Rick Spence

And those are people that a lot of people would come in contact with, bankers, lawyers, and doctors. They were not the majority there, but vastly overrepresented in terms of the general population. And especially within the cities.

So in that sense, the roots of anti-Semitism to me is that Jews in Germany and elsewhere, and not just in Germany by any means, France, Britain, everywhere else, became identified with the bad changes that were taking place. But you also found that Jews were not only prominent among capitalists, they were also prominent in the socialist movement as well.

So one of the things you could look around, if we return to Germany in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I, and you look around in Bavaria or elsewhere, you tend to find that there are a lot of Jews in visible positions on the German left. Rosa Luxemburg is but one example of that. You know, Eugen Levine, some of them came in from Russia.

You know, when the Soviets sent a representative to Germany in this period, it's Karl Radek, a Jew. So it wasn't difficult to exploit that to argue that just as the ranks of capitalism was full of Jews... The ranks of Bolshevism or of the revolutionary left were full of Jews because you could easily go around and distinguish a great many of them. They don't have to be the majority.

They just have to be numerous, prominent, and visible, which they were. So this provided you a... In the case of the propaganda of the German army, the type of stuff that Hitler spewed out, they could put all the anti-capitalist rhetoric in there, wanted to. The army was never going to overthrow capitalism, and the capitalists knew they weren't going to do it. So go ahead. Talk shit about us.

We don't really care. Because we know that the army would prevent that from happening. The way to then undermine the real enemy, it was a scene, the revolutionary left was to point out the Jewish influence there. I mean, look at Russia. Well, Lenin's up at Trotsky. There he is. Look, there's a Jew. There's one. Radek is a Jew. It wasn't hard to find them in that regard.

Well, the Protocols of the Alerted Elders of Zion is probably one of the most troublesome and destructive works of literature that has ever emerged.

and yet its origins remain obscure.

So you get a whole variety of stories about where it came from. So the one story that is often is that it was the work of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, and in particular, it was all crafted in 1904 and 1905. In Paris, there's a whole description of... Piotr Raczkowski, who was supposedly the chief of the Okhran at the time, was the man behind it.

Another fellow by the name of Matvei Golovinsky was the drafter of it. They had this document written by a French political writer from some decades back called Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. which they were then adapting. Usually it's argued that they plagiarized it into the protocols. And none of that is really true.

I mean, the first part about it is that at the time this supposedly took place, Rajkosy wasn't working for the Okhrana. He'd been fired and he wasn't in Paris. And the whole situation which is described couldn't have taken place because the people who did it weren't there. It's a story. But it provides a kind of explanation for it. So the protocols emerge. So you always have to go back.

This is one of the things that I have found always useful in research is go back to the beginning. Find the first place this is mentioned or the first version or the first iteration. Where does it start? So you go back to St. Petersburg, Russia, around 1903. There is a small right-wing anti-Semitic newspaper published there called Znamya, Banner.

And it publishes in a kind of serial form a work, doesn't credit with any original author. And this is the first version of the protocols of the learned elders of Zion. But what it's actually describing is a Judeo-Masonic plot to rule the world. Those two terms are always combined together. And in fact, in the earlier version, there's far more mentions of Freemasons than there are Jews.

And the publisher of Znamya is closely connected to a thing called the Union of the Russian People, the Union of the Russian Men, which ostensibly existed to defend the empire against subversion. particularly against what it thought was Jewish subversion, when they also argued that the prominence of Jews in revolutionary movements somehow proved that this was in some way a Jewish revolution.

But again, this is not a mainstream newspaper. It's not appealing to a mainstream population. Very few people saw it. But this is where it appears. Now, keep in mind, that's two or three years before it's usually said to have been written. Or the other version is that there's this crazy priest by the name of Sergei Niles, and he wrote it. or actually appended it as an appendix to his work in 1905.

Now, it was around before that. So Niles didn't create it. It wasn't drafted in Paris in 1904, 1905. It was serialized in an obscure right-wing Russian newspaper called

Russian term basically for notes of a meeting. Yeah. Well, it's notes of a meeting. These are the goofiest things I've ever seen. Because what you've got here, it's not notes. No one takes notes from a meeting that way. What you've got is like the exposition of a Bond villain, right? It's all of this, boy, oh, then we're going to do this.

And then the last thing you want to do is lay out your, if you've got a plan for world domination, my suggestion would be don't write it down. So it's not notes of a meeting. It's, again, it's another sort of narrative or story that's being told. It bears no resemblance to the dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.

But what it is, the best thing, it's not particularly readable in some ways. There was an Italian writer, Cesare Michalis, who wrote a book translated in English called The Non-Existent Manuscript.

And what it is, is that he takes the different versions, starting with the 1902, 1903 versions, and looks through the other ones, and he tries to, in the process, to reconstruct what he thinks the original might have been. But the other thing he does, which was fascinating to me, is that he takes this whole sort of initial text and