The myth of the Jewish world domination conspiracy
Antisemitism is still rife in the Western world, and a century-old forgery is (partly) to blame
Recently I was watching Bojack Horseman, the excellent adult animation that depicts a, well, horse-man going around the West Coast, fucking over his friends, and being generally depressed. It’s usually an extremely sensitive and progressive show, dealing very well with issues such as celebrity culture, mental health, sexuality, discrimination, inequality, late capitalism, and myriad other topics, with astuteness and an eye for detail that shows often lack when broaching such themes. Its characters are more than three-dimensional — they’re messy, complicated messes, some of whom try and do the right thing but do it badly, and some of whom want to do the right thing but can’t overcome their nature (although the show seems to be constantly trying to tell us they can). And the creator himself seems sympathetic, having held up his hands over a number of issues, including the biggest one he wishes he could correct: casting a white woman as one of the main characters although she’s meant to have Vietnamese heritage. (Although saying ‘sorry’ and admitting you’re in the wrong doesn’t fix the damage, it’s a damn sight better than a lot of television showrunners do.)
But even Bojack, with its ‘look at me I’m so hip and liberal’ agenda that it isn’t afraid to flaunt, is beset by a problem the Western world doesn’t really seem to have come to terms with: antisemitism. An episode in the first half of season five included a parodical animation of its own (how meta), a pisstake of the founding of a large corporation which, in the episode, was being investigated by aforementioned main character for numerous abuses of its staff. I felt extremely uncomfortable watching it, for one main reason: it was heavily implied that these money-loving fat cats who had monopolised the market way back when and had grown the multinational corporation now intent on destroying the environment, workers’ rights, and any semblance of a fair labourer-owner relationship, were Jews. From how they were depicted (hook-nosed, shady) to the names they had (Jeremiah, Ezekiel), it was an unmistakable implication that the dirty capitalists whose moral compass spins on the axis of a hundred dollar bill were those bloody Jews, who, like, own the world, and stuff.
I find it incredible that conspiracy theories are such a big thing right now. Whatever you put it down to — a lack of faith in politicians and experts, the postmodern attack on science that’s been going on for nearly half a century, a failing education system — even if belief in conspiracy theories hasn’t become more prevalent, it’s certainly become more public. How people can even tease themselves that these ideas hold any water is beyond me; more than that, though, I wonder how stressful it must be living a regular, day-to-day life while genuinely believing that, for example, Gateshead Council has a plan to commit genocide on its residents. But more important than my own incredulity is the fact that some of these conspiracy theories are genuinely, and very, dangerous, not least the one that argues Jews are behind the scenes controlling everything. No, everything.
The history of this idea in the modern world comes down to a single falsified document, a book entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion published in 1903 in Russia. The book was plagiarised from other documents in French, German and Russian, and presents itself as a series of reports of meetings between Jews and Freemasons, in which the above groups allegedly hatched a plan to overturn Christian civilisation and build a world directly under their rule, liberalism and socialism being the means of doing so. Although dates on when it was written aren’t agreed upon, general consensus points to the first few years of the twentieth century, meaning it was published and distributed at around the same time as the anti-Jewish pogroms took place in the Russian Empire, in which thousands of Jews were murdered and which, according to Benny Morris in his sprawling work on the Israel-Palestine conflict Righteous Victims, was a contributing factor in the creation of the state of Israel. The text, naturally, was completely fabricated. The Times reported it to be a forgery as early as 1921, and it has been analysed many times since.
Rampant antisemitism obviously wasn’t anything new in the early twentieth century. But the book had, and continues to have, a profound effect, not least on some of the people we expect to be running our country. If anyone reading has missed the Labour antisemitism scandal that shook the party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, you must have been living under a rock. It kicked off, perhaps, with a 2015 post by the then-Shadow Immigration Minister Afzal Khan, the sharing of a very obviously conspiracy-laden antisemitic post for which he apologised with the lame excuse that he ‘didn’t read the text below’. (Classic Rothschild conspiracy stuff, by the way.) Then, Corbyn was found to be a member of some pro-Palestine Facebook groups in which were being posted antisemitic comments, which he subsequently left. It developed to the point where the scandal has its own Wikipedia page and the Equality and Human Rights Commission is currently investigating whether Labour has ‘unlawfully discriminated against, harassed or victimised people because they are Jewish’. While I’m personally of the opinion that the Labour Party responded relatively vigilantly (if belatedly) to a vastly overblown accusation which got jumped on by the media, it serves nonetheless to highlight the point.
