The Protocols Of The Learned Elders of Zion is a book which purports to be a record of the wicked plans and tactics the Jewish elders use to take over the world. The Protocols were actually written in Paris sometime between 1895 and 1899 by an agent of the Russian secret police though Anti-semites don’t think so. In particular, within the last few years there have been several TV series on Arab TV which have assumed this book to be true. I think the whole thing is funny in a sad and twisted wierd way – so here’s my take on it…~Rav Shmuel
THE INTERNATIONAL JEW AND THE FORD MODEL T The ethnic or “racist” variant of political Jew-hatred
The “Protocols” and the “Great Hoax”
If your hero’s were Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford you’ll probably like the video by an anti-Semite named William Pierce – Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion Explained – Oct. 30, 1999 Thanks, John Paterson, proof, when a person reaches this level of ignorance there’s really not much can be done. The Protocols are a complete forgery most of which was copied from an obscure satire on Napoleon III by Maurice Joly called “Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel” (“A Dialogue in Hell Between Montesquieu and Machiavelli”).
For anyone not familiar with the facts behind the [exposed forgery] of the Protocols of Zion, the influence Henry Ford had on antisemitism and Jew hatred during the turn of the century in America, may you find this re-post enlightening.
“Schizophrenics? Jamaicans? Negroid rythmns?” ~Dr. William Pierce, a bigoted asshole selling hatred sandwiches
The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”
In the 21st Century
by Arthur Wailer
Thoughts on the Roots of Anti-Semitism in Europe
The beginning of violent European anti-Semitism is often traced to the Crusades at the end of the eleventh century. Others claim it commenced in 1010 with organized mass murders of Jews in France, followed by massacres in areas that are now part of Germany. For almost a thousand years the many versions of religious anti-Semitism have been accompanied by other manifestations of Jew-hatred in political, economic, and cultural spheres.
A close study of the history of anti-Semitism shows that it is first and foremost an expression of political and cultural opposition to Jewish ideals. The earliest known anti-Semitic writings emanated from the ruling class of the Hellenistic empires of the Middle East, specifically the Ptolemaic empire based in Egypt and the Seleucid empire based in Syria.
From that time to the present, anti-Semitism in its most virulent manifestations has been consistently associated with one empire or would-be empire after another.
The ethnic or “racist” variant of political Jew-hatred began in the late 19th century in Germany. At that time the term anti-Semitism first appeared. Fed also by the religious variety, this culminated in the genocide of the Holocaust.
Anti-Semitism is an extreme form of irrational hate, which should not be confused with strong criticism. Jews have been demonized for millennia and defined as the source of all evil. Other recourses to ancient history are often used in Europe to “point to an immutable negative Jewish character. Jews have also been discriminated against in many societies while, simultaneously, having double moral standards applied to them.
Often enough anti-Semites will point to a refusal on the part of Jews to assimilate to national cultures or “identity” in the geographical locales of which Jews have settled and nurtured successful communities.
- Jews are bidden to be “a light unto the nations.” (Isaiah 42:6) A light stands separate from that which it illuminates. The Divine charge to the Jewish people is to “be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Ex. 19:1) This is a mission from which we cannot resign because it is embedded in the Covenant between God and the nation of Israel.
- “A nation that will dwell in solitude and not be reckoned among the nations.” (Numbers 23:9)
The Covenant, which God introduced in His promises to the Patriarchs, which was accepted by the entire Jewish nation at Sinai (where all Jewish souls were present), and which was renewed on two other occasions in Jewish history, stipulates the following:
On God’s side, He promised:
That the Jewish people will never cease to exist (Gen.17:7).
That He will never totally abandon the Jewish people (Lev. 26:44).
That the Jewish people will inherent the Land of Israel (Gen.12:7; Gen.15:18).
That the Jewish people will never cease to exist (Gen.17:7).
That He will never totally abandon the Jewish people (Lev. 26:44).
That the Jewish people will inherent the Land of Israel (Gen.12:7; Gen.15:18).
On Israel’s side, we promised:
That we will be faithful to God and keep His Torah (Ex.24:7).
