KF has a thread like this called "reddit general" so I thought we should have one where you post random reddit posts, particularly funny, weird, entertaining, cringe etc. ones. You can also post infamous reddit posts that became copypastas, like this one.
Here's some recent ones I came across:
ghostarchive.org
Some thot with a weird butt:
ghostarchive.org
Somebody posts a whole essay about anti Semitism on a murder mystery sub:
Feel free to post random spergy comments as stand-alones, here's some recent ones I found:
tWo SpIrItS about a native woman who was murdered and unidentified for decades:
On the same post, apparently the extremely common forensics marker of shovel shaped teeth being a sign of a victim being Asian or native is racist, bc many decades ago a native girl who ended up in another state got mislabeled as Asian bc she was an unidentified decedent for decades. It's also racist to say natives and Asians are related. Even though they are, genetically.
Here's some recent ones I came across:
This happened yesterday night. Me (35M) and GF (30F) have been in a steady relationship for about 7 years. Our sex life has diminished quite a bit, but only in quantity, and not in quality. On average we have sex once or twice a week, usually on weekends.
When we do have sexy time, I'd say about 50% of those encounters are preceded by sexy-talk. We talk about thing we would like to do, we show each other porn we bookmarked during the week specifically for these interactions, and we talk about fantasies. All of this really elevates the experience and has become a really fun tradition of ours.
Lately, threesomes have been a recurrent topic in these conversations, either via porn showcasing, or fantasy theory crafting. But since usually there's sex right after, I believe we both get hit with post-nut clarity and don't chase the subject further.
So I decided to make it happen. We are mostly introverts, so meeting people while out and about was never going to make it happen, so I had to think of a different approach. And for this I would have to bring the topic up outside of our pre-sex-talks. So I did, on a regular Tuesday evening. My proposal was met with shock, excitement, and some doubts. We put our fantasies, worries, and planing efforts on the table and we came to an agreement: our first third wheel was going to me an M (we both tread a bit into the bi territory); it was up to me to contact and arrange this first meeting; this person has to be a trustworthy stranger to us both; and she gets to use a blindfold during the act, to enhance our who's who fantasy.
And this is were I fucked up. I decided to hire a pro, since dating apps were failing me. After a few days of scrolling through various local sites of male offerings, and the select few targeted at women, I found a guy about our age, had threesomes in his description, masseuse, and not incredibly huge in every area. I contacted the guy, he seemed real chill and down to earth, talked about what we wanted to do, and he was on board. A bit over budget, but I seemed to have found exactly what I was looking for.
I let my GF know that Saturday was the day. I don't tell her who is coming, or where I found this person, just that it's a he, and is coming Saturday night.
Saturday night comes. We decided to use fake names for ourselves, because why not, we are newbies at this. She gets into her favorite lingerie, blindfold at hand, and the doorbell rings. I go down, open the door, meet the guy. He's as calm as he seemed on text. I explain our rules again, and we go up to the apartment.
I won't go into much detail here but we had the time of our lives. You could feel the levels of excitement going through the roof. My GF didn't take the blindfold off the whole time, and I could tell she was really enjoying that aspect.
The whole thing was over in about an hour. Guy goes into the bathroom with his stuff to clean himself and get ready to leave. Meanwhile I stay in bed with GF, she takes the blindfold off, and we talk a bit. Both of us are in ecstasy, and in a very happy mood.
A few minutes later, guy comes out of the bathroom and locks eyes with GF. She looks at him and says a name (not the advertised guy's name) out loud with clear surprise in her voice. He, with the same amount of shock as her, calls my GF by her real name. And they start laughing uncontrollably.
Turns out this person was an ex of my GF.
The shame inside me was already immense, when he turned to me and said "you know, I could've done this for free!".
We are still in shock about it all, and while I think it will not permanently damage our relationship, I do think this was our first and last sexual endeavor involving other people.
TL;DR: I hired a sex worker to have a MFM threesome with me and my GF, and he turned out to be my GF's ex.
Quick update to respond to those questioning the Clark Kent situation with the blindfold: They had a brief relationship about 10 years ago. I believe they dated for about 3 months, and her body has changed since then. There wasn't talking at all, we went straight to business. I honestly believe it is quite hard to recognize someone from moaning and grunting alone. Also, the room was dim litted.
It could also have been professionalism on his side, to not say anything unless 100% sure. If he knew as soon as he saw her and said something, he may have risked breaking the moment and possibly me asking for a refund.
When we do have sexy time, I'd say about 50% of those encounters are preceded by sexy-talk. We talk about thing we would like to do, we show each other porn we bookmarked during the week specifically for these interactions, and we talk about fantasies. All of this really elevates the experience and has become a really fun tradition of ours.
Lately, threesomes have been a recurrent topic in these conversations, either via porn showcasing, or fantasy theory crafting. But since usually there's sex right after, I believe we both get hit with post-nut clarity and don't chase the subject further.
