Vile Anti-Semitic Hoax 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ Still Around

 

An anti-Semitic hoax more than a century old reared its ugly head again as the Republican National Convention was underway last week.
 
Mary Ann Mendoza, a member of the advisory board of President Trump’s reelection campaign, was due to speak on Aug. 25. But she was suddenly pulled from the schedule after she had retweeted a link to a conspiracy theory about Jewish elites plotting to take over the world.
 
In her now-deleted tweet, Mendoza urged her roughly 40,000 followers to read a lengthy thread that warned of a plan to enslave the “goyim,” or non-Jews. It included fevered denunciations of the historically wealthy Jewish family, the Rothschilds, as well as the top target of right-wing extremism today, the liberal Jewish philanthropist George Soros.
 
The thread also made reference to one of the most notorious hoaxes in modern history: “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” As a scholar of American Jewish history, I know how durable this document has been as a source of the belief in Jewish conspiracies. The fact that it is still making the rounds within the fringe precincts of the political right today is testament to the longevity of this fabrication.
 
Fake news
 
Surely no outright forgery in modern history has ever proved itself more durable. In the early 20th century, the Protocols were concocted by Tsarist police known as the Okhrana, drawing upon an obscure 1868 German novel, “Biarritz,” in which mysterious Jewish leaders meet in a Prague cemetery.
 
This fictional cabal aspires for power over entire nations through currency manipulation and seeks ideological domination by disseminating fake news. In the novel, the Devil listens sympathetically to the reports that representatives of the tribes of Israel present, describing the havoc and subversion that they have wrought, and the destruction that is yet to come.
 
The Okhrana – “protection” in Russian – worked for what was then the most powerful anti-Semitic regime in Europe and wanted to use the hoax to discredit revolutionary forces hostile to the reactionary policies and religious mysticism of Tsarist rule.
 
The document became a global phenomenon only about two decades after the Okhrana’s fabrication. Widespread publication and republication coincided with both the influenza pandemic of 1918-20 and the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 – both of which stirred fears of obscure forces that menaced social control.
 
Scapegoating Jews for disease and political unrest was nothing new. Medieval Jews had been massacred in the wake of accusations of having poisoned wells and spreading plagues.
 
But a century ago, the crisis in public health probably mattered less than the Communists’ seizure of power in Russia, which, if unchecked, might overwhelm the political order that the Great War had destabilized. That some of the revolutionary leaders were of Jewish birth seemed to reinforce the predictions of the Protocols.
 
Tsar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanovs, was known to have read the Protocols before being executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. In the following year, Hitler delivered his first recorded speech, in which he depicted an international conspiracy of Jews – of all Jews – to weaken and poison the Aryan race and to extinguish German culture.
 
Hitler himself was unsure of the authenticity of the Protocols – a question of verification that may not have mattered all that much to the Nazis. The Führer told one of his early associates that the Protocols were “immensely instructive” in exposing what the Jews could accomplish in terms of “political intrigue,” and in demonstrating their skill at “deception [and] organization.”
 
‘Americanized’ conspiracy
 
In the U.S., the hoax was given a wide distribution by the most admired businessman of his time: Henry Ford. By 1920, Ford had “Americanized” the forged document as “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.” It ran as excerpts in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, for 91 straight weeks. “The International Jew” was translated into 16 languages.
 
Though Jewish communal leadership mounted a lawsuit that forced the auto magnate to issue a retraction in 1927, the malignant hatred behind the Protocols continued to seep into the public conversation.
 
In the 1930s, the popular anti-New Deal “radio priest” Charles E. Coughlin excerpted the Protocols in his newspaper, Social Justice. But Father Coughlin was wary about endorsing its accuracy, and merely stated that it might be of “interest” to his readers.
 
History as conspiracy
 
Why is it that this demonstrably false document continues to hold sway today?
 
Perhaps the simplest explanation is human irrationality, which neither education nor enlightenment has ever managed to defeat.
 
The willingness to believe in the fantasy of a surreptitious Jewish stranglehold on the international economy and on mass media also validates the insight of the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter. He traced in political extremism of both right and left an apocalyptic strain and a belief in an imminent confrontation between good and absolute evil.
 
Hofstadter was well aware that conspiracies punctuate the annals of the past. But especially for those Americans who hanker for the security of a settled way of life, political paranoia is tempting, such as the belief – as Hofstadter wrote – that “history is a conspiracy,” in which unseen forces are the shadowy driving mechanisms of human destiny.
 
