THE PRAGUE CEMETERY. Why do so many people in the modern West hate the Jews?
Did you know? French and Russian fascists created a panic that caused WWII and the Shoa (Holocaust)
Oh what a tangled web we weave / when first we practice to deceive...
—Sir Walter Scott
Why do so many people in the modern West hate the Jews? Lately, of course, because the meaning makers keep telling people that Israel—the Jewish State—is supposedly committing ‘genocide,’ and an antisemitic culture will of course 1) believe the accusation, and 2) make all Jews pay for it.
But this has deeper roots. In The Prague Cemetery, the late Umberto Eco gave us an account of those.
This remarkable Italian polymath—“medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator”—was smart, erudite, and a good observer. And a good writer. You may know him from The Name of the Rose—a whodunit set in the Middle Ages. But my special affections go to The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco’s historical novel about the birth of modern ‘political’ antisemitism in the nineteenth century.
Historical novels blend fact and fiction. But is Eco a ‘rigorist’ or a ‘libertine’? Does he invent only where the record is silent (reconstructive historical fiction—as in Mary Renault’s novels) or merely to deepen our grasp of fact (non-fiction novel—as in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood)? Or is he perhaps inventing freely (historical romance—as in Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers) or even imposing a frankly alternate reality (historiographic metafiction—as in Octavia Butler’s Kindred)?
What in Eco’s novel is fact and what is fiction? I’ll tell you further below, but try to guess…
The Prague Cemetery
Written in a daring style, The Prague Cemetery is narrated in the first-person voice of a madman, Simone Simonini, a paranoid racist foaming at the mouth—gripped by dissociation and megalomania—who composes a literary fraud depicting the Jewish people as a horde of monstrous, powerful psychopaths. In Simonini’s deranged account, the Jews have organized themselves as a grand international conspiracy that plots in secret how to corrupt and dominate every last Western institution. The plan is to destroy Western Civilization. Because they are mean.
To create his fraud, Simonini plagiarizes from another book, The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, written by a Frenchman, Maurice Joly. This book has nothing to do with Jews. Published in 1864, it exposes the camouflaged, proto-totalitarian schemes and intrigues of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s secret police in the French Second Republic and the so-called ‘Liberal Empire’—a period lasting from 1848 to 1870.
Ever mindful of Louis Napoleon’s thought police, Joly never refers to him by name; instead, The Dialogue takes an indirect approach: a fictional (and dead) ‘Machiavelli’—the great theorist of the cynical use of power—explains to a fictional (and dead) ‘Montesquieu’—the great architect of democratic power-balancing—how, despite all of Montesquieu’s careful engineering and design, democracy will be destroyed.
All will be lost, says ‘Machiavelli,’ the minute the citizens allow the Prince—he never says ‘Louis Napoleon’—to spend citizen monies in secret, that is, to create a clandestine intelligence service or secret police. For with such clandestine power, a pretend-democratic Prince can and will corrupt every relevant institution, gutting it from within whilst preserving the facade, recruited now to the Grand Simulacrum of democracy, where the hidden puppet masters pull on the institutional strings—and especially those attached to the controlled press—to create and manage a ‘consensus reality’ that steers the citizens to demand what the Prince already wants. The bulk of Joly’s book consists of ‘Machiavelli’ patiently detailing for an increasingly horrified ‘Montesquieu’ the secret methods that a democratic-seeming but totalitarian Prince will employ.
To the madman Simonini, who means to paint a tableau of an international Jewish conspiracy, Joly’s material is pure gold. It already describes a giant secret conspiracy and its methods, so the work of imagining all that cloak-and-dagger stuff is done. Moreover, by 1897, when a stray copy of Joly’s book falls into Simonini’s hands, nobody remembers that it ever existed, because Louis Napoleon’s cops had of course right away found Joly and thrown him in jail, confiscating thereafter all copies of The Dialogue. So Simonini can, with impunity, simply plagiarize the discourses of Joly’s ‘Machiavelli.’
With minor changes courtesy of Simonini’s pen, Joly’s Machiavellian discourses become speeches uttered in a council of ‘Jewish Elders’ whose world-domination meetings Simonini sets, most dramatically, in the Prague Cemetery. There, among the flickering shadows and graves, his ‘Jewish Elders’ conspire to perfect the clandestine methods by which they corrupt every Western institution. Soon, they will destroy Western Civilization. Because they are mean.
