MemeMachineGo!

I recently read the late, great Will Eisner’s last work, The Plot: The Secret Story of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a history of the Protocols in sequential art (comic book) form. (Despite having read the afterword, until looking at that Boston Globe article, I’d missed that it was by Stephen Bronner — I once took a class of his at Rutgers.)

Much of the material I was familiar with, but The Plot also went into how thoroughly and how often the Protocols had been debunked — starting in the London Times in 1921, through a Swiss Court ruling in 1935, through a US Senate Judiciary Committee report in 1964, to a Russian court ruling in 1993, and beyond… and how the Protocols keep coming back, no matter how many times you kill them.

I was upset to find that Google’s first result for protocols elders zion is a site called Bible Believers presenting the Protocols as authentic (no link — I don’t want to give them any more Google juice.)

Of the Protocols themselves little need be said in the way of introduction. The book in which they are embodied was first published in the year 1897 by Philip Stepanov for private circulation among his intimate friends. The first time Nilus published them was in 1901 in a book called The Great Within the Small and reprinted in 1905. A copy of this is in the British Museum bearing the date of its reception, August 10, 1906. All copies that were known to exist in Russia were destroyed in the Kerensky regime, and under his successors the possession of a copy by anyone in Soviet land was a crime sufficient to ensure the owner’s of being shot on sight. The fact is in itself sufficient proof of the genuineness of the Protocols. [emphasis added — Zed] The Jewish journals, of course, say that they are a forgery, leaving it to be understood that Professor Nilus, who embodied them in a work of his own, had concocted them for his own purposes.