Because anti-Semitism has survived nearly a couple of millennia, no form of prejudice has yet found a more vivid place in the imagination. And the fact that no international Jewish conspiracy was ever located has never depleted the power of the Protocols to tap into subterranean currents of demonization.
 
From the Rothschilds to Soros
 
What sustains the influence of the Protocols among cranks and extremists is not the language of the text itself – which few of them are likely to have fully read in its various versions – but what this forgery purports to underscore, which is the astonishingly cunning influence of Jews in modern history.
 
The Protocols thus have no importance in themselves; they are spurious. But they do bestow precision upon apocalyptic fears, which could not survive without some ingredient of plausibility – however wildly far-fetched.
 
The Rothschild family was pivotal to the emergence of finance capitalism in 19th-century Europe. The family firm had branches in Germany, France, Austria, Italy and England, which lent credence to the charge of “cosmopolitanism” during an era of rising nationalism. The boom-and-bust oscillations of the economy generated not only misery but also grievances against financiers who seemed to benefit from such uncertainties.
 
Today, Soros, a Hungarian-born, British-educated American Jew, has become an especially hated figure for the far-right. Among the world’s canniest investors, he has spent billions of dollars promoting progressive causes. He seems to personify what Ford called “the international Jew.”
 
Venom against minorities other than Jews has not resulted in any equivalent to the Protocols. Judeophobia produced a specious documentation that bigotry against no other minority has ever elicited. Perhaps the very explicitness of the Protocols helps strengthen the suspicion that majority beliefs and interests are under attack, and keeps this dangerous form of anti-Semitism alive.
 
 
Why the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ is still pushed by anti-Semites more than a century after hoax first circulated.   By Stephen Whitfield. The Conversation ,  September 2, 2020.

 

Here are some facts about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: they were first published in the US exactly a hundred years ago this summer. While they were presented to readers in 1920 as the secretly recorded words of a Jewish leader forming a conspiracy to overtake the world, we now know it is a fabrication, created by tsarist agents in Russia two decades earlier. Published here by Henry Ford in his anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent newspaper starting in June 1920, The Protocols purport to be the minutes of a series of lectures given by a Jewish elder, plotting world domination. And in their broad incoherence, they sound a lot like the conspiracy theories inundating our discourse now—and the president’s speeches.
 
The text itself is comprised of 24 numbered sections. Each is two to six pages long, loosely based around a subject or a theme. Well, very loosely. Subjects are listed in terse sentences at the top of each section, and include “topics” such as gold, economics, international Masonry, gold (gold comes up a lot), drunkenness and “the meaning of anti-Semitism.” The Protocols is the most famous anti-Semitic tract in the western world, and though it’s regularly referenced in that context, I’ve never met anyone who has read it. Frankly, I suspect the vast majority of people who have referenced it have not read it.
 
With so many conspiracy theories surfacing toward the mainstream in 2020, no small number of them with an anti-Semitic bent, I felt it was time to read it myself.
 
So here are some other facts I can share, having done so: The Protocols are repetitive, unconvincing, fragmentary, a pure slog; disordered, ridiculous, elliptical, deliberately confusing, and above all, incoherent. So, so incoherent. One gets the sense while reading The Protocols that while a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters given a thousand years couldn’t compose King Lear, those same monkeys given six months and a bottomless pot of coffee might have created this mess. Here’s a sample paragraph, taken from “Protocol No. 1,” that will give you a sense of how they sound:
 
The despotism of Capital, which is entirely in our hands, reaches out to it a straw that the State, willy-nilly, must take hold of: if not—it goes to the bottom.
 
Should anyone of a liberal mind say that such reflections as the above are immoral I would put the following questions:– If every State has two foes and if in regard to the external foe it is allowed and not considered immoral to use every manner and art of conflict, as for example to keep the enemy in ignorance of plans of attack and defense, to attack him by night or in superior numbers, then in what way can the same means in regard to a worse foe, the destroyer of the structure of society and the commonwealth be called immoral and not permissible?
 
