-Caveat Lector- excerpted from: Pat Robertson and the "Illuminist Myth" http://www.isrp.org/illuminism.html NOTES ON THE PROTOCOLS FABRICATION 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. Much of this information comes from Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide. 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 "money-lenders," 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 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. [Please see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (New York: Harper and Row). 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 yourth.] 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 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 counterfit to the "real thing" which "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"... BARRITZ 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. Petersberg, 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 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. 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." DISJOINTED PIECES COME TOGETHER 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. 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. A MYTH LOOKING FOR A HAPPENING 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. 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. Petersberg 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. PYOTR IVANOVICH RACHKOVSKY 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 various exiled Russian revolutionaries and terrorists. 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. 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. THE FORGING OF THE PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION 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. Rachkovsky entrusted the finished forgery to Yulina Glinka, his agent in Switzerland, who then transferred them to Rachkovsky's old friend, Sergey Nilus at the great Orthodox monastery of Optina Pustyn. Nilus, a Russian 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 became a systematic anti-rationalist. Nilus was enthralled and totally taken in by the ruse. Rachkovsky had reasoned that if anyone could be taken in by the intrigue and find a way of publishing the Protocols, Nilus would be the man. Rachkovsky had not reasoned in vain. 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. 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. PLAYING WITH FIRE 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 -- which found itself into the pages of the Times of London and other newspapers and magazines in the West; and more, it was this version which Russian �migr�s carried with them to America after the final collapse of their forces in the Crimean Peninsula in 1922. To these �migr�s, 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, spreading the Illuminati Myth wherever they went and to whomever they met. 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." What is it about American Christians which makes them think that they can play with such fire 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 sell their own mothers 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 Savanarola, Zwingle, Calvin, Cromwell and countless others. 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. As we have already indicated, the Illuminist Myth is inextricably bound up with the Protocols. Indeed, when the myth first surfaced in 1905 it surfaced as part-and-parcel of the Protocols. The Protocols, however, are such a transparent forgery that one may wonder why it is even necessary to prove the point. The fact remains, however, that in the years immediately following the Russian Revolution and the First World War, when the Protocols were emerging from obscurity and becoming a world-famous document, multitudes of people who were by no means insane took them, at least initially, very seriously; 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 a play directed against Napoleon III and dated 1865. The title of the obscure play was Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel. BACKTRACKING THE ILLUMINATI MYTH 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 what 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 (minus, no doubt the naked references to the Jews and the overt racism which characterized fascism) but the fact is, it's relatively easy to prove the 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. Once here, it is not particularly difficult to follow its path up through the years straight to Pat Robertson and others in the Christian Right today. THE TORTURED PATH OF THE ILLUMINATI MYTH IN EUROPE And there can be little doubt as to the specific origin and nature of the myth Robertson and others are peddling. Professor Donald S. Strong of the University of Texas writes, "...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 and Fascist Italy." [Donald Strong, Organized Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1941), pg.1.] Strong continues -- taking the reader back to Europe just after the First World War, he describes the spread of the myth into Hungary in 1919; he writes, "The appearance of this ideology (i.e., the Illuminati Myth) in post-war 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 anti-revolutionary, anti-Semitic ideology made its appearance. Here, as in post-war Russia, the ideology was not used as a means of elite defense; instead an old elite, temporarily dislodged, employed it as a means of discrediting the new revolutionary (i.e., Communist) elite and justifying its own return to power. Thus, in the name of this anti-revolutionary, anti-Semitic ideology, the White Terror was directed not only against the Bolsheviks in general and the few Jewish Bolsheviks, but against all the half million Jews in Hungary. The speedy association of Jews and Bolsheviks in the 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."33 [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 was 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 Kulturkamp' -- 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."34 As the Illuminati Myth took hold in Germany, the middle and upper classes found reason to allow themselves to be pulled into the whirlpool. Strong