Warrant for Genocide

The book is about the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And how these forgeries are being used against the Jews all over the world, from the Medieval Ages down to the twentieth century.

Here is the conclusion of the book that i would like to share to you all. 

“A Case-study in Collective Psychopathology”

It is often said that wherever Jews have settled since the Dispersion, antisemitism has appeared in the local population. This belief is mistaken. It is true that traditionally the Jewish religion has encouraged a certain separateness and exclusiveness, notably by making it impossible for a strict Jew to marry a non-Jew and difficult for him even to eat together with non-Jews. Yet these circumstances have never in themselves prevented Jews from taking part in the life of wider society, or from having cordial relations with non-Jews. For some two thousand years Jewish settlements existed in India and China without attracting any particular attention; to this day the Jewish artisans and peasants of India are regarded simply as one of the innumerable religious communities of the subcontinent, with nothing in the least odd about them. But there is no need to labour the point. There are after all many minorities in the world which show trait of separateness in one way or another, and they are not always seen as enemies.

Even in those parts of the world where antisemitism is endemic it can have very diffirent meanings. There is a kind of antisemitism which is fairly closely related to the role played by Jews, or at least by some Jews, in the society in question. For instance, it has happened again ang again the Jews, because of thier peculiar history, have been pioneers in trade and money-lending in predominantly agricultural societies, while at the same time living more or less segregated from the population around them. In such cases they have attracted the same kind of hostility as, say, Indian traders in southeastern Africa or Chinese traders in Java. Again, the centuries in the ghetto inevitably fostered attitudes of inferiority and of compensatory superiority in many Jews, which did not automatically disappear the moment the ghetto walls fell; and this too helped to feed antisemitism. But in all this there is nothing that is not parallelled in many other forms of social antagonism the world over. And certainly, thought these factors might have led to occasional outbreaks of violence, they would never by themselves have led to attempts at genocide. The antisemitism that leads to such results is of diffirent and very special kind.

Exterminatory antisemitism appears where Jews are imagined as a collective embodiment of evil, a conspiratorial body dedicated to the task of ruining and then dominating the rest of mankind. This kind of antisemitism can exist almost regardless of the real situation of Jews in society. It can prosper where Jews form a large, cohesive and clearly recognizable minority, but also where the only Jews are a few scattered individuals who hardly regard themselves as Jews at all. And if it thrives on the spectacle of rich and influential Jews, it does not necessarily wilt where all Jews are poor. Most striking of all, it can be found among people who have never set eyes on a Jew and in countries where there have been no Jews for centuries.

This kind of antisemitism is a matter of fantasy, and what it fantasies is the opposite of reality. In reality Jews are just as diverse as one would expect from thier extraordinarily varied history. Even before the creation of the State of Israel introduced new complexities there was little enough to link, say, an assimilated, free-thinking Frenchman of Jewish descent with a rigorously orthodox rabbi in eastern Europe, or an artisan in Salonika with a doctor in Berlin, or any of these with the second or third generation of Jewsish immigrants in the United States. No doubt a certain awareness of common origins and a common cultural heritage, an awareness also of repeated persecurions and migrations, colours the outlook of most Jews; but this is vastly diffirent from the unity and uniformity which antisemites imagine. Again, since the Dispersion there has been no cetral Jewish authority of any kind. Though individual rabbis have at times attained great moral prestige, there has been nothing in the least like a government- not even ecclesiastical government- with authority over all Jews; even the chief rabbinate in the various countries is a modern invention which originated simply as an administrative convenience. Above all, the Jews of the world have never possessed, as a collectivity, any considerable power. In some countries and at some times individual Jews might achieve positions of influence, and individual Jewish communities might be able to defend thier interests when these were threatened; it could even happen that properous and fortunate communities were able to assist persecuted Jews in other lands. The fact remains that Jews have not been able either to protect themselves or thier fellows from wholesale massacre or to induce any great power to do so.

After the Second World War the Higher SS and Police Leader in Central Russia, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, made the following statement:

  ”I am the only living witness but I must say the truth. Contrary to the opinion of the National-Socialists that the Jews were a highly organized group, the appalling fact was that they had no organization whatsoever…It gives the lie to the old slogan that the Jews are conspiring to dominate the world and that they are so highly organized…If they had some sort of organization, these people could have been saved by the millions; but instead they were taken completely by surprise.”