As Simonini works away at his fraud in his Paris apartment, out on the streets a great political scandal is unfolding. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French Army, has been falsely accused of sharing military secrets with the enemy: Germany. The antisemites who dominate the French officer corps make a great show of trying this (quite obviously) innocent Jew for treason, and that show helps to mobilize onto the streets the anti-Dreyfusards, the antisemites, thousands of them shouting ‘Death to the Jews.’ Their opponents, the Dreyfusards, led by the famous French author Émile Zola, march to defend Dreyfus and the Jews, though they are less numerous.
The leading French antisemite, Édouard Drumont, quite involved in the false accusations against Dreyfus and the ensuing antisemitic agitation in France, reads Simonini’s text and sees great value in it. He takes it to the Paris office of the Okhrana, the Tsarist Empire’s secret police, where it is recognized as a useful propaganda tool for stirring up anti-Jewish mob violence in Russia. The Tsarist bosses worry that the Russian slaves, the serfs, will rise in revolution to depose the Tsar, so the plan is to make everyone paranoid about the supposed Jewish conspiracy and “drown the revolution in Jewish blood,” as the Tsar’s chief policeman, Vyacheslav von Plehve, is (plausibly) alleged to have said.1
Accordingly, the Okhrana employs Simonini’s document to produce an anti-Jewish panic among the Tsar’s subjects that results in pogroms: mass killings, rapes, and pillaging of Jews. Never mind that the humble villages (shtetls) of these downtrodden and oppressed ‘Russian’ Jews might have won a prize for Least Likely Meeting Place for World-Domination Planning—never mind that: they are robbed, raped, and murdered anyway. All across what we now call Eastern Europe, and during the long years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jews are robbed, raped, and murdered. And all because Simonini’s mind virus has spread his deranged ideas to entire populations of Eastern Europeans, driving them completely insane.
Erudite readers of The Prague Cemetery know that Umberto Eco is writing about the nineteenth-century roots of the ‘world-domination’ slanders against the Jews, which were recycled by the German Nazis in the twentieth century to cause another European anti-Jewish panic and another bout of murderous insanity: the Shoa or Holocaust. (Simonini’s fraud is a truly powerful mind virus!)
Okay, so what in this is fact and what is fiction? A lot is fact.
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte
Louis Napoleon was the nephew of the famous French revolutionary, either the conqueror or the liberator of Europe (depending on your ideological stance): Napoleon Bonaparte.
After his uncle’s defeat in 1815, Louis Napoleon’s mother, Hortense de Beauharnais, former Queen of Holland during the Napoleonic Empire, went into Swiss exile with her two children in tow. Her older son, Napoleon Louis (you read correctly) later became involved with the Italian nationalist-revolutionaries, the carbonari, and died of disease in 1831 while fleeing in Italy the Austrian troops of the autocratic Habsburgs, formerly the rulers of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire that Napoleon Bonaparte had abolished. That left the younger Louis Napoleon as the only surviving male of the Bonaparte line and hence as the pretender to the Bonapartist throne.
That mystique, and Louis Napoleon’s increasingly public political profile, made him popular in France, which alarmed the Orléanist monarchy—the junior branch of the restored Bourbon monarchy then ruling France under Louis-Philippe. So the Bourbons pressured the Swiss to expel him. To avoid conflict, Louis Napoleon left Switzerland in the same year of 1831 and went to Italy. From that point forward he would move a lot.
This Louis Napoleon, who wrote republican and pro-worker texts from British exile, thereby enhancing the revolutionary prestige of his name, seemed like he might carry forward the torch of liberation. That impression positioned him well to benefit politically from the astonishing phenomenon: the 1848 revolution that deposed the restored French monarchy, followed by the establishment of universal male suffrage, which elected Louis Napoleon president of the French Second Republic.
The 1848 revolution—or, more properly, revolutions—proved that, while European hopes for freedom and equality had been dashed in 1815, they had not been extinguished. For in 1848 almost all the peoples of Europe rose in revolution—in the same year! It was a social and political cataclysm never before seen or even imagined.
And yet, as I have found, the year 1848 is now barely mentioned in Western schooling systems. It has consequently disappeared utterly from the historical consciousness of modern Westerners—as if it never happened. That is quite interesting, because the year 1848 is perhaps the most important year in all of our history. On that year, the modern world was ushered in, setting the European peoples, and then the entire planet, on a gradual slope of liberal-democratic transformation.