So, yes . . . willy-nilly and despotic, to be sure. We could take the time to break down the broken syllogism, the extraneous interpolations, the half-formed similes—but clearly the intention is not for it to be read so closely. It’s to confuse, to obfuscate, and as recourse for their confusion to make the reader think, “Right, hate the Jews, we’re supposed to be hating the Jews.” The text goes on like this for almost 80 pages, and its lone appeal is as a secretive look into secretive meetings—the sound of a voice in situ, a clandestine peek into the clandestine. There’s something far more complicated about it for its unintended audience, in possession of it as a forgery; reading it as the words of a tsarist agent trying to imitate a Jewish plotter, I found myself in that strange confusion I used to feel when on the satirical Colbert Report there was an author interview, and I’d lose the thread of Colbert in faux-Fox-News persona. In that case, the recourse was to say, Oh, right, satire and book promotion. Again, with The Protocols, the recourse is always: anti-Semitism.
 
It’s also worth pointing out that there are almost no proper nouns in The Protocols, granting the text a sense of universality, but also causing a broad atmosphere of generalized confusion. It’s hard to comprehend purely from a close reading, at any specific moment, who is speaking, and to whom, and why. There is no effort, to borrow Coleridge’s phrase, to conjure “willing suspension of disbelief.” The forgery relies entirely upon our accepting its verisimilitude as a given. The voice of The Protocols doesn’t convince the reader that it truly represents spoken word. There is no attempt at persuasion.
 
Which makes sense on its own terms, but is heavily troubled by the fact that Coleridge was describing how fiction works. We’re meant to believe that this particular incoherence is reality. In which case it strikes the reader that the incoherence is the point—we enter this text in a state of confusion, seeking answers. We grow only more confused as it incoherently proceeds. The only purchase we can really gain over it is remembering that is it meant to be factual, an artifact, authentic. Its lack of authenticity on its own terms hardly matters.
 
Incoherence, pseudo-authenticity, secrecy: the same qualities define the conspiracy theories that have overwhelmed the discourse in Right Wing circles for four years (and longer, frankly, none more than QAnon. Without rehearsing its entire history, in brief: a purported administration insider who calls himself Q began posting what appeared to be inside information on how Donald Trump was breaking up a ring of “deep state,” or pedophile, or otherwise nefarious actors not only in the world of politics, but in Hollywood (Spielberg, Hanks, COME ON) and philanthropy (Soros). While at first it seemed a fringe hobby, in recent days disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has taken the group’s oath, sharing a video saying, “Where we go one, we go all,” and multiple GOP primary winners to varying degrees are open supporters of the conspiracy theory. They sell a lot of merch. The theory itself builds around Trump’s cryptic comment in a 2017 Oval Office interview that “a storm’s coming.”
 
The language of Q’s initial posts shared many qualities with The Protocols. Clipped, terse, bearing an aesthetic that suggested military concision and allusiveness, the style helped those who jumped on with Q early to be swayed by a sense of its verisimilitude. Here’s Q’s first post in its entirety:
 
          HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am. Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. US M’s will conduct the operation while NG activated. Proof check: Locate a NG member and ask if activated for duty 10/30 across most major cities.

Of course there are aspects of Q’s voice that are markedly different from the voice of The Protocols. There are knowable proper nouns, starting with the reference to Hillary Clinton, as “HRC.” There are time stamps, dates, the repeated reference to the National Guard as “NG.” But these references serve the same purpose at the elliptical generality of the voice of The Protocols—where in 1920 Henry Ford was presenting us with the purportedly authentic minutes of a meeting (leaving aside the fact they contain no real “protocols” in a literal way), in 2017 Q was presenting an ostensibly authentic voice of a government official on social media. Marshall McLuhan would remind us that each medium—the secrecy of meeting notes, the exposition and revelation of information on Twitter—determines the message. And in each case the message is: something serious is going down, and you’re not in on it.
 
Beyond that, there are some clear similarities in each voice. Compare Q’s cadences, the terse constructions, with the introductions to each of The Protocols. Here’s the opening of “Protocol No. 18”:
 
           Measures of secret defense. Observation of conspiracies from the inside. Overt secret defense—the ruin of authority. Secret defense of the King of the Jews. Mystical prestige of authority. Arrest on the first suspicion.
 