The lack of congruence between the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the realities of the Jewish situation has never been better expressed.

The myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy, then, has very little to do with real people and real situations and real conflicts in the modern world; and this seems natural enoughwhen one considers how it originated. The fantasy of Jews as a brotherhood of evil was first conceived between the second and fourth centuries, as a device of immunizing Christians agaisnt the attractions of the parent religion; and seven or eight centuries later, in Western Europe, it developed into a coherent and terrifying demonology. From the twelfth century onward Jews were seen as a conspiracy of sorcerers working on orders from Satan for the spiritual and physical ruination of Christendom. This was the period when Jews began to be massacred on charges of killing Christian children, of torturing the consecrated wafer, of poisoning wells. And in the same period the mystery-plays taught people that Antichrist would be a Jew and would have the Jews as his most devoted followers.

Myths do not necessarily disappear with the circumstances that first produced them. They sometimes acquire an autonomy, a vitality of their own, that carries them across the continents and down the centuries. This was very much the case with the demonological view of Jewry and Judaism. In many parts of eastern and central Europe it was still widely believed right into the twentieth century that the blood of Christian children was used for making the unleavened Passover bread. Within the last twenty or thirty years it has happened to Jewish tourists in the remoter parts of Spain to be told that you could not possibly be Jews, as they had no horns.

Such fact are no mere curiosities, for the modern myth of the Jewish world- conspiracy grew straight out of these ageold superstitions. This is so true that certain individuals have dealt in both the medieval and modern versions of the myth: the first editor of the Protocols, the pogromshchik Krushevan, also disseminated charges of ritual murder, and so did Streicher and von Leers; while Himmler himself, when once he heard the tales of ritual murder, found them immediately convincing. Even that profoundly medieval fantasy, the legend of Antichrist as the Messiah of the Jews, persisted into modern times. Des Mousseaux was obsessed by the idea; while the first influential edition of the Protocols formed part of Nilus’s prophecy of Antichrist, and in the Protocols themselves the future king of the Jews has all the traditional traits of Antichrist. And what after all are the Elders of Zion but sorcerers in the service of Satan-quite openly in Goedsche’s novel, where the devil appears in person among the assembled rabbis, and still recognizably in the current editions of the Protocols?

But not even the Nazis could have constructed an effective ideology solely from archaic superstitions, from eschatological prophecies and tales of black magic. It is characteristic of antisemitic forgeries and fabrications of the type of the Protocols that they combine the medieval with the modern. While the basic assumptions and attitudes are those of an ancient demonology, the supposed conspiracy is a thoroughly modern affair. For one thing, it operates on a bigger scale; whereas ritual murder was imagined as happening from time to time, now here, now there, the Elders of Zion are imagined as an international government whose machinations constantly affect the whole world. And again, the means by which the Elders pursue their goal belong entirely to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead of muttering spells these sorcerers place articles in the press, instead of poisoning wells they plunge whole countries into slumps and wars and revolutions.

In all this the Protocols faithfully reflect the complex structure of latter-day antisemitism at its most virulent. For in the eyes of fanatical antisemites the Jew, while retaining all the mysterious, uncanny, supernatural attitudes that were wished upon him in the Middle Ages, is also the symbol of modernity, or rather of everything that is felt frightening in the modern world. The modern age brought the emancipation of the Jews, firts in France at the time of the French Revolution and then in one country after another during the nineteenth century. Everywhere Jews quickly became prominent in those fields for which they had been fitted by their previous history: banking, certain branches of commerce, journalism. And at the same time Jews became prominent in liberal, radical, and revolutionary movements- as was only to be expected in view of their own experience of oppression and their often very incomplete emancipation. There was nothing mysterious in any of this- but it did mean that those who for whatever reason suffered helplessly from the modern world, and could not adjusts themselves so as to benefit from it, could easily see in the Jew the embodiment of the civilazation they detested.

Evwn  here, of course, the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy remained grotesquely remote from reality. It is true that Jews benefited from the French Revolution, but totally untrue that they caused it. It is true that some Jews became prominent bankers, but utterly false that banking was invented by Jews as a means to securing world-domination. And while many Jews became important figures in journalism and in politics, the views they expressed and the interests they supported range over almost the entire political scpetrum.