According to the Torah, unlike most covenants, this one is unconditional. Even if the Jews renege on their obligation, God, in the merit of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, will never annul his covenant with the Jews.
This belief has sparked much debate with varying opinion and it’s not the purpose of this editorial to examine the religious dogma, however many learned intellectuals have made comments of one form or another:
“The Jew is that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and has illumined with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring, and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religions.”
–Leo Tolstoy
“It was in vain that we locked them up for several hundred years behind the walls of the Ghetto. No sooner were their prison gates unbarred than they easily caught up with us, even on those paths which we opened up without their aid.”
–A. A. Leroy Beaulieu, French publicist, 1842
“One of the gifts of the Jewish culture to Christianity is that it has taught Christians to think like Jews, and any modern man who has not learned to think as though he were a Jew can hardly be said to have learned to think at all.”
–William Rees-Mogg, former Editor-in-Chief for The Times of London and a member of the House of Lords
–Leo Tolstoy
“It was in vain that we locked them up for several hundred years behind the walls of the Ghetto. No sooner were their prison gates unbarred than they easily caught up with us, even on those paths which we opened up without their aid.”
–A. A. Leroy Beaulieu, French publicist, 1842
“One of the gifts of the Jewish culture to Christianity is that it has taught Christians to think like Jews, and any modern man who has not learned to think as though he were a Jew can hardly be said to have learned to think at all.”
–William Rees-Mogg, former Editor-in-Chief for The Times of London and a member of the House of Lords
The “Protocols” and the “Great Hoax”
The conceptual inspiration for the Protocols can be traced back to the time of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. At that time, a French Jesuit named Abbe Barruel, representing reactionary elements opposed to the revolution, published in 1797 a treatise blaming the Revolution on a secret conspiracy operating through the Order of Freemasons. Barruel’s idea was nonsense, since the French nobility at the time was heavily Masonic, but he was influenced by a Scottish mathematician named Robison who was opposed to the Masons.
In his treatise, Barruel did not himself blame the Jews, who were emancipated as a result of the Revolution. However, in 1806, Barruel circulated a forged letter, probably sent to him by members of the state police opposed to Napoleon Bonaparte’s liberal policy toward the Jews, calling attention to the alleged part of the Jews in the conspiracy he had earlier attributed to the Masons. This myth of an international Jewish conspiracy reappeared later on in 19th century Europe in places such as Germany and Poland.
The Protocols are a complete forgery most of which was copied from an obscure satire on Napoleon III by Maurice Joly called “Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel” (“A Dialogue in Hell Between Montesquieu and Machiavelli”).
Elements of the text in the Protocols appears to be plagiarized from an 1864 pamphlet, Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu), written by the French satirist Maurice Joly. Joly’s work attacks the political ambitions of Napoleon III using Machiavelli as a diabolical plotter in Hell as a stand-in for Napoleon’s views.
Joly himself appears to have borrowed material from a popular novel by Eugène Sue, The Mysteries of the People, in which the plotters were Jesuits. Jews do not appear in either work. Since it was illegal to criticize the monarchy, Joly had the pamphlet printed in Belgium, then tried to smuggle it back into France. The police confiscated as many copies as they could, and it was banned. After it was traced to Joly, he was tried on April 25, 1865, and sentenced to fifteen months in prison. Joly committed suicide in 1878.
The story of the Protocols then continues with a chapter in a novel called “Biarritz” by a German bureaucrat named Hermann Goedesche. In the chapter, “The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel”, Goedsche wrote about a nocturnal meeting between members of a mysterious rabbinical cabal, describing how at midnight, the Devil appears before those who have gathered on behalf of the Twelve Tribes of Israel to plan a “Jewish conspiracy”.
The story of the Protocols then continues with a chapter in a novel called “Biarritz” by a German bureaucrat named Hermann Goedesche. In the chapter, “The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel”, Goedsche wrote about a nocturnal meeting between members of a mysterious rabbinical cabal, describing how at midnight, the Devil appears before those who have gathered on behalf of the Twelve Tribes of Israel to plan a “Jewish conspiracy”.
