Our regularly scheduled programming
In which I rant, and I write about dystopia
We’ve had a few interim updates since the last “regularly scheduled” newsletter, a premise I should probably abandon in favor of the “when I get ranty” production schedule. Speaking of me getting ranty, a Business Insider reporter asked me what I thought about Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter, and I hardly paused for breath over the ensuing half hour.
She wrote most of it down, and you can read it here. I was mainly glad she used this:
In November, he called on "independent-minded voters" to vote Republican to curb a Democratic majority. While such an endorsement may seem commonplace in today's political landscape, critics warn Musk's widespread influence and increasingly conspiratorial posts appear to be favoring far-right extremism.
"I think he's intentionally empowering right-wing extremists," J.M. Berger, a researcher on extremism on social media like Twitter, told Insider. "Any argument that he's trying to empower the center is patently bullshit and should be treated as such."
Anyway, I promised a bit more on the dystopian origins of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, so without further ado, here’s a little bit of background on that, the promotion of said book by the Elon Musk of the 1920s, as well as a look at two pretty weird antisemitic dystopian novels posing as philosemitic dystopian novels. One was written by a U.S. Congressman!
* Sorry about the wonky footnotes; I’m too tired to try to fix them.
The multi-plagiarized origins of the Protocols
The road to The Protocols is winding. In 1864, French author Maurice Joly published a book called Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a scathing analysis of the challenges and vulnerabilities of representative government when faced with the threat of demagoguery, aimed very specifically at the authoritarian rule of Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, aka Emperor Napoleon III.
The target of the tract was deliberately obscured by the book’s literary device of a dialogue between two dead men, an unsuccessful effort to protect the author from prosecution, and the intentional ambiguities left the door open to reimagining. Hermann Goedsche, a Prussian author of sweeping and lengthy historical romances, took full advantage, plagiarizing Joly’s text and others with a few dramatic tweaks for his epic-length dystopian-ish novel of political intrigue, Biarritz (1868), which runs on a timeline starting in the 18th century and ending in the not-too-distant future.
One chapter of Biarritz, titled “In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague," outlines a vast Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, with details liberally borrowed from Joly’s critique of Napoleon III’s political manipulations, but attributed to a secret council of rabbis.
Biarritz, in turn, was plagiarized by the unknown author of The Protocols, who dispensed with Goedsche’s lengthy melodrama to focus exclusively on the fictional Jewish conspiracy, presenting it as fact. The Protocols first appeared in Russian newspapers around the turn of the century and were plagiarized and adapted again as a chapter in a religious book by a Russian Orthodox apocalyptic mystic-slash-grifter named Sergei Nilus, who subsequently re-published the text as its own book.[i] The Protocols soon spread rapidly around the world, first published in book form for an American audience in 1920 by Small, Maynard & Co. of Boston.[1]
Joly’s critique of Napoleon III is recast in Protocols as a description of international crises caused by a race-based Jewish conspiracy. In its final form, Protocols is essentially a litany of everything that can theoretically go wrong in a society based on representative government, but it argues all these potential abuses are happening or have already happened as part of the Jewish plot. The crises are so diverse and wide-ranging that they provide a Rorschach test for readers, who could readily associate them with the latest worrisome developments in the real world. For examples, the prologue and appendix of the American edition clearly frame the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks in Russia as part of the Jewish conspiracy, linking the “Jewish Peril” to the scourge of Communism.
The conspiracy theories contained in Protocols were amplified and popularized by some of the biggest megaphones of the day, including the propaganda machine of Hitler and the Third Reich. In Russia, the text was promoted by Tsar Nicholas II, incitng deadly antisemitic pogroms and riots. In the United States, as Solomon Cruso’s mixed race prince notes (see previous newsletters), the chief promoter of the Protocols was Henry Ford.
A pioneer in the realm of industrial manufacturing, Henry Ford was isolated by his great wealth and success, which initially cast him as a role model and an “industrial statesman” whose opinions on all matters were much sought after.[ii]
Not unlike Elon Musk, once Ford started actually expressing his opinions, things took a bad turn, exposing him (in the words of lawyers in one lawsuit) as being “ignorant of most matters unrelated to automobiles.” Also like Elon Musk, except Ford probably actually knew something about automobiles.