But though the movement towards democracy proved inexorable, it wasn’t without setbacks or without further bloodshed. One of those setbacks was Louis Napoleon himself, who, once in power, promptly betrayed the spirit of 1848. He led, from his presidential seat, a coup against the Republic in 1852, and thereafter, though he cleverly pretended to relax and allow a ‘Liberal’ Empire, he used his secret police extensively to cow dissidents, corrupt every institution, and manage the reality of French citizens, becoming a forerunner of modern totalitarianism.
Perhaps this was all to be expected. After all, Louis Napoleon had twice attempted already, before his election in 1848, to take power in France by coup. Maurice Joly, in any case, was never fooled.
Maurice Joly
Maurice Joly, too, is a historical figure. He was a lawyer turned talented political analyst, and he indeed wrote The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu to explain and denounce, though obliquely, Louis Napoleon’s methods.
The Dialogue is a brilliant and urgent warning to French citizens—and Westerners more broadly—that the bosses, at the dawn of modern democracy, were merely posing as liberal democrats and were already busy secretly corrupting democratic institutions and preparing to destroy what remained of democracy itself.
As MOR (The Management of Reality) argues over the length of our system of interconnected articles, Westerners have indeed been living in counterfeit democracies built on the model of Louis Napoleon’s stealth totalitarianism, so aptly described by Maurice Joly. In the next few years, what is left of Western democracy—lest we rise—will be utterly destroyed. Very little time remains. That is our prediction.
Maurice Joly was thrown in jail and all copies of The Dialogue were confiscated by Louis Napoleon’s agents. The book vanished from public view and was soon utterly forgotten. It is certainly plausible, however, that one surviving copy may have fallen into Édouard Drumont’s hands right when Drumont was busy trying to convince the French that a giant Jewish conspiracy was supposedly strangling France.
Édouard Drumont and Alfred Dreyfus
To Drumont, the French Third Republic’s secularism—its separation of Church and State, its expulsion of religious orders—was an existential threat. He rejected the reduction of Catholicism to a private faith and wished to restore her as the divinely ordained public soul of the nation: the Church as the sovereign. He drew strong support from clerical conservatives, rural Catholics, monarchists, and ultramontane or papist factions smarting from the erosion of the Church’s political and moral authority.
Drumont’s antisemitism was part and parcel of his frankly medieval, Catholic outlook. By casting the Jews as the enemy—as the political cause of everything he hated in the modern world—he meant to rally the faithful to reclaim France for Catholicism and purge it of republican ‘corruption.’ Drumont thus became the influential national boss of French Jew-hatred, energetically laying the groundwork for modern ‘political’ antisemitism in France.
His book La France Juive (‘Jewish France’), published in 1886, was one of the most widely read antisemitic works of its time, promoting the idea that ‘the Jews’—a small and vulnerable minority—supposedly controlled French finance, media, and politics. In 1892, Drumont founded the antisemitic periodical La Libre Parole, which went on harping about Drumont’s favorite topic: the supposed Jewish conspiracy.
Then came the Dreyfus Affair. Yes, that is historical too. It was a huge thing. And it changed history.
One major impact was on Theodore Herzl, in Paris to cover the Dreyfus Affair for Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse. After witnessing giant hordes of antisemites chanting in the streets of Paris “Death to the Jews!”, it became obvious to Herzl that the European Jews would be murdered. Soon after, he published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) and gave birth to the modern Zionist movement.
Now, there is some reason to believe that the false accusations against Captain Alfred Dreyfus may have originated with Drumont himself, because the real traitor, the man responsible for sharing French secrets with Germany, was a French officer by name Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, of aristocratic Hungarian rather than Jewish descent, and this Esterhazy was a secret advisor to Drumont in La Libre Parole.2
These facts suggest the following hypothesis: that the antisemites in command of the French military collaborated with Édouard Drumont and Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy to stage the Dreyfus Affair from the start. According to this view, the officers themselves leaked military secrets to the Germans in order to establish a paper trail that could then be pinned on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the convenient Jewish scapegoat. It was a calculated antisemitic operation to commit treason against France in the name of Jew-hatred. The same French military class, after all, would welcome the German Nazis into France just decades later, and many of its members would serve in the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime, enthusiastically working to oppress their fellow French citizens and to deport and slaughter the French Jews. If Vichy was treason perfected, the Dreyfus Affair may have been its dress rehearsal.