In 1871, the story was being presented in France as serious history. In 1872, the “The Jewish Cemetery in Prague”, translated into Russian, appeared in St. Petersburg as a separate pamphlet of purported non-fiction. François Bournand, in his Les Juifs et nos contemporains (1896), reproduced a speech from the chapter as that of a Chief Rabbi “John Radcliff”.
In 1901 a Russian official in the Chancery of the Synod of Moscow named Sergei Alexandrovich Nilus published a strange work entitled, “The Great in the Little and the Antichrist as a Proximate Political Possibility”. Nilus expressed the view that only the Holy Russian Empire could save the world from the rule of Antichrist.
The Victor Mardsen Translation
The idea behind the book was to bolster the absolute authority of the Czarist regime. In 1905 a second edition of the book appeared with one significant addition – the Protocols!
A secret investigation ordered by the newly appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers Pyotr Stolypin soon determined that the Protocols were authored by operatives of the Okhranka in Paris. The details were not made public to avoid compromising the chief of secret service Pyotr Rachkovsky and his agents, but when Nicholas II learned of the results, he requested:
“The Protocols should be confiscated, a good cause cannot be defended by dirty means”. Despite of the order, or because of the “good cause”, numerous reprints proliferated.
Nilus circulated several editions of the Protocols in Russia as part of an anti-Semitic campaign. Though the early prints were in Russia, the Protocols quickly spread to the rest of Europe by Russian expatriates after the 1917 revolution. Some of them claimed that it provided proof that the Jews were behind the Russian Revolution. Another expatriate Russian, Boris Brasol, brought it to the United States around 1920 where it became the core of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic program. By the time Nilus died, Europe had been saturated by millions of copies of the Protocols
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American Edition of the Protocols
Living the Lie
Just after its appearance in London in 1920, Lucien Wolf exposed the Protocols as a plagiary of the earlier work of Joly and Goedsche, in a pamphlet of the Jewish Board of Deputies. The following year, in 1921, the story of the forgery was published in a series of articles in the London Times by Philip Grave, the paper’s correspondent in Constantinople.
A whole book documenting the forgery was also published in the same year in America by Herman Bernstein. Nevertheless, the Protocols continued to circulate widely. They were even sponsored by Henry Ford in the United States until 1927, and formed an important part of the Nazis’ justification of genocide of the Jews in World War II.
During an interview published in the New York World February 17, 1921, Mr. Henry Ford put the case for the “Protocols of Zion” tersely and convincingly. He said:
“The only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on. They are sixteen years old and they have fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now.”
He made this statement when Jewish leaders and the Jewish Press in America were fulminating against a series of articles printed in Ford’s newspaper The Dearborn Independent during the years 1920 to 1922. After some years of pressure such as only organized Jewry can conceive or inflict, Henry Ford was made to apologize to Jewry in a letter addressed to Louis Marshall, then leader of the American Jewish Committee, dated June 30, 1927. Ford’s apology was abject, but neither then nor since did he ever deny the truth of the articles.
Adolf Hitler also wrote on the Protocols in his infamous book Mein Kampf. From Chapter XI: Nation and Race — Volume I: A Reckoning:
Adolf Hitler also wrote on the Protocols in his infamous book Mein Kampf. From Chapter XI: Nation and Race — Volume I: A Reckoning:
. . . To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed. And that is what matters!
It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brain these disclosures originate; the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims. The best criticism applied to them, however, is reality.
Anyone who examines the historical development of the last hundred years from the standpoint of this book will at once understand the screaming of the Jewish press. For once this book has become the common property of a people, the Jewish menace may be considered as broken.
Spreading the Lie
After the Second World War, proponents of The Protocols often charged that Jews had affirmatively encouraged the Holocaust. Typical of the genre was a Mexican reprint with a cover depicting a Jewish hand behind Nazism—and behind Masonry, Communism, and religious and financial powers. A common charge was the Jews instigated the murder of six million of their co-religionists in an effort to secure the world’s sympathy, whether for the creation of the state of Israel or for other secret objectives.