One quality of this writing is that it appears to require some inside clandestine knowledge of its own system of reference. If you have to ask what HRC means, what NG means, you’ll never know. Same with the coded language of “the King of the Jews,” that “secret defense” both Wilsonian Americans and tsarist Russians might have feared in the Communists in their midst. It serves as well as a shorthand, pushing back against the painful project I myself undertook: You don’t really need to read the whole thing to get what it’s about. Here are some conspiratorial SparkNotes. There is also a marked absence of narrative. Narrative itself suggests causation—this happened, and then that happened next as a result. In The Protocols, in Q world, there is only one causal relationship: this exists because of the conspiracy itself, which predates and always supersedes the argument.
 
This kind of coded language as it pertains specifically to The Protocols themselves carries over into the rhetoric of our moment more directly. In anti-Semitic flare-ups this summer, NFL receiver DeSean Jackson caused controversy after sharing fabricated Hitler quotations on his Instagram account, and after apologizing, was backed up by former NBA star Steven Jackson, who was less contrite. Comedian Nick Cannon was fired from one of his jobs for referring to a Protocols-like conspiracy involving “Rothschilds,” language from all three appearing to derive from the rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan. Longtime anti-Semitic commentator and one of the few humans I believe actually has read The Protocols, British former footballer and full-time conspiracy theorist David Ickes, made a video claiming COVID was caused by new 5G cellular phone towers. It was immediately taken down in June by YouTube, but only after Britons had torn down 5G towers in England (it didn’t kill the virus). But the Icke video found new hosts, including space on the official personal website of longtime vocal anti-Semite, the novelist Alice Walker, who also posted on her site the pseudo-documentary Plandemic, about COVID-denier and disgraced former doctor Judy Moskovitz.
 
All these threads converged at the 2020 RNC. Only hours before she was to speak as part of the convention, Mary Ann Mendoza, the mother of an Arizona police officer killed in 2014 by a drunk driver, had her speech canceled. That day she’d retweeted a long Twitter thread claiming that QAnon had uncovered a Jewish plot, led by “Rothschilds,” [sic] to take control of world governments. “‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ Is Not A Fabrication,” a part of the thread read. “And Certainly It Is Not Anti-Semetic [sic] To Point Out This Fact.” Mendoza had a long history of tweeting out such anti-Semitic canards.
 
So. Yes. Varied conspiracy theories proliferate, and The Protocols themselves have found their way back into our discourse alongside them. Early in Trump’s impeachment trial, in November 2019, security analyst Fiona Hill brought up the fact that anti-Semitic smears by Roger Stone, against her and philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros, were literally out of the same playbook: “This is the longest-running anti-Semitic trope that we have in history,” Hill told congress. “This is the new Protocols of The Elders of Zion.” She at least was involved enough to describe the text as a tsarist forgery. On his Fox News show, GOP propagandist Tucker Carlson recently disparaged the popular book White Fragility by suggesting that seeing someone reading it on the subway is akin to watching someone reading The Protocols openly (I only brought my own copy to the public pool, and was careful to cover it up with my daughter’s Pocahontas towel).
 
And in May of this year, when the president himself went to visit a Ford factory in Michigan, he made his not so subtle dog whistle to all these conspiracists. Speaking to reporters, he said, “The company was founded by a man named Henry Ford. Good bloodlines, good bloodlines, if you believe in that stuff you’ve got good blood.” The ouroboros of conspiracy theorizing was complete. Who can even tell head from tail at this point.
 

Which inevitably, as all things seem to do in 2020, brings us back to the fascism-curious POTUS himself. In the epilogue of The Protocols, in the edition I read—I’m consciously not mentioning the publisher or editor, as it’s packed with all kinds of other anti-Semitic hate and doesn’t deserve our attention—the purported translator of the 1905 edition of the text, a Czech named Sergius A. Nilus, writes that when The Protocols were supposedly discovered, “the storm was about to break on apathetic Russia.” Is this the same storm Trump was dog whistling in Michigan, along with his propping up of Henry Ford? Could he be expected to remember such details? Wasn’t Churchill’s World War II memoir called The Coming Storm? How specific are storms, and their coming, their breaking? At some point when reading so much conspiratorial thinking one fears he’s growing to be part of the conspiracy, and ducks out. Remembers that the point of all these primary documents—The Protocols, Q’s posts, Plandemic, even Trump’s speeches and comments themselves—signify to the listener simply because they exist. There’s no narrative, no causation, just patterns in the rug.
 
