The Command Post
Iraq
August 26, 2003
The Foundation For Modern Anti-Semitism

FORWARD: Century of Hatred: 'Protocols' Live To Poison Yet Another Generation.
There's no comfort in the fact that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was actually lifted from a parody having nothing to do with Jews, but it is striking that the Protocols are still influential today. It's also striking, though not all that surprising, that the Protocols are being taught as fact at Berkeley when they are a forgery.

Given all that's occurred in the Middle East in the latest Intifada, now in its third year, it sickens me to think that this sort of trash is still held up as fact and used to instigate violence against Jews in general and Israel in particular.

That the idiots at MEChA have embraced them doesn't even surprise me anymore. Jew-hating seems to have become a global hobby throughout history and I will never understand why.

History's most virulent antisemitic propaganda essay, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," was first published 100 years ago this week. Though the Protocols turned out to be both a notorious plagiarism and a shocking forgery, the essay would exercise a powerful impact upon the modern era, principally as a critical factor in generating the Holocaust.

Despite its gross falsehood and the horrors it sparked, the Protocols strikingly continues to be promoted today, most alarmingly in such important institutional settings as the United Nations and Middle Eastern governmental media.

The first publication to print the Protocols was the St. Petersburg newspaper Znamya — Russian for Banner — from August 26 to September 7, 1903. Pavel Krushevan, editor of the paper, was known for his ultra-rightist antisemitic views and found common cause with the so-called Black Hundreds, a group active on behalf of extremist causes.

Krushevan, however, was not the author of the Protocols. It was drafted under the prodding and guidance of Piotr Rachkovsky, director of the Paris branch of Okhrana, the Russian secret police. Sinister and wily, he cultivated the art of forging letters or documents in which Jews were targeted as revolutionaries and anarchists striving for democracy in czarist Russia. As early as 1891, he revealed his intentions in a private letter.

The published Protocols were said to be the secret decisions reached at a gathering of Jewish leaders. That gathering was initially held to be the First Zionist Congress, which met in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland. Later, the source was attributed to B'nai B'rith.

What was stunning about the Protocols, as later scholarly investigation and research revealed, was that it was lifted almost entirely from a forgotten political satire published in Paris in 1864 and written by a well-known democrat, Maurice Joly.

Joly's pamphlet was designed to expose the repressive character of Emperor Napoleon III's regime, which ruled France at the time. Titled "A Dialogue in Hell: Conversations Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu About Power and Rights," the pamphlet made no reference to the Jews.

Read the whole article.

Posted By Robert Prather (Insults Unpunished) at August 26, 2003 02:23 AM | TrackBack
Comments

And here I thought the Elders of Zion myth was limited to Middle East propagandists. Berkeley should be shamed into firing this dick.

Posted by: rrgg@hotmail.com at August 26, 2003 02:39 PM

Berkeley cannot be shamed, as the crowd of libs over there lend profound new meaning to the word "shameless".

Remember, they were the same folks who blamed the U.S. for 9/11, and said we deserved it.

> They are, exponentially, to the left of leftist.

Posted by: Seth at August 26, 2003 03:32 PM

They add a whole new dimension to the words 'portside pukers'.

Posted by: Cap'n SPIN at August 26, 2003 05:43 PM

There is a problem here. Americans are so poorly educated in history that many of them think that Vietnam was the bloodiest war in human history. Their religious education is probably just as bad.

Here's my point: Americans have never read the "Protocols...", most likely, unless they are kooks.
More and more, in fact, Americans, maybe correctly, see that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Moslems DO have a moral equivalence. That there is no moral "high ground" when both sides kill women and children, despite their endless justifications and insistence of righteous revenge.

This idea, that Jews aren't special, that they don't deserve any consideration above and beyond everybody else, has become in practical usage the definition of "anti-Semitism". You "hate" Jews because you do not see them as better then you in some way.

Most Americans, in fact, who dislike Jews, do so NOT out of religious reasons, but because they have MET one or more Jews who are so ill-mannered, so inconsiderate and rude, so grasping and mean, that that one or several taint all Jews.

And this taint is amplified by the refusal of Jews to condemn other Jews who behave this way. Were some Jews to stand up and roundly criticize and shun bad behavior in other Jews to non-Jews, it would do much to redeem their poor reputation.

A people are not judged by their most enlightened, their kindest, most artistic, friendliest, and most scholarly; they are judged by how they treat their stupid, cruel, violent, petty, and crude brethren.

Posted by: Anonymous at August 30, 2003 12:19 PM

The University of Nebraska Press will offer in its Spring 2004 catalog the English edition of Cesare De Michelis, The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion. This is a comprehensive and detailed study of the earliest texts published in Russia of the Protocols. It's oriented toward the academic audience, but anyone interested will find the text accessible. Originally published in Italian, the English edition includes the full Russian text.
The book is part of the Studies in Antisemitism series of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at Hebrew University.

Posted by: Alifa at September 1, 2003 04:19 AM

David Duke is a malignant narcissist.

