I've been drawn back into Umberto Eco's *The Prague Cemetery*. The original document of racial replacement theory is *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion*, a forgery produced in the 19th century at the behest of the secret service of a European country that no longer exists and may even have been defunct by the time the forgery was delivered. The forgery claims to describe a conspiracy of jews to take over, but as Eco notes it looks a lot like an earlier document that claimed to describe a conspiracy of jesuits to take over, which itself resembled a scene in Alexandre Dumas' *Joseph Balsamo* which described a conspiracy of magi led by Cagliostro plotting to take over during the 18th century.
As wikipedia summarizes: > *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion* (Протоколы сионских мудрецов) or *The > Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion* is a fabricated > antisemitic text <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitic_canard> purporting > to describe a Jewish <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish> plan for > global domination. The hoax <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoax> was > plagiarized from several earlier sources, some not antisemitic in nature. > [1] > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#cite_note-FOOTNOTEGraves1921-2> > It > was first published in Russia > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire> in 1903, translated into > multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of > the 20th century. It played a key part in popularizing belief in an > international > Jewish conspiracy > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Jewish_conspiracy>. > Distillations of the work were assigned by some German teachers, as if > factual, to be read by German schoolchildren after the Nazis came to power > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machtergreifung> in 1933,[2] > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#cite_note-Segel-1995-3> > despite > having been exposed as fraudulent by the British newspaper *The Times > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Times>* in 1921 and the German *Frankfurter > Zeitung <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurter_Zeitung>* in 1924. It > remains widely available in numerous languages, in print and on the > Internet, and continues to be presented by neofascist, fundamentalist and > antisemitic groups as a genuine document. It has been described as > "probably the most influential work of antisemitism ever written".[3] > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#cite_note-FOOTNOTEBronner20031-4> The idea that there is a cabal of elite others who are manipulating history to their benefit and your detriment is not a grass roots paranoia, it is a deliberate fiction that was invented and has been propagandized off and on since the end of the 19th century. It is not a "white people" thing, that white people spontaneously do from an innate xenophobia. It is a sociopathology that some people find profitable to encourage. -- rec --
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