The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion with Preface and Explanatory Notes [Paperback]

This book has been the source of so many conspiracy theories that I felt that I should take the plunge and find out what it is about by reading it for myself.

I think that the provenance of this book is well known. It was supposedly based on a satire written in France concerning that country during the reign of Napoleon III concerning a secret cabal intent on controlling the world and discussing how it can be done. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is largely of an update of this book in which the secret cabal is made up of senior figures in the Jewish race. The book was supposedly produced by the Russian secret service and should be regarded as fiction.

I did not find that there was much that I could get my teeth into with this book. It is full of generalities and contains nothing that could be regarded as a specific policy. Despite this, people have treated this book as some kind of 'how to' manual and evidence that everything you see or believe is not what it seems.

For Hitler (who name checks this book in Mein Kampf), it provided ample justification for his anti Jewish policy when he became Chancellor. Because of this book, he was prepared to believe that Jews were behind the Russian Revolution and also in control of the press and the banks and the universities. He was prepared to believe that every ill in modern society had some kind of Jewish core.

For others (like David Icke for instance), the book is seen as evidence not necessarily of a purely Jewish/Zionist conspiracy
but of a secret cabal aiming at achieving world domination. People look at organisations like the Freemasons and the Bilderberg Group as evidence that there is some underlying control which manipulates financial and political systems. There is even a satanic element of this control.

Others see that these protocols are an incredibly accurate forecast of the course of the Twentieth Century.

Having now read the book, I am not convinced of anything alleged in the book. For one thing, if there was such a secret organisation, why would it spill the beans by actually writing down its plans? As far as it being an accurate forecast, I personally think it far too vague; anyone with a mind to do so could simply interpret events and trends to fit in with the Protocols. The very vagueness of the book is in fact one of its strengths; it means that every action or trend can be traced back to some shadowy brotherhood.

Maybe I am being stupid or hopeless naive for failing to realise how things really are in our world. Or maybe I am actually part of the conspiracy who is using this review as a smokescreen. You will have to decide.

There are numerous arguments about the legitimacy of the claims to authorship of this document and i won't bore you further with them. However, if there is any shred of truth to these claims then this is a seriously dangerous book. Mnay of the plans do seem to be coming to fuition in our modern world and the whole thing leaves one extremely unsettled. Of course, the danger is that there are groups who will use such a book to fuel hatred of the Jews. Read it carefully and recognise that it is Zionism that is the issue, not the whole Jewish people. There are plenty of non-Jewish zionists amongst the modern American version of Christianity (that bares no resemblance to the traditional and ancient form of the faith)who seek the same political aims - this is not a racial issue. This book is hard to stomach whatever its origin, but one worth reading.

I came to this work by reading 'Future Tense' by Jonathan Sacks; it wasn't something I'd heard of before. Lord Sacks describes it as a forgery, which I don't think is quite the right word. A forgery is an imitation trying to pass itself off as real; this is fiction, at best. Claptrap might better summarize it for someone who hasn't read it. The basic idea it presents is that Jews and Freemasons conspired together to rule the world in the late nineteenth century in Paris. The protocols are supposedly the reports for their meetings. The work was exposed as a cobble-up by the London Times newspaper in 1921, as much of it was originally written as a sarcasm about Napoleon III. He's the one who remodelled Paris into the 'city of light' we know today - wide boulevards with no building allowed to be taller than the width of the street it stood on. He wanted dramatically wide spaces in Paris so that he could deploy his cavalry against the people in the next revolution, which didn't happen, although the space proved useful for the tank battles of August 1944 as Leclerc's French 2nd Armoured cleared out the Nazi occupation force.

Anyway, fiction; but some bits resonate, such as when they mention a power to temporarily restrict liberties. The 1990s Labour Government mentioned that one. There's another - 'keep promising them to give back all the liberties we have taken away as soon as we have quelled the enemies of peace'; I'm sure I've heard that one in the context of the handgun ban and it gets mentioned when ludicrous security measures come under the spotlight. How about 'the leader surrounding himself with millionaires'? They might have been anticipating the current Government's cabinet. Then there's a policy of treating political crime as criminal; er, isn't that how Britain treated the IRA? So the cynicism originally aimed at Napoleon, still echoes through time.

Where it's obviously nonsense is its nineteenth century cobbler trying to make it seem to be a Jewish writing. He doesn't even try. The scriptures rate no mention whatever, a feat not achieved by any real Jewish writings since those of Moses. All the old testament prophets quote or allude to those writings, as does everyone since, up to and including Lord Sacks. God gets a passing mention, logic doesn't. Anti-Semitism has its origins in state paranoia; governments don't like having people in their population who have a split loyalty. In ancient times, the state's politics and religion were one and the same. The priests ruled Egypt where Pharoah was a god. Julius Caesar liked that enough to adopt it for himself, so the cult of the caesar god became Rome's religion and that gradually developed into an intolerence of other religions, leading to the bloodshed of the Jewish revolts, the Iceni revolt and so on.

In England, the state religion became the Church of England, which was still the local authority at the time these protocols were - literally - made up. It doesn't take much thought to appreciate that if the official state Curch of England was the local authority, having split loyalty to attend Catholic, Jewish or a non-conformist chapel for worship could complicate your life. That's why the twentieth century saw those powers and responsibilities for local government stripped from the church and given to secular councils. They work for everyone.

The damage done by this work was out of all proportion to it's author's intentions. Hitler liked them, as they suited his prejudices. Perhaps he didn't read them himself, or else he missed the point in protocol 5 - 'Orators who speak so much that they will exhaust the patience of their hearers and produce an abhorrence of oratory.'

Reading this work provides a slant on social history, but nothing more. The historical nonsense that any group can dominate the world somehow is a repetitive theme in many fictional writings. Didn't James Bond sort out a few organisations bent on world domination? I think the men from U.N.C.L.E. did too. And if bankers thought they were getting close, this is the year for them to have a re-think.