Modern conspiracy theories still sometimes take their classical form — Rothschild conspiracy theories still abound, as the above story of Khan shows — but there’s a bigger one that’s been taking hold, particularly among members of the alt-right (because it would be unfair to only criticise the left for this kind of thing): that George Soros, the Jewish multi-billionaire investor and philanthropist, is some sort of ‘puppet master’, the mastermind behind ‘a variety of alleged global plots’. Some of his ‘plots’ include helping to collapse the communist empire of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and donating over $12 billion to various initiatives meant to tackle poverty and help people study at university. How malicious.
One can make sarcastic comments, but the theories that surround him aren’t nearly as benign as his philanthropy. Glenn Beck has said on many occasions that Soros is a ‘puppetmaster’ controlling the Obama administration (as if anything Glenn Beck says is worth giving the time of day). Governments throughout the nineties referred to him respectively as a ‘puppet of Jerusalem’ and a bringer of currency crises, and recently, Vladimir Putin said he ‘intervenes in things all over the world’. Sure, like the Kremlin doesn’t. Even President Trump (I write ‘even’ as though it should be a surprise; Trump is also an anti-vaxxer and doesn’t believe in climate change, so obviously he’s an Antisemite) has been spouting anti-Soros lies on his Twitter feed. Of course, none of it makes any sense; Channel 4 published a long article debunking almost all of the main theories about Soros, and a quick google will confirm their findings if that doesn’t suffice — as if these antisemitic claims need to be rebuffed with evidence, instead of simply offered the lack of attention they deserve.
The idea that Soros controls everything, though, harks back to Protocols, and is mirrored in other conspiracy theories that argue similar things: that the Illuminati are somehow behind the scenes pushing for a New World Order, that there is a secret ‘deep state’ government behind the US government which actually controls everything, George Carlin’s famous bit that ‘you have no choice’ because the ‘real owners’ of America have the whole political and media establishment in their pocket, Bill Hicks’ ‘elite’ who run all the corporations and terrify incoming presidents into doing what they say — the list goes on, and they all seem to stem from a scaremongering belief that regular people have no freedom or control over what happens, and that a few very rich people own everything and make all the decisions. Sound familiar? The antisemitic background to these conspiracy theories is something yet to be stamped out in Western society.
It seems obvious that those who believe, say, the Earth is flat, would also be up for believing other wild conspiracy theories, like the fact that the Jews own all of the media and banks and money in the world. But there is a specific reason for this antisemitism among right-wing conspiracy theorists who also busy themselves campaigning against vaccinations and 5G: that being the fact that most of these conspiracy theories have a religious root. The aforementioned flat-earth conspiracy is directly lifted from passages in the Bible. Anti-vaccination arguments which first came about in the eighteen hundreds were mostly promoted by the religious, who saw the practice as a tainting of human blood with that of animals. And much antisemitism comes from the heinous belief that the Jews killed Jesus, despite this order by the Catholic Church having been renounced in the mid-sixteenth century at the Council of Trent. (Anyone remember when Christopher Hitchens called Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ ‘boring, sadistic and lurid in equal measure’ due this very implication?) So that side of these dangerous conspiracy theories shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. But why they remain so pervasive in relatively rational, progressive circles is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it’s because of a lack of trust in our political establishments — that they haven’t really been doing what we’ve wanted them to do for the last two decades — that people turn to such outlandish beliefs to offer an explanation. Maybe they’ve always been there, and all it took was the opportunity for anyone to share their ideas online and for news to spread across the world in minutes that has brought them to the surface. Whatever the reason these theories are becoming more popular, remember this: the world ain’t flat, vaccinations aren’t making your kid autistic, and for the love of god, the Jews are not behind everything.
