Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

114 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:95
Put differently, then as now, The Protocols served as an ideal vehicle
by which decision-makers and those dependent upon them could evade
responsibility for disastrous decisions and blame others, especially but not
exclusively the Jews, for their catastrophic mistakes. In the case of the
Tsarist government in 1905, it was responsible for the first major defeat of a
European power by an Asian nation. The Protocols served as a relatively
cost-free means of deflecting the anger and bitter resentment of the victims
of those mistakes to a group unable to retaliate.
To make matters worse, The Protocols has historically served as a support
for the conviction that genocide is a moral imperative. It has rightly
been called a “warrant for genocide.” 68 Daniel Pipes has described the
political pamphlet, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, ou la
politique au xixe siècle (Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu or
the Politics of the Nineteenth Century, 1864). The pamphlet ascribed to Emperor
Napoleon III the ambition to dominate the world. It contained no reference to Jews
or Judaism. However, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the pamphlet
was transformed into an antisemitic tract by an unknown author working for the
Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police. The “dialogue” became the “protocols” in 1905,
the year of Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution.
In its revised form, The Protocols described an alleged conference of the leaders
of world Jewry who claimed that, under the cloak of democracy, they already
controlled a number of European states and were close to their ultimate objective:
world domination. In his article in the London Times, Graves succinctly described
the Okrana’s motives in publishing The Protocols in 1905: “They were designed to
foster the belief among Russian conservatives and especially in court circles, that
the prime cause of discontent among the politically minded elements in Russia was
not the repressive policy of the bureaucracy, but a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.
They thus served as a weapon against the Russian Liberals, who urged the Czar to
make certain concessions to the intelligentsia.”
The complete text of Graves’ article was published in the New York Times,
September 4, 1921, “London Times Publishes an Exposure Showing How They
[The Protocols] are a Paraphrase of a French Book Attacking Governmental
Abuses Under Napoleon III., Published 1865,” New York Times, http://query.
nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F05E1DE1431EF33A25757C0A96F9C9460
95D6CF&scp=1&sq=Protocols&st=p. The complete text of the original Dialogue
aux Enfers has been made available on the Internet by Google Books at http://
books.google.com/books?id=8B8JAAAAQAAJ&dq=Dialogue+aux+Enfers+ntre+
Machiavel+t+Montesquieu,+ou+la+politique+au+xixe+si%C3%A8cle&printsec=
frontcover&source=bl&ots=0_2PiRlT8c&sig=JeScUVFjGaPRNSQ2mG-ineTdBe4
&hl=en&ei=WlyMSeuLLtCCtwe_1-WUCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&
ct=result.
68. This is the apt title of an important study of The Protocols, Norman Cohn,
Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion (London: Serif, 2005). The belief that the Holocaust was
not only justified, but was also regarded as an urgent moral necessity, is discussed