So I decided to make it happen. We are mostly introverts, so meeting people while out and about was never going to make it happen, so I had to think of a different approach. And for this I would have to bring the topic up outside of our pre-sex-talks. So I did, on a regular Tuesday evening. My proposal was met with shock, excitement, and some doubts. We put our fantasies, worries, and planing efforts on the table and we came to an agreement: our first third wheel was going to me an M (we both tread a bit into the bi territory); it was up to me to contact and arrange this first meeting; this person has to be a trustworthy stranger to us both; and she gets to use a blindfold during the act, to enhance our who's who fantasy.
And this is were I fucked up. I decided to hire a pro, since dating apps were failing me. After a few days of scrolling through various local sites of male offerings, and the select few targeted at women, I found a guy about our age, had threesomes in his description, masseuse, and not incredibly huge in every area. I contacted the guy, he seemed real chill and down to earth, talked about what we wanted to do, and he was on board. A bit over budget, but I seemed to have found exactly what I was looking for.
I let my GF know that Saturday was the day. I don't tell her who is coming, or where I found this person, just that it's a he, and is coming Saturday night.
Saturday night comes. We decided to use fake names for ourselves, because why not, we are newbies at this. She gets into her favorite lingerie, blindfold at hand, and the doorbell rings. I go down, open the door, meet the guy. He's as calm as he seemed on text. I explain our rules again, and we go up to the apartment.
I won't go into much detail here but we had the time of our lives. You could feel the levels of excitement going through the roof. My GF didn't take the blindfold off the whole time, and I could tell she was really enjoying that aspect.
The whole thing was over in about an hour. Guy goes into the bathroom with his stuff to clean himself and get ready to leave. Meanwhile I stay in bed with GF, she takes the blindfold off, and we talk a bit. Both of us are in ecstasy, and in a very happy mood.
A few minutes later, guy comes out of the bathroom and locks eyes with GF. She looks at him and says a name (not the advertised guy's name) out loud with clear surprise in her voice. He, with the same amount of shock as her, calls my GF by her real name. And they start laughing uncontrollably.
Turns out this person was an ex of my GF.
The shame inside me was already immense, when he turned to me and said "you know, I could've done this for free!".
We are still in shock about it all, and while I think it will not permanently damage our relationship, I do think this was our first and last sexual endeavor involving other people.
TL;DR: I hired a sex worker to have a MFM threesome with me and my GF, and he turned out to be my GF's ex.
Quick update to respond to those questioning the Clark Kent situation with the blindfold: They had a brief relationship about 10 years ago. I believe they dated for about 3 months, and her body has changed since then. There wasn't talking at all, we went straight to business. I honestly believe it is quite hard to recognize someone from moaning and grunting alone. Also, the room was dim litted.
It could also have been professionalism on his side, to not say anything unless 100% sure. If he knew as soon as he saw her and said something, he may have risked breaking the moment and possibly me asking for a refund.
Wholesome Captain America : wholesomememes | Ghostarchive
I wake up every night and have to run to the bathroom. I went to a doctor and he just laughed at my condition. I can’t continue like this!
Some thot with a weird butt:
At Popeyes of all places? : Instagramreality | Ghostarchive
Somebody posts a whole essay about anti Semitism on a murder mystery sub:
Introduction
The Holocaust didn’t pop up out of nowhere, though it can often feel that way with what we’re taught in history class. With so many different topics to cover in such a short span of time, it frequently feels like Adolph Hitler rose in Germany, indoctrinated the German people with ideas about an international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, and the Holocaust proceeded in kind.
But the truth is that anti-Semitism was widespread, not just in Europe but throughout the world, in the early 20th century and long before that. But perhaps no document was more influential in bringing about the massive spike in anti-Semitism in the early 20th century than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Purporting to be the minutes from a meeting of an incredibly powerful and secretive rabbinical council, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were frequently presented as a work of non-fiction and were often used to justify violent pogroms against the Jewish people. This is for one very specific reason: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion outlined plans for global Jewish domination.
Therefore, any attacks against Jews were not viewed as discriminatory or prejudicial but as defensive measures, a necessity to keep one’s own nation safe from an imagined threat. To be fair, there have been countless literary forgeries throughout history, so what makes this one so special?
I would point to two factors. The first and foremost is that most literary forgeries don’t result in the mass extermination of 6 million people. The other, and the reason that I’m covering The Protocols today, is that over a hundred years later, we still don’t know who originally produced* this text that brought about so much death and devastation.
* I use the term “produced” rather than “written” for very specific reasons that I’ll cover later in this piece, but I wanted to address this here in case alarm bells are going off in anyone’s heads on the word choice here; I know they would be in mine.
A History of International Jewish Conspiracies
Trying to provide an overarching history of anti-Semitism here would be a Herculean task. Honestly, just talking about the history of international Jewish conspiracies itself is a whole, whole lot, but I’m going to do my best here.
Historians have tracked belief in an international Jewish conspiracy back to the thirteenth century. The reasons behind this belief are clear, even if they are unequivocally false.
The clearest reason for these beliefs is the concept of the Jews as a subversive nation working within broader, more formally recognized nations to undermine and eventually take over those nations.
This belief is rooted in a warped idea regarding Jewish self-determination. Most secular Zionists, who historically make up the largest sect of Judaism, believe that they have a right to self-determination.