There is in fact a great irony in the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy - which is, that it reached its most coherent and deadly formulation at the very time when Jews were in reality more divided than ever before - between orthodox and reformed, practising and indifferent, believing and agnostic, assimilationist and Zionist, not to mention the many who utterly rejected their Jewish origin. But all this had not the slightest effect on the myth or on those who propagated it; for they were in any case convinced that though the powers of darkness might put on many forms and wear many disguises, in their ultimate purposes they were at one.

In one form or another the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy has survived for many centuries and has spread across the world from continent to continent. And it has always shown the same astonishing capacity both to turn certain individuals into blind fanatics, beyond the reach of rational argument and impervious to evidence, and to disturb and confuse in varying degress large numbers of otherwise quite sensible people. This surely suggests that it answers to deep and enduring unconscious needs. I know that in advancing such a hypothesis one invites scepticism, and there is no denying that many attempts to apply the findings of dynamic psychology to social phenomena have been misguided. But one is dealing here with very bizarre phenomena indeed; and I do not think that one can account for these particular fantasies, nor for the fact that they are always attached to this particular group, unless one takes unconscious mechanisms into account.

Reflecting on these matters some ten years ago, I advanced the hypothesis that these notions about Jews are above all a matter of unconscious negative projections, i.e. of the mental mechanism by which human beings read into the behaviour of others the anarchic tendencies  which they fear to recognize in themselves. More specifically, i argued that in this form of antisemitism the Jews,as a collectivity, are unconsciously seen as both the ‘bad’ son, i.e. the rebellious son full of murderous wishes towards the father, and the ‘bad’ father, i.e. the potential torturer, castrator, and killer of the son. Later I discovered that several professional psychoanalysts had preceded me with precisely the same hypothesis; and the present study has convinced me that it is indeed a fruitful one.

Half of the hypothesis is familiar enough. Following Sigmund Freud himself, various psychoanalysts have argued that the Jews, because they reject the Christian God, are unconsciously seen by some Christians as ‘bad’, rebellious sons - indeed as parricides. This means that, traditionally, it has been easy and tempting for a Christian to make the Jew a scapegoat for any unconscious resentment he may have against his father, or for that matter against his God. But this is only one aspect of the matter, and not, it seems to me,  the most important.

Unconsciously ‘the Jew’is even more closely identifiedwith the ‘bad’ father than he is with the ‘bad’ son. This is understandable enough,for the historical relationship of the Jewish people to Christianity and to Europe makes it almost inevitable that it should be seen as a kind of collective father-figure. As an identifiable people the Jews are of course very much older than most of the European people, but that is not all: the Jewish religion is tha parent religion out of which, and in rivalry with which, Christianity developed. Most important of all, perhaps is the fact that while the God of Christianity combines the attribute of father and son, the God of the Jew is father only - and, one may add, in the eyes of  Christians who learn of Him only from the Old Testament and know nothing of the later development of Judaism, a singularly tyrannical and merciless father at that.

The Jews in Christendom, then, were ideally situated to recieve the Oedipal projections associated with the ‘bad’ father. This was a terrible fate, for the fantasied ‘bad’ father is infinitely more hateful than any real father could ever be. This is inevitable, in view of the psychic processes by which this figure is produced. When a small boy both loves and hates his father with such intensity that the conflict becomes intorelable, he split the father-image into a ‘good’ father and a ‘bad’ father. This enables him, by idealizing his real father or some father-surrogate, to acquire a father whom he can love unreservedly. Unfortunately the same process also produces a father-image which is utterly hateful - and this too can be projected on to any suitable father-surrogate that offers. To realize just what this implies one has to remember what infantile haterd is like - that where a small child hates, it wishes to kill, smash, utterly destroy the hated object. At the same time it feels intensely guilty. This feeling of guilt is quickly repressed into the unconscious, but it finds an outlet nevertheless. The hated object itself turns into a monster demanding retribution, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The figure of the ‘bad’ father becomes a persecutor, endowed with all the merciless hatred and destructive fury which the child feels, but dare not fully recognize, in himself.

