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

Continued from Part Four

THE PROTOCOLS AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

From 1905 onward, anti-Semitism took a decidedly different turn; no longer was it confined to religious circles; it had clearly burst those old bounds and had begun to flow in new and much more dangerous channels - so much so that agents of the government began to find it convenient to invent Jewish names for all the Autocracy’s opponents. From any kind of a factual standpoint, this was nonsense; to be sure, Jews were involved in the revolutionary movements of the time, but they played no greater role than many other minorities who were likewise persecuted by the hated Autocracy.

The Protocols were republished in 1911 and 1912; but it was not until 1917 (at the time of the Revolution) that they really took off under a new title: He is Near, at the Door ... Here Comes Antichrist.

The 1917 version was distributed as a pocket-sized pamphlet to the soldiers of the "White Armies" during the Revolution; most, therefore, came to believe that the Revolution had been the product of a Jewish conspiracy; and that Lenin, Trotsky, and the Red Army were nothing more than puppets in this vast plot, an intrigue which was - like the French Revolution before it - ultimately under the control of the "Illuminati."

After the defeat of the "Whites," thousands of them fled as expatriates to Western Europe, carrying with them their pocket-sized Protocols - and it was this rendition of the Protocols - with the imprimatur of the Czarist government on it's cover - which found itself onto the pages of the Times of London and other newspapers and magazines in the West; and more, it was this version which Russian émigrés carried with them to America after the final collapse of their forces in the Crimean Peninsula in 1922. TO THESE EMIGRES, THE WAR IN RUSSIA HAD BEEN A CONTEST WHICH HAD PITTED "CHRISTIAN RUSSIA" AGAINST THE POWER OF SATANIC ILLUMINISM, and it was this mindset, along with their pocket-sized copies of the Protocols, which they brought to this country - and it is precisely this myth which Pat Robertson and others are using today as a means to galvanize Christians into political action aimed at taking back the country for "Christ and the church." To be sure, the references to the Jews have been dropped and "code words" adopted (i.e., "secular-humanism," "liberals," "Illuminists," etc.), but the myth is the same - and there, lurking in the background, are still the Jews.

Some Christians, no doubt, will have a difficult time believing that their leaders could have "hooked into" such a deadly mythology - that certainly the story which Robertson has described in the pages of The New World Order is different from that which Hitler used to bewitch the German people. The sad answer is, it’s not! And it's not just that there exists a good deal of evidence which suggests the parallel nature of the two mythologies [i.e., Hitler's and Robertson's (minus the naked references to the Jews and the overt racism which characterized German fascism)] - but the fact is, it's relatively easy to prove the relationship between the two (i.e., Robertson's version and Hitler's version) by tracing the trail of the original mythology from Russia - where it first surfaced as a full-blown story - to Germany and ultimately to the United States. From there, it is not particularly difficult to follow its path up through the years straight to Pat Robertson and others in the Christian Right today. Many have done so. For example, take Professor Donald S. Strong of the University of Texas. As early as 1941 he wrote,

"... it is important to note here that the ideology spread by ... (enthusiasts of the Illuminati Myth) in the United States is the same as that which accompanied certain political developments in Russia before World War I, in Poland and Hungary shortly after that war, and more recently in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy (and finally here in the United States)." [Donald Strong, Organized Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1941), pg. 1.]

THE TORTURED PATH OF THE ILLUMINATI MYTH

Strong continues,

"The appearance of this ideology (i.e., the Illuminati Myth) in postwar Hungary is of interest because, before World War I, anti-Semitism was almost unknown there ... It was during the crushing of the short lived ... (Communist) regime (in Budapest) that the anti-revolutionary, anti-Semitic ideology made its (first) appearance. Here, as in postwar Russia, the ideology was not used as a means of elite defense; instead an old elite (i.e., the aristocracy and the large landholders) temporarily dislodged (by Bela Kun and the socialists), employed it as a means of discrediting the new revolutionary (i.e., communist) elite and justifying its (i.e., the aristocracy's) own return to power. Thus, in the name of this anti-revolutionary, anti-Semitic ideology, the White Terror was directed not only against the ... (communists) in general and the few Jewish Bolsheviks (who were connected to them), but against all the half million Jews in Hungary. The speedy association of (the Jews ... with the) Bolsheviks in the (Illuminist) ideology came about partly from the spread of the ideology from the White Russians and partly from the fact that Bela Kun and several other leaders of the revolution actually were Jews." [Donald Strong, Organized Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1941), pg. 6.]

From Hungary, the myth then spread into Germany. Like Russia, there had been a history of anti-Semitism in the Reich; but like Russia again, the anti-Semitism which had manifested itself prior to the First World War was more religious than it was political. Moreover, the anti-Semitism which had taken hold in Germany prior to the war had existed principally only in the lower classes. The middle and upper classes were relatively free of the scourge. Indeed, Bismarck, an aristocrat, had been responsible for launching a campaign in the latter part of the nineteenth century which had aimed at the full integration of the Jewish community into all aspects of German life. There was, of course, some resistance: in 1871 Professor August Rohling, a theologian, produced Der Talmudjude which represented Judaism as a devilish doctrine; in 1878, Adolf Stocker, the court preacher, founded the anti-Semitic Christian Social Labor Party; and finally - in connection with the Kulturkampf - the Catholic Church initiated a crusade which aimed at blaming the Jews for its troubles with Bismarck. But all in all, the population embraced Jewish assimilation as a measure whose time had come - modernity seemed to demand it. Nonetheless, despite this history of toleration, Germany - like Russia, Poland and Hungary before it - succumbed quickly to the allure of the Illuminati Myth and the political anti-Semitism which the myth inevitably unleashed; and in this respect, the German experience differed from the others only insofar as the "Communist Revolution" never really took hold in Germany.

