THE ORIGINS OF THE ILLUMINIST MYTH:
THE FABRICATION OF THE PROTOCOLS
OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION
by: S.R. Shearer
[What follows pertains largely to the forgery known to the world as
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion; but the same pattern
of fabrication found here is repeated in all the other so-called "documentation"
bearing on the Illuminati Myth. It also parallels the thesis behind
Pat Robertson's book,
The New World Order. Indeed, the extent
to which the worldview behind Pat Robertson's book -
The New World
Order - and the hypothesis which undergirds
The Protocols of
the Learned Elders of Zion indicates the degree to which this kind
of thinking - i.e., the kind of thinking which undergirds the
Protocols
- has seeped into the evangelical Christian community in recent years.
(Many of these parallels are indicated in the text below.)]
1
THE ORIGINS OF THE ILLUMINATI
MYTH: THE ABBE BARRUEL
Illuminati enthusiasts and devotees like to paint the myth as extending
back into the misty past, but that simply is not the case.
The Illuminati
Myth did not exist as literature prior to the French Revolution -
and even then only as disjointed pieces, not as a consistent whole.
Not until 1905 did the myth explode on the world as a coherent
body of literature. What anti-Semitic writings that did exist prior
to 1797 had nothing to do with the Jews as participants in a revolutionary
world-conspiracy aimed at the destruction of Christianity; it was largely
confined to religious themes with only the most indirect political overtones.
Clearly, the anti-Semitic literature which existed prior to 1797 tied
the Jews to the death of Christ, and on that basis they were persecuted;
it also pictured them as "moneylenders," and occasionally
it linked them to the practice of witchcraft; but it never portrayed
them as revolutionaries bent on the conquest of the world. On the contrary,
Jews were painted as weaklings and cowards; a people hardly worth even
the most indirect kind of political attention - and for that reason,
most European armies excluded Jews from military service well into the
nineteenth century.
The first disjointed pieces of the Illuminati Myth can be traced
back to the French Revolution, specifically to the French cleric, the
Abbe Barruel. [Please see Norman Cohn,
Warrant for Genocide
(New York: Harper and Row)] As early as 1797, nine years after the revolution,
Barruel, in his five-volume
Memoire pour servir a l’histoire
du Jacobinisme, argued that the French Revolution represented the
culmination of an age-old conspiracy of the most secret of secret societies.
Down through the centuries this secret society had purportedly poisoned
a number of monarchs; and in the eighteenth century it had captured
the Order of Freemasons [here, Robertson’s
Juden-frei rendition
parallels the original unswervingly (please see pgs. 67-68 of Robertson's
New World Order)]. In 1763, the conspiracy supposedly created
a secret literary academy consisting of Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet,
Diderot, d’Alembert and other luminaries of the "French Enlightenment."
This group of men ostensibly met regularly in the house of Baron d’Holbach
and through its publications had undermined all morality and true religion
in France [parallels pg. 67, Robertson's
New World Order]. From
1776 onward, Barruel maintained, Condorcet and the Abbe Sieyes had built
up a vast revolutionary organization of half a million Frenchmen who
were the "Jacobins" of the French Revolution. But the heart
of the conspiracy - the real leadership of the revolution - was supposed
to rest in a Bavarian group known as the Illuminati under the headship
of a certain Adam Weishaupt [parallels pg. 67, Robertson's
New World
Order]. To this handful of Germans, all the Freemasons and Jacobins
of France owed blind allegiance - or so Barruel thought.
THE STUPIDITY OF IT ALL
It is beyond belief that thoughtful men could possible accept such
drivel! To those possessing even a modicum of knowledge concerning
the "Enlightenment" and the French Revolution, such a tale represents
absurdity and factual inaccuracy on such a vast scale that it
hardly merits attention, let alone serious refutation.
Diderot, Voltaire, Holbach and the other founders of the "Enlightenment"
- whose writings in large part produced not only the French Revolution,
but the American Revolution as well - were anything but "lovers of the
Jews." Voltaire, perhaps the leading figure of the French Enlightenment,
was often heard to say that all men were worthy of freedom and the benefits
of the Enlightenment except the Jews!! Why? -
because "... the Jews
were not of the same species as the rest of mankind!" This is hardly
a statement which could reasonably be attributed to the supposed leader
of the Jewish Conspiracy in France. Indeed, in it one can hear the demonic
footsteps of the coming Holocaust echoing up through the corridors of
history to lodge themselves finally in the hellish darkness of Hitler's
Germany. Similar statements are easily attributable to many of the other
leaders of the Enlightenment. But then such facts have never dissuaded
anti-Semites before, and they could hardly be thought able to do so
today.
To the men and women of the Enlightenment, Western Civilization had
taken a wrong turn when it had embraced Judeo-Christianity. To "Enlightenment
Man," history had begun with the flowering of Greek civilization in
the sunny hills and islands of the Aegian - not the "backwaters" of
Judea and Samaria - and had reached its zenith under Imperial Rome and
the Emperor Marcus Aurelius - not the "secondary and relatively unimportant
kingdom of David and Solomon."
The Ancient World of Greece and Rome had detested the Jews and their
concept of "One God." Cicero and maintained,
"They (i.e., the Jews)
are - all of them - born with a raging fanaticism in their hearts, just
as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not
be the least surprised if these people would not some day become deadly
to the human race."
Voltaire's charge against the Jews - his hatred of them - had nothing
to do with the Medieval and Catholic concept that they were the "killers
of Christ." Voltaire refused to have recourse to the anti-Jewish position
of the "Christian Civilization" that he himself had abandoned. Indeed,
Voltaire was as much anti-Christian as he was anti-Semitic; to Voltaire,
Christianity was merely an extension of Judaism, a view of Christianity
which he had adopted from the Graeco-Roman Civilization he admired so
much. Voltaire had instead recast his hatred of the Jews in the anti-Semitism
of the Ancient World; he had cloaked his anti-Semitism in the ideas
of Tacitus and Horace who had hated the Jews with a hatred older and
much more obscene than anything conjured up by the Medieval Church -
the pagan anti-Semitism of Greece and Rome.