He invents and then projects a false, fictitious, self for the world to fear, or to admire. He maintains a tenuous grasp on reality to start with and the trappings of power further exacerbate this. Real life authority and David Duke’s predilection to surround him with obsequious sycophants support David Duke’s grandiose self-delusions and fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience.
David Duke's personality is so precariously balanced that he cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism and disagreement. Most narcissists are paranoid and suffer from ideas of reference (the delusion that they are being mocked or discussed when they are not). Thus, narcissists often regard themselves as "victims of persecution".
Duke fosters and encourages a personality cult with all the hallmarks of an institutional religion: priesthood, rites, rituals, temples, worship, catechism, and mythology. The leader is this religion's ascetic saint. He monastically denies himself earthly pleasures (or so he claims) in order to be able to dedicate himself fully to his calling.
Duke is a monstrously inverted Jesus, sacrificing his life and denying himself so that his people - or humanity at large - should benefit. By surpassing and suppressing his humanity, Duke became a distorted version of Nietzsche's "superman".
But being a-human or super-human also means being a-sexual and a-moral.
In this restricted sense, narcissistic leaders are post-modernist and moral relativists. They project to the masses an androgynous figure and enhance it by engendering the adoration of nudity and all things "natural" - or by strongly repressing these feelings. But what they refer to, as "nature" is not natural at all.
Duke invariably proffers an aesthetic of decadence and evil carefully orchestrated and artificial - though it is not perceived this way by him or by his followers. Narcissistic leadership is about reproduced copies, not about originals. It is about the manipulation of symbols - not about veritable atavism or true conservatism.
In short: narcissistic leadership is about theatre, not about life. To enjoy the spectacle (and be subsumed by it), the leader demands the suspension of judgment, depersonalization, and de-realization. Catharsis is tantamount, in this narcissistic dramaturgy, to self-annulment.
Narcissism is nihilistic not only operationally, or ideologically. Its very language and narratives are nihilistic. Narcissism is conspicuous nihilism - and the cult's leader serves as a role model, annihilating the Man, only to re-appear as a pre-ordained and irresistible force of nature.
Narcissistic leadership often poses as a rebellion against the "old ways" - against the hegemonic culture, the upper classes, the established religions, the superpowers, the corrupt order. Narcissistic movements are puerile, a reaction to narcissistic injuries inflicted upon David Duke like (and rather psychopathic) toddler nation-state, or group, or upon the leader.
Minorities or "others" - often arbitrarily selected - constitute a perfect, easily identifiable, embodiment of all that is "wrong". They are accused of being old, they are eerily disembodied, they are cosmopolitan, they are part of the establishment, they are "decadent", they are hated on religious and socio-economic grounds, or because of their race, sexual orientation, origin ... They are different, they are narcissistic (feel and act as morally superior), they are everywhere, they are defenseless, they are credulous, they are adaptable (and thus can be co-opted to collaborate in their own destruction). They are the perfect hate figure. Narcissists thrive on hatred and pathological envy.
This is precisely the source of the fascination with Hitler, diagnosed by Erich Fromm - together with Stalin - as a malignant narcissist. He was an inverted human. His unconscious was his conscious. He acted out our most repressed drives, fantasies, and wishes. He provides us with a glimpse of the horrors that lie beneath the veneer, the barbarians at our personal gates, and what it was like before we invented civilization. Hitler forced us all through a time warp and many did not emerge. He was not the devil. He was one of us. He was what Arendt aptly called the banality of evil. Just an ordinary, mentally disturbed, failure, a member of a mentally disturbed and failing nation, who lived through disturbed and failing times. He was the perfect mirror, a channel, a voice, and the very depth of our souls.
Duke prefers the sparkle and glamour of well-orchestrated illusions to the tedium and method of real accomplishments. His reign is all smoke and mirrors, devoid of substances, consisting of mere appearances and mass delusions. In the aftermath of his regime - Duke having died, been deposed, or voted out of office - it all unravels. The tireless and constant prestidigitation ceases and the entire edifice crumbles. What looked like an economic miracle turns out to have been a fraud-laced bubble. Loosely held empires disintegrate. Laboriously assembled business conglomerates go to pieces. "Earth shattering" and "revolutionary" scientific discoveries and theories are discredited. Social experiments end in mayhem.
It is important to understand that the use of violence must be ego-syntonic. It must accord with the self-image of David Duke. It must abet and sustain his grandiose fantasies and feed his sense of entitlement. It must conform David Duke like narrative. Thus, David Duke who regards himself as the benefactor of the poor, a member of the common folk, the representative of the disenfranchised, the champion of the dispossessed against the corrupt elite - is highly unlikely to use violence at first. The pacific mask crumbles when David Duke has become convinced that the very people he purported to speak for, his constituency, his grassroots fans, and the prime sources of his narcissistic supply - have turned against him. At first, in a desperate effort to maintain the fiction underlying his chaotic personality, David Duke strives to explain away the sudden reversal of sentiment. "The people are being duped by (the media, big industry, the military, the elite, etc.)", "they don't really know what they are doing", "following a rude awakening, they will revert to form", etc. When these flimsy attempts to patch a tattered personal mythology fail, David Duke becomes injured. Narcissistic injury inevitably leads to narcissistic rage and to a terrifying display of unbridled aggression. The pent-up frustration and hurt translate into devaluation. That which was previously idealized - is now discarded with contempt and hatred. This primitive defense mechanism is called "splitting". To David Duke, things and people are either entirely bad (evil) or entirely good. He projects onto others his own shortcomings and negative emotions, thus becoming a totally good object. Duke is likely to justify the butchering of his own people by claiming that they intended to kill him, undo the revolution, devastate the economy, or the country, etc. The "small people", the "rank and file", and the "loyal soldiers" of David Duke - his flock, his nation, and his employees - they pay the price. The disillusionment and disenchantment are agonizing. The process of reconstruction, of rising from the ashes, of overcoming the trauma of having been deceived, exploited and manipulated - is drawn-out. It is difficult to trust again, to have faith, to love, to be led, to collaborate. Feelings of shame and guilt engulf the erstwhile followers of David Duke. This is his sole legacy: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder.

Posted by: WASPS AGAINST DUKE at March 10, 2004 04:04 AM

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