What this right means has been openly debated for years, with some claiming that an actual physical Jewish state is not necessary and others insisting that it is. While many currently point to Israel as this Jewish state, it was only established in 1948, following World War II and the Holocaust.
As a result of this belief combined with virulent anti-Semitism across the board, Jewish groups tended to keep to themselves, creating their own self-supporting communities that were often necessary to survive the prejudicial world that was, quite literally, out to get them.
Because of this belief and this communal inwardness, conspiracy theories were floated that Jewish people were like a sleeper state within a state. Nationalist leaders, like Adolph Hitler and Mao Zedong, have historically viewed peoples who do not conform to their status quos as a threat to hegemony. Nationalism only truly works when such a leader can unite their constituents under a broad sense of identity, meaning that those who refuse to conform to that identity are often labeled as subversive.*
But this is not the only reason for the rise of international Jewish conspiracies throughout the modern era. The trope of the greedy Jewish banker has become ubiquitous and seems to be having quite the renaissance on Twitter these days. And as many of us know, money rules the modern world. This belief has been used to suggest that since Jewish bankers control the purse strings, they could easily take over the world if and when they wanted to. This would certainly be news to the Jewish people, who I think would be quite content simply not being discriminated against.
However, like most long-lasting stereotypes, that of the Jewish banker is rooted in a small kernel of truth that is then blown out of proportion and weaponized against the stereotyped group. Historically, Jewish people did make up a high proportion of banking and financial jobs.
Why? On this question, historians are split. Some believe that it was because Jews were excluded from guilds, membership in which was almost a prerequisite for success. Banking, on the other hand, did not require guild membership to be successful, meaning that many Jews gravitated towards it as one of their few options. Other historians believe that this was not the case and that the Jewish community’s high literacy rates led many to pursue banking. Furthermore, many Christians were hesitant to take jobs in banking since charging interest was seen as “usury” and therefore a sin to be avoided, leading many Christians (the vast majority in many European countries at this time) to avoid banking altogether.
Needless to say, regardless of the reasons behind this stereotype, it contributed to an image of Jews as puppeteers that opportunistic world leaders were more than happy to exploit, and I certainly don’t just mean Hitler here. Czar Nicholas II for one, who was deposed during the Russian Revolution, feverishly contributed to the production and distribution of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ensuring that those who could read could become indoctrinated by this conspiratorial ideology and those who could not could learn about it secondhand from those that could.
In other words, it was not merely prejudice that stoked these fires but political savvy and opportunism as well. And without such opportunism, The Protocols would never have gotten nearly as massive as they did in the early 20th century.
* If you’re on this subreddit, there’s a decent chance that you find cults interesting as well. This behavior is not unlike the behavior typically exemplified by cults, such as Scientologists, labeling people as Suppressive Persons (SPs) and harassing them. Quite frankly, it serves a very similar purpose as well, uniting your current members while showing consequences for refusing to conform and punishing those deemed outsiders.
What are The Protocols?
As mentioned above, The Elders of the Protocols of Zion are a fabricated text that was spread widely throughout the world in the early 20th century and is still shared to this day among neofascist and neo-Nazi organizations, purporting to reveal secret Jewish plans for world domination.
In case you had any doubts and were wondering if the supposed meeting minutes for an evil group of rabbis was simply leaked, the book itself isn’t even very original. In fact, it outright plagiarizes much of its material. Much of the text is directly ripped from Maurice Joly’s “The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,” an 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly. Material is also taken from a chapter of Biarritz, an 1868 anti-Semitic novel by German novelist Hermann Goedsche.
Therefore, we not only know that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a forgery; we know exactly where that forgery comes from. And this isn’t new information. Philip Graves, an Anglo-Irish journalist, revealed this plagiarism in a series of articles for The Times way back in 1921, a couple decades before the Holocaust even took place.
So why were The Protocols not dead in the water right then and there? Several reasons I think- 1) People wanted an enemy and no well-researched piece is going to dissuade them of those notions if they had already made up their minds. This is something that is only period-specific and definitely doesn’t happen constantly today. /s 2) The written word was not as widespread as it once was, and those who chose to spend their money publishing The Protocols far outweighed (at least financially) those who chose to spend their money publishing Graves’ work. And 3) The Protocols are a fantastic conspiratorial text in that they are incredibly vague. Names, dates, and issues are omitted, allowing the reader to insert their own projections and making the source material highly flexible. Furthermore, the book does not lay out the specifics of how the Jews plan to conquer the world (since there is, of course, no logical path for them to do so); it only suggests that their plan to do so, however vague, is imminent. With that in mind, Graves’ refutation of The Protocols mostly fell on deaf ears, and they continued to be propagated and spread like a virus.
And spread it did, with the help of some extremely wealthy malefactors. In addition to Czar Nicholas II, who eventually shifted the rhetoric of The Protocols to suggest that the Russian Revolution was a Jewish world domination attempt and that the Bolshevists were all Jews, and Adolph Hitler, who had the book taught as fact in schools across Nazi Germany, Henry Ford here in the United States published a series of anti-Semitic articles in a newspaper he owned which quoted The Protocols heavily. The Philadelphia Public Ledger published them as the “Red Bible,” replacing allusions to Jews with those to Bolsheviks and purporting to reveal the communist plot for world domination.