The fact is, Voltaire's hatred of the Jews went far beyond the more
"mundane" anti-Semitism of the church of his day, and there are scholars
who argue with considerable persuasiveness that Voltaire's anti-Semitism
was of a far more murderous kind than that found in the official church
doctrine of his time. He had acquired his hatred of the Jews from the
very same people who had supposedly taught him the value of freedom
and the worth of man (i.e., the pagans of Greece and Rome). Moreover,
it is probably not too much to say that his hatred went further even
than the hatred of Cicero, Tacitus, and Horace in as much as he viewed
Judaism (and Judaism's daughter, Christianity) of having poisoned the
civilization he loved so well. This feeling of contempt and disgust
for Judaism and Christianity was the view of the mainstream of the Enlightenment.
Montesquieu, Locke, Gibbon, Hume, Rosseau, Mirabaud, Holbach, Voltaire,
etc., were all to one degree or another anti-Semitic. The charge that
these men were participants in some great Jewish world-conspiracy is
so fraudulent and absurd that it hardly bears consideration, let alone
rebuttal. It would be akin to seriously arguing with someone who insisted
that two plus two equalled three. About all one could do is to shake
his head and walk away.
THE FREEMASONS AND THE ILLUMINATI
As for the obscure German group known as the "Illuminati" - it was
anything but a sinister group of men bent on a world-conspiracy. It
was in fact nothing more than a cluster of "armchair intellectuals"
more at home in their comfortable gatherings than in the streets inciting
rebellion; they were more like an over-aged "athletic club" whose members
could talk a good game, but nothing else. Moreover, they were anything
but the leaders of the French Enlightenment, they were rather its timid
followers. Indeed, they derived their name - "the Illuminati" (meaning
the "enlightened ones") - from the fact that they were followers of
the French Enlightenment, not its leaders. Finally, the Illuminati and
the other followers of the Enlightenment were not Freemasons at all,
but rather their rivals.
The Freemasons were the sworn enemies of the French Enlightenment and
were (insofar as the French were concerned) originally Catholic and
Monarchists who fought against the Revolution. Indeed, King Louis XVI
and his brothers were all Freemasons. Rather than profiting from the
Revolution, the Freemasons suffered greatly from its excesses under
the Terror which the Revolution unleashed. The Freemasons were hunted
down mercilessly and guillotined by the hundreds by the Jacobins. Furthermore,
the charge that the Illuminati involved itself in witchcraft is so absurd
that it fairly boggles the mind; these men were men who prided themselves
on being men of science and rationalism; they everywhere denounced the
"medieval" concept of witchcraft as being superstitious. Finally, the
thought that half a million Frenchmen would ever under any circumstances
"blindly" follow a small group of Germans (Bavarians) is so ridiculous
that it is dizzying in its stupidity.
THE SIMONINI LETTER
In 1806, Barruel produced a document in support of his slanderous charges
against the Jews - the
Simonini Letter. Like almost everything
else connected with the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy, the letter
was a forgery - a fabrication produced by the French Political Police
under Fouche. Its objective was to influence Napoleon against the Jews.
The letter was ostensibly written by an army officer, J.B. Simonini.
After having congratulated Barruel on "unmasking" the Jacobins,
which Simonini claimed were preparing the way for Antichrist, the letter
went on to describe the so-called Jewish role in the entire "Jacobin
Plot."
At the time of his death in 1820, Barruel had elaborated the beginnings
of the modern myth of the Judeo / Masonic Conspiracy. He had written
a vast manuscript to show how a revolutionary conspiracy had existed
down through the ages, from Mani to the medieval Knights Templar, and
thence to the Freemasons. The whole organization was supposedly controlled
by a Supreme Council.
The Council was veiled in impenetrable secrecy
and had no fixed residence, but wherever the statesmen of the Great
Powers gathered, there they could be found as an "unseen and controlling
presence" lurking in the background [parallels pg. 71, Robertson's
New World Order]. The Council, which - according to Barruel -
was made up entirely of Jews, elected a Grand Master and around the
figure of the Grand Master, Barruel wove a truly lurid tale of intrigue,
terror, despotism, sorcery and witchcraft. The tale was so fanciful,
and so much the product of his own fevered imagination, that a few weeks
before his death, Barruel - in a fit of conscience - sought to destroy
all his existing manuscripts. He failed.
IN THE JEWISH CEMETERY IN PRAGUE
Barruel’s fantasies and the Simonini fabrication by Fouche found
little acceptance in the first half of the nineteenth century. But around
1850, the myth reappeared - this time in Germany as a weapon of the
extreme right in its struggle against the growing forces of liberty
and democracy.
Writing after the great democratic uprisings of 1848 had swept through
Europe, rocking the monarchies of the "Old World" to their
very foundations, E.E. Eckert began to expand on Barruel’s themes
of half a century earlier. The Catholic magazine,
Historische-Politische
Blatter picked up Eckert’s writings and helped spread them
throughout southern Germany.
[And these are precisely the writings
that Hitler "ran into" in Vienna and Munich in his youth.
]
A few years later, Herman Goedsche, writing for
Neue Pruessiche
Zeitung, authored a book which was to become the basis of one of
the most famous anti-Semitic fabrications of all times - "The Rabbi’s
Speech." How a relatively obscure and openly fictitious novel by
Goedsche was transformed into the twisted and demonic "Rabbi’s
Speech" is itself a case study in the pathological mental processes
at work in those who give credence to the Illuminati Myth. Herman Goedsche
had at one time been a minor official in the Prussian postal service.
