September 30, 2010

The Origins of the Illuminati Myth and the Protocols (2 of 5)


Continued from Part One

THE SIMONINI LETTER

In 1806, Barruel produced a document in support of his slanderous charges against the Jews - the Simonini Letter. Like almost everything else connected with the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy, the letter was a forgery - a fabrication produced by the French Political Police under Fouche. Its objective was to influence Napoleon against the Jews. The letter was ostensibly written by an army officer, J.B. Simonini. After having congratulated Barruel on "unmasking" the Jacobins, which Simonini claimed were preparing the way for Antichrist, the letter went on to describe the so-called Jewish role in the entire "Jacobin Plot."

At the time of his death in 1820, Barruel had elaborated the beginnings of the modern myth of the Judeo/Masonic Conspiracy. He had written a vast manuscript to show how a revolutionary conspiracy had existed down through the ages, from Mani to the medieval Knights Templar, and thence to the Freemasons. The whole organization was supposedly controlled by a Supreme Council. The Council was veiled in impenetrable secrecy and had no fixed residence, but wherever the statesmen of the Great Powers gathered, there they could be found as an "unseen and controlling presence" lurking in the background. The Council, which - according to Barruel - was made up entirely of Jews, elected a Grand Master and around the figure of the Grand Master, Barruel wove a truly lurid tale of intrigue, terror, despotism, sorcery and witchcraft. The tale was so fanciful, and so much the product of his own fevered imagination, that a few weeks before his death, Barruel - in a fit of conscience - sought to destroy all his existing manuscripts. He failed.

IN THE JEWISH CEMETERY IN PRAGUE

Barruel’s fantasies and the Simonini fabrication by Fouche found little acceptance in the first half of the nineteenth century. But around 1850, the myth reappeared - this time in Germany as a weapon of the extreme right in its struggle against the growing forces of liberty and democracy.

Writing after the great democratic uprisings of 1848 had swept through Europe, rocking the monarchies of the "Old World" to their very foundations, E.E. Eckert began to expand on Barruel’s themes of half a century earlier. The Catholic magazine, Historische-Politische Blatter picked up Eckert’s writings and helped spread them throughout southern Germany. [And these are precisely the writings that Hitler "ran into" in Vienna and Munich in his youth.]

A few years later, Herman Goedsche, writing for Neue Pruessiche Zeitung, authored a book which was to become the basis of one of the most famous anti-Semitic fabrications of all times - "The Rabbi’s Speech." How a relatively obscure and openly fictitious novel by Goedsche was transformed into the twisted and demonic "Rabbi’s Speech" is itself a case study in the pathological mental processes at work in those who give credence to the Illuminati Myth. Herman Goedsche had at one time been a minor official in the Prussian postal service. He had been dismissed, however, after having participated in a plot designed to incriminate the famous democratic leader, Benedec Waldeck. The plot had involved the use of forged letters.

In 1868, Goedsche produced a sensational novel under the pseudonym of "Sir John Retcliffe." The novel was entitled Biarritz. It contained a chapter called, "In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague." The novel itself was straight fiction and Goedsche never claimed that it was anything else but that. The chapter in question described a secret, nocturnal meeting which was supposed to have taken place in the Jewish Cemetery in the city of Prague during the Feast of Tabernacles. [It's interesting to note in this connection that there are some in "Latter Rain" who have taken note of all this and who have described these "goings-on" as a kind of "Black Mass" - a satanic precusor or spiritual counterfeit to the "real thing" (speaking here of the so-called "Black Mass.") which some "Latter Rain" devotees expect to occur in the "Latter Days" just prior to the Return of Christ.]

At eleven o’clock, the gates of the cemetery creak softly and the rustling of velvety coats is heard. A vague, white figure passes like a shadow through the cemetery until it reaches a certain tombstone; here it kneels down, touches the tombstone three times with its forehead and whispers a prayer. Another figure approaches; it is that of an old man, bent and limping. It coughs and sighs as it moves. The figure takes its place next to its predecessor and it too kneels down and whispers a prayer. A third figure appears, and then a fourth and so on until thirteen figures have finally appeared, each one having repeated the aforementioned procedure.

When the thirteenth and final figure has at last taken its place, a clock strikes midnight. From out of the grave there comes a sharp, metallic sound. Suddenly, a blue flame appears and lights up the thirteen figures. A hollow voice says, "I greet you heads of the Twelve Tribes of Israel." And the figures dutifully reply, "We greet you, Son of the Accursed" - which is to say, "Antichrist." The assembled figures are meant to represent the twelve tribes of Israel. The additional figure represents the "unfortunates of the exile" - the Diaspora.