After the horror of the Holocaust, as one might expect, flaunting of The Protocols wound down significantly but not fully.
Palestinian Islamist group Hammas included The Protocols as justification for attacks against Israel in its 1988 charter, stating that it shows Jewish plans for world domination, which were being realized in their takeover of that part of the Middle East. This wasn’t removed from their charter until 2017. In 2001, the Palestiniain Solidarity Committee of South Africa handed out copies of The Protocols at the World Conference against Racism, apparently completely oblivious to the irony of the situation.*
In 2001-2002, Arab Radio and Television created a 30-part miniseries that included a dramatization of The Protocols and distributed it in Egypt. Both the US and Israel criticized them for airing the series.
So obviously, The Protocols were spread far and wide. They have been translated into many different languages and have undoubtedly had an impact on the 20th century. So where did this mysterious conspiratorial book come from? The answer is that no one is quite sure.
*The Israel and Palestine conflict is one of the most complex and troubling issues within current world affairs. Please do not try to fight about or solve this conflict in the comments below. I know that people have very strong opinions on this issue that they are entitled to, but this write-up is about The Protocols themselves, not this conflict. If my post gets locked because y’all start arguing over a highly controversial issue, then so help me God, I will turn this car around. I wanted to include this information because I thought it was interesting for the subject we are discussing today.
Authorship of the Protocols
The real mystery surrounding The Protocols lies in their creation. Who created such an influential conspiracy text that had such a massive impact on the 20th century? Who helped impact and arguably drove one of the greatest tragedies in modern history?
That’s an excellent question. According to historian Cesare G. De Michelis, textual evidence suggests that The Protocols could not have been created prior to 1901. Unfortunately, without having access to his book, which I believe is written in another language, I do not know what specific evidence this is.
In 1905, anti-Semitic Russian author Sergei Nilus published The Protocols in full as the final chapter of his book The Great within the Small and Antichrist, an Imminent Political Possibility, Notes of an Orthodox Believer. Known for his staunch religious beliefs and anti-Semitic views along with a knack for concise titles, Nilus is believed to be the first person to publish The Protocols in full. He labeled them 1902-1903, and it is commonly believed that they were written during this period in Russia, the language of which they were originally published in. It is believed that an abridged version of The Protocols may have been published in the ultra-nationalist Russian newspaper Znamya in 1903.
It has since come out that Pavel Krushevan, who served as the publisher and editor of Znamya, purposefully obscured the origins of The Protocols to ensure they would be more likely to catch on as a conspiratorial text. In other words, Krushevan almost certainly knew that what he was publishing was a blatant lie; he worked hard to ensure that that lie carried more weight than it ever should have.
Seeing as Krushevan was a member of the Black Hundredists, a far-right ultra-nationlist group that was anti-Semitic and highly xenophobic, this isn’t necessarily surprising. They were also known for inciting pogroms; their publication of The Protocols only helped with that incitement. So could Krushevan have written The Protocols himself, or perhaps in consultation with other Black Hundredists? It’s possible but far from certain.
However, the fact that The Protocols are referenced in a 1902 article in the conservative Saint Petersburg-based newspaper Novoye Vremya by journalist Mikhail Osipovich Menshikov suggests that they existed prior to this. He said that an upper-class woman, now known to be Yuliana Glinka, had suggested that he read the booklet. To his credit, Menshikov was unamused, questioning the authenticity of The Protocols and suggesting that those spreading it were “people with brain fever.” Glinka, a Russian occultist, is now primarily remembered for passing along one of the most damaging and degrading documents in human history, far from a positive legacy.
Several other authors have been suggested as creators of The Protocols over the years, however. In 1921, Princess Catherine Radziwill, a Polish-Russian aristocrat, denounced The Protocols as a forgery and accused Russian journalists Matvei Golovinski and Manasevich-Manuilov of creating the protocols under the direction of Pyotr Rachkovsky, Chief of the Russian secret service in Paris. While this origin would make sense, it has since been refuted by historians, such as De Michelis, as provably false.
In the 1920s, when news that The Protocols were merely a forgery was brought to light, Allen Dulles (yes, that Allen Dulles- the first civilian director of the CIA) supposedly discovered the original source of The Protocols, a man named Mikhail Raslovlev, a Russian émigré and self-identified anti-Semite in Constantinople who reportedly gave this information to writer Peter Grose, who then passed it along to Graves, so as not to “give a weapon of any kind to the Jews, whose friend I have never been.” Dulles actually tried to use this information to get the US Department of State to denounce the Protocols as a forgery… without success. But there seems to be little evidence to support Raslovlev’s claims of authorship.
So who originally wrote The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? The truth is that we have no idea who produced one of the most influential works of the 20th century and anyone who claims to know is merely peddling their own brand of conspiracy thought.