While the Spartacists - a radical group of German Socialists under Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxumburg - threatened the government in Berlin for three months in the winter of 1918-1919, and Socialists seized power in Munich for a brief period, they were all quickly swept away. Unlike Poland, Hungary and Russia, no real military threat ever materialized in Germany. The catalyst in Germany was profound economic distress. Strong writes,

"The more menacing the ... (economic situation) became, the stronger the Nazis grew, ever professing to be defenders of the existing social order against revolutionary chaos." [Donald S. Strong, Organized Anti-Semitism in America (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Public Affairs, 1940), pp. 83-108.]

The Protocols are such a transparent forgery that one may wonder how it was that they spread so fast throughout the Christian West. The fact remains, however, that multitudes of people who were by no means insane took them very seriously at the time - after all, the government of one of the greatest nations in the world, Imperial Russia, had attested in unequivocal terms to their authenticity. Indeed, the Times of London editorialized, "What are these Protocols? Are they authentic? If so, what malevolent assembly concocted these plans and gloated over their exposition? ... Have we by straining every fiber of our national body escaped a Pax Germanica only to fall into a Pax Judaica?"

But shortly thereafter, the myth began to unravel. On August 18, 1921, the Times of London, which had done so much to spread the myth, took the lead in unraveling it by devoting a resounding editorial admitting its error. The Times had just published in its issues of August 16, 17, and 18 a lengthy dispatch from its correspondent in Constantinople, Philip Graves, which revealed the fact that the Protocols were nothing more than a clumsy forgery copied from Maurice Joly's play, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel.

THE RAISON D'ETRE BEHIND THE MYTH'S MAGNETISM

Still, countless numbers of people continued to feel irresistible drawn to the myth - the facts of the matter notwithstanding. Professor Strong also noted this phenomenon back in 1941 and was puzzled by it - and he refused to write off those who were drawn to it as uneducated buffoons - certainly Ford, DuPont, the Pope, Churchill and countless others like them could not be so easily dismissed. There had to be something more behind the myth's "drawing power."

To get a more precise idea of why people were drawn to the myth, Strong undertook a study of more than 121 organizations which were involved in one way or another with the Illuminist Myth during the years 1933-1940. Strong wrote,

"To understand precisely how and why ... the (Illuminist Myth) has circulated in America ... it is necessary to examine the character of the proponent organizations. What are the personality types, occupations, and affiliations of the leaders? What is the class status, religion, and geography ... of the membership? How are funds raised? What sort of propaganda is used and through what channels? To what extent do the groups cooperate? What objectives have they in common? These are the key questions to be answered." [Donald Strong, Organized Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1941), pg. 15.]

Strong chose 9 groups out of the 121 as representative; he then proceeded to subject these groups to a minute examination. He found that they could be grouped broadly into three different categories:

- Christian groups (the National Union for Social Justice, the American Christian Defenders, and the Defenders of the Christian Faith);

- Antilabor and business groups (the Industrial Defense Association, the Edmondson Economic Service, the American Vigilant Intelligence Service, and James True Associates);

- Political and patriotic groups (The Paul Reveres and the Order of ’76).

AND IT'S PRECISELY HERE THAT STRONG BEGAN TO DISCOVER THE REAL REASON BEHIND THE "STAYING POWER" OF THE ILLUMINIST MYTH: IT WAS THE GLUE WHICH WAS HOLDING TOGETHER THIS RATHER POLYGLOT ALLIANCE OF OTHERWISE UNRELATED CULTURAL, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL GROUPS WHICH WAS STANDING IN THE WAY OF SOCIALIST FORCES WHICH THREATENED THEIR UNDOING. The myth (whether expressed as the "Illuminist Plot," the "Communist Conspiracy," and/or "Secular-Humanism") gave the alliance the raison d'etre necessary to hold it together. It provided an enemy against which they could rally their forces and make "common cause." Without it, the alliance would fall apart.

The myth stimulated -

Businessmen and antilabor groups because it portrayed communism and the business community's hated advesaries, the labor unions, as tools of Illuminism;

It galvanized Christians in as much as it painted a dire threat against Christianity; and finally

It excited national and patriotic groups as a response to the "one-worldism" of Illuminism.

Thus, it was (and is) in the interest of all three communities [Big Business and antilabor groups); Christians; and the various nationalist and patriotic groups (i.e., the John Birch Society, the American Security Council, etc.)] to fan the flames of Illuminism, and - if only unwittingly and unintentionally - the underlying anti-Semitism that goes along with it. Thus, it is a matter of pure fact - even today - that one cannot involve himself in this alliance without someday involving himself in anti-Semitism! - and this is as true for Christians as it is for Big Business, and the various nationalist and patriotic groups.

PLAYING WITH FIRE

What is it about American Christians which makes them think that they can play with such fire (i.e., the Illuminist Myth) and not get burned? Over twenty million people - from the White Terror which so gripped Europe after the First World War to the ovens of Auschwitz during the Second World War - have perished directly as a result of this myth.

Christians are being hustled, and its not "Minnesota Fats" who’s doing the hustling, but experts at the game of politics who would pimp their own mothers as prostitutes if it could achieve their goal of worldly political power. Thinking we are wise, we have become fools and are playing with the same fire which consumed the White Russians and the German people. American Christians think to use the political process for their own ends, but in the final analysis it may be the political process which will use them for its ends.

1. Much of this information comes from two sources: Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide and Donald Strong, Organized Anti-Semitism in America.

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