Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (4 page)

—W. B. YEATS, “NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN”

I
n 1919, the European citizen—who five years earlier had perhaps, like the young Hitler, celebrated the outbreak of war—now surveyed a world that was utterly changed. For the victors, the alteration was great enough: millions of young men dead or wounded, women widowed and children left fatherless, mountains of debt, economies turned wholesale to the production of armaments, and colonies newly aware, through their own sacrifice, of their right and potential to become independent nations. But for the defeated, the change had been cataclysmic. The ancient empire of the Habsburgs had flown apart and was reconstituting itself as a series of small nations, with the flags of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Austria about to be added to the
Children’s Illustrated Encyclopedia
. In Istanbul, though the sultan hung on, the Ottoman Empire itself—which had lasted half a thousand years—was finally being dismembered by foreign forces and native independence movements, but not before the killing of a million Armenians in the hills of Anatolia and the plains of Syria. And then there was Russia, which had entered the war as a vast, creaking monarchy and exited—following an audacious coup d’état led by men with strange noms de guerre such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin—as an experiment in an entirely new type of government, one completely unrooted in history or experience. In 1918, the entire Russian royal family had been murdered in Yekaterinburg, the Orthodox Church suppressed, the lands of the nobility sequestered, and the factories of the magnates nationalized. An organization was set up, the Communist International, or Comintern, dedicated to spreading the revolution to all the nations of the world. In Europe the sound of strange marching songs could be heard coming from the East.

Everywhere peoples stared out of the abyss, their certainties and traditions replaced by extreme anxiety and dangerous novelty. The experience of war, so totally brutalizing and massive in its industrial scale, had shaken their faith in progress itself. The technologies that were supposed to bring comfort and prosperity had instead brought death and unbelievable destruction. No one, save a few eccentric doomsayers, had entered the war imagining its catastrophic consequences. Not the intellectuals, not the generals, not the leaders, the philosophers, or the clerics. How, then, should they now make sense of the world?

People could have blamed themselves. Many had tolerated or encouraged their governments in arms races, in belligerent patriotism, in imperial ambitions, in bellicose diplomacy and egoism. Journalists and writers had embraced the prospect of conflict—conflict in which one’s own side was inevitably victorious and one’s troops would be home by Christmas. Those who had argued loudest against war had been the most reviled. The people of 1919, however, were no more likely to point the finger of blame at themselves than we are today, we who enjoy universal adult franchise, a free press, and the free exchange of information. Instead, they looked elsewhere. They had, it seemed, been badly led, politically and militarily. Some went as far as to believe they had been actively duped, fooled, lied to, and, where defeated, betrayed.

For the socialist and Marxist left, the culprit was obvious. Imperialism was to blame, an imperialism fostered by the insatiable demand by business interests for cheap raw materials, new markets, and vast profits. Who, after all, had gained from the four years of warfare? Men in top hats with currency signs on them, men from Krupp, Vickers, and Nobel, men with access to the highest reaches of government. The industrialists had effectively encouraged the carnage to begin and had then kept it going, making fortunes from the slaughter. You had to look no further than them and their agents; monopoly capitalism was the hidden hand.

For many people, however, capitalism was an abstraction. They needed to find a group that appeared to have benefited from the war and the revolutions that followed it. For if they had benefited (and were still benefiting), might they not also have helped bring this situation about?

The Jews

It did not seem ludicrous to the conservative man or woman of 1919 to suspect the Jews. Unlike most peoples, the Jews were international, living in every country and apparently holding positions of influence and wealth in almost all of them. But though they were omnipresent, they were also aloof, and though ubiquitous in public life, they were separate in the private domain. With their archaic language of worship, their aversion to mixed marriages, their extreme attachment to education, they gave the impression of being heirs to a great secret.

What was more, throughout history the Jews could be found standing next to—or just behind—the agents of radical change. It was pointed out by many right-wing writers and amateur historians that one of Oliver Cromwell’s earliest acts, after executing Charles I, was to readmit Jews into England, whence they had been banished nearly four hundred years earlier, and that both the American and French Revolutions, with their advocacy of the rights of man, had released Jews from previous restrictions. Napoleon’s conquests had been followed by Jewish emancipation, and in 1806, the Corsican tyrant had even convened the Grand Sanhedrin, a gathering of notable European Jews. Jews had been prominent in the bourgeois and nationalist revolutions of 1848, in the Paris Commune of 1871, and in the 1905 revolution in Russia.