So it comes about that the small boy constructs out of his own destructive impulses and his own sense of guilt a father-figure of quite monstrous cruelty and murderousness - a castrating, torturing, cannibalistic, all-powerful being beside whom even the harshest of real parents would appear harmless. The trouble is that the many men who never cease to be small boys in their emotional lives continue to see these monsters around them, incarnated in other human beings. It was the tragedy of the Jews that from the later Middle Ages onwards they tended to be seen in just such a way. In popular art they commonly appeared as extremely old men who are also devils - creatures with enormous growths of hair and beard, but also with horns and tails and with expressions of horrible cruelty.

Viewed in these terms the worst of the traditional antisemitic accusations take on a new and still more disturbing meaning. One has only to look at any medieval picture illustrating a ritual murder story ( for instance, that reproduce as plate 19) to recognize the unconscious content of the fantasy. A small boy - it is, significantly, always a boy, never a girl - is surrounded by a group of elderly men with long beards, who are torturing and castrating him and drawing off and collecting his blood. The same unconscious content is clearly recognizable in the other constantly recurring accusation, which was of torturing the consecrated wafer. This of course was effective only where and when Christ was believed to be physically present in the host, that is to say in Roman Catholic countries; but there it was very effective indeed - in Poland it provoked massacres as late as the eighteenth century. Here too the illustrations show bearded Jews attacking the wafer with nails and pincers - and, as though to uncover the true meaning of these stories, we are sometimes told not only that the host gushed blood but that, at the height of the torture Christ appeared in the wafer as a small child, bleeding and weeping.

All this helps to throw a new light on the oldest and deadliest charge of all, the charge of deicide, which was still a subject of such passionate debate at the Vatican Council in 1965. In Freud’s eyes the idea of deicide had only one unconscious meaning, and that was parricide; but that is not its only possible meaning. For Christians the crucified Christ has the significance much more of a son than of a father. If, therefore, as is constantly asserted in Christian teaching, the Jews are collectively guilty of the death of Christ, they are not so much parricides as slayers of a son, the suppressors of a new generation, those who destroy fresh life and thwart its promise. And nobody has ever watched a passion-play can doubt for a moment that that is how medieval people really did interpret the Jewish part in the cricifixion.

If one now turns from the medieval to the modern world one makes an astonishing discovery: the Jews has retained his symbolic value as simultaneously the ‘bad’ son and the ‘bad’ father. Again the first half of the hypothesis may seem more familiar than the second. Helped by the circumstance that numerous Jews have become prominent in the modern world as innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries, traditionalists have often seen all Jews as a sort of collective ‘bad’ son, a denier and destroyer of order and authority. But again it is the second part of the hypothesis that is the more important. Modern civilization is commonly experienced, by those who suffer under it, as incomprehensible, uncontrollable, omnipotent; and in so far as Jews were thought to be the creators of that civilization and that masters of its myaterious powers, this tended to perpetuate and reinforce their symbolic significance as ‘bad’ parents. And indeed it is obvious enough that the Elders of Zion are father-figures. Their very name shows it; and what they do to nations is strictly comparable with what the ‘bad’ father is imagined as doing to the son. They draw off the life’s blood of the nations and divert it to their own sinister purposes, they drive the peoples to torment and death in wars, they deprive millions of food. Above all they have the monopoly of power. Mysterious, inscrutable, they manipulate and torment human beings who in their hands are as helpless and ignorant as children.

Now it is quite certain that this image of the Jew profoundly influenced Hitler himself. An American psychoanalyst has pointed out how mistaken it is to see Hitler as a father-figure: ‘Hitler is the adolescent who never even aspired to become a father in any connotation, nor, for that matter, a Kaiser, a president… He is the Fuhrer: the glorified older brother, who replaces the father…He is… a gang leader who keeps the boys together by demanding their admiration, by creating terror, and by shrewdly involving them in crimes from which there is no way back.’ The worst of these crimes were performed against the father, incarnated in the Jew. Another psychoanalyst, delving into Hitler’s youth and family background, has found strong grounds for thinking that he unconsciously identified his own father with a particular Jewish doctor and so with Jews as a collectivity. If this is true, one may be sure that the process was greatly facilitated by the age-old unconscious identification of ‘the Jew’ with the ‘bad’ father.