Immersing himself in extreme right-wing views, Ford bought his his local newspaper, The Dearborn Independent and forged it into a weapon against the sinister people he believed were controlling world events—the Jews. (I’ll refrain from making another Musk comparison, but, you know.) Supervised by the magnate directly, the Independent manufactured and distributed antisemitic conspiracy theories as efficiently as the assembly lines Ford had championed in the automotive industry.
Ford’s aggressive publication of these libels won him the admiration of a young Adolf Hitler. [iii] Many of his antisemitic conspiracies, such as an accusation that the U.S. Federal Reserve was a Jewish plot against America, continue to hold sway among extremists today, but nothing published by the Independent was as pernicious and durable as The Protocols.
Plagiarized from a dystopian novel, The Protocols naturally went on to inspire a number of dystopian imitators. The first major work in this subgenre was published in 1944—When? A Prophetical Novel of the Very Near Future, written under the pseudonym H. Ben Judah.[2] Technically an apocalypse story, When? elaborates on The Protocols conspiracy theory, layering in novel concepts, including the bones of a new extremist ideology.[iv]
In the style of other political dystopias, When? features lengthy Socratic dialogues at the expense of plot,[3] in this case including extensive bibliographies pointing to other works of racial theory and antisemitism. At various points, the characters literally read books to each other. The major thrust of its wearying exposition is that there are two races of Jews, one noble and one malignant, with the latter responsible for global crises of the sort described in The Protocols, which are explicitly referenced. The book’s main protagonist, Brian Benjamin, is one of the “good Jews” of Sephardic extraction, as opposed to the “bad Jews” of Ashkenazi descent.
The novel contains the first full articulation of an extremist ideology known as Christian Identity, a worldview that would inspire generations of American racists. During its heyday in the 1980s, Christian Identity inspired a number of violent terrorist groups, including The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, responsible for racial murders and attempted bombings, and the Aryan Nations, whose leadership was among 14 people prosecuted for sedition in 1987 for alleged support of a wide range of illegal and violent white supremacist activities. Its most influential leader, a longtime neo-Nazi named Richard Butler, had other dystopian connections—when he was a boy, he had avidly read The Red Napoleon, which helped shape his racist views.
The ideology laid out in When? holds that Ashkenazi Jews are directly descended from the biblical Cain, the first murderer in Judeo-Christian tradition. According to the book, Cain was not the son of Adam and Eve, as most people believe, but was fathered by Satan, in the form of the serpent in the garden of Eden, extensively citing biblical texts as well as mythical beliefs to justify this claim.[v] The pseudonymous author stops short of unambiguously stating that Cain is the genetic son of Satan, but he strongly implies it and documents additional biblical accounts of interbreeding between “fallen angels” and Cain’s progeny.[4] Whether or not Cain was Patient Zero for the demonic seed, the phrase “seed of the serpent” has literal, genetic meaning here. The author also identifies Cain as the originator of the conspiratorial group of Elders described in the Protocols.
After almost 100 pages of dialectic exposition, the book follows its characters through battle of Armageddon.[5] The white nations and the “good Jews” formally pray to God for deliverance, and he responds by striking down the forces of the “bad Jews” and their non-white allies, who are also implied to be descended from demonic stock. A supernatural “holocaust” kills thousands of enemy soldiers, swallows their leaders whole, and destroys the Dome of the Rock and other Muslim structures.[6] The Second Coming follows, and the returning Christ is anointed king of an Anglo-Saxon empire on earth, racially purifying the United States and Canada by exiling the “seed of the serpent” races to await the Final Judgment.
The good Jew/bad Jew dichotomy did not originate in When? Although the novel crystallizes the idea and casts it in racial terms, the same tension runs through other Jewish-centric dystopias, whose authors, like Solomon Cruso, often take great pains to avoid the label of antisemitism even as they indulge in pernicious stereotypes.