This is almost certainly true of the rambling, incoherent speeches the president has given since the pandemic began. At his ill-conceived indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, Trump’s long speeches could go on for endless paragraphs. Take this one, a kind of conspiratorial thinking about the upcoming presidential election:

     Joe Biden and the Democrats want to prosecute Americans for going to church, but not for burning a church. They believe you can riot, vandalize and destroy, but you cannot attend a peaceful pro-America rally. They want to punish your thought, but not their violent crimes. They want to abolish bail, abolish and open up your borders. They want open borders, let everyone, and by the way, we’re doing so well. We have a record this month on the borders. Nobody’s coming in. Very few people. And they want to abolish ICE, our great people from ICE who send the roughest toughest, meanest people that you’ve ever seen or ever heard.
 
The paragraph reads like someone who has read The Protocols and wants to sound like them. I’d be remiss not to point out that even this long paragraph doesn’t come close to approaching the length and prolixity of any single protocol, and served as a reminder to this reader, at least, that the sheer length of each protocol strains the credibility of The Protocols as a record of actual spoken lectures. Reading a Trump rally speech on the page bears out something of the same thing that we find in The Protocols, in QAnon. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It doesn’t often cohere. It’s so broad as to be difficult to track, and hides its outright lies (“Biden wants to prosecute Americans for going to church”) in a willy-nilly garble. It purposely obfuscates. But in the midst of the miasma, the confusion, we’re forced to grasp back at what we came here for. In The Protocols, it’s the anti-Semitism, fulfilling our belief in a Jewish plot to destroy non-Jewish culture merely because it exists. In Trump, it’s Trump’s desire to gain and retain power.
 
Some facts about this speech, still: it is repetitive, unconvincing, fragmentary, a pure slog; disordered, ridiculous, confusing, and above all, incoherent. But it’s not the voice of The Protocols, not exactly. It belongs to the same genre: spoken, boasting, elliptical. Early on in “Protocol No. 1” the forgery reads, “Every man aims at power, everyone would like to become a dictator if he could.” That part, at least, is not at all hard to comprehend. In fact, it sounds quite familiar.
 
The Incoherence of Hate: Reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. By  Daniel Torday.  LitHub, August 27, 2020.
 

 

The modern world’s most consequential conspiracy text was barely noticed when it first appeared in a little-read Russian newspaper in 1903. The message of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is straightforward, and terrifying: The rise of liberalism had provided Jews with the tools to destroy institutions—the nobility, the church, the sanctity of marriage—whole. Soon, they would take control of the world, as part of a revenge plot dating back to the ascendancy of Christendom. The text, ostensibly narrated by a Jewish leader, describes this plan in detail, relying on centuries-old anti-Jewish tropes, and including lengthy expositions on monetary, media, and electoral manipulation. It announces Jewry’s triumph as imminent: The world order will fall into the hands of a cunning elite, who have schemed forever and are now fated to rule until the end of time. 

It was a fabrication, and a clumsy one, largely copied from the obscure, French-language political satire Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, or The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, by Maurice Joly. But it has enjoyed a remarkable appeal, despite various attempts to ban it and calls for individuals to denounce it—and now, in our conspiracy-saturated moment, it has decisively reemerged.
 
The book sells widely in Turkey, Syria, and Japan; remains a staple of Russian Orthodox bookshops; and in 2002, was the subject of a long-running Egyptian television series. It is widely available on eBay and on the Barnes & Noble website. The British charity Oxfam sold it on its site until March of this year. When asked by The New York Times in 2018 to name the books at her bedside, Alice Walker listed David Icke’s And the Truth Will Set You Free, a contemporary summary of The Protocols. At a 2019 congressional hearing, the former National Security Council official Fiona Hill described The Protocols’ image of a greedy, devious Jew as “the longest-running anti-Semitic trope we have.” Last week, when an automated Twitter bot managed by the FBI posted a 139-page file containing the text and the agency’s documents on it, hate-filled praise streamed in alongside the replies condemning the tweet for its lack of context. For devotees, The Protocols’ capacity to explain the world remains so resonant that the COVID-19 pandemic has now been blamed on the machinations of the ubiquitous Jewish elders.
 
A mountain of writings has surfaced over the past century and more, each devoted to revealing the supposed perfidy of the Jews. But nearly all have disappeared: The back shelves of research libraries are packed with anti-Semitic best sellers now turned to dust. (Who still reads Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a massive best seller celebrated by George Bernard Shaw at the time of its publication in 1899 as a “masterpiece”?) Even Hitler’s Mein Kampf is rarely cited, though it remains a favorite of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan and in a newly energized far right. 
 