But whatever the case may be, what is certain is that Drumont fanned the flames of the accusation against Dreyfus—most energetically via La Libre Parole—until it became a gigantic international crisis, not merely a French scandal.
The pivotal moment came when the renowned French author Émile Zola published his incendiary open letter J’accuse…! on January 13, 1898, in the newspaper L’Aurore. In it, Zola directly accused the French military and government of antisemitism and of orchestrating a cover-up to protect the real traitor while condemning an innocent man, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, simply because he was Jewish. Zola’s intervention electrified public opinion, polarizing French society and galvanizing the emerging Dreyfusard movement, which sought to expose the injustice and vindicate Dreyfus.
As evidence of Dreyfus’s innocence mounted and French institutions persisted in their refusal to correct the miscarriage of justice, outrage spread beyond France’s borders and several foreign governments began discussing a diplomatic response. Boycott threats were issued against the Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair scheduled for the year 1900 in Paris, intended to showcase French culture, industry, and progress. These boycott threats were widely reported in the international press, underscoring how profoundly the Dreyfus Affair had stained France’s global reputation. Though the Expo did happen, the shadow of the Dreyfus Affair hung over it.3
But was it Drumont who, in the middle of all this excitement, brought The Protocols to the attention of the Okhrana?
Nothing has been easier for historians than to establish social and political connections between Drumont and the Okhrana in Paris, so everything really does point to Drumont. Yet the specific detail—the claim that it was Drumont and none other who brought a copy of The Dialogue to the Okhrana—remains speculation based on circumstantial evidence.
The Okhrana
What is well established is that the Okhrana, by whatever means, did indeed procure a copy of The Dialogue close to the end of the nineteenth century. Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, who headed the Okhrana office in Paris, led the effort to rework with careful touches the Machiavellian discourses in The Dialogue in order to produce the famous fraud, later published in 1905, in Russia, by Sergey Nilus as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, included as an appendix to his book The Great in the Small (Velikoe v Malom). Nilus presented The Protocols as the supposedly discovered minutes of a secret Council of Super-Rabbis where these ‘Elders of Zion’ conspired to destroy Western Civilization.
The Protocols was indeed used by the Tsarist police to stir up mob hatred of Jews in the Tsarist Empire. As Vyacheslav von Plehve and other top Tsarist policemen had hoped, their antisemitic incitements, which began even before The Protocols was concocted, sparked mass insanity in the Tsarist Empire, and pogroms did indeed flare up—with great human cost—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The most famous—and almost the worst—of these is the Kishinev Pogrom.
But The Protocols was not done making violent trouble—this book would cause a genocide in the 20th century. That story is not told in The Prague Cemetery, which concludes with Simone Simonini’s completion of his fraud.
This Simonini, the madman, is himself a fictional character, created by Eco to emphasize the derangement that is antisemitism (though he took the man’s name from a historical document that I will discuss in a future piece).
But though Eco goes only thus far, we must keep going. Let us follow The Protocols, therefore, into the 20th century.
Phillip Graves
Phillip Graves was a journalist working for The Times of London. While in Istanbul, someone gave him a book missing its cover and title page. It had something to do with The Protocols, he was told.
Leafing through it, Graves quickly saw that this mystery book was indeed almost identical to The Protocols. By dint of some research, he established it was Maurice Joly’s The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. No question about it: The Protocols had been plagiarized from The Dialogue.
This was political dynamite, because all of Europe was becoming hysterical with The Protocols and the supposed evil, anti-Western, international Jewish conspiracy about which it ranted. So the journalist Graves did something supremely honest (in itself amazing): in The Times of London he published an article titled:
In parallel columns, side by side, he printed entire passages from The Protocols—already a bestseller taking the world by storm—and the corresponding passages in The Dialogue, allowing people to see with their own eyes the justice of his claim: that the two books were nearly identical. The Protocols was a fraud—there was no Jewish conspiracy.
That should have settled it. But it didn’t.
Although Philip Graves’s 1921 exposé represented the first major journalistic effort to debunk The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it received almost no follow-up in the wider press. There was no wave of editorial amplification, no saturation coverage, and no coordinated media effort to publicize the finding. Outside the United Kingdom, and especially in the United States, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, the rest of the media was mostly silent.
