Every now and then the Public Library runs a sale, surplus volumes are sold for ridiculously low prices, and if you're willing to plow through piles of stuff like "Needlepoint Therapy", or 1957 political science textbooks, you can occasionally turn up some treasures. I got two last week, for fifty cents each, "The Fart Book", a humorous cartoon book about flatulence (for the wife) and for myself , "Los Protocolos de los Sabios de Sion", a Spanish language Mexican 1960s edition of the most notorious piece of black propaganda of all time. The text of this obscenity is on the internet in English, but I find reading book length material difficult on line and I occasionally like to read Spanish to keep my language skills up. Also I was embarassed to be seen walking around downtown carrying this very recognizeable title on a Jewish holiday. I will not type the title here in English to frustrate Google searches, but I'm sure you know what it is.

The book was originally written as a piece of black propaganda in the early 1900s by the Czar's secret police to discredit the Jews, and it purports to be a manifesto by Jewish leaders on how they plan to take over the world. It was quickly shown to be not only a crude forgery, but mostly plagiarized as well, entire sections of it have been demonstrated to have been lifted verbatim from a French political satire written decades later which had nothing to do with the Jews. But the book has persisted nonetheless, it has been a cornerstone of anti-semitic thought ever since, was read and quoted by Hitler, published and distributed in the USA by Henry Ford, and today is still quoted at length by anti-semites both domestic and foreign. Needless to say, it's a big hit in the Arab World, but before we congratulate ourselves too much, it is also part of many a racist far right website and organization in this country. It's followers debunk the debunkers, and produce volumnious volumes of scholarship to prove how those who try to discredit the book are just members of a Jewish conspiracy attempting to cover their tracks and "hide the truth".

This is what is really upsetting about this text, not necessarily the pamphlet itself, written for political reasons (to harness Russian anti-semitism to attack socialism by alleging the latter was all a Jewish conspiracy). The scholarly critical notes which accompany this edition are supposedly written by a reactionay Spanish priest of the Franco era.
His justifications of the book exhibit all the evasions and perversions of the true ideologue. The cleric actually acknowleges the possible unauthenticity of the Protocols, but dismisses it by announcing that "even if this is the case, they still ring true because they document what is clearly happening in the world today as should be obvious to any objective observer."

It's all nonsense, of course. The book is all written in generalities, there are no specific instructions or plans to indicate how this Zionist conspiracy is supposed to actually do all the things it claims to want to do. Nothing that can be verified or checked by independent research or challenged by alternative interpretation is here. It is one long harangue gleefully detailing how the alleged writers are going to pervert the world for their own benefit. I don't see how even a genuine antisemite could take it at face value. No actual blueprint would simultaneously be so free of actual recommendations and also so bare-facedly malicious. What the true authors forgot was that real villains never see themselves that way. They are convinced they are in the right and that they must reluctantly carry out their malignancies for the benefit of all, or at least, for the protection of the righteous. Anyone who's read Mein Kampf has recognized this. Hitler THOUGHT he was a good guy. Political polemics are deliberately written as apologies, to demonstrate the virtue of their authors. The Protocols would be embarassing and make uneasy reading even for the monsters who supposedly wrote them.

The "sages of Zion" do not exist, and I suspect the true authors were primarily interested in their own immediate struggle against the socialist revolutionary fervor of turn of the century Russia. What remains is a text that has somehow, perhaps even unexpectedly, struck a resonance with the authoritarian and reactionary mind so often associated with, but not limited to, anti-semitism. Reading this book, like reading Mein Kamp or the Communist Manifesto, gives us an insight into the mind of the ideologue, the mentality that already knows how the world works and sees evidence to support that assessment everywhere, and furthermore, is furious that no one else seems to see it: further evidence of the perverting influence of his ideological enemies.