A Rumor About the Jews by Stephen Eric Bronner

Author:Stephen Eric Bronner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466887480
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

FIVE

Spreading the News: The Protocols Triumphant

World War I was begun by the great powers without ideals or clearly defined interests, and it ended with a continent in ruins.1 Beyond the thirty-eight million dead and maimed, beyond the previously unimaginable devastation, its victims included those upon whom the learned elders of Zion had promised to wreak their vengeance. Four empires were destroyed whose roots reached back more than a thousand years: the Austro-Hungarian, the German, the Ottoman, and the Russian. The war decimated the ancien régime. Established traditions were overturned and a corrosive cynicism was generated among much of the population. In an epoch marked by chaos and transition, it was little wonder that the Protocols should have gained such popularity.

World War I was an irrational escape from domestic pressures rather than a way of pursuing attainable goals. Unable to meet the demands of reform at home, the legitimization of the old elites ever more surely rested on the ability to bring about spectacular successes abroad. Its members could neither admit the senselessness of the conflict nor expose their culpability. This would have meant tossing themselves upon the “trash can of history” and belittling the “brotherhood of the trenches.” It was only logical that the old elites should have sought to highlight the organic unity of the nations, which they claimed to represent, and blame an outsider or traitor for the slaughter they had brought about. They could not deal with the implications of imperialism, militarism, class conflict, and a stubborn reactionary political structure incapable of reform. Virtually all conservatives and militant reactionaries, especially those on the losing side, needed to justify themselves both politically and existentially. Indeed, when the spectacular successes were not forthcoming, it was necessary to provide a reason for the defeats and a source for the mistaken policy: antisemitism provided both.

Nowhere was this more the case than in Imperial Russia. Its economic situation 1914 was still woeful by western standards; its masses of peasants in the countryside and proletarians in the city were impoverished; its army poorly trained and staffed; its resources insufficient for a protracted struggle. But this did not keep the czar and czarina, who quarreled constantly with the doddering Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary over the Balkans, from being among the prime instigators of World War I. The defeats came quickly. Nevertheless, the pitifully incompetent rulers of Russia were willing to suffer increasing losses in order to maintain their tumbling prestige.

The czar and czarina remained firm in their convictions. They never doubted their royal prerogatives or the divine legitimization of their rule. And so, when the revolution finally struck, they were left in a daze. Its first phase in February of 1917, which resulted in the formation of a provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky, was hard for the aristocracy and other stalwarts of the old regime to swallow; the second phase, the Bolshevik seizure of power in November, left them in a state of complete incomprehension. Indeed, if the Jews didn’t exist, the far right would probably have invented a functional equivalent to blame for the catastrophe.

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