In 1897, the literacy rate in Russia was only 24%, and the Czarist leadership feared literacy among their serfdom, as they feared it would lead to revolt or revolution. Thus, it was not until the Bolshevist programs of the 1920s-1930s when much of Russia became literate.
I tend to agree with the argument that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first authored in Russia, given where it first popped up, but beyond this I don’t have much idea. I highly doubt that it was produced by a peasant, both because of low literacy rates and because of Glinka’s early adoption of The Protocols as early as 1902, likely shortly after they were written.
Therefore, I find it highly likely that The Protocols were produced by a highly anti-Semitic Russian aristocrat, perhaps meant to squash czarist opposition in Russia or simply to antagonize the Jewish people. Clearly, they were very well-read to bring in the writing of Joly and Goedsche, even if they weren’t particularly creative themselves.
Perhaps, somewhere in Russia, there is a document stuffed away in the back of archive that reveals the true origins of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This happens more often than you might think with historical conundrums. But I think more likely, we will never know who produced this horrible document; the identity of one of history’s greatest villains may be permanently lost.
Conclusion
Throughout this piece, I’ve used my usual dry wit that I drop throughout most of my write-ups. However, in this piece, I felt like I used it more than usual and that it stood out to me a lot me because of the incredibly heavy nature of the subject matter, so I thought I’d address why I decided to keep my usual style for such a difficult subject.
First and foremost, I use humor to cope with incredibly dark subject matter, and I hope that it makes it more easily digestible for my audience as well. After all, when Allen Dulles’ is one of the most heroic figures in your writeup, you know that you’re dealing with some incredibly dark material. However, far more important, at least in my mind, is that it helps to highlight the absolute absurdity of the circumstances surrounding The Protocols.
If we simply tell the story of The Protocols without a hint of ridicule, we risk legitimizing the process through which they rose to prominence and inspired horrible acts. There was no rationality behind the acceptance of these documents. While the peasantry may have been goaded into labeling the Jewish people as their scapegoat, many members of the aristocracy were learned enough to know better, and yet they chose not to.
Quite frankly, this dynamic is precisely why I chose to write this piece, to highlight just how little actual evidence needs to be present for such a claim to gain traction.
One of my favorite history books is Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, in which the historian argues that the men who made up Reserve Police Battalion 101, one of several roving death squads who were initially used to execute the Final Solution before it was centralized in concentration camps, were not, in fact, extraordinarily anti-Semitic, at least no more so than most throughout Europe (and quite frankly the US) at this time.
Rather, they were ordinary Germans who had been utterly brainwashed by an intensive and all-encompassing propaganda campaign, a campaign built heavily upon The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I first read Ordinary Men when I was in undergraduate. I was fascinating by it. It was incredibly brutal and disturbing, at times churning my stomach, but I read through it in record time, much of it baking under the warm sun outside the performing arts center at my college.
When I reached the end of Browning’s tight monograph, however, I felt a chill run down the back of my spine. In his final words, Browning warns us that if such a thing could happen to ordinary men, who among us can claim full immunity from such propaganda and who can assert, with absolute certainty, that an event like the Holocaust won’t happen again.
I fear that I see much of the same currents in today’s conspiracy thought as I do in The Protocols, particularly in groups like Q ’Anon, where specifics, such as authorship, dates, and names are eschewed in favor of emotionally charged rhetoric meant to rile people up.
So as we make our way through politically polarizing times, let’s remember just how easy it is to fall into such traps and that none of us are immune to propaganda. Let’s remember that the Holocaust didn’t just come out of nowhere; it was a long, long time in the making.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#cite_note-71
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dialogue_in_Hell_Between_Machiavelli_and_Montesquieu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_state#:~:text=In world politics, Jewish state,homeland for the Jewish people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez#:~:text=9 References-,Background,population, particularly in rural areas.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/633637-ordinary-men
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/usury-and-moneylending-in-judaism/
The Holocaust didn’t pop up out of nowhere, though it can often feel that way with what we’re taught in history class. With so many different topics to cover in such a short span of time, it frequently feels like Adolph Hitler rose in Germany, indoctrinated the German people with ideas about an international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, and the Holocaust proceeded in kind.
But the truth is that anti-Semitism was widespread, not just in Europe but throughout the world, in the early 20th century and long before that. But perhaps no document was more influential in bringing about the massive spike in anti-Semitism in the early 20th century than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Purporting to be the minutes from a meeting of an incredibly powerful and secretive rabbinical council, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were frequently presented as a work of non-fiction and were often used to justify violent pogroms against the Jewish people. This is for one very specific reason: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion outlined plans for global Jewish domination.
Therefore, any attacks against Jews were not viewed as discriminatory or prejudicial but as defensive measures, a necessity to keep one’s own nation safe from an imagined threat. To be fair, there have been countless literary forgeries throughout history, so what makes this one so special?
I would point to two factors. The first and foremost is that most literary forgeries don’t result in the mass extermination of 6 million people. The other, and the reason that I’m covering The Protocols today, is that over a hundred years later, we still don’t know who originally produced* this text that brought about so much death and devastation.