Since then, brave scholars have expanded on Graves’ work. Notably, I recommend:
Ben-Itto, H. (2005). The Lie that Wouldn't Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. London: Vallentine Mitchell.
Cohn, N. (1967). Warrant for genocide: The myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. New York: Harper & Row.
At the time, however, nobody else moved. It was as if the editors of The Times had felt compelled to publish Graves’s exposure only in order to avoid having Graves conclude that the entire British establishment, closely identified with that newspaper, was brimming with ideological antisemites, which would surely have led Graves to denounce them.
We have commented on the widespread antisemitism and Nazi sympathies of the British establishment and the British Crown here:
So the hypothesis here is that The Times published Graves’s piece because the only way to keep appearances and keep Graves controlled was to publish his exposure and then have the rest of the system pretend it never happened.
And that is how your reality is managed.
Supporting this interpretation is the fact that, before Philip Graves exposed The Protocols in The Times, that very same newspaper had played an outsized role promoting the Russian fraud.
On May 8, 1920, The Times had published an unsigned article under the headline ‘The Jewish Peril: A Disturbing Pamphlet: Call for Inquiry,’ treating the ridiculous nonsense in The Protocols as possibly authentic and urging the British government to investigate the supposed Jewish conspiracy that that fraud described. The tone was credulous and alarmist, and it helped introduce The Protocols to a broader English-speaking audience under the guise of concern and inquiry.
The ‘Jewish Peril’ article in The Times carried the implicit weight of establishment authority because The Times was regarded as the semi-official voice of the British ruling class—closely aligned with the British Crown and its imperial institutions, and quite influential within elite policymaking circles. The veneer of respectability that The Times gave to The Protocols amplified the anti-Jewish paranoia in a climate already tense with postwar upheaval, fears that the Russian Revolution would spread to Europe, and widespread antisemitism in segments of the British elite.
So, while Graves’s reporting was precise, courageous, and intellectually conclusive, the damage from the paper’s earlier promotion of The Protocols had already spread far and wide—and would continue to echo across the world for decades. Moreover, stunningly, nobody else picked up the story of the exposure of the Russian fraud, and The Times itself dropped the subject following Graves. This created a vacuum that antisemitic propaganda quickly filled. As a result, Graves’s fact-based reporting was drowned out.
Henry Ford’s megaphone did much of that drowning out.
Henry Ford and the German Nazis
Henry Ford was typical of the top industrialists in the United States, who were quite frankly psychopaths cruelly treating their own workers as disposable human material for their own aggrandizement, and who were quite paranoid that a social revolution would destroy the oppressive order that had made them so comfortable. We have explained that here:
The major strategy adopted by these industrialists, led by the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller fortunes, was the leadership and promotion of eugenics, which—under the tutelage of these industrial giants and their army of paid retainers—became a massive, international movement. In Europe, again with the tutelage and millions of these Anglo-American eugenicists, German eugenics was morphed into German Nazism, allied with similar movements in other countries. We have explained that here:
Now, when Graves published his London Times piece in 1921, Henry Ford was busy with a series of articles—mostly ghostwritten by his retainer, William J. Cameron—that Ford published as The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. These articles relied heavily on The Protocols as core source and intellectual foundation, frequently citing The Protocols as the authentic ‘proof’ of the alleged global Jewish conspiracy. Ford’s articles were published in 1920-1922, a period that straddles Graves’s exposure. There was no way for Graves to compete: Ford had more muscle—millions of dollars—to popularize The Protocols than Graves had to expose this fraud.
Henry Ford’s The International Jew series first appeared in the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper that Ford had bought. These articles were then compiled and distributed as a multi-volume set under the same title. In order to ensure a wide circulation, Ford pressured—effectively compelled—his national network of Ford dealerships to distribute his literary poison. In many cases, copies were handed out to customers who bought cars or brought them in for service. This strategy massively expanded the reach of Ford’s antisemitic messaging. As a result, The Dearborn Independent reportedly reached a circulation of over 700,000 at its peak, making it one of the most widely distributed newspapers in the United States at the time.
Ford’s reach was not only American, but global. Significantly, it was quite important in Germany.
Ford’s The International Jew and his endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were translated into German in the 1920s and became widely influential among far-right and Nazi circles. His ideological and financial support played a crucial enabling role in their dissemination. His materials were republished by ultranationalist German publishers and entered the bloodstream of Nazi propaganda efforts.