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| While there is continued popularity of The Protocols in nations from South America to Asia, since the defeat of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the Second World War governments or political leaders in most parts of the world have generally avoided claims that The Protocols represent factual evidence of a real Jewish conspiracy. The exception to this is the Middle East, where a large number of Arab and Muslim regimes and leaders have endorsed them as authentic.
As popular opposition to Israel spread across the Middle East in the years following its creation in 1948, many Arab governments funded new printings of the Protocols, and taught them in their schools as historical fact.
They have been accepted as such by many Islamist organizations, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Reportedly, Arabic editions issued in the Middle East were found on sale as far away as London. There are at least nine different Arabic translations of the Protocols and more editions than in any other language including German.
The Protocols also figure prominently in the anti-Semitic propaganda distributed internationally by the Arab countries and have spread to other Muslim countries, such as Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
During the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt was the main source of internationally distributed antisemitic propaganda. In 1960, the Protocols were featured in an article published by Salah Dasuqi, military governor of Cairo, in al-Majallaaa, the official cultural journal.
In 1965, the Egyptian government released an English-language pamphlet titled Israel, the Enemy of Africa and distributed it throughout the English-speaking countries of Africa. The pamphlet used the Protocols and The International Jew as its sources and concluded that all the Jews were cheats, thieves, and murderers.
In a foreword to a translation of Shimon Peres’ book The New Middle East, the Egyptian state-owned publisher al-Ahram editorialized in 1995:
“When The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were discovered, some 200 years ago, and translated in various languages, including Arabic, the World Zionist Organization attempted to deny the existence of the plot, and claimed forgery. The Zionists even endeavored to purchase all the existing copies, in order to prevent their circulation. But today, Shimon Peres proves unequivocally that the Protocols are authentic, and that they tell the truth.”
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| The first Iranian edition of the Protocols was issued during the summer of 1978 before the Iranian Revolution after which the Protocols were widely publicized by the Iranian government. A publication called Imam, published by the Iranian embassy in London, quoted extensively from the Protocols in its issues of 1984 and 1985.
In 1985 a new edition of the Protocols was printed and widely distributed by the Islamic Propagation Organization, International Relations Department, in Tehran.
The Astaneh-ye Qods Razavi (Shrine of Imam Reza) Foundation in Mashhad, Iran, one of the wealthiest institutions in Iran, financed publication of the Protocols in 1994.
Parts of the Protocols were published by the daily Jomhouri-ye Eslami in 1994, under the heading The Smell of Blood, Zionist Schemes. Sobh, a radical Islamic monthly, published excerpts from the Protocols under the heading The text of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for establishing the Jewish global rule in its December 1998–January 1999 issue, illustrated with a caricature of the Jewish snake swallowing the globe.
Iranian writer and researcher Ali Baqeri, who researched the Protocols, finds their plan for world domination to be merely part of an even more grandiose scheme, saying in Sobh in 1999:
“The ultimate goal of the Jews… after conquering the globe… is to extract from the hands of the Lord many stars and galaxies”.
The Great Hoax today
The Protocols continues to be published and distributed in many nations, and via the internet. A Japanese edition displayed at the exhibition attests to the fact that the actual presence of Jews is not necessary for charges of a Jewish conspiracy to take hold.
Meanwhile, the forgery has found traction in much of the Middle East. Televised dramatizations of The Protocols have appeared on Egyptian television in October-November 2002 and on Al-Manar (Hezbollah) television in 2003. The latter version included scenes depicting Jews draining the blood of a Christian child as an ingredient in matzah (unleavened bread consumed by observant Jews during the Passover holiday; the actual ingredients are flour and water only).
In 2003, the manuscript library at Alexandria, Egypt reportedly displayed an Arabic edition of The Protocols as an example of a Jewish holy book.
In 2005, Iranian booksellers displayed copies of The Protocols and The International Jew at the Frankfurt (Germany) Book Fair, the world’s largest.