He had been dismissed, however, after having participated in a plot
designed to incriminate the famous democratic leader, Benedec Waldeck.
The plot had involved the use of forged letters.
In 1868, Goedsche produced a sensational novel under the pseudonym
of "Sir John Retcliffe." The novel was entitled
Biarritz.
It contained a chapter called, "In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague."
The novel itself was straight fiction and Goedsche never claimed that
it was anything else but that. The chapter in question described a secret,
nocturnal meeting which was supposed to have taken place in the Jewish
Cemetery in the city of Prague during the Feast of Tabernacles. [It's
interesting to note in this connection that there are some in "Latter
Rain" who have taken note of all this and who have described these "goings-on"
as a kind of "Black Mass" - a satanic precusor or spiritual counterfeit
to the "real thing" (speaking here of the so-called "Black Mass.") which
some "Latter Rain" devotees expect to occur in the "Latter Days" just
prior to the Return of Christ.]
At eleven o’clock, the gates of the cemetery creak softly and
the rustling of velvety coats is heard. A vague, white figure passes
like a shadow through the cemetery until it reaches a certain tombstone;
here it kneels down, touches the tombstone three times with its forehead
and whispers a prayer. Another figure approaches; it is that of an old
man, bent and limping. It coughs and sighs as it moves. The figure takes
its place next to its predecessor and it too kneels down and whispers
a prayer. A third figure appears, and then a fourth and so on until
thirteen figures have finally appeared, each one having repeated the
aforementioned procedure.
When the thirteenth and final figure has at last taken its place, a
clock strikes midnight. From out of the grave there comes a sharp, metallic
sound. Suddenly, a blue flame appears and lights up the thirteen figures.
A hollow voice says, "I greet you heads of the Twelve Tribes of
Israel." And the figures dutifully reply, "We greet you, Son
of the Accursed" - which is to say, "Antichrist." The
assembled figures are meant to represent the twelve tribes of Israel.
The additional figure represents the "unfortunates of the exile"
- the
Diaspore
BIARRITZ SPREADS
The relevant volume of
Biarritz was published in 1868. But this
was only the beginning of the story - for soon this frankly fictional
episode began its demented transformation. It was the Russian anti-Semites
who first thought of treating the story as an authentic record. In 1872,
the chapter, "In the Jewish Cemetery of Prague," appeared
by itself in St. Petersburg, then the capital of Czarist Russia, as
a pamphlet. In 1876, a similar pamphlet appeared in Moscow with the
title, "In the Jewish Cemetery in Czech Prague - the Jews, Sovereigns
of the World." In 1880, a second edition of the Moscow pamphlet
appeared in both Odessa and Prague. In 1886, it appeared in the Paris
publication
La Contemporain for July of that year. In all these
versions, the chapter from
Biarritz was presented no longer as
fiction, but as fact - "The Rabbi’s Speech."
The authenticity of the speech was vouched for by an English diplomat
- one "Sir John Readclif." To complete the irony and twisted
turns of this story, when Francois Bournand printed the "Rabbi’s
Speech" in
La Contemporain, he prefaced it with a startling
revelation: "We find the program of Jewry, the real program of
the Jews, expressed by ... the Chief Rabbi, John Readclif ... It is
a speech made in the 1880s."
Like a boomerang, the whole thing had come back on the unsuspecting
Goedsche (Retcliffe).
Later editions of the "Speech" pictured Goedsche (AKA, Retcliffe,
Retclif, Readclif, etc.) not as the Chief Rabbi, but as a hero. For
instance, in 1933, the "Speech" surfaced in Sweden and was
prefaced by a melancholy statement: "Sir John Readclif paid with
his life for exposing the great Jewish conspiracy. It was a sad ending
for a man ... who had been an English diplomat and historian."
Unbelievable? It would seem so! - but such are the "facts"
that Illuminati enthusiasts marshal in defense of their system of conspiracy
theories. And make no mistake about it, this is the stuff from which
the entire myth of the Illuminati Conspiracy has been built.
DISJOINTED PIECES COME TOGETHER
Within a year of the publication of Goedsche’s fantasy, there
appeared in France a book which was to become the "Bible"
of the modern Illuminati Myth:
La Juif, le judaisme et la judaisation
des peuples chretiens by Gougenot des Mousseaux.
Mousseaux had become convinced that the world was falling into the
grip of a mysterious body of Satan worshippers whom he called "Kabbalistic
Jews."
In reality, the
Kabbalah is nothing more than a body of Jewish
mystical and theosophical doctrine dating in the main from the late
medieval ages. It has been fully expounded in such works as the
Zohar.
While there can be no doubt that the
Kabbalah falls outside the
mainstream of Western (and Jewish) religious thinking,
there is nothing
secret about it.
Des Mousseaux, however, imagined the
Kabbalah as something quite
different: a secret demonic religion, a systematic cult of evil, established
by the devil at the beginning of the world. According to des Mousseaux,
the first practitioners of this cult were the sons of Cain, who after
the flood were succeeded by the sons of Ham - these were the Chaldeans.
In due time, they passed their secret on to the Jews who in turn controlled
the Gnostics, the Manichees, and the Moslem sect of the Assassins. They
at last transmitted their diabolical lore to the Templars who handed
it to the Freemasons. But at all times the Jews, as the "representatives
on earth of the spirit of darkness," had supplied the Grand Masters.