Within the Third Reich, Ford’s name carried enormous weight. Adolf Hitler praised him by name in Mein Kampf, referred to him as “a single great man,” and kept Ford’s life-size (!) portrait in his office. Nazi propagandists routinely cited Ford’s work to give credibility to their own antisemitic claims. By the 1930s, The Protocols, often accompanied by selections from The International Jew, were used in German classrooms, particularly in Hitler Youth instruction and antisemitic curricula. These texts appeared in schoolbooks, pamphlets, and recommended reading lists aimed at shaping the worldview of the next generation.
For his efforts spreading Jew-hatred in Germany and to the entire world, the Nazi regime awarded Ford the Großkreuz des Deutschen Adlerordens, the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle, the highest decoration that the Nazis bestowed on foreigners, which Ford gratefully received from the German consul in 1938, right before the German Nazis plunged the entire world into war.
In large part thanks to Henry Ford, the claims in The Protocols created an anti-Jewish panic that drove millions insane. That insanity was responsible for the great crime of the 20th century: the Shoah or Holocaust.
Conclusion: the Great Irony of The Protocols
Many people believed the lies in The Protocols because they could see that the Jews were succeeding at everything.
To give you a sense for that, consider the following relevant statistic. According to chatGPT’s calculations, and rounding a bit, 3 Nobel Prizes are awarded for every 200,000 Jews, or for every 11 million Christians, or for every 450 million Muslims. Jews do better than Christians and Muslims by about 2 and 3.5 orders of magnitude, respectively. Obviously, then, once the Jews were freed from the ghettos, they outperformed everybody, becoming the best lawyers, doctors, scientists, etc.
But being a good professional and being the boss are not the same thing.
And that is precisely what The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion demonstrated. In so doing, The Protocols produced perhaps the greatest political and historical irony the world has ever seen. I’ll explain.
The Protocols, as you’ll recall, alleged that ‘the Jews’ formed a vast international conspiracy, pulling the strings of every major institution in the West: labor unions, the media, finance, big industry, and the governments themselves. Supposedly, these all-powerful secret overlords intended to destroy Western Civilization. And yet, when the Jews of Europe were marked for extermination, none of these institutions supposedly in thrall to ‘the Jews’ lifted a finger to help. On the contrary: they either pretended not to notice the slaughter or they actively collaborated with it.
Thus, by poisoning the minds of Europeans and driving them to genocidal insanity, The Protocols proved its central thesis to be a lie: the Jews had no hidden levers of power. Yes, they occupied important jobs in every profession, because they excelled at everything, but they were not the bosses.
Indeed, the Jews couldn’t even mount a feeble defense—apart from a few heroic and doomed acts of resistance like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. They were the most powerless people in Europe, utterly unprotected by the very systems they were accused of controlling. This, then, is the Great Irony: the text that became the main agent of Western reality management, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, by causing an anti-Jewish genocide, refuted its own claims!
The Protocols demonstrated that it was the antisemites—the Jew-haters in Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington—who held world power. And they were so powerful, in fact, that they could plunge the entire planet into war to kill the defenseless Jews. This is no exaggeration. Killing every last living Jew was so important to the German Nazis that, in the last stages of the war, they famously diverted resources from the defense of Germany in order to accelerate the mass killing—at the cost of invasion!
It is important to see it: it was the antisemites—the Jew-haters—and not the Jews who meant to destroy the West, and who did destroy the West. For the antisemites not only murdered between 5 and 6 million Jews, but also caused the deaths of upwards of 64 million non-Jews. And these totalitarians enslaved hundreds of millions of non-Jewish Europeans in the territories they conquered.
The accusations in The Protocols, it follows, were the most spectacular Orwellian inversion in modern history: they portrayed the most vulnerable, easiest to kill population as the most powerful, allowing thereby the true bosses of the world—those who really do mean to kill or enslave us all—to escape notice as the oppressors and, indeed, to recruit our support for their nefarious goals!
I’ve explained the broader significance of Orwellian inversions here:
Today, we are still bombarded by the Orwellian inversions of the antisemites who remain in power and who still control the institutions of media and academia that manage our reality. We are told that the Jews—victims of history’s worst genocide—are now themselves supposedly committing genocide, even as proudly genocidal jihadis openly attack the Jewish State, as on 7 October 2023—the deadliest day for Jews since the Shoa (Holocaust).
Why are media and academia doing this? Why are they protecting the prestige of Qatar, the jihadi slave State that created the Hamas terror infrastructure and attacked Israel on October 7th?
