Get ready for a wordy, fact-less, totally biased page of anti-Nazi word-vomit. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion comes off to me as a half-assed attempt at turning people against an entire civilization. It came across as though the writer(s) thought one day to themselves: “How can I make this harmless group within our society look as though they were the cause of all tangible turmoil?”, and from that came the text I am discussing. Or perhaps, they lost a soccer game and went home and ranted about how absolutely terrible the other team was despite their failings being entirely their own fault, making up all sorts of crazy rumors and insults, and then ultimately titling the other team an entire f****** race. I’m sure that analogy has no application to the readings at hand here, but still. It cant be expressed enough how much this text makes you think, “Where the hell did they get these ideas??”. There isn’t much factual substance to it, several translations throughout history corrupting the contents and making it nearly impossible to validate. With little to no understanding of real Judaism, the writers took on the task of discussing the Jews’ truest character and intentions, religious, political and economical plans, ultimately undermining the confidence and strength of their arguments. This is like me, an English major who received a 1 on her statistics exam, claiming that I know everything about statistics. Its so completely brash and outlandish that it comes across as almost humorous.
Now, after bashing the text as much as I can without rendering myself a sailor, I want to touch on the fact that if this text is so unbelievably unbelievable, why did so many people adopt the opinions exploited as their own? Why was it used as cause to commit mass genocide? Why are some of the stereotypes displayed in the Protocols still alive and applied today to the Jewish communities?
Well, I am not a history major, and I have a very media-influenced and limited knowledge of the Nazi era. But I can say that Germany faced large amounts of national humiliations, they lost wars, lives, and sunk into undeniably irreversible debt. A treaty was signed stripping Germany of all its power, making the big war soldier look like a baby with its thumb stuck in its mouth. Of course, because humans have such a freakish and drug-like addiction to nationalism and pride, it became easy to find the first possible inconvenience in their lives, and rage, rage, rage about it. In my opinion, Germany didn’t know where to direct their humiliations, their struggles, their anger. So when a man with a really shitty mustache and extreme eugenic ideals stood before them and claimed it was one, undeniable source, they committed the irrevocable and their anger turned to pointed, fatal hatred. I don’t know if I’m talking out of my rear right now, I probably am, but this is the only way that I can make sense of this entire country’s power-hungry destruction of an entire people and their culture. Its sick, and scares me to think that it was that easy, and that we, humans, have such little control over our powerful, powerful emotions.