* I use the term “produced” rather than “written” for very specific reasons that I’ll cover later in this piece, but I wanted to address this here in case alarm bells are going off in anyone’s heads on the word choice here; I know they would be in mine.
A History of International Jewish Conspiracies
Trying to provide an overarching history of anti-Semitism here would be a Herculean task. Honestly, just talking about the history of international Jewish conspiracies itself is a whole, whole lot, but I’m going to do my best here.
Historians have tracked belief in an international Jewish conspiracy back to the thirteenth century. The reasons behind this belief are clear, even if they are unequivocally false.
The clearest reason for these beliefs is the concept of the Jews as a subversive nation working within broader, more formally recognized nations to undermine and eventually take over those nations.
This belief is rooted in a warped idea regarding Jewish self-determination. Most secular Zionists, who historically make up the largest sect of Judaism, believe that they have a right to self-determination.
What this right means has been openly debated for years, with some claiming that an actual physical Jewish state is not necessary and others insisting that it is. While many currently point to Israel as this Jewish state, it was only established in 1948, following World War II and the Holocaust.
As a result of this belief combined with virulent anti-Semitism across the board, Jewish groups tended to keep to themselves, creating their own self-supporting communities that were often necessary to survive the prejudicial world that was, quite literally, out to get them.
Because of this belief and this communal inwardness, conspiracy theories were floated that Jewish people were like a sleeper state within a state. Nationalist leaders, like Adolph Hitler and Mao Zedong, have historically viewed peoples who do not conform to their status quos as a threat to hegemony. Nationalism only truly works when such a leader can unite their constituents under a broad sense of identity, meaning that those who refuse to conform to that identity are often labeled as subversive.*
But this is not the only reason for the rise of international Jewish conspiracies throughout the modern era. The trope of the greedy Jewish banker has become ubiquitous and seems to be having quite the renaissance on Twitter these days. And as many of us know, money rules the modern world. This belief has been used to suggest that since Jewish bankers control the purse strings, they could easily take over the world if and when they wanted to. This would certainly be news to the Jewish people, who I think would be quite content simply not being discriminated against.
However, like most long-lasting stereotypes, that of the Jewish banker is rooted in a small kernel of truth that is then blown out of proportion and weaponized against the stereotyped group. Historically, Jewish people did make up a high proportion of banking and financial jobs.
Why? On this question, historians are split. Some believe that it was because Jews were excluded from guilds, membership in which was almost a prerequisite for success. Banking, on the other hand, did not require guild membership to be successful, meaning that many Jews gravitated towards it as one of their few options. Other historians believe that this was not the case and that the Jewish community’s high literacy rates led many to pursue banking. Furthermore, many Christians were hesitant to take jobs in banking since charging interest was seen as “usury” and therefore a sin to be avoided, leading many Christians (the vast majority in many European countries at this time) to avoid banking altogether.
Needless to say, regardless of the reasons behind this stereotype, it contributed to an image of Jews as puppeteers that opportunistic world leaders were more than happy to exploit, and I certainly don’t just mean Hitler here. Czar Nicholas II for one, who was deposed during the Russian Revolution, feverishly contributed to the production and distribution of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ensuring that those who could read could become indoctrinated by this conspiratorial ideology and those who could not could learn about it secondhand from those that could.
In other words, it was not merely prejudice that stoked these fires but political savvy and opportunism as well. And without such opportunism, The Protocols would never have gotten nearly as massive as they did in the early 20th century.
* If you’re on this subreddit, there’s a decent chance that you find cults interesting as well. This behavior is not unlike the behavior typically exemplified by cults, such as Scientologists, labeling people as Suppressive Persons (SPs) and harassing them. Quite frankly, it serves a very similar purpose as well, uniting your current members while showing consequences for refusing to conform and punishing those deemed outsiders.
What are The Protocols?
As mentioned above, The Elders of the Protocols of Zion are a fabricated text that was spread widely throughout the world in the early 20th century and is still shared to this day among neofascist and neo-Nazi organizations, purporting to reveal secret Jewish plans for world domination.
In case you had any doubts and were wondering if the supposed meeting minutes for an evil group of rabbis was simply leaked, the book itself isn’t even very original. In fact, it outright plagiarizes much of its material. Much of the text is directly ripped from Maurice Joly’s “The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,” an 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly. Material is also taken from a chapter of Biarritz, an 1868 anti-Semitic novel by German novelist Hermann Goedsche.
Therefore, we not only know that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a forgery; we know exactly where that forgery comes from. And this isn’t new information. Philip Graves, an Anglo-Irish journalist, revealed this plagiarism in a series of articles for The Times way back in 1921, a couple decades before the Holocaust even took place.