[None of this, of course, is in the Bible - none of it; and for Christians
- especially evangelicals - to accept such drivel and to pattern their
"mindset" around it is tantamount to calling upon themselves the curse
of Revelation 22:18 ("For I testify unto every man that heareth the
words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these
things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this
book"). Why? - because isn't that what one is doing by embracing such
extra-Biblical material? (i.e., religious material which is so
fundamental that it helps to shape one's world-view, but material which
- nonetheless - cannot be found in the Bible).] According to des Mousseaux,
the cult centered on the worship of Satan or Lucifer; the chief symbols
of the cult were the serpent and the phallus. The rituals included exotic orgies of the wildest kind. But this
was not all: by murdering Christian children, the Jews - who in reality
were supposed to be witches - acquired demonic power. All this was supposed
to be a part of the
Kabbalah. Of course, it never was! Never!
- except in the imaginations and innumerable forgeries produced by devotees
of the Illuminati Myth.
Finally, in the last chapter of his book, des Mousseaux pictured Antichrist
as a Jewish king whom all nations would accept as their savior. As he
neared the 500th page of his manuscript, the author began to ratchet
his frenzy up into monumental heights:
"... the Jews will raise up a man with a genius for political imposture,
a sinister bewitcher around whom fanatical multitudes will cluster.
The Jews will hail this man as the Messiah, but he will be more than
that. After destroying the authority of Christianity, he will unite
mankind in one great universal brotherhood and bestow on it a superabundance
of material goods. For these great services, the Gentile nations will
accept him, exalt him, and worship him as a god - but in reality,
for all his apparent benevolence, he will be Satan’s instrument
for the perdition of mankind." [Gougenot des Mousseaux, Le Juif,
le judaisme it la judaisation des peuples chretiens, Paris, 1869,
pgs. 485-498.]
What des Mousseaux had done was to bring together all the heretofore
disjointed pieces of the Illuminist Myth and weave them together as
a coherent whole. All that was needed now was for someone to tie it
all to a specific and contemporary event. The man that did this was
Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky.
PYOTR IVANOVICH RACHKOVSKY
In the late nineteenth century, Russia was a hotbed of religious (as
opposed to political) anti-Semitism. Russia was the last true autocracy
or absolute monarchy in Europe. It was also the country with the largest
Jewish population in the world - some five million, or about a third
of all Jews everywhere. They were confined by decree to the "Pale
of Settlement" - a group of provinces extending from the Baltic
Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south - an area which embraces
much of what is today modern Poland and the Ukraine - all of which was
then part of the Russian Empire. They were subjected to severe economic,
residential, and educational restrictions. Throughout the nineteenth
century, they were persecuted by the peasantry and were on the whole
miserably poor.
The nineteenth century was also a time when the Russian Autocracy was
beginning to encounter active political opposition, notably from clandestine
terrorist groups which were then operating throughout Europe much in
the same fashion that Middle East terrorist groups are doing today.
The authorities were determined at all costs to mask the fact that the
main opposition to the regime was Russian in origin and that there were
actually real Russians - and educated ones at that - who so hated the
Autocracy that they were prepared to assassinate its representatives.
Slowly at first - and quite haphazardly - they accordingly began to
pretend that all opposition to the regime, and particularly all terrorism,
was the work of a "Jewish conspiracy." The appearance of
Biarritz
in St. Petersburg in 1872, in Moscow in 1876, and in Odessa in 1880
was connected to this pretense. Still, there existed as yet no overall
theme to the tales which surfaced, and there appeared to be no coordinated
effort behind it all.
After the shocking assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, the
Okhrana (i.e., the secret police) was founded by imperial decree
for the "protection of public security and order." Previously,
the chief organ of the Secret Police had been the "Third Section"
of the Imperial Chancellery, which was founded after the Decembrist
Revolt of 1825. The
Okhrana had branches in all the principal
towns in Russia, as well as a foreign service
centered in Paris.
The foreign service of the
Okhrana was headed up by Pyotr Ivanovich
Rachkovsky. A Russian compatriot described him as "... slightly
too ingratiating in his manners and his suave way of speaking ... which
made one think of a great cat carefully concealing his claws."
As chief of the foreign branch of the
Okhrana, Rachkovsky organized
over a period of some nineteen years (1884-1903) a network of agencies
in France, Switzerland, London, and Berlin. As a result, he was easily
able to keep a close check on the activities of the various exiled Russian
revolutionary and terrorist groups. During this entire period, Rachkovsky
resided in Paris and made it his headquarters.
Rachkovsky was a born intriguer who delighted in forging documents.
One of his favorite methods of sewing discord in the ranks of the opposition
was to forge a letter or pamphlet in which a supposed revolutionary
attacked the revolution. For example, in 1887 there appeared in the
French press a letter by a certain "P. Ivanov" who claimed
- quite falsely - that the majority of the terrorists were Jews. In
1890 there appeared another pamphlet accusing the revolutionaries who
had taken refuge in London of being British spies. In 1892 a letter
appeared over the famous name of Plekhanov, accusing the leadership
of
Narodnaya Volya of having published the "confessions"
of Plekhanov. A few weeks later came another letter in which Plekhanov
in turn was attacked by other supposed revolutionaries. In reality,
all these documents were forged by one man - Rachkovsky! Rachkovsky’s
life was filled with such intrigues.
SERGEY ALEXANDROVICH NILUS
In 1902, Rachkovsky became involved in a court intrigue in St. Petersburg
which also involved the future editor of the
Protocols - Sergey
Alexandrovich Nilus. Nilus, a man wholly dedicated to Orthodoxy and
the concept of a "Holy Russia," was the perfect picture of
the classic Russian - a huge man with a long, flowing gray beard and
deep blue eyes. He had a veiled and somewhat troubled look. He wore
boots and a simple peasant’s shirt with a belt which had a prayer
embroidered on it. In character he was capricious, unruly, and despotic.
