had perpetrated this mass genocide, the Holocaust. And the answer he came up with is that what enabled this atrocity was conspiracy theory. It was the myth of Jewish control of the world, which was believed in by the Nazis. Cohn focuses on this document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was the central document of anti-Semitic literature. The German historian, Golo Mann, said that the Holocaust was a crime committed because of bad literature. As Cohn demonstrates, the Protocols was this central document that the Nazis used as a warrant for genocide. Even today, if you go online, you see people talking about the Protocols as if it were an authentic document. This document was in fact an abject forgery or hoax or fraud. And Cohn’s book traces the history of this document, how it originated in Russia in the 1890s and how it was used in Nazi Germany in the 1930s as a warrant for genocide. As Cohn shows, this document was a pretty obvious fraud even from its early days in Russia. It originated and was first published in a Russian text in the early 1900s, put together by the secret police of the Tsar, Nicholas II. At the time, Nicholas II was facing a lot of opposition within Russia from liberal forces and also from revolutionary forces. The early signs of the Russian Revolution were already apparent, so Nicholas II needed an external scapegoat to blame for the dysfunction of his Russia. In reality, what was wrong in Russia was despotism and it was Nicholas II’s fault. His secret police created many documents – there was sort of almost a fad for creating documents that blamed Russia’s ills on the Jews – and the Protocols was one such document. It had a short-term effect in Russia, but almost by the First World War, people in Russia had stopped believing that the Protocols was an authentic document. It’s a very strange document. What it purports to be is the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish elders that occurs at some point in the 1890s. But any literate person who looks at the document is immediately going to see that it doesn’t look like a real historical record of a real historical meeting. There are no dates specified, there are no names specified, there are no places specified. It’s a fairly obvious fabrication. After World War I, it had ceased to have an effect in Russia, but it had certainly instigated many pogroms against the Jewish population of Russia before World War I. So already it was a blood soaked document that had been used as a warrant for murder. But after the First World War, translations of this spurious document began to appear in the West, in England, in France, and particularly in Germany, and there was a new audience for this kind of anti-Semitism , a new rising movement that needed this kind of document to justify what it was going to do. It does happen again and again in conspiracy theory that people latch on to pieces of evidence or documents that are quite spurious – these people have a need for these documents. In 1921, the Times of London published a sensational article in which one of their reporters demonstrated that the Protocols was not only a fraudulent document, but it was a plagiarism. The reporter had unearthed the book that was used as the basis for this plagiarism, a quite obscure book written in 1864 called Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, written in French by Maurice Joly, and it was a satire on the regime of Napoleon III. Napoleon III put Joly in jail and seized all the copies of the book that were circulating in public, which meant that this book had almost vanished from people’s memory. But in 1921 a reporter for the Times found this old book and realised that approximately two fifths of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was simply lifted from that earlier book and just put into the mouths of the Elders of Zion. It was a flat out piece of plagiarism and fabrication from a 50-year-old book. At that point in 1921, all literate people knew that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a junk document. It was a cheap fabrication and plagiarism that had been put together in Russia for political purposes. Nobody serious still believed that this was really the record of a meeting of Jewish elders planning to take over the world. However, in Germany there were people who had a use for this document. As Norman Cohn points out, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1924, he actually refers to the Protocols. Hitler nervously acknowledges that some liberal newspapers have suggested that it’s a fraud, but he says, all you need to do is look around you in the world today and see what’s happening to realize that the liberal papers are wrong. This document is not a fraud, Hitler says, it’s a real description of what is really going on. Hitler and the Nazis need documentary evidence to justify their program of anti-Semitism and the best they can do is this exploded and ridiculous document, the Protocols, so it’s given a second very sinister reboot when the Nazis come to power. It’s prescribed as a textbook in schools and it’s used as a warrant for the terrible genocide that’s to come. Exactly. It’s completely upside down. Hitler in 1939 was obviously moving the world towards war. But Hitler was portraying this as the Jews moving the world towards war. He said the Jews were orchestrating and creating the conditions for a vast Second World War and if they get their way and start this war, I’m going to do what is only just and that is to eliminate them because they’re the ones who are starting this conflict. Of course, that was a completely upside down view of what was really happening. It was the Nazis who were pushing the world inexorably to war, and the Jews, far from being an all-powerful, sinister group of people who were more powerful than the Nazis, were in fact a group of powerless victims who were being increasingly mistreated. First their shops were boycotted, then they were being deported, and of course the so-called final solution was underway once the war began. There’s a fascinating quote from Heinrich Himmler, who addressed a meeting of the SS and said to them: What we are doing is we’re exterminating this race of people who were planning to exterminate us, the good Aryan people of Europe, so what we’re doing is a just act. And he said to the SS, what’s really remarkable is that we have all remained decent people, even as we’re carrying out what he called this “moral duty” to exterminate the Jewish race. The Protocols were used by the Nazis to reposition themselves as the victims or the possible victims of this vastly powerful race of people and the Holocaust was really just a preemptive act of self-defense. I mean, it’s obscene, it’s a complete inversion of factual reality and of moral reality and that is the kind of consequence that conspiracy theory can lead to when it’s used and abused by people with ultimate political power. I think they are and I think we have to keep reading books like these. They not only tell us what really happened in the past, but they provide us with a kind of warning about what can happen again in the future if we’re not careful. One of the revelations in Cohn’s book that really haunts me is the research that showed that during the Nazi period, even despite the Nazis’ use of anti-Semitic propaganda, there was no huge increase in rabid anti-Semitism among the German people. The level of anti-Semitism remained more or less the same from the start of the Nazi era to the end. But what did change radically was the level of indifference, public indifference, to the fate of the Jewish people. The German people were so heavily bombarded with propaganda that they just became increasingly indifferent to what was happening to the Jews. They turned a blind eye, they were weary, they were apathetic, they were looking out for themselves. That was the effect that this conspiratorial propaganda had on the German population. And I think in our own day, we do have to stay on our toes and avoid the temptation to become indifferent and apathetic. We need to insist that there is such a thing as objective truth and that people who repeatedly avoid telling the objective truth and keep turning the truth on its head are doing great damage to society and may do further damage by eroding our sense that the truth matters. So I think we have to remain on our toes against conspiracy theory all the time. Another quote that haunts me is from Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” This was amply demonstrated in Jonestown, it was demonstrated horribly during the Nazi era, and I think that we should be alert to anybody who attempts to make us believe absurdities today, not just because we should believe in reality, but because people have a political agenda. When you look at the way the Nazis used this propaganda to consolidate their own power and to render their population docile, I think we have to be very suspicious of any leader anywhere who even flirts with this style of thought."