So why were The Protocols not dead in the water right then and there? Several reasons I think- 1) People wanted an enemy and no well-researched piece is going to dissuade them of those notions if they had already made up their minds. This is something that is only period-specific and definitely doesn’t happen constantly today. /s 2) The written word was not as widespread as it once was, and those who chose to spend their money publishing The Protocols far outweighed (at least financially) those who chose to spend their money publishing Graves’ work. And 3) The Protocols are a fantastic conspiratorial text in that they are incredibly vague. Names, dates, and issues are omitted, allowing the reader to insert their own projections and making the source material highly flexible. Furthermore, the book does not lay out the specifics of how the Jews plan to conquer the world (since there is, of course, no logical path for them to do so); it only suggests that their plan to do so, however vague, is imminent. With that in mind, Graves’ refutation of The Protocols mostly fell on deaf ears, and they continued to be propagated and spread like a virus.
And spread it did, with the help of some extremely wealthy malefactors. In addition to Czar Nicholas II, who eventually shifted the rhetoric of The Protocols to suggest that the Russian Revolution was a Jewish world domination attempt and that the Bolshevists were all Jews, and Adolph Hitler, who had the book taught as fact in schools across Nazi Germany, Henry Ford here in the United States published a series of anti-Semitic articles in a newspaper he owned which quoted The Protocols heavily. The Philadelphia Public Ledger published them as the “Red Bible,” replacing allusions to Jews with those to Bolsheviks and purporting to reveal the communist plot for world domination.
After the horror of the Holocaust, as one might expect, flaunting of The Protocols wound down significantly but not fully.
Palestinian Islamist group Hammas included The Protocols as justification for attacks against Israel in its 1988 charter, stating that it shows Jewish plans for world domination, which were being realized in their takeover of that part of the Middle East. This wasn’t removed from their charter until 2017. In 2001, the Palestiniain Solidarity Committee of South Africa handed out copies of The Protocols at the World Conference against Racism, apparently completely oblivious to the irony of the situation.*
In 2001-2002, Arab Radio and Television created a 30-part miniseries that included a dramatization of The Protocols and distributed it in Egypt. Both the US and Israel criticized them for airing the series.
So obviously, The Protocols were spread far and wide. They have been translated into many different languages and have undoubtedly had an impact on the 20th century. So where did this mysterious conspiratorial book come from? The answer is that no one is quite sure.
*The Israel and Palestine conflict is one of the most complex and troubling issues within current world affairs. Please do not try to fight about or solve this conflict in the comments below. I know that people have very strong opinions on this issue that they are entitled to, but this write-up is about The Protocols themselves, not this conflict. If my post gets locked because y’all start arguing over a highly controversial issue, then so help me God, I will turn this car around. I wanted to include this information because I thought it was interesting for the subject we are discussing today.
Authorship of the Protocols
The real mystery surrounding The Protocols lies in their creation. Who created such an influential conspiracy text that had such a massive impact on the 20th century? Who helped impact and arguably drove one of the greatest tragedies in modern history?
That’s an excellent question. According to historian Cesare G. De Michelis, textual evidence suggests that The Protocols could not have been created prior to 1901. Unfortunately, without having access to his book, which I believe is written in another language, I do not know what specific evidence this is.
In 1905, anti-Semitic Russian author Sergei Nilus published The Protocols in full as the final chapter of his book The Great within the Small and Antichrist, an Imminent Political Possibility, Notes of an Orthodox Believer. Known for his staunch religious beliefs and anti-Semitic views along with a knack for concise titles, Nilus is believed to be the first person to publish The Protocols in full. He labeled them 1902-1903, and it is commonly believed that they were written during this period in Russia, the language of which they were originally published in. It is believed that an abridged version of The Protocols may have been published in the ultra-nationalist Russian newspaper Znamya in 1903.
It has since come out that Pavel Krushevan, who served as the publisher and editor of Znamya, purposefully obscured the origins of The Protocols to ensure they would be more likely to catch on as a conspiratorial text. In other words, Krushevan almost certainly knew that what he was publishing was a blatant lie; he worked hard to ensure that that lie carried more weight than it ever should have.
Seeing as Krushevan was a member of the Black Hundredists, a far-right ultra-nationlist group that was anti-Semitic and highly xenophobic, this isn’t necessarily surprising. They were also known for inciting pogroms; their publication of The Protocols only helped with that incitement. So could Krushevan have written The Protocols himself, or perhaps in consultation with other Black Hundredists? It’s possible but far from certain.
However, the fact that The Protocols are referenced in a 1902 article in the conservative Saint Petersburg-based newspaper Novoye Vremya by journalist Mikhail Osipovich Menshikov suggests that they existed prior to this. He said that an upper-class woman, now known to be Yuliana Glinka, had suggested that he read the booklet. To his credit, Menshikov was unamused, questioning the authenticity of The Protocols and suggesting that those spreading it were “people with brain fever.” Glinka, a Russian occultist, is now primarily remembered for passing along one of the most damaging and degrading documents in human history, far from a positive legacy.
Several other authors have been suggested as creators of The Protocols over the years, however. In 1921, Princess Catherine Radziwill, a Polish-Russian aristocrat, denounced The Protocols as a forgery and accused Russian journalists Matvei Golovinski and Manasevich-Manuilov of creating the protocols under the direction of Pyotr Rachkovsky, Chief of the Russian secret service in Paris. While this origin would make sense, it has since been refuted by historians, such as De Michelis, as provably false.