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The American retail chain, The American retail chain,The American retail chain,
Wal
The American retail chain, Wal-Mart, was criticized for selling The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on its website with a description that suggested it might be genuine. It was withdrawn from sale in September 2004, as ‘a business decision’. It is distributed in the United States by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.
In 2002, the Paterson, New Jersey-based Arabic-language newspaper The Arab Voice published excerpts from the Protocols as true. The paper’s editor and publisher Walid Rabah defended himself from criticism with the protestation that “some major writers in the Arab nation accept the truth of the book.”
No matter where the “Protocols” appear in contemporary society the resounding theme by anti-Semites is that they continue to ring true, that the text somehow “fits” into current world events and International Jewry. Even should some kind of “fit” be found to current events, the Protocols are very general in their descriptions.
They describe plans for wars, political unrest, and economic crises. It’s not too hard to predict the occurrence of any of these things in a general sense, and one observes that these things have occurred more or less continually throughout human history. Thus, the fact that these general facts fit any particular period does not speak to the authenticity of the Protocols in any way. It certainly does not validate the more specific but less demonstrable claims of secret plots and evil conspirators.
Hell, even Nostradamus is more specific in his quatrains then the protocols are to any specific event. Should we continue to worry?
Hmmmmmmmmm. I still often wonder
-Arthur Wailer
-Arthur Wailer
The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu
The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (in the original French Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu ou la politique de Machiavel au XIXe siècle) is a political satire written by French attorney Maurice Joly in protest against the regime of Napoleon III, a.k.a. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.
The piece uses the literary device of a dialogue of the dead, invented by ancient Roman writer Lucian and introduced into the French belles-lettres by Bernard de Fontenelle in 18th century. Shadows of the historical characters of Niccolo Machiavelli and Charles Montesquieu meet in Hell in the year 1864 and dispute on politics. In this way Joly tried to cover up a direct, and then illegal, criticism of Louis-Napoleon’s rule.
Dialogue aux enfers, 1864
Joly relates in his 1870 autobiography that one evening thinking of Abbé Galiani’s treatise Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds and walking by Pont Royal, he was inspired to write a dialogue between Montesquieu and Machiavelli. The noble baron Montesquieu would make the case for liberalism; the Florentine politician Machiavelli would present the case for despotism.
Machiavelli claims that he “… wouldn’t even need twenty years to transform utterly the most indomitable European character and render it as a docile under tyranny as the debased people of Asia”. Montesquieu insists that the liberal spirit of the peoples is invincible. In 25 dialogues, step by step, Machiavelli, who by Joly’s plot covertly represents Napoleon III, explains how he would replace freedom with despotism in any given European country: “… Absolute power will no longer be an accident of fortune but will become a need” of the modern society. At the end, Machiavelli prevails. In the curtain-line Montesquieu exclaims “Eternal God, what have you permitted!…”.
The book was published anonymously (par un contemporain, by a contemporary) in Brussels in 1864 and smuggled into France for distribution, but the print run was seized by the police immediately upon crossing the border. The police swiftly tracked down its author, and Joly was arrested. The book was banned. On 25 April 1865, he was sentenced to 18 months at the Sainte-Pélagie Prison in Paris. The second edition of “Dialogues” was issued in 1868 under Joly’s name .
Campaigning against Napoleon III at the French constitutional referendum, 1870, Joly wrote an epilogue to his “Dialogue”. It was published at Le Gaulois and La Cloche magazines.
In the beginning of 20th century Joly’s book was used as a basis for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous Russian-made antisemitic literary forgery. There is an abundance of evidence that The Protocols were lavishly plagiarized from Joly’s book.
Ford’s Anti-Semitism
Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic views echoed the fears and assumptions of many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anti-Semitism in America saw a change in expression and virulence when increased immigration from Europe brought millions of Jews to the U.S. during Ford’s childhood in the latter half of the 19th century. It reached its peak during the mid-1920s: a time when Ku Klux Klan membership had reached four million, Prohibition restricted alcohol consumption, and discriminatory immigration policies were enacted favoring immigrants from northern and western Europe over other parts of the world.