It was often noted that the Jews whom the German troops in eastern Europe treated with the greatest cruelty were the orthodox Jewish men with their long beards. The photographs of youngsters mocking, humiliating, and killing these men of truly patriarchal appearance provide a counterpart to the old woodcuts of ritual murder - but with this difference, that whereas the ritual murders were the merest fictions, the vengeance exacted was real murder, indefinitely repeated.

Yet that is not the whole story. The deepest fear of all is that Jews are, collectively, poisoners or even themselves a sort of poison. This fantasy took shape at the same time as the fantasy of ritual murder; the first occasions when the disappearance of young boys was attributed to Jewish bloodlust were in 1144 and 1168, and the first time when Jews - 86 of them were burnt for plotting to poison the Christian population was in 1161. By the fourteenth century such accusations were commonplace. In France in 1321 it was reported that the Jews were employing lepers to poison all the wells in Christendom. At the time of the Black Death in 1349 it was widely believed that the Jews had caused the plague by poisoning the wells with a mixture of Christian flesh, hearts and blood (obtained by ritual murder), and of spiders, frogs, and lizards. On that occasion some 300 Jewish communities in Germany, France, and Spain were exterminated; and similar accusations were made, with similar results, at innumerable local plagues down to the mid-sixteenth century. Not that the charges were limited to such emergencies - Martin Luther was expressing the general view when he wrote: ‘If [ the Jews ] could kill us all, they would gladly do so, aye, and often do it, especially those who profess to be physicians. They know all that is known about medecine in Germany; they can give poison to a man of which he will die in an hour, or in ten or twenty years; they thoroughly understand this art.’ As late as 1610 the medical faculty of the University of Vienna solemnly announced that Jewish physicians were obliged by their laws to poison every tenth Christian patient. 

In the modern version of the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy these accusations reappear in a pseudo-scientific form. The Protocols themselves talk not only of using drink and loose woman to undermine the physique  of the Gentiles but of actually inoculating the Gentiles with diseases; and in much Protocols-type literature, particularly in the United States, schemes for mass inoculation are interpreted as a Jewish plot to inject the population with syphilis. But here again it was Hitler who found the most effective and murderous formulation for an age-old obsession. By the peculiar interpretation which he gave to German racist theories he made sexual intercourse with a Jew appear as something which literally poisoned the blood. In Nazi propaganda the idea was carried to the point where the Jews were habitually called ‘the world-poisoners’ and were even themselves equated with bacteria.

Just as much as ritual murder, fantasies of this kind are rooted in the unconscious. Every psychoanalyst has had patients who are haunted by the illusion that they have taken in something bad, which is destroying them from within, or who live in perpetual dread of improbable infections; not to mention the true paranoiacs who are convinced that they are being poisoned by particular individuals. These are deep waters indeed, and this is not the place to speculate about etiologies on which specialists are by no means agreed. This much, however, can be safely said: that to imagine that the Jews have poisoned the water-supply or are corrupting people’s blood is to ascribe to them truly uncanny powers. And it is likely that when antisemites kill not simply Jewish men but also Jewish women and children, when they see the extermination of all Jews as an indispensable cleansing or disinfection of the earth, they are moved by terrors stemming from the earliest stages of infancy.

There can be many kinds of unconscious negative projections, and it is a matter not merely of scientific interest but also of practical importance to appreciate just what projections have traditionally been attached to the Jews. It is often assumed that all ethnic prejudice is very much of a kind - that, for instance, hatred of Negroes must have must have precisely the same emotional roots as hatred of Jews; yet the assumption is certainly mistaken. It is of course true that the fanatical Negro-hater, say in the American south, is moved by unconscious as well as by conscious anxieties and that his view of Negroes is gravely distorted by projections. It is also true that much of the cruelty to which Negroes have been subjected has been dictated by these projections. Yet however whites may see Negroes, they can hardly see them as hidden, manipulating ‘elders’. The fantasy of an infinitely powerful, world-dominating conspiracy does not in fact get projected on to Negroes, and that may well be why not even the most fanatical Negro-haters dream of genocide. It is a different matter with the Jews. In the most dangerous form of antisemitism Jews are seen above all as ‘bad’ parents, and this makes them so overwhelmingly powerful that the only way to cope with them is to destroy them utterly. That, it is suggested, is why from the twelfth to the twentieth century the truly fanatical antisemites - the kind who deal in tales of ritual murder and in the Protocols -  have so frequently fomented vast massacres. For the ultimate ideal of such people is not a world where they can lord it over Jews, as the white supremacist likes to lord it over Negroes, but of a world where there are no Jews left at all.