BIARRITZ SPREADS

The relevant volume of Biarritz was published in 1868. But this was only the beginning of the story - for soon this frankly fictional episode began its demented transformation. It was the Russian anti-Semites who first thought of treating the story as an authentic record. In 1872, the chapter, "In the Jewish Cemetery of Prague," appeared by itself in St. Petersburg, then the capital of Czarist Russia, as a pamphlet. In 1876, a similar pamphlet appeared in Moscow with the title, "In the Jewish Cemetery in Czech Prague - the Jews, Sovereigns of the World." In 1880, a second edition of the Moscow pamphlet appeared in both Odessa and Prague. In 1886, it appeared in the Paris publication La Contemporain for July of that year. In all these versions, the chapter from Biarritz was presented no longer as fiction, but as fact - "The Rabbi’s Speech."

The authenticity of the speech was vouched for by an English diplomat - one "Sir John Readclif." To complete the irony and twisted turns of this story, when Francois Bournand printed the "Rabbi’s Speech" in La Contemporain, he prefaced it with a startling revelation: "We find the program of Jewry, the real program of the Jews, expressed by ... the Chief Rabbi, John Readclif ... It is a speech made in the 1880s."

Like a boomerang, the whole thing had come back on the unsuspecting Goedsche (Retcliffe).

Later editions of the "Speech" pictured Goedsche (AKA, Retcliffe, Retclif, Readclif, etc.) not as the Chief Rabbi, but as a hero. For instance, in 1933, the "Speech" surfaced in Sweden and was prefaced by a melancholy statement: "Sir John Readclif paid with his life for exposing the great Jewish conspiracy. It was a sad ending for a man ... who had been an English diplomat and historian."

Unbelievable? It would seem so! - but such are the "facts" that Illuminati enthusiasts marshal in defense of their system of conspiracy theories. And make no mistake about it, this is the stuff from which the entire myth of the Illuminati Conspiracy has been built.

DISJOINTED PIECES COME TOGETHER

Within a year of the publication of Goedsche’s fantasy, there appeared in France a book which was to become the "Bible" of the modern Illuminati Myth: La Juif, le judaisme et la judaisation des peuples chretiens by Gougenot des Mousseaux.

Mousseaux had become convinced that the world was falling into the grip of a mysterious body of Satan worshippers whom he called "Kabbalistic Jews."

In reality, the Kabbalah is nothing more than a body of Jewish mystical and theosophical doctrine dating in the main from the late medieval ages. It has been fully expounded in such works as the Zohar. While there can be no doubt that the Kabbalah falls outside the mainstream of Western (and Jewish) religious thinking, there is nothing secret about it.

Des Mousseaux, however, imagined the Kabbalah as something quite different: a secret demonic religion, a systematic cult of evil, established by the devil at the beginning of the world. According to des Mousseaux, the first practitioners of this cult were the sons of Cain, who after the flood were succeeded by the sons of Ham - these were the Chaldeans. In due time, they passed their secret on to the Jews who in turn controlled the Gnostics, the Manichees, and the Moslem sect of the Assassins. They at last transmitted their diabolical lore to the Templars who handed it to the Freemasons. But at all times the Jews, as the "representatives on earth of the spirit of darkness," had supplied the Grand Masters. [None of this, of course, is in the Bible - none of it; and for Christians - especially evangelicals - to accept such drivel and to pattern their "mindset" around it is tantamount to calling upon themselves the curse of Revelation 22:18 ("For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book"). Why? - because isn't that what one is doing by embracing such extra-Biblical material? (i.e., religious material which is so fundamental that it helps to shape one's world-view, but material which - nonetheless - cannot be found in the Bible).] According to des Mousseaux, the cult centered on the worship of Satan or Lucifer; the chief symbols of the cult were the serpent and the phallus. The rituals included exotic orgies of the wildest kind. But this was not all: by murdering Christian children, the Jews - who in reality were supposed to be witches - acquired demonic power. All this was supposed to be a part of the Kabbalah. Of course, it never was! Never! - except in the imaginations and innumerable forgeries produced by devotees of the Illuminati Myth.

Finally, in the last chapter of his book, des Mousseaux pictured Antichrist as a Jewish king whom all nations would accept as their savior. As he neared the 500th page of his manuscript, the author began to ratchet his frenzy up into monumental heights:

"... the Jews will raise up a man with a genius for political imposture, a sinister bewitcher around whom fanatical multitudes will cluster. The Jews will hail this man as the Messiah, but he will be more than that. After destroying the authority of Christianity, he will unite mankind in one great universal brotherhood and bestow on it a superabundance of material goods. For these great services, the Gentile nations will accept him, exalt him, and worship him as a god - but in reality, for all his apparent benevolence, he will be Satan’s instrument for the perdition of mankind." [Gougenot des Mousseaux, Le Juif, le judaisme it la judaisation des peuples chretiens, Paris, 1869, pgs. 485-498.]

What des Mousseaux had done was to bring together all the heretofore disjointed pieces of the Illuminist Myth and weave them together as a coherent whole. All that was needed now was for someone to tie it all to a specific and contemporary event. The man that did this was Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky.

Continued...Part Three