A close friend recalled a camping trip in 1919 during which Ford lectured a group around the campfire. He “attributes all evil to Jews or to the Jewish capitalists,” the friend wrote in his diary. “The Jews caused the war, the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbery all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy…”
In 1918, Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America. The series ran in the following 91 issues. Ford bound the articles into four volumes titled “The International Jew,” and distributed half a million copies to his vast network of dealerships and subscribers. The rhetoric was not unusual for its content, as much as its scope. As one of the most famous men in America, Henry Ford legitimized ideas that otherwise may have been given little authority.
In 2012, American Experience interviewed Hasia Diner, the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg
Hasia Diner
Professor of American Jewish History and Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, and Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History to ask her about Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic views and the impact of his public expression of them. Diner is a prolific author and has written many books about American Jewish history, including her 2004 book, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000. Here are excerpts from her interview.
What is the climate of anti-Semitism in America during the late 19th century?
By the 1870s in Europe and the United States, the argument shifts to the Jews as defective. Not Judaism as defective, but the Jew as a particular social type who had defective mental and moral abilities. All sorts of attributions were made to “the Jews.” The Jews killed Christ, the Jews do not want to accept the truth of Christianity, the Jews made money off the war, the Jews are profiteers, the Jews cheat you in business. The Jews have a certain phenotype: the Jew has a hook nose, the Jew is loud, the Jew talks with his hands.
By the 1870s in Europe and the United States, the argument shifts to the Jews as defective. Not Judaism as defective, but the Jew as a particular social type who had defective mental and moral abilities. All sorts of attributions were made to “the Jews.” The Jews killed Christ, the Jews do not want to accept the truth of Christianity, the Jews made money off the war, the Jews are profiteers, the Jews cheat you in business. The Jews have a certain phenotype: the Jew has a hook nose, the Jew is loud, the Jew talks with his hands.
Anti-Semitism came from the top down from elite sources, and from the bottom up from populist sources. It came from the right, and the left. Small towns were no more hotbeds of anti-Semitism than large cities. It could be pretty much anyplace.
What exposure might Henry Ford have had to anti-Semitism when he was growing up on a farm in rural Michigan in the 1870s and 1880s?
The world that Henry Ford grew up in was one that very likely offered him certain themes about the Jews. He might have heard about them in church, that they were responsible for the crucifixion. He could have heard about them when somebody grumbled about having shopped in a Jewish-owned store and felt that they didn’t get the right price, or that they were sold shoddy goods, that the Jewish shopkeeper was too aggressive in trying to talk them into buying something. There were many places, without being able to put your finger on a specific one in a specific town, in which “the Jew” serves as, at that point of time, almost both a theological and a kind of racialized symbol of forces that people considered to be nefarious.
What kind of things did Henry Ford blame on Jews?
Throughout The Dearborn Independent, Ford published articles that would refer to Jews in every possible context as at the root of America and the world’s ills. Strikes: It was the Jews. Any kind of financial scandal? The Jews. Agricultural depression? The Jews. So “the Jew,” in a way, became the symbol of a world that was being manipulated and controlled.
Throughout The Dearborn Independent, Ford published articles that would refer to Jews in every possible context as at the root of America and the world’s ills. Strikes: It was the Jews. Any kind of financial scandal? The Jews. Agricultural depression? The Jews. So “the Jew,” in a way, became the symbol of a world that was being manipulated and controlled.
To me, that’s one of the really crucial forces in this rhetoric — that things didn’t just happen; but rather somebody is orchestrating these developments, and it’s the Jews who are doing it for their benefit. They’re doing it in order [to] gain the twin-linked goodies of power and wealth.
Ford also republished the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — what is that?
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a notorious forgery that originally came from Russia, and [was] translated into English. [It] claimed the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy — that a group of Jews got together and basically planned the fate of the world, be it financial catastrophe, be it war. The world was controlled by this little cabal of Jews. [This forgery was] printed in The Dearborn Independent as a factual piece. And so someone reading it would take this to be the news.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a notorious forgery that originally came from Russia, and [was] translated into English. [It] claimed the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy — that a group of Jews got together and basically planned the fate of the world, be it financial catastrophe, be it war. The world was controlled by this little cabal of Jews. [This forgery was] printed in The Dearborn Independent as a factual piece. And so someone reading it would take this to be the news.