The historical importance of the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy lies in the fact that it has served as a warrant for many massacres, culminating in attempted genocide in the middle of the present century. Again and again over a period of some eight centuries, and over a wide range of countries, it has enabled organized groups to kill Jews. And it has done this in two ways, which seemed to have remained pretty constant down the ages: by providing the organized groups with an ideology, and by bewildering the rest of the population.

Whether one considers the Black Hundreds of tsarist Russia, or those sections of the SS and SD which were directly concerned in the ‘final solution’, one finds very much the same combination of types; and so far as one can tell from the records, the same combination existed already in those earlier groups of Jew-killers which operated between the first crusade and the sixteenth century. It cannot be said that these groups consisted wholly of genuine fanatics. On the contrary, they contained plenty of purely destructive types, who wanted nothing but a chance to torture and murder, and also plenty of looters, whose main interest was in the property of the killed. To these one must add, for the modern period, the oppotunists at all levels, from whom the organizing and carrying through of massacres was simply a means to a better income, more security, and more prestige than they could otherwise have hoped for. Yet it seems certain that however narrow, materialistic, or downright criminal their own motives may be, such men cannot operate without an ideology behind them. At least when operating collectively, they need an ideology to legitimate their behaviour, for without it they would have to see themselves and one another as what they really are - common thieves and murderers. And that apparently is something which even they cannot bear.

The ideology which has proved most suitable for the purpose is the myth of the  Jewish world-conspiracy, whether in the traditional form which centres on tales of ritual murder and well-poisoning or in the modern form which centres on the Protocols. And this is where the true fanatics have their place - as bearers and elaborators of that fantastic view lof the world on which the whole murderous enterprise depends for its justification. Thanks to various empirical investigations carried out by psychologists and psychoanalysts, notably in the United States, a great deal is know about the typical personality-structure of such people. What emerges when fanatical antisemites are subjected to psychological tests is a quite abnormal degree of fear and hatred of parental figures, who are seen now as menacing and now as mutilated and killed. This means that the unconscious fantasies of such people correspond with the unconscious content of the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy. Fanatical antisemites are in fact people whose own deepest emotional needs compel them to see life as a struggle against just such a conspiracy as is portrayed in the Protocols. For them belief springs from an inner necessity; and this gives them an air of absolute conviction, which in turn gives the criminals and opportunists the reassurance and encouragement they need.

A group formed out of these elements is, sociologically speaking, a very special kind of group indeed. Reflecting in 1946 on the extreme forms of Nazi antisemitism, the psychoanalyst Ernst Simmel remarked that the process of group-formation itself, when occuring under pathological conditions, can bring about a mass delusion, in fact a mass psychosis. And he added: ‘This clinical syndrome: unrestricted aggressive destructiveness under the spell of a delusion, in complete denial of reality, is well know to us as a psychosis; it is a paranoiac form of schizophrenia. The parallel is a suggestive one. For though the individulas who make up a group of Jew-killers are well within the bounds of reality, and most of them are not even fanatics, and even the fanatics are far from mad - yet it is perfectly true that the group as a whole behaves like a paranoiac in the grip of his delusion.

There is another peculiarity of such groups that reminds one of paranoiac schizophrenics: their megalomaniac sense of mission. When it comes to describing their own role, not only the medieval Jew-killers but also the Black Hundreds and the Nazi leaders apocalyptic imagery taken straight from the Book of Revelation. All alike see themselves as the angelic hosts overthrowing the powers of darkness, or a collective St Michael killing the dragon, even as a collective Christ overthrowing Antichrist. No army engaged in a real war agaisnt a real enemy has ever indulged in such self-exaltation as Jew-killers engaged in their one-sided struggle against an imaginary conspiracy. To hear them on the subject of themselves, one would think that killing unarmed and helpless people, including small children and old women, was a very brave and risky undertaking. It is a phenomenon which only begins to make sense when one recalls that a paranoiac murderer too can feel terrified of his harmless victims. For what these people see as the enemy is in fact the destructiveness and cruelty in their own psyches, externalized. And the greater the unconscious sense of guilt, the more fearsome the imaginary enemy.