He fancied himself a mystic and a heaven sent defender of "Holy
Russia." He repudiated modern civilization and saw it as a conspiracy
of the powers of darkness. He had become a systematic "anti-rationalist."
The intrigue was directed against a Frenchman named Phillippi who,
like Rasputin after him, had established himself at the Russian Imperial
Court as a "faith-healer;" he had become the idol and spiritual
guide for the Czar and Czarina. Rachkovsky and Nilus both took part
in the intrigue against Phillippi, and on the same side. Phillippi was
cherished, flattered, and almost worshipped by the Imperial family,
but he also had powerful enemies - the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna
and the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna. To break Phillippi, they
had turned to Rachkovsky. Thanks to the relations which he had so carefully
cultivated with the French police, Rachkovsky was able to develop an
incriminating file on Phillippi.
The intrigue against Phillippi involved Nilus as the central player.
Nilus, who had lost his entire fortune in riotous living while living
in France as a young man, had returned to Russia and had adopted the
life of a perpetual pilgrim, wandering from monastery to monastery.
Around 1900 he wrote a book which described how he had been converted
from atheistic intellectualism to a fervent believer in Orthodoxy. The
book came to the attention of the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna.
Nilus was accordingly summoned to St. Petersburg at the end of 1901
and the court clique surrounding Rachkovsky and Feodorovna hit upon
the following plan: Nilus was to be formally ordained as an Orthodox
priest and then married to one of the Czarina’s ladies-in-waiting,
Yelena Alexandrovna Ozerova. A concerted effort was then to be made
to impose Nilus on the Czar and Czarina as their confessor; if it had
succeeded, Phillippi would have been removed.
It was an ingenious plan, but Phillippi’s supporters were able
to counter it. They drew attention to Nilus’s immoral past - Nilus
had been (and still was) a notorious womanizer; as a result, Nilus fell
into disgrace and was forced to leave the court. Nilus, who was then
aged forty-seven, made his way to the great monastery of
Optina Pustyn.
There he and his dependents - which included his usual retinue of women
(of which his new bride was now a part) - found permanent lodging in
four rooms of a large villa located on the grounds of the famous monastery.
The rest of the villa was employed as a home for cripples, idiots, and
the mentally ill who lived there in the hope of a miraculous cure.
If the intrigue had failed in its original intent, it did accomplish
one thing: it had brought together Rachkovsky and Nilus and established
a relationship between the two which was to have a profound effect on
the future course of the world.
THE GENESIS OF THE PROTOCOLS
Between 1894 and 1899, France was rocked by the arrest and imprisonment
of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew who had been falsely accused of selling
French military secrets to the Germans. During this same period, Russia
was moving inexorably in the direction of revolution. It was during
this period that Rachkovsky hit upon a plan to take des Mousseaux’s
anti-Semitic material, weave it into an obscure play entitled
Dialogue
by Maurice Joly, and create thereby the
Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion - and by doing so to lay the blame for all the unrest
in Russia on the Jews. The French military authorities had been doing
just that insofar as the Dreyfus affair was concerned, and by 1895 it
looked as if they had been successful in transferring the blame for
France’s sorrowful military condition from themselves to Dreyfus
and the Jews. Rachkovsky reasoned that if it had worked so well for
the French, why then not for the Russians? And this is precisely what
Rachkovsky was attempting to do in forging the
Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion.
THE DIALOGUE AND THE PROTOCOLS
Maurice Joly, the author of
Dialogue, had conceived the idea
of the play during a time when it was forbidden to criticize the despotic
regime of Napoleon III. In order to avoid press censorship, Joly had
developed the idea of writing an imagined dialogue between the great
champion of the French Enlightenment, Montesquieu, and the infamous
Italian cynic, Machivelli. Montesquieu was to present the case for democracy,
liberalism, and reform. Machivelli would defend the position of cynical
despotism and Napoleon III. In this way he thought that he could criticize
the Emperor. But the play, which was published in Brussels, was confiscated
in Paris. Joly was arrested by the agents of Napoleon III and his writings
were suppressed. In despair, Joly committed suicide in 1879.
But Joly’s play was indeed an admirable work - incisive, ruthless,
and logically and beautifully constructed. The debate is opened by Montesquieu
who argues that in the present age, the enlightenment ideas of liberalism
had made despotism, which Montesquieu argued had always been immoral,
impractical as well. But Machivelli replies with such eloquence and
at such length that he dominates the rest of the play. Machivelli argues
that the great mass of people are simply incapable of governing themselves;
normally, they are inert and only too happy to be ruled by a strong
man. Machivelli maintains that the concepts of politics have never had
anything to do with morality and insofar as practicality is concerned,
the inventions of the modern world were better suited to the imposition
of despotism than democracy. Moreover, the people in actuality desired
despotism. The forces that might oppose the despot’s rule could
be dealt with easily enough: the press could be censored and political
opponents could be watched by the police.
So long as the despot dazzled the people with his prestige, he could
be sure of their support. Such is the book that inspired the forger
of the
Protocols. He plagiarized it shamelessly. In all, about
one-half of the entire text of the
Protocols is clearly based
on passages from Joly. In nine of the chapters, the borrowings amount
to more than half of the text; in some they amount to three-quarters;
in one (Protocol VII) they amount to the entire text. Moreover, with
less than a dozen exceptions, the order of the borrowed passages remains
the same as it was in Joly’s play, as though the forger had worked
through the
Dialogue mechanically, page by page, copying straight
into the
Protocols as he proceeded. Even the arrangement in the
chapters is much the same - the twenty-four chapters of the
Protocols
corresponding roughly to the twenty-five chapters of the
Dialogue.
Only towards the end, where the prophecy of the anti-Christian "Messianic
Age" of Antichrist appears, does the forger allow himself any real
independence of thought. [Please see Norman Cohn,
Warrant for Genocide
(New York: Harper and Row) for a lengthy comparison between the
Protocols and the
Dialogue.]
