All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Aug. 16, 2011 - Skeptoid
17:24
Skeptoid #271: The Zionist Conspiracy

There is no plausible reason to think a conspiracy of Jews plans to take over the world's banks and governments. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Assessing Our Good Intentions 00:01:56
Once in a while, we need to step back and assess who we are as people and as a society.
I tend to think we're overwhelmingly good.
Very few people consciously consider themselves to be the bad guys.
But of course, good intent doesn't always lead to what other people would consider good behavior.
Today we're going to study one particularly dramatic manifestation of this.
The fundamentally anti-Semitic Zionist conspiracy theory.
That's up next on Skeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief.
And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way.
And now we're even offering a little bit more.
If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid.
The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content.
These episodes are a few minutes longer.
We get rid of the ads and we'll replace them with more Skeptoid.
The Extended Premium Show available now.
Come to skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The Zionist Conspiracy.
Today we're going to point the skeptical eye at conspiracy theories that claim Jews are trying to take over the world.
There's not just one version of this, there are many, and in their various forms they've been around for centuries.
The Zionist Conspiracy Myth 00:13:24
There's hardly been a moment in the past 2,500 years when some group somewhere has not been fomenting mistrust and suspicion of Jews and their motives.
The Jews want to take over your government.
The Jews want to take control of your banks.
The Jews want to abolish your church.
The accuracy of these claims is one thing.
The history behind them is another.
Although the word Zion means many things to many cultures, it's usually a place of peace and unity and cross-cultural brotherhood.
However, it's most often associated with the Jewish people in particular.
In that lexicon, the word Zion typically refers to the promised land, the homeland promised by God to the Jews, according to Judeo-Christian canon.
Zion can also refer more specifically to the city of Jerusalem or the location of Solomon's Temple, and sometimes to the biblical land of Israel.
Historically, a Zionist was any person who fought for the establishment of a Jewish nation in Zion.
This was finally fulfilled over the course of many bloody months from 1947 to 1949, as various nations fought over the partitioning of Jerusalem and the surrounding region.
The nation of Israel has held a tenuous foothold ever since, and it remains the political and spiritual homeland of all Jewish people all over the world.
Since its establishment, the mission of Zionists has been to defend and strengthen Israel and to oppose challenges to its sovereignty.
In short, Zionism is Zionist nationalism.
Some critics of Zionism frequently broaden the application of the word Zionist to include any people anywhere who express support for Israel.
Suffice it to say that anti-Semitism is not your everyday bigotry.
Its roots run deep.
It is cross-cultural, and it's been institutionalized as an official national policy by some of the world's greatest superpowers.
Nazi Germany is only the most obvious example of anti-Semitism as policy, but it's hardly the only one.
500 years before Christ, in the time of ancient Persia, Xerxes ordered all Jews in his kingdom to be killed.
Various Roman emperors and Greek kings ordered the Jews to be exterminated.
While the Christians prosecuted their crusades against Muslims and Jews, the Muslims were forcing Christians and Jews to either convert or be killed.
In the 1300s, Jews were widely burned at the stake throughout Europe for causing the plague.
In the 1400s, the Spanish Inquisition burned some 30,000 Jews for refusing to leave their country.
But this list could go on and on, ad nauseum.
Jews have always been blamed for something, and were always at the receiving end of the genocide.
There are scant examples in history of Jews doing the same to anyone else.
And yet claims of Zionist conspiracy have always persisted, lack of evidence notwithstanding.
The most significant evidence of the existence of the Zionist conspiracy to rule the world appeared in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1903.
Znymia was a small short-lived newspaper published by an extreme nationalist faction called the Black Hundreds, for whom anti-Semitism was a core value.
Znymia serialized 24 articles over nine issues of the paper titled, The Protocols of the Sessions of the World Alliance of Freemasons and the Sages of Zion.
They were, apparently, the recorded minutes of that group's meeting, which took place sometime in the late 1800s.
The headline was, A Program for World Conquest by the Jews, Minutes of a Meeting of the Elders of Zion.
Its articles covered such topics as economic war, methods of conquest, acquisition of land, a transitional government, propaganda, destruction of religion, organizing disorder, and the control of stock markets.
Russian ultra-nationalist Pavel Khrushchevon, the publisher of Znymia and openly anti-Semitic, refused to give his source for the articles, other than to say they were received by him in French and were translated.
The Protocols of Zion, as they were commonly called, were widely translated and reprinted.
They appeared in numerous Russian publications for the next 14 years, and then arose in the West.
Britain, the United States, and Germany began publishing them around 1920, and they've been available in print somewhere ever since.
Today they're still published throughout the Middle East, in Venezuela, in Malaysia, in Indonesia, most often in Muslim countries.
The first Western publication is believed to have been in the Times of London on May 8, 1920, under the headline, The Jewish Peril.
While some readers were shocked at what they believed the Jews were up to, others were more skeptical, and one of the Times correspondents finally uncovered a shocker.
A year after the publication, in August of 1921, the Times published a follow-up called The End of Protocols, in which it was revealed that much of the Protocols of Zion was a nearly exact copy of an 1864 book by Maurice Jolie called The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.
Jolie, a conservative French lawyer, wrote it as a satirical account of how Napoleon III was planning to take over the world.
Large sections of it were plagiarized word for word in the original French, literally replacing the word French with the world and replacing Napoleon III with Jews.
As Jolie's book was, and still is, available for anyone to examine, this revelation established conclusively that the protocols of Zion were a hoax.
But who was the hoaxer?
Pavel Khrushyevan himself, perhaps?