For the sense of guilt is there, and unremittingly at work. Originally engendered by the murderous impulses felt by the small child towards its parents, it is enormously intensified by the real violence which the adult deploys against his victims. Yet it is not experienced as a sense of guilt, for it is completely denied and repressed into the unconscious. Instead it is experience as a sense of danger, of threat, a blind terror lest the wronged ones, the parents killed in fantasy and the parent-surrogates killed in reality, arise and exact retribution. This alone can explain the extraordinary paradox about the Nazi massacres - that as the Jews became more and more helpless, as they were killed in ever vaster numbers, so they were felt to be more and more powerful, malignant, and dangerous. It also accounts for the fact that a man like Goebbels, for whom antisemitism was at first little more than a technique of vote-catching, ended his days raving about the omnipotent Jewish rulers of the world. It was his own guilt-ridden unconscious that made of the imaginary Elders of Zion a power more terrible than the Nazi regime itself.

It is when it has been adopted by groups of professional, organized Jew-killers that the myth of Jewish world conspiracy has revealed its true potentialities. For all the indications are that however widespread and intense antisemitism may be, it does not result in killing unless and until such groups begin to operate. Pogroms as apontaneous outbreaks of popular fury seem to be a myth, and there is in fact no established case where the inhabitants of a town or village have simply fallen upon their Jewsih neighbours and slaughtered them. This was true even in the Middle Ages - the great massacres which accompanied the people’s crusade and the Black Death were all led by organized bands coming from outside. In modern times popular initiative has been still less in evidence, for the organized group themselves have been effective only when they were carrying out the policy and enjoying the sponsorship of some kind of government - whether in tsarist Russia and under the White regime during the Russian civil war or in the Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. Would-be pogromshchiki who lacked this kind of support and were resolutely opposed by the authorities- as in the United States- never manage to organize large-scale violence and soon lapsed, or were thrust, into obscurity.

Yet the myth of the Jewish worl-conspiracy can have its effect on the mass of the population too, and this in turn has a bearing, even if an indirect one, on the fate of the Jews. Centuries of propaganda about sorcery and ritual murder and the secret Jewish government produced a general atmosphere of superstitious dread which was largely unconnected with specific economic conflicts. A certain suspicions that Jews constitute a united collecitivity, devoted to sinister aims and endowed with mysterious powers, was still extremely widespread in the first half of the present century. No doubt fanatical believers in the conspiracy, the true adepts of the Protocols, were always a relatively small minority; but they were still numerous enough to make themselves heard, and there were vast numbers of half-and quater-believers to pick up scraps of what they had to say. There is nothing strange about this, for only exceptionally mature personalities are wholly immune to the infantile fears and hatreds to which such a myth appeals. Particulary in periods of exceptional strain, anxiety, and disorientation, multitudes of people yielded to the temptation to blame all their troubles on the machinations of those uncanny beings - reacting to social and economic crises, for instance, very much as their ancestors had reacted to the plague.

What this meant in practice, whether in tsarist Russia or in Germany after the First World War or to some extent throughout the world in the fateful years 1933-45, was that people were unwilling to bestir themaelves on behalf of the  Jews. The very widespread indifference, the ease with which people dissociated themselves themselves from the Jews and their fate, was certainly in part a result of a vague feeling that, even if there were no Elders of Zion, Jews were somehow uncanny and dangerous. And ironically enough this feeling grew stronger as the persecution of the Jews grew worse. The explanation is plain, if depressing: when people know even with half their minds that a great injustice is being done, and lack the generosity and courage to protest, they automatically throw the blame on to the victims as the simplest way of easing their own consciences. Just as the organized killers needed the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy if they were not to recognize themselves as common thieves and murderers, so very many ordinary people needed some smattering of it if they were not to see themselves as passive accomplices in the persecution and massacre of innocent people.

The story of the Protocols is the story of how in twentieth century Europe a grossly delusional view of the world, based on infantile fears and hatreds, was able to find expression in murder and torture beyond all imagining. It is a case-history in collective psychopathology, and its deepest implications reach far beyond antisemitism and the fate of the Jews. Is it utopian to suggest that the more fully and widely these implications are faced, the better the chance of recognizing and limiting, perhaps even of forestalling, similar aberrations in the future?

7 comments December 2, 2008