NILUS AND THE PROTOCOLS
Rachkovsky entrusted the finished forgery to Yulina Glinka, his agent
in Switzerland. She then transferred it to Rachkovsky’s old friend,
Sergey Nilus at
Optina Pustyn. Nilus was enthralled and totally
taken in by the ruse. Rachkovsky had reasoned that if anyone could be
duped by the intrigue and find a way of publishing the
Protocols,
Nilus would be the man. Rachkovsky had not reasoned in vain.
Alexander du Chayla, a Frenchman who visited Nilus at
Optina Pustyn
during this time, has left an account of how truly fooled Nilus was
by Rachkovsky’s forgery. Du Chayla writes:
"Nilus took (the Protocols) from the shelf and began
to (read to me) ... the most remarkable passages of the text and of
his own commentaries. At the same time he watched the expression on
my face, for he assumed that I would be dumbfounded by the revelation.
He was rather upset when I told him that this was nothing new to me
...
"Nilus was shaken and disappointed by this. He retorted that
I took this view because my knowledge ... (of these things) was superficial
and fragmentary. It was absolutely necessary that I should feel the
full impact. And it would be easy for me to get to know the Protocols
because the original was in French.
"Nilus did not keep the (actual) manuscript of the Protocols
in his house for fear lest it be stolen by the Jews. I recall how
amused I was by his perturbation when a Jewish chemist of Kozelsk,
taking a walk with a friend in the monastery forest and trying to
find the quickest route to the ferry, happened to stray into Nilus’s
garden. Poor Nilus! He was convinced for a long time afterwards that
the chemist had come to carry out a reconnaissance.
"Some time after our first conversation about the Protocols,
one afternoon about four o’clock, one of the patients from Nilus’s
home ... brought me a letter: Nilus was asking me to come and see
him on an urgent matter. (He was at last prepared to show me the actual
manuscript - the original - of the Protocols).
"I found Sergey in his study. He was alone ... Dusk was falling,
but it was still light for the earth was covered with snow. I noticed
on his writing-table something like a rather large envelope, made
of black material and decorated with a big triple cross with the inscription:
‘In this sign you shall conquer’. A little picture of St.
Michael, in paper, was also stuck in the envelope. Quite clearly all
this was intended as an exorcism.
"Sergey crossed himself three times before the great icon of
the Mother of God ... and opened the envelope, from which he took
a leather-bound notebook ...
"‘Here it is’, said Nilus, ‘the charter of the
Kingdom of Antichrist’.
"He opened the notebook ... The text was written in French by
various hands and, it seemed to me, with different inks.
"‘You see’, said Nilus, ‘during the sessions
of the secret Jewish government, at different times, various people
filled the office of secretary, hence the different handwritings’.
"After showing me the manuscript, Sergey placed it on the table
... and said: ‘Well, now read!’... While reading the manuscript,
I was struck by certain peculiarities in the text. There were some
spelling mistakes and above all, some expressions which were not French
[Du Chayla was a native Frenchman, while the forger, Rachkovsky, was
Russian and spoke French only as a second language - editor.] Clearly
the manuscript was written by a foreigner ... It took me two and a
half hours to read the document ... (Finally) Sergey wanted to know
what impression my reading had produced on me. I told him straight
out that I (still) stood by my previous judgment. I didn’t really
believe in the ‘Elders of Zion’.
"Nilus’s face clouded. ‘You really are under the influence
of the Devil’, he said. ‘Satan’s greatest ruse is to
make people deny (these things) ... What will you say now if I show
you how what is said in the Protocols is being fulfilled, how
the mysterious sign of the coming of Antichrist appears on all sides,
how the imminent advent of his kingdom can be felt everywhere’?"
Then he proceeded to the ‘exhibits in the case’. He opened
the chest. Inside there were, in an indescribable state of disorder,
detachable collars, India rubbers, household utensils, insignia of
various technical colleges, even the cipher of the Empress Alexandra
Feodorovna and the Cross of the Legions d’honheur. On all these
objects Nilus detected, in his hallucination, the seal of Antichrist,
in the form of a triangle or of two superimposed triangles ... If
an object bore a trademark even vaguely suggesting a triangle, that
was enough to secure it entry to his museum ...
"With increasing excitement and anxiety, in the grip of a sort
of mysterious terror, Nilus explained to me that the sign of ‘the
Son of Perdition’ is now contaminating all things, that it shines
even from the scrolls of the great icon behind the altar in the Church
of the Hermitage ... I felt a sort of fear. It was now past midnight.
The gaze, the voice, the reflex-like gestures - everything about Nilus
- gave me the feeling that he was walking on the edge of a (mental)
abyss and that at any moment his reason might disintegrate into madness."
[A. du Chayla in La Tribune Juive, pgs 3-4.]
Clearly, then, Nilus really believed in the
Protocols and in
the myth of the "Jewish-World Conspiracy." Rachkovsky had
done his work well in choosing as his agent the mentally deranged Sergey
Nilus.
Nilus soon arranged to have the book passed by the Moscow Censorship
Committee on September 28, 1905 and it appeared in print a short time
later attached to a commentary by Nilus called
The Root of Our Troubles
- meaning, of course, the Illuminati, i.e., the Jews. Nilus’s
star quickly rose at the Imperial Court as a result, and the Metropolitan
(Archbishop) of Moscow ordered a sermon quoting Nilus’s version
of the
Protocols to be read in all 368 churches of Moscow. This
was duly done on October 16, 1905 and the sermon was promptly reprinted
throughout all of Russia.
