(No better incident illustrates this point than the first visit of the Japanese delegation to Hebrew University in 1978. They brought as their gift-crucial and carefully thought out in a gift culture-a beautifully bound translation of the Protocols into Japanese. This was so perfect a story, so deeply cutting and dark a joke, it seems like a perfect candidate for urban legend. But it is not.)*...
In a sense, the Protocols expresses their understanding of the anomalous present. Democracy is a prelude to horror. Someone is secretly planning its overthrow. Who else, but a people smart enough to con Gentile commoners into overthrowing their own aristocracies? Even some pathetic aristocrats become "infected with the idea of freedom, SO-CALLED LIBERALISM, and, for the sake of an idea, are willing to yield some of their power." Hence, free press, free thinking, Darwin, and Nietzsche are all pawns of the Jewish conspiracy. "Jews must know what we know," reasons the conspiracist, "and they must be planning what we would plan were we in their position."
If this psychological projection underlies the composition of the Protocols and appealed to some of its readership, the prophetic nature of the text, the extraordinary accuracy of its predictive powers over the early decades of the 20th century, provided it with a much wider and more frightened audience. Above all, it was disturbingly accurate in its reading of egalitarian ideologues.
Whenever the egalitarian zealots managed to pull off a revolution, whether in France in 1789 or in Russia in 1917, no sooner did they acquire power than they turned to terror to rule. All the fair promises that lured the commoners to support the leadership ended in mob rule and bloodthirsty demagogues. Given that the Protocols came out little more than a decade before the Russian Revolution and that by the time Marsden translated it into English, in 1922, the Bolsheviks had begun their purges and mass arrests, the work seemed utterly prophetic...
As [Hitler] plotted his own war of conquest to enslave the world's races, he projected precisely that intention on the Jews. "In reading ... the Protocols, one has the feeling that one is reading descriptions of Hitler's own ... plans. Page after page, all one needs to do is substitute the words 'Hitler will ... whenever the Protocols say 'the Jews [sic] will ... ""
And the same phenomenon repeats in the 21st century among the most zealous believers in the Protocols, the Islamists who plan to do what they accuse the Jews of doing. Here a Turkish Muslim working for the imposition of Sharia on Turkey outlines the plan of action:
You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers ... until the conditions are ripe, they [Muslim followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria [Hama] ... like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete, and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it. ... You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey .... Until that time, any step taken would be too early-like breaking an egg without waiting the full 40 days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world. Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all-in confidence ... trusting your loyalty and sensitivity to secrecy. I know that when you leave here-[just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and feelings expressed here.
It sounds precisely like what the Protocols imagined-long, slow, patient infiltration, using democracy to gain power, biding one's time until the proper moment to strike, the need for secrecy lest people who, were they to learn of the plans, would immediately and effectively terminate the conspiracy. The Project, a Muslim Brotherhood plan to bring Europe under Sharia rule first uncovered in Switzerland in 2001, resembles the Protocols so strikingly that readers-especially Jewish readers, who know how terrible it is to be accused of such awful plans -- initially recoiled at even entertaining the possibility that such things are true.
*Confirmed to me in conversation and e-mail by Menahem Milson, head of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the time, who received the gift from the delegation."
--- The Melian Dialogue, the Protocols, and the Paranoid Imperative / Richard Landes