writes, "(National Socialism) ...rallies its followers in the name of the national symbol against an alleged menace of revolution. (As a result), the middle classes... were drawn heavily to the Nazis. As the Nazis gained strength... they (also) drew members... from the upper classes..." [Donald Strong, Organized Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1941), pg.9.] And what is interesting here is that these classes were precisely those which heretofore had not participated in the old forms of religious anti-Semitism. [And this is a lesson that evangelicals, in particular, would do well to take note of; for while their own brand of eschatology (doctrine of "end times") mitigates against their participation in any form of religious anti-Semitism, it may not serve them well as protection from the seductiveness of political anti-Semitism and the allure of the Illuminati Myth. As the experience of the German middle and upper classes with political anti-Semitism demonstrates, the Illuminati Myth has a way of attracting people which heretofore have never been involved in anti-Semitism.] THE MYTH SURFACES FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE UNITED STATES Strong then describes the appearance of the Illuminist myth in the United States. He writes, "Anti-Semitism in its political form (i.e., the Illuminati Myth) first appeared in the United States at the end of the (First) World War..." "As a part of the post-war (i.e., World War I) 'Red Scare' large quantities of anti-Semitic literature entered into circulation. This literature indicated the first effort in the United States to identify a revolutionary ideology with the Jews (in the United States)." [Donald Strong, Organized Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1941), pg.15.] Strong then traced the trail of this ideology -- which ran like some well worn trail from its initial appearance in America during the Red Scare thourgh Ford and the America First movement of the 1930s to the war. From the war, the trail continued on through the McCarthy era and the John Birch Society to today. [We covered a portion of the post World War II segment of this trail in Section I.] To get a more precise idea of those people who were drawn to the Illuminist Myth -- and the reasons why -- 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. He wrote, "To understand precisely how and why... the (Illuminist Myth) has circulated in America since 1933, 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: (1) Christian (the National Union for Social Justice, the American Christian Defenders, and the Defenders of the Christian Faith); (2) anti-labor and business (the Industrial Defense Association, the Edmondson Economic Service, the American Vigilant Intelligence Service, and James True Associates); and (3) political and patriotic (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 a 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 (1) businessmen and anti-labor groups because it portrayed communism and their hated advesaries, the labor unions, as tools of Illuminism; (2) it galvanized Christians in as much as it painted a dire threat against Christianity; and finally (3) it excited national and patriotic groups as a response to the "one-worldism" of Illuminism. Thus, it was in the interest of all three communities (Big Business (and anti-labor groups), Christian politicos, 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 went along with it. Thus, it is a pure fact 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 nationalist and patriotic groups. Thus, the re-emergence of the Illuminist Myth in Christian circles today should be of great concern for all right-thinking evangelicals! THE DIALOGUE AND THE PROTOCOLS Maurice Joly, the author, 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.] THE GENESIS OF THE PROTOCOLS The fabricator of the of the Protocols was Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, who was the head of the Foreign Service Branch of the Okhrana headquarted in Paris. The Okhrana had been founded by imperial decree for the "protection of public security and order" after the Decembrist Revolution of 1825. Previously, the chief organ of the Secret Police had been the "Third Section" of the Imperial Chancellery, which was founded after the Decembrist Revolt. 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 various exiled Russian revolutionaries and terrorists. During this entire period, Rachkovsky resided in Paris and made it his headquarters. Rachkovsky was a born intriguer who delighted in forging documents. SERGEY ALEXANDROVICH NILUS & THE PROTOCOLS In 1902, Rachkovsky became involved in a court intrigue in St. Petersberg which also involved the future editor of the Protocols -- Sergey Alexandrovich Nilus. The intrigue was directed against a Frenchman called 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 while living in France as a young man in riotous living, 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; he had become a mystic. The book came to the attention of the Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna. Nilus was accordingly summoned to St. Petersberg 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. THE CLIMATE OF PUBLIC OPINION WHICH FOSTERED 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 the plan of transforming Joly's play into the Protocols and by doing so to lay the blame for all the unrest in Russia on the Jews. NILUS AND THE PROTOCOLS Rachkovsky entrusted the finished forgery to Yulina Glinka who then transferred them 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 taken in 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) ...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 note-book... "'Here it is', said Nilus, 'the charter of the Kingdom of Antichrist'. "He opened the note-book... 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 trade-mark 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------- RELIGION IN POLITICS P.O. BOX 69 Rancho Cordova, CA 95741-0069 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (916) 635-8739 ------------------------------------------------------------------- . DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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