Many authors advanced theories over the ensuing 70 years, but it wasn't until 1992 and the collapse of communism that certain Soviet archives were unsealed and made available.
Russian researcher Mikhail Lipashinya spent five years going through the records, and the story he unearthed was worthy of a modern spy tale.
In a world that can feel overwhelming, spreading thoughtful, evidence-based content is one of the best ways to make a positive impact.
Ask your local public radio station to air the Skeptoid Files, a 30-minute radio-friendly version of Skeptoid that pairs two related episodes promoting real science, true history, and critical thinking.
And in these challenging times for public media, we're offering these broadcasts for free to radio stations, available on the PRX Exchange or directly from Skeptoid Media.
It's an easy ask.
Just send a quick message to your station's programming director.
By helping to bring the Skeptoid files to the airwaves, you'll help promote the essential skills we all need to tell fact from fiction.
Just go to your local station's website, find the programming director's email address, or just their general email address.
You can even use the telephone.
I know that might sound crazy.
It's an old legacy device that allows real-time voice communication.
I know that's weird, but hey, it's an option.
The world can feel chaotic, but you're not powerless.
When you promote critical thinking, you can help your community tell fact from fiction.
And that's how we shape a better future.
In uncertain times, spreading good ideas can make you feel helpful, not helpless.
Let's stand up for reason, truth, and understanding together.
Get them to air the Skeptoid files from Skeptoid Media, available on the PRX Exchange, and they'll know what that is.
In the opening years of the 1900s, the imperialist Russian government correctly saw impending revolution as a very real possibility.
The primary job of the Akhrana, the Russian secret police, was to stave this off as best they could.
And in a war of ideologies, propaganda is usually the best weapon.
Anti-Semitism was endemic in the imperial government.
Indeed, discrimination against Jews was a national policy.
And blaming the empire's problems on the Jews was a familiar tactic of the regime.
Pietr Rochkovsky was the head of the Akhrana based in Paris, where he could keep an eye on the many revolutionaries who had sought safety in France.
Around 1900, while researching propaganda campaigns, he came across the dialogue in hell between Machiavella and Montesquieu.
Documents unearthed by Lipashinya show that Rachkovsky's office hired the author and political activist Matvy Golovinsky to write something up showing that the Jews were behind everything the revolutionaries opposed.
Golovinsky wrote the Protocols of Zion using the text provided by Rochkovsky as a guide, and then it was delivered back to Russia by their agent Yuliana Glimkia.
She delivered it into the eager hands of publisher Pavel Khrushchevan, and the rest is history.
Mikhail Lipashinya's findings were written up in the French magazine Les Figaro in August of 1999, and again to much greater attention in L'Express a few months later.
In what seems like an almost pitiful last gasp of a dying regime, as the revolution progressed, the imperialists began calling the Bolshevik revolutionaries themselves Jews.
The term Judeo-Bolshevism was invented to associate Jews with communism and later became one of Adolf Hitler's pet phrases.
The ironic footnote to all of this is that Golovinsky, author of the most infamous anti-Semitic document in modern history, changed allegiances after the 1917 revolution and became a Bolshevik himself.
With the Protocols of Zion having been so thoroughly proven to be a hoax as early as 1921, its continued publication and endorsement by such world leaders as Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suggests that belief in the Zionist conspiracy is driven by something other than true history or evidence.
Many scholars have identified three basic types of antisemitism.
One, ancient antisemitism, which despised Jews because they were poor and considered inferior.
Their culture had a late start and few friends, and they never got a strong foothold.
Two, modern antisemitism, on the other hand, is largely based on suspicion of the Jews trying to control the world economy.
Since the establishment of Israel, suddenly Jews have been considered to be in a position of strength from which they can wield international power.
And three, Christian antisemitism, which has its roots in Jewish deicide.
This is the belief that all Jews everywhere are responsible for the execution of Jesus Christ.
This underlying theme has been the primary driver of European antisemitism for 2,000 years.
Why were the Jews always on the receiving end of Holocaust, crusades, inquisitions, and imperial edicts?
Why are there no stories of Jews riding forth and exterminating their enemies?
The Christians and the Muslims fought each other, and both fought the Jews.
We don't seem to have ever seen the Jews fighting back.
The simple answer is that throughout most of history, there has never been a Jewish homeland.
There were no Jewish kings to send armies against the Christians and the Muslims.
There were no Jewish dungeons in which confessions of apostasy could be extracted.
The Jewish culture has been largely a civilization of refugees ever since biblical times.
They are history's greatest scapegoats and toughest survivors.
So far, not a single one of any of the myriad Zionist conspiracies has ever come true or been evidenced to exist.
The only foundations supporting the Zionist conspiracies are profound historically rooted anti-Semitism and hoaxed or non-existent evidence.
Centuries of oppression have marginalized the Jewish community and they remain a tiny minority in the world, hardly the likely suspects to rise and conquer the world's economies and governments.
Some conspiracies are undoubtedly real, but of the many conspiracy theories that claim to predict future events, like a Zionist world government, not one has ever materialized.
To those who promote or fear any given Zionist conspiracy, consider that all of its predecessors has faded away unfulfilled.
Finding Your Own Zion 00:02:00
I urge you instead to find your own Zion, a place of peace, unity, and cross-cultural brotherhood.
But if you insist on having evidence for the Zionist conspiracy, the official logo for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, a grouping of jagged polygons, is said to spell out the word Zion.
Watch out!
Every Skeptoid episode has complete bibliographic references on its transcript page at skeptoid.com.
Plus further reading suggestions if you want to know more.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from skeptoid.com.
Hello everyone, this is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and mousse.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile non-profit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX
Export Selection