An early and memorable example of the genre was the best-selling novel Caesar’s Column, by Ignatius Donnelly, an eccentric U.S. congressman, published more than 50 years before When? and 20 years before the first English publication of The Protocols. Caesar’s Column mixes a period-appropriate portion of saccharine romance with a terrifying vision of a technologically depraved society ruled by an oligarchy and centered in a futuristic New York City, accessed by airship, internally connected by an elaborate mass transit system and informed by news reports delivered on telescreens.
Donnelly depicts a conflict between a corrupt and violent oligarchy and a corrupt and violent rebellion, both of which feature Jews in unsubtly emphasized leadership roles. Like Cruso, Donnelly offers a Jewish protagonist and a blended narrative that characterizes Jews as the world’s ultimate puppet masters, while blaming their power-grasping tendencies on a long history of unjust persecution:
…now the Christian world is paying, in tears and blood, for the sufferings inflicted by their bigoted and ignorant ancestors upon a noble race. When the time came for liberty and fair play the Jew was master in the contest with the Gentile, who hated and feared him. "They are the great money-getters of the world. They rose from dealers in old clothes and peddlers of hats to merchants, to bankers, to princes. They were as merciless to the Christian as the Christian had been to them. They said, with Shylock: 'The villainy you teach me I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.'[vi]
The book concludes on a grim note, with an apocalyptic civil war that leaves New York in ruins amid a smoldering pyre of countless corpses, the result of rebel airships bearing “death bombs.” Both the oligarchs and the rebels fall before mob rule, and the prospect of long period of anarchy looms for the once-proud city.
What differentiates each of these works is the authorship. Cruso was one weird guy, but he was definitely Jewish, and so one might consider the possibility that his professed philosemitism was sincere. Donnelly, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more Irish, was writing about Jews from the perspective of an outsider, using the Jewish-sounding name of his protagonist to obfuscate a narrative that would otherwise present as strongly antisemitic.
The author of When?, similarly, used a Jewish pseudonym and featured a Sephardic Jewish protagonist with the explicit intention of rebuffing accusations of antisemitism:
Do not let the reader be deceived into believing that this book is anti-Semitic. Actually it is just the opposite, the writer himself being of Semitic Judah, and therefore wishing to point out that there are two types of so-called Jews, the real Semitic Jew and the Ashkenazim so-called Jew who is a convert to Judaism only, ostensibly by religion, but not by blood.[7]
[1] https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007244, Nilus, Sergi︠e︡ĭ. “The Protocols and World Revolution: Including a Translation and Analysis of the "Protocols of the Meetings of the Zionist Men of Wisdom". Small, Maynard. 1920.
[2] Judah, H. Ben. When? A Prophetical Novel of the Very Near Future. British Israel Association of Greater Vancouver. 1944.
[3] Berger, J.M. “The Turner Legacy: The Storied Origins and Enduring Impact of White Nationalism’s Deadly Bible”, The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague 7, no. 8 (2016). pp 14, 19, 23, 33.
[4] Judah, op. cit., 72-74.
[5] Judah, op. cit., 90.
[6] Judah, op. cit., 88-113.
[7] Judah, op. cit., p 3.
[i] Landes, Richard, and Steven T. Katz, eds. The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. NYU Press, 2012. p. 79-82. It is not impossible Nilus could have been the first author of The Protocols in its finished form, but few scholars have asserted this.
[ii] Ribuffo, Leo P. "Henry Ford and" The International Jew"." American Jewish History 69.4 (1980): 437.
[iii] Ribuffo, Leo P. "Henry Ford and" The International Jew"." American Jewish History 69.4 (1980): 437.
[iv] Portions adapted from Extremist Construction of Identity (Berger, 2017)
[v] Mikhail Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right
[vi] Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar's Column. Public Domain Books, 2004. Kindle file. p. 24.
Very interesting, I knew about the “Protocols” and Henry Ford, but not any of the rest of this. As for Ford, in my parents’ generation which came of age in the 1930s, many American Jews therefore shunned Ford cars. (But Ford briefly had a Jewish CEO in the 2010s.)