THE PROTOCOLS AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
From 1905 onward, anti-Semitism took a decidedly different turn;
no longer was it confined to religious circles; it had clearly burst
those old bounds and had begun to flow in new and much more dangerous
channels - so much so that agents of the government began to find
it convenient to invent Jewish names for all the Autocracy’s opponents.
From any kind of a factual standpoint, this was nonsense; to be sure,
Jews were involved in the revolutionary movements of the time, but they
played no greater role than many other minorities who were likewise
persecuted by the hated Autocracy.
The
Protocols were republished in 1911 and 1912; but it was
not until 1917 (at the time of the Revolution) that they really took
off under a new title:
He is Near, at the Door ... Here Comes Antichrist.
The 1917 version was distributed as a pocket-sized pamphlet to the
soldiers of the "White Armies" during the Revolution; most,
therefore, came to believe that the Revolution had been the product
of a Jewish conspiracy; and that Lenin, Trotsky, and the Red Army were
nothing more than puppets in this vast plot, an intrigue which was -
like the French Revolution before it - ultimately under the control
of the "Illuminati."
After the defeat of the "Whites," thousands of them fled
as expatriates to Western Europe, carrying with them their pocket-sized
Protocols - and it was this rendition of the
Protocols -
with the
imprimatur of the Czarist government on it's cover
- which found itself onto the pages of the
Times of London and
other newspapers and magazines in the West; and more,
it was this
version which Russian émigrés carried with them to America
after the final collapse of their forces in the Crimean Peninsula in
1922. TO THESE EMIGRES, THE WAR IN RUSSIA HAD BEEN A CONTEST
WHICH HAD PITTED "CHRISTIAN RUSSIA" AGAINST THE POWER OF SATANIC ILLUMINISM,
and it was this mindset, along with their pocket-sized copies of
the Protocols, which they brought to this country - and it is precisely
this myth which Pat Robertson and others are using today as a means
to galvanize Christians into political action aimed at taking back the
country for "Christ and the church." To be sure, the references
to the Jews have been dropped and "code words" adopted (i.e., "secular-humanism,"
"liberals," "Illuminists," etc.), but the myth is the same - and there,
lurking in the background, are still the Jews.
Some Christians, no doubt, will have a difficult time believing
that their leaders could have "hooked into" such a deadly
mythology - that certainly the story which Robertson has described in
the pages of The New World Order is different from that which
Hitler used to bewitch the German people. The sad answer is, it’s
not! And it's not just that there exists a good deal of evidence
which suggests the parallel nature of the two mythologies [i.e., Hitler's
and Robertson's (minus the naked references to the Jews and the overt
racism which characterized German fascism)] - but the fact is, it's
relatively easy to prove the relationship between the two (i.e., Robertson's
version and Hitler's version) by tracing the trail of the original mythology
from Russia - where it first surfaced as a full-blown story - to Germany
and ultimately to the United States. From there, it is not particularly
difficult to follow its path up through the years straight to Pat Robertson
and others in the Christian Right today. Many have done so. For example,
take Professor Donald S. Strong of the University of Texas. As early
as 1941 he wrote,
"... it is important to note here that the ideology spread
by ... (enthusiasts of the Illuminati Myth) in the United States is
the same as that which accompanied certain political developments
in Russia before World War I, in Poland and Hungary shortly after
that war, and more recently in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy (and finally
here in the United States)." [Donald Strong, Organized
Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
1941), pg. 1.]
THE TORTURED PATH OF THE ILLUMINATI MYTH
Strong continues,
"The appearance of this ideology (i.e., the Illuminati Myth)
in postwar Hungary is of interest because, before World War I, anti-Semitism
was almost unknown there ... It was during the crushing of the short
lived ... (Communist) regime (in Budapest) that the antirevolutionary,
anti-Semitic ideology made its (first) appearance. Here, as in postwar
Russia, the ideology was not used as a means of elite defense; instead
an old elite (i.e., the aristocracy and the large landholders) temporarily
dislodged (by Bela Kun and the socialists), employed it as a means
of discrediting the new revolutionary (i.e., communist) elite and
justifying its (i.e., the aristocracy's) own return to power. Thus,
in the name of this antirevolutionary, anti-Semitic ideology, the
White Terror was directed not only against the ... (communists) in
general and the few Jewish Bolsheviks (who were connected to them),
but against all the half million Jews in Hungary. The speedy
association of (the) Jews ... with the) Bolsheviks in the (Illuminist)
ideology came about partly from the spread of the ideology from the
White Russians and partly from the fact that Bela Kun and several
other leaders of the revolution actually were Jews." [Donald
Strong, Organized Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston, 1941), pg. 6.]
From Hungary, the myth then spread into Germany. Like Russia, there
had been a history of anti-Semitism in the Reich; but like Russia again,
the anti-Semitism which had manifested itself prior to the First World
War was more religious than it was political. Moreover, the anti-Semitism
which had taken hold in Germany prior to the war had existed principally
only in the lower classes. The middle and upper classes were relatively
free of the scourge. Indeed, Bismarck, an aristocrat, had been responsible
for launching a campaign in the latter part of the nineteenth century
which had aimed at the full integration of the Jewish community into
all aspects of German life. There was, of course, some resistance: in
1871 Professor August Rohling, a theologian, produced
Der Talmudjude
which represented Judaism as a devilish doctrine; in 1878, Adolf Stocker,
the court preacher, founded the anti-Semitic Christian Social Labor
Party; and finally - in connection with the
Kulturkampf - the
Catholic Church initiated a crusade which aimed at blaming the Jews
for its troubles with Bismarck. But all in all, the population embraced
Jewish assimilation as a measure whose time had come - modernity seemed
to demand it. Nonetheless, despite this history of toleration,
Germany
- like Russia, Poland and Hungary before it - succumbed quickly to the
allure of the Illuminati Myth and the political anti-Semitism which
the myth inevitably unleashed; and in this respect, the German experience
differed from the others only insofar as the "Communist Revolution"
never really took hold in Germany.