What separates Ford from other people who were publishing anti-Semitic material during this time?
There are lots of small town newspapers that publish scurrilous anti-Semitic material, so it wasn’t unusual in that way. But what’s notable about The Dearborn Independent is that it was also spread through the Ford Motor dealerships. And so that there’d be stacks of them in a dealership in California, dealership in Massachusetts, a dealership in Iowa. In some places, the dealership would actually put copies of the newspaper in the car, so that when you drove off with your Model T, there you had on the seat next to you a copy of The Dearborn Independent.
There are lots of small town newspapers that publish scurrilous anti-Semitic material, so it wasn’t unusual in that way. But what’s notable about The Dearborn Independent is that it was also spread through the Ford Motor dealerships. And so that there’d be stacks of them in a dealership in California, dealership in Massachusetts, a dealership in Iowa. In some places, the dealership would actually put copies of the newspaper in the car, so that when you drove off with your Model T, there you had on the seat next to you a copy of The Dearborn Independent.
And because The Dearborn Independent was published by Ford, it meant that other newspapers would pick up on what he said, and if only in reporting on an article that appeared in The Dearborn Independent, it meant that it got much greater currency than if it had just been a small-town newspaper in some equivalent sized town in Wisconsin or Montana. But this was Henry Ford’s newspaper, and pretty much anything Henry Ford did was news.
What Henry Ford says, people stop and listen. There are people who talked about him as a potential presidential candidate in the 1920s. Some local tavern keeper makes a anti-Semitic remark over the bar, well, nobody cares. Somebody may listen, and maybe repeat it, but it has a very limited span. But Henry Ford’s ability to gain a national audience with his words made him a very dangerous person.
What did the Jewish community think about Ford’s paper?
For the Jews who are reading Ford’s rants in The Dearborn Independent, this is very frightening. Jewish publications in English and in Yiddish are reporting on the material that comes out in The Dearborn Independent. They’re really tracking this.
For the Jews who are reading Ford’s rants in The Dearborn Independent, this is very frightening. Jewish publications in English and in Yiddish are reporting on the material that comes out in The Dearborn Independent. They’re really tracking this.
They’re frightened, I think, for two reasons. One, which is haunting, which is they’re aware of what’s going on in Germany. They see the rise of the National Socialist Party, and they’re tracking that at the same time. And while it’s at a very early date in Hitler’s career, they are really paying attention to what’s happening. It’s also frightening because it’s going on in their home in the United States, where they want to feel like they really belong and that they have served their country and that they are citizens and that they are viewed as real Americans.
And Ford is just about the most popular American, certainly one of the wealthiest; here’s the person whose money and whose influence commands tremendous attention, spewing stuff that’s no different than what Hitler is saying in his beer hall meetings in Munich at the same time.
For the Jews, I think it causes them to really question how really they’re being accepted as Americans. I think it had psychic damage. I think it caused a kind of inward turning, a kind of fear of the larger society. I think it caused them to feel that they had to prove themselves, that it wasn’t just enough that they were sober, honest, hard-working citizens. They had to make these pronouncements about how American they were.
In 1938, Ford received an award from the Nazi regime called the “Grand Cross of the German Eagle.” How do we make sense of this award? What does it mean?
The Germans honor Ford, we could say, for a couple reasons. For one thing, they’re very taken with the whole assembly line technological modernization. The Model T and Volkswagen are sort of similar cars. The idea of the Volkswagen, the people’s car, was to be affordable to the average German. It’s kind of like the Model T of its day; that the automobile shouldn’t just be something for the elite, but it should be a car that the ordinary German could afford. So the Ford Model T and Volkswagen, we might think of as sort of in a similar category.
