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ROBERT S. WISTRICH
Semites or European and American neo-Nazis. A tissue of lies they may
be, but in terms of their effect the
Protocols
might just as well have been
true. For wherever there is a will to believe, events can be made to fit
even into the paranoid vision of the Jewish world conspiracy, with its
geopolitical center in Zion and its secret affiliates supposedly operating
throughout the globe.
The modern anti-Semitic imagination has been colored for over a
century by gloomy, apocalyptic prophecies of the coming victory of the
omnipotent Jew. A demonic, mythical creature whose undeviating will
to destroy the Gentiles is assumed to lie behind all the negative processes
of change and provides a seductively simplistic explanation for a world
out of joint - whether it be fear of pollution by alien, "inferior" races;
the
angst
provoked by class struggle, ethnic and religious conflict, the
leveling tendencies of mass society; the hatred of capitalism or of
Communism, of modern urban civilization or of liberal, pluralist
democracy; the belief in sinister occult forces (freemasons, Jews, etc.)
working to undermine order, hierarchy, authority and tradition; or else
the fear of a spiritual vacuum induced by the decline of Christianity or
Islam in a world of rapid modernization and social change. The same
delirious causality, developed during the Christian Middle Ages, appears
to haunt the modem anti-semitic discourse. The principle of evil is not in
ourselves.
It
comes from the outside, from the insidious "other," it is the
product of conspiracy and of devilish forces whose incarnation is the
mythical Jew.
A century ago, it might have been Edouard Drumont's cryptic
formula, "All comes from the Jew, all returns to the Jew," Wilhelm
Marr's prophecy of
Finis Germaniae
or Houston Chamberlain's vision of
Teutons and Jews locked in a relentless battle of Destiny. Fifty years ago
it was Hitler's either-or polarization of the struggle for world hegemony
between "Aryans" and "Semites"; followed in 1952 by the dying Stalin's
vision of "rootless cosmopolitans" and Jewish "poisoners" in the service
of Wall Street capitalism and Western intelligence services (the Doctor's
Plot); then came the post-Stalin imagery of the "world Zionist
corporation" with its octopus-like tentacles reaching out to subvert the
"socialist camp" and forestall Third World national liberation
movements; more recently we have seen the efforts of Arab dictators or
Islamic theocrats (Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Khomeini, etc.) to unite the
Muslim masses against the deadly threat of a Zionist-Imperialist "cancer,"
said to be threatening to extirpate their existence.
In
all
these cases we find across the cultural and political divides an
astonishingly similar conspiracy theory of history, society and politics, in–
tegrated into a closed system of belief and salvationist politics whose es-