But it was not just a matter of political radicalism. Jewish banks had financed the Industrial Revolution; Jewish entrepreneurs were at the forefront of the revolution in retailing, their names to be found on the fronts of great department stores. During the second half of the nineteenth century, public Jews like Disraeli and fictional Jews like Trollope’s adventurer Melmotte in
The Way We Live Now
excited public opinion with their political and economic activities. The large populations of ordinary, poor, or illiterate Jews mostly failed to register. In proportion to their numbers, it was said, the Jews did incredibly well.

For the most part, this was seen as a product of the character of the Jewish community—family-oriented, cosmopolitan, and ambitious. There had always been that strain in European conservatism, however, which, observing that the natural order of things was being subverted by progress and radicalism, preferred a more organized explanation. They suggested that secret societies had been behind the major upheavals of the past century or so: the Freemasons had been the organizing force behind undermining the eighteenth-century
ancien régime
; a secret body called the Illuminati had been involved in French Jacobinism and the revolution; and the Jews and Freemasons working together were responsible for the Year of Revolutions in 1848. There was some historical basis for these beliefs. In the early stages of the movement for Italian unity, for example, secret societies known as the Carbonari (charcoal burners) had indeed met in dark forests, sworn horrible oaths, and conspired against foreign occupiers and petty kings. As the century ended, real anarchists with bombs and guns hatched plots to kill prime ministers and blow up emperors, sometimes with real success. So the idea of a more ambitious conspiracy seemed not so very far-fetched, and the possibility that the Jews might act in concert to achieve particular objectives not so very eccentric.

What brought the two ideas together was the Russian Revolution of October 1917. From the beginning, it was evident that a large number of those most active in the building of the new Soviet Russia were Jews. Persecuted under the tsars and subject to occasional massacres, known as pogroms, whenever there was political unrest in the empire, Jews had tended, naturally enough, to side with the reforming or revolutionary left, which promised an end to repression. In fact, the Bolsheviks had relatively few Jews in senior positions, in contrast to their allies the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who were led by men and women from Jewish families. These few, however, caught the eye. There was Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) at the head of the Red Army; Grigory Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), boss of the revolution-spreading Comintern; and Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) at Lenin’s right hand.

The supposed prominence of the Jews in Soviet Russia was remarked upon by the professional diplomats working for the British Foreign Office. In 1919, the British ambassador in Copenhagen, Lord Kilmarnock, wrote to Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon that most Bolsheviks, as far as he could see, were either Germans or Jews. In the same year, an official report published by the Foreign Office contained observations made in a dispatch by the Reverend B. S. Lombard, a naval chaplain serving in Russia. The revolutionary movement, Lombard claimed, “originated in German propaganda and was, and is being carried out by international Jews.” Lombard had also been ashore in Russia and seen the consequences of Red control over certain towns. “All business becomes paralyzed,” he wrote, “shops were closed, Jews became possessors of most of the business houses.”
¹

American diplomats were telling their bosses much the same thing. Documents from the State Department archives include a file dealing with the relationship between Jewish financial interests and the Russian Revolution. The main document, “Bolshevism and Judaism,” dated November 13, 1918, is a report stating that a Bolshevik takeover had been planned in early 1916, and listing ten or so Jewish companies whom the report’s author, an employee of the U.S. War Trade Board, believed to have been involved. Also in the file are a number of cables sent between the State Department and the American embassy in London. One, which illustrates how this perception was commonplace among Western diplomats, is worth quoting in full.

October 16, 1919 In Confidential File. Secret for Winslow from Wright. Financial aid to Bolshevism & Bolshevik Revolution in Russia from prominent Am. Jews: Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, Otto Kahn, Mendell Schiff, Jerome Hanauer, Max Breitung & one of the Guggenheims. Document re—in possession of Brit. police authorities from French sources.
²

The perception that the Jews were behind the Russian Revolution informed the opinions of some of the most illustrious political figures of the time, even in phlegmatic Britain. On February 8, 1920, Winston Churchill contributed an article to the
Illustrated Sunday Herald
. In it he addressed the threat from Bolshevism. “This worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstruction of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality has been steadily growing,” he warned readers. And as to who was behind it: “There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the bringing about of the Russian revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.”
³

In the minds of some, then, including a certain former corporal in the German army who, a thousand kilometers away in Munich, was saying similar things but with rather more venom, the notion that the Jews were behind the war and revolutions that had traumatized Europe began to take root. But this suspicion was as nothing compared to the conspiracy that others were suggesting might be at the heart of things.

Enter the Protocols

“Since the autumn of 1919,” wrote a commentator seven years later, “a remarkable book has been circulating in Germany, the civilized countries of Europe and America.”
⁴
This book was titled
Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion—
in English,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
—and it contained 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?