While the Spartacists - a radical group of German Socialists under
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxumburg - threatened the government in Berlin
for three months in the winter of 1918-1919, and Socialists seized power
in Munich for a brief period, they were all quickly swept away. Unlike
Poland, Hungary and Russia, no real military threat ever materialized
in Germany. The catalyst in Germany was profound economic distress.
Strong writes,
"The more menacing the ... (economic situation) became, the
stronger the Nazis grew, ever professing to be defenders of the existing
social order against revolutionary chaos." [Donald S. Strong,
Organized Anti-Semitism in America (Washington, D.C.: American
Council on Public Affairs, 1940), pp. 83-108.]
The
Protocols are such a transparent forgery that one may wonder
how it was that they spread so fast throughout the Christian West. The
fact remains, however, that multitudes of people who were by no means
insane took them very seriously at the time - after all, the government
of one of the greatest nations in the world, Imperial Russia, had attested
in unequivocal terms to their authenticity. Indeed, the
Times of
London editorialized, "What are these
Protocols? Are
they authentic? If so, what malevolent assembly concocted these plans
and gloated over their exposition? ... Have we by straining every fiber
of our national body escaped a
Pax Germanica only to fall into
a
Pax Judaica?"
But shortly thereafter, the myth began to unravel. On August 18, 1921,
the
Times of London, which had done so much to spread the myth,
took the lead in unraveling it by devoting a resounding editorial admitting
its error. The
Times had just published in its issues of August
16, 17, and 18 a lengthy dispatch from its correspondent in Constantinople,
Philip Graves, which revealed the fact that the
Protocols were
nothing more than a clumsy forgery copied from Maurice Joly's play,
Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel.
THE RAISON D'ETRE BEHIND
THE MYTH'S MAGNETISM
Still, countless numbers of people continued to feel irresistible drawn
to the myth - the facts of the matter notwithstanding. Professor Strong
also noted this phenomenon back in 1941 and was puzzled by it - and
he refused to write off those who were drawn to it as uneducated buffoons
- certainly Ford, DuPont, the Pope, Churchill and countless others like
them could not be so easily dismissed. There had to be something more
behind the myth's "drawing power."
To get a more precise idea of why people were drawn to the myth, Strong
undertook a study of more than 121 organizations which were involved
in one way or another with the Illuminist Myth during the years 1933-1940.
Strong wrote,
"To understand precisely how and why ... the (Illuminist Myth) has
circulated in America ... it is necessary to examine the character
of the proponent organizations. What are the personality types, occupations,
and affiliations of the leaders? What is the class status, religion,
and geography ... of the membership? How are funds raised? What sort
of propaganda is used and through what channels? To what extent do
the groups cooperate? What objectives have they in common? These are
the key questions to be answered." [Donald Strong, Organized
Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
1941), pg. 15.]
Strong chose 9 groups out of the 121 as representative; he then proceeded
to subject these groups to a minute examination. He found that they
could be grouped broadly into three different categories:
- Christian groups (the National Union for Social Justice, the American
Christian Defenders, and the Defenders of the Christian Faith);
- Antilabor and business groups (the Industrial Defense Association,
the Edmondson Economic Service, the American Vigilant Intelligence
Service, and James True Associates); and
- Political and patriotic groups (The Paul Reveres and the Order of
’76).
AND IT'S PRECISELY HERE THAT STRONG BEGAN TO DISCOVER THE REAL REASON
BEHIND THE "STAYING POWER" OF THE ILLUMINIST MYTH: IT WAS THE
GLUE WHICH WAS HOLDING TOGETHER THIS RATHER POLYGLOT ALLIANCE OF
OTHERWISE UNRELATED CULTURAL, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL GROUPS WHICH WAS
STANDING IN THE WAY OF SOCIALIST FORCES WHICH THREATENED THEIR UNDOING.
The myth (whether expressed as the "Illuminist Plot," the "Communist
Conspiracy," and/or "Secular-Humanism") gave the alliance the raison
d'etre necessary to hold it together. It provided an enemy against
which they could rally their forces and make "common cause." Without
it, the alliance would fall apart.
The myth stimulated -
- Businessmen and antilabor groups because it portrayed communism
and the business community's hated advesaries, the labor unions, as
tools of Illuminism;
- It galvanized Christians in as much as it painted a dire threat
against Christianity; and finally
- It excited national and patriotic groups as a response to the "one-worldism"
of Illuminism.
Thus, it was (and is) in the interest of all three communities [Big
Business and antilabor groups); Christians; and the various nationalist
and patriotic groups (i.e., the John Birch Society, the American Security
Council, etc.)] to fan the flames of Illuminism, and - if only unwittingly
and unintentionally - the underlying anti-Semitism that goes along with
it. Thus, it is a matter of pure fact - even today - that one cannot
involve himself in this alliance without someday involving himself in
anti-Semitism! - and this is as true for Christians as it is for Big
Business, and the various nationalist and patriotic groups.
PLAYING WITH FIRE
What is it about American Christians which makes them think that they
can play with such fire (i.e., the Illuminist Myth) and not get burned?
Over twenty million people - from the White Terror which so gripped
Europe after the First World War to the ovens of Auschwitz during the
Second World War - have perished
directly as a result
of this myth.
Christians are being hustled, and its not "Minnesota Fats"
who’s doing the hustling, but experts at the game of politics who
would pimp their own mothers as prostitutes if it could achieve their
goal of worldly political power. Thinking we are wise, we have become
fools and are playing with the same fire which consumed the White Russians
and the German people. American Christians think to use the political
process for their own ends, but in the final analysis it may be the
political process which will use them for its ends.