The answer is not far to seek, if we dig a bit in our recent history. It turns out that the Western media have been thoroughly corrupted by the CIA, the US clandestine service, as confessed recently and publicly by Udo Ulfkotte—editor of one of Germany’s most important newspapers—shortly before he died.
And the CIA was created after WWII by absorbing the intelligence infrastructure of the German Nazis. We are speaking here of (at least) tens of thousands of German Nazis and Nazi collaborators, as documented by historian Christopher Simpson in the year 1988, a work since extended by other historians.
It is this antisemitic control of media and academia that makes it impossible for Westerners to learn the lesson of the Shoa (Holocaust): that the enemies of the Jews, the antisemites—and not the Jews—hold power everywhere. And that is why, despite the Shoa, so many Westerners still today believe the lies of The Protocols.
To confirm this, just ask any random person in any street of the West who it is that controls the media, and you are quite likely to hear the view expressed that it is ‘the Jews.’ It hardly makes an impression on such people that, under this interpretation, the Jews would have to be using the media to accuse themselves of genocide! Any such ‘theory’ can be acceptable only to those who, come what may, must represent ‘the Jews’ as evil, even if incoherently evil.
But if we insist on rational coherence, then the simple cultural fact is inescapable: the public narrative on the Arab–Israeli conflict has been designed by the enemies of the Jews. We are publishing a careful and thorough refutation of that pretend-historical narrative here:
The most recent development in this false narrative is the portrayal of Israel’s frankly ineffective ‘self-defense’ in Gaza—which has been mostly against buildings and not against the genocidal horde that tried to wipe out the Israeli Jews on 7 October—as a ‘genocide,’ in dramatic and historical defiance of the meaning of that term and of the facts of war in Gaza.
And these enemies of the Jews obviously control even the Israeli establishment, as evidenced by the ridiculous and suicidal policies of the Israeli bosses, and by the statements of some Israeli politicians and government officials who speak as if they were paid liars of the jihadis whose only job is to destroy the prestige of Israel.
This latter hypothesis stretches plausibility not in the least, given the infinite budgets and infinite moral corruption of the modern jihadis and their US patrons (including Donald Trump), and moreover the open scandal that is the Israeli ‘leadership.’ But if you need to see fingers in the pie, consider the allegations of so-called ‘Qatar-gate,’ according to which Qatar—the US-supported, Trump-supported jihadi slave-State responsible for the genocidal attack of October 7th—has been paying certain functionaries in the Netanyahu government (this seems to be the tip of the iceberg).
The effect of all this management of reality is to produce the supreme Orwellian inversion, which makes people equate the Jews—historically the liberators of the Western peoples—with their tormentors and killers: the German Nazis.
WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. JEWS ARE NAZIS.
If Westerners cannot learn to recognize these recycled lies, the Jews will be killed again. And then—just as in 20th century—ordinary Westerners, seduced by antisemitism, will again find themselves slaves.
How do I know? I know because this is what—century after century—always happens. The following series is meant to help you see that regularity:
SEMITISM vs. ANTISEMITISM (Part 1). The Structure of our History
Imagine that history class were like plunging into the millennia-spanning, action-packed, multi-novel adventure worlds of Frank Herbert (Dune), Isaac Asimov (Foundation), or J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings). No child would ever get bored!
Ben-Itto, H. (2005). The Lie that Wouldn't Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. London: Vallentine Mitchell. (pp. 23-25, 29)
Ben-Itto, H. (2005). The Lie that Wouldn't Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. London: Vallentine Mitchell. (pp.195-196)
Mandell, R. D. (1967). The Affair and the Fair: Some Observations on the Closing Stages of the Dreyfus Case. The Journal of Modern History, 39(3), 253-265.
Francisco, your latest piece is simply excellent. I learn so much from your writings. Best wishes, Marv.
Lots of food for thought here.
One complication is that just enough lieutenants with Jewish names can be found working with (read: for) the global bosses to keep a malicious theory going -- that the bosses are figureheads being manipulated by these 'powers behind the throne'.
Another complication is the fifth column among the Jewish people (including in Israel), who as you mentioned seem intent on demonizing the innocent and defending the guilty.
What their motives are only GOD knows, but Jew-haters are constantly platforming them on social media as 'whistleblowers' and 'proof' that the rest of us are lying.