In the 1920s, when news that The Protocols were merely a forgery was brought to light, Allen Dulles (yes, that Allen Dulles- the first civilian director of the CIA) supposedly discovered the original source of The Protocols, a man named Mikhail Raslovlev, a Russian émigré and self-identified anti-Semite in Constantinople who reportedly gave this information to writer Peter Grose, who then passed it along to Graves, so as not to “give a weapon of any kind to the Jews, whose friend I have never been.” Dulles actually tried to use this information to get the US Department of State to denounce the Protocols as a forgery… without success. But there seems to be little evidence to support Raslovlev’s claims of authorship.
So who originally wrote The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? The truth is that we have no idea who produced one of the most influential works of the 20th century and anyone who claims to know is merely peddling their own brand of conspiracy thought.
In 1897, the literacy rate in Russia was only 24%, and the Czarist leadership feared literacy among their serfdom, as they feared it would lead to revolt or revolution. Thus, it was not until the Bolshevist programs of the 1920s-1930s when much of Russia became literate.
I tend to agree with the argument that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first authored in Russia, given where it first popped up, but beyond this I don’t have much idea. I highly doubt that it was produced by a peasant, both because of low literacy rates and because of Glinka’s early adoption of The Protocols as early as 1902, likely shortly after they were written.
Therefore, I find it highly likely that The Protocols were produced by a highly anti-Semitic Russian aristocrat, perhaps meant to squash czarist opposition in Russia or simply to antagonize the Jewish people. Clearly, they were very well-read to bring in the writing of Joly and Goedsche, even if they weren’t particularly creative themselves.
Perhaps, somewhere in Russia, there is a document stuffed away in the back of archive that reveals the true origins of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This happens more often than you might think with historical conundrums. But I think more likely, we will never know who produced this horrible document; the identity of one of history’s greatest villains may be permanently lost.
Conclusion
Throughout this piece, I’ve used my usual dry wit that I drop throughout most of my write-ups. However, in this piece, I felt like I used it more than usual and that it stood out to me a lot me because of the incredibly heavy nature of the subject matter, so I thought I’d address why I decided to keep my usual style for such a difficult subject.
First and foremost, I use humor to cope with incredibly dark subject matter, and I hope that it makes it more easily digestible for my audience as well. After all, when Allen Dulles’ is one of the most heroic figures in your writeup, you know that you’re dealing with some incredibly dark material. However, far more important, at least in my mind, is that it helps to highlight the absolute absurdity of the circumstances surrounding The Protocols.
If we simply tell the story of The Protocols without a hint of ridicule, we risk legitimizing the process through which they rose to prominence and inspired horrible acts. There was no rationality behind the acceptance of these documents. While the peasantry may have been goaded into labeling the Jewish people as their scapegoat, many members of the aristocracy were learned enough to know better, and yet they chose not to.
Quite frankly, this dynamic is precisely why I chose to write this piece, to highlight just how little actual evidence needs to be present for such a claim to gain traction.
One of my favorite history books is Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, in which the historian argues that the men who made up Reserve Police Battalion 101, one of several roving death squads who were initially used to execute the Final Solution before it was centralized in concentration camps, were not, in fact, extraordinarily anti-Semitic, at least no more so than most throughout Europe (and quite frankly the US) at this time.
Rather, they were ordinary Germans who had been utterly brainwashed by an intensive and all-encompassing propaganda campaign, a campaign built heavily upon The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I first read Ordinary Men when I was in undergraduate. I was fascinating by it. It was incredibly brutal and disturbing, at times churning my stomach, but I read through it in record time, much of it baking under the warm sun outside the performing arts center at my college.
When I reached the end of Browning’s tight monograph, however, I felt a chill run down the back of my spine. In his final words, Browning warns us that if such a thing could happen to ordinary men, who among us can claim full immunity from such propaganda and who can assert, with absolute certainty, that an event like the Holocaust won’t happen again.
I fear that I see much of the same currents in today’s conspiracy thought as I do in The Protocols, particularly in groups like Q ’Anon, where specifics, such as authorship, dates, and names are eschewed in favor of emotionally charged rhetoric meant to rile people up.
So as we make our way through politically polarizing times, let’s remember just how easy it is to fall into such traps and that none of us are immune to propaganda. Let’s remember that the Holocaust didn’t just come out of nowhere; it was a long, long time in the making.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#cite_note-71
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dialogue_in_Hell_Between_Machiavelli_and_Montesquieu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_state#:~:text=In world politics, Jewish state,homeland for the Jewish people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez#:~:text=9 References-,Background,population, particularly in rural areas.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/633637-ordinary-men
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/usury-and-moneylending-in-judaism/
Feel free to post random spergy comments as stand-alones, here's some recent ones I found:
tWo SpIrItS about a native woman who was murdered and unidentified for decades:
On the same post, apparently the extremely common forensics marker of shovel shaped teeth being a sign of a victim being Asian or native is racist, bc many decades ago a native girl who ended up in another state got mislabeled as Asian bc she was an unidentified decedent for decades. It's also racist to say natives and Asians are related. Even though they are, genetically.
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