On Aug. 19, 2020, at 11 AM PST, the FBI tweeted out a message that just included an attachment with the title: “Protocols of Learned Elders of Zion.” That’s pretty much all this story needs to say. But in case you don’t know what the significance of this is, it is somewhat similar to—though not the same as—tweeting out Mein Kampf with just a link to a PDF of the book by Adolf Hitler. As a little sidenote: The prick who tweeted this out forgot the “the” in front of “learned,” because like most bigots, details and the execution of ideas are not their strong suits.
What makes it different is that it is even more insidious to promote, without context or explanation, something from the “archives” that is infamously fabricated. The Protocols of Learned Elders of Zion is the document created by anti-Semites and used by subsequent anti-Semites to promote the conspiracy theory that Jewish folks around the world have a secret plan to control the world. (Seriously.) And it’s an old document, and we all know that old documents can feel very important to different groups of people at different times, for different reasons. And there’s more to this than just the forged anti-Semitic documents.
Sometimes called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and sometimes with “the Learned” in front of “Elders,” the document was sold to many in the public as “the confidential minutes of a Jewish conclave convened in the last years of the nineteenth century.” It was a complete hoax created by the Russian czar’s secret police force at the time. It has been called “the most notorious political forgery of modern times.”
The documents were translated into German, French, English, and other European languages and disseminated around the world at the beginning of the 20th century. One of the conceits was that Jews were planning to use socialism and liberalism in order to subvert Christian civilization. Sound familiar? Sound like the entirety of the Republican manifesto?
The spurious character of the Protocols was first revealed in 1921 by Philip Graves of The Times (London), who demonstrated their obvious resemblance to a satire on Napoleon III by the French lawyer Maurice Joly, published in 1864 and entitled Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (“Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu”). Subsequent investigation, particularly by the Russian historian Vladimir Burtsev, revealed that the Protocols were forgeries compounded by officials of the Russian secret police out of the satire of Joly, a fantastic novel (Biarritz) by Hermann Goedsche (1868), and other sources.
The FBI’s link includes letters to J. Edgar Hoover and the like that were supposedly from American citizens throughout the years sending on the document to the FBI with the hope that it would be investigated. Once again, it is important to note that without any context, the FBI account is doing exactly what its original forgers were hoping: Passing it on as real.
But there’s more. The account then tweeted out archive information on Rex Tugwell. Tugwell was “one of the five original members of President Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust,” a group that heavily influenced the development of the New Deal.” Here’s a quote from Tugwell: “[W]e were confronted with a choice between an orderly revolution—a peaceful and rapid departure from past concepts—and a violent and disorderly overthrow of the whole capitalistic structure … the [New Deal] effort is not to destroy our institutions, but to save them from the poison of unlimited greed, and to turn the results of common effort toward more general benefits. Enlarged incomes for common people, greater leisure, security from risk – these are the items of the present program.”
Preceding the zero-context Protocols of Zion bullshit tweet, the FBI tweeted out archives on MOVE. You know what move is? That was May 13, 1985, when police dropped a makeshift bomb on a Black liberation compound in Philadelphia, obliterating an entire neighborhood and killing more than a dozen Black Americans. Sort of reminds me of far-right pipe bombs, seemingly supported by local and federal law enforcement teams looking the other way in Portland, OR.
There have been a ton of responses to this strange and sad social media account move.
And sadly, though predictably, the racist, QAnon, anti-Semite, Holocaust-is-a-hoax crowd has come like flies to shit. All one can do is get out the vote.
We need to turn out Democratic voters to defeat Trump in November, even during a pandemic. You can help out from home, no matter where you live, by writing personalized letters to infrequent, but Democratic-leaning, voters in swing states. Click here to set up an account with Vote Forward, the most popular get-out-the-vote activity among Daily Kos activists.