The Germans honor Ford, we could say, for a couple reasons. For one thing, they’re very taken with the whole assembly line technological modernization. The Model T and Volkswagen are sort of similar cars. The idea of the Volkswagen, the people’s car, was to be affordable to the average German. It’s kind of like the Model T of its day; that the automobile shouldn’t just be something for the elite, but it should be a car that the ordinary German could afford. So the Ford Model T and Volkswagen, we might think of as sort of in a similar category.
From the point of view of anti-Semitism, Hitler could look at Ford as somebody who was — let’s call him an age-mate. They were both in the 1920s beginning to write and disseminate information about what they both considered to be this great powerful threat, “the Jew.”
And Hitler was very much inspired by Ford’s writing. And the idea that this could happen in the United States, I think, was very important to Hitler as well, because as people in the United States were speaking out against Nazism and were using a kind of rhetoric, “Well, it could never happen here,” and “We are the bastions of democracy,” I think Hitler would have derived a degree of satisfaction to be able to point to Ford as, in a way, just as good an anti-Semite as he was.
Is it possible to quantify the damage Ford wrought?
It’s hard to say how much damage Ford did. People may have been anti-Semitic without Ford. It’s only intriguing as to the degree to which he may have been responsible, rather than the degree to which he corroborated ideas that were floating out there from other sources.
It’s hard to say how much damage Ford did. People may have been anti-Semitic without Ford. It’s only intriguing as to the degree to which he may have been responsible, rather than the degree to which he corroborated ideas that were floating out there from other sources.
Hitler was very aware of Henry Ford, of Henry Ford’s writings, and praised them. He turned to the same documents. There’s a common thread. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a cherished text for both. And there were certainly business connections between Ford Motors and the Nazi regime.
The question is always asked: What did American Jews do in response to the escalating crisis in Europe, after Hitler’s rise to power? And while I think there’s no question they did a lot, they were very active, they were agitated and agitating, to some degree their behavior was tempered. Their sense of what they could do was tempered by the knowledge of how pervasive anti-Semitism was in America. If somebody like Henry Ford, with such power and such wealth, could be such an outspoken anti-Semite — and we know Hitler was very impressed by Henry Ford — then it must be that lots of Americans share those attitudes. And therefore there’s really a limit to what we can do.
If there had been no Henry Ford, would they have been more aggressive? We can’t know that. But I think in their calculus, “How aggressive can we be, pressing for the cause of the Jews of Europe?” “How much can we try: pressure Congress, editorials in newspapers, demonstrations, for example to allow in more German Jewish refugees, or then Polish Jewish refugees?” They were very much aware of the extent of anti-Semitism and the degree to which they-their options were really limited by that attitude out there, in a way, embodied by Ford.
HITLER AT FAULT FOR MORE OF OUR PROBLEMS
Book blames Nazis for Islamic anti-Semitism
Although, as Liel Liebovitz wrote in his article on Hitler as internet meme (aphenomenonthat may be a thing of the past, as the production company behind Downfall, the much-spoofed film that sparked the trend, has filed copyright claims and removed most videos from YouTube), “we know—we feel!—that there could never really be another Hitler to terrify and enrage us so purely as the original once had,” more evidence continues to stoke our furies against the one true Führer.
In his recent book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, Jeffrey Herf claims that “The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would have been over long ago were it not for the uncompromising, religiously inspired hatred of the Jews that was articulated and given assistance by Nazi propagandists and continued after the war by Islamists of various sorts.” One example comes from a 1942 message broadcast to the Middle East in which Hitler announced: “Your only hope for rescue is the destruction of the Jews before they destroy you!” The transcript for this and 6,000 other broadcasts were held as classified by Washington until 1977, and two years ago Herf became the first scholar to examine them.
Sources: HolocaustResearchProject.org and WGBH Educational Foundation
THE INTERNATIONAL JEW: THE WORLD’S FOREMOST PROBLEM Part 1 Abridged from the original as published by the world renowned industrial leader, HENRY FORD, SR. Appearing originally in the periodical published by the Ford Motor Co. “The Dearborn Independent.”
The Song for this video is on the Album called by the same name: Protocols – released by JMG (www.jewishmusicgroup.com) on Oct. 31, 2006