But The Protocols has survived, more so than any other text of its kind. It has done so not because its ideas are particularly original, and certainly not because they’re correct. It has done so for the simple reason that The Protocols is, curiously enough, a compelling read. Conspiracy theories are many things, but most of all, they’re narratives—understandable, comprehensive stories about how the world works, complete with the arcs and the rhythms of any other epic tale of heroes and villains. Part of what makes certain ones endure is how well they unfurl that story.
 
The Protocols’ voice is cool, patronizing, vile; the voice of someone who is ready to perform any task, however dastardly, in the march toward world domination. This, then, is no secondary source, unlike other familiar, formulaic expressions of anti-Semitism, but a chance to overhear a consequential Jewish leader plotting the fate of the world. This narrative immediacy is the difference between a newspaper article and a novel, between remove and urgency. The Protocols is not, purportedly, mere narration of a diabolical plot—it’s evidence of one. It projects authority by obscuring its authorship, not unlike various religious texts—or, to use a much more recent and pertinent example, the anonymous dispatches that form the foundation of QAnon.
 
And beneath its wild, hate-filled surface, The Protocols has a surprisingly solid, if plagiarized, core. Joly’s source material is an astute portrait of modernity’s ills, imagining a collision between (the well-meaning, but inadequate) Montesquieu and (the brilliant, immeasurably more persuasive) Machiavelli, and ultimately reveals the susceptibility of liberal society to manipulation and distraction using war, or greed, or the clouds of nostalgia. It was a prescient view of the world, as the political theorist Hans Speier has said, one that perceived “the hazards of popular sovereignty as well as the abuse of power by social engineers.” Nearly everything about The Protocols is wrong, but just enough about its depiction of the onset of totalitarianism is insightful that it is harder to dismiss than other, more outlandish conspiracy theories.
 
And though its most fervent following is on the far right, the text itself is without any emphatic leftist or rightist coloring. This is why it can be embraced as it is today by disparate groups such as evangelicals, neo-Nazis, some anti-Israel activists, and a slice of black-metal fans. It is endlessly versatile, a Rorschach test onto which a great assortment of convictions can readily be sketched.
 
Perhaps the finest of all scholars writing today about The Protocols is Michael Hagemeister, a mild, left-leaning German based at the Ruhr University in Bochum. His entry into the study of this text provides a useful look at its rapid move in recent years from obscurity at the far fringe of political life to something close to the mainstream.
 

Hagemeister was introduced to The Protocols when he was visiting the Soviet Union in the early 1980s to research a dissertation on the 19th-century right-leaning philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. Hagemeister’s interest in Fedorov, coupled with his ancestry—relatives had served as senior figures in the Romanov administration—convinced the rightist intellectuals he encountered that he was a kindred spirit. As a result, one of them, a specialist in German thought, asked if on his next trip he might bring along a copy of a book of great importance, a book that proved worldwide Jewish domination.
 
To Hagemeister, the plot laid out in The Protocols seemed no more current than the fear of the Illuminati or the Freemasons, the stuff of a Dan Brown bestseller. Its fortune has risen considerably since. Having now spent 30 years studying the text, Hagemeister told me recently that he isn’t surprised that it’s been used to explain the pandemic. The Protocols feels all the more pertinent, he added, at moments of crisis such as this one, when the righteous are urged to close their ranks to repel the enemy—a strategy the book suggests could effectively stop the Jews. Like QAnon’s missives or some of the finest novels, The Protocols is a narrative about the crucial moment just before cataclysm, and the notion that those horrors can still be averted with a swift and unequivocal response.
 
The belief captured by The Protocols that the world is in the clutches of a cabal—mighty, yet small enough to fit itself into the discreet, darkened corner of a club—certainly isn’t the sole possession of those who loathe Jews. But Jews, whether in the guise of Soros or Rothschild, Disraeli or Marx, provide a time-tested, biblically vetted vortex. And at a jittery moment such as ours, when it’s so easy to feel the world is cascading out of control, it’s revealing that The Protocols has shed its archaic feel.
 
The Conspiracy Theory to Rule Them All. What explains the strange, long life of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? By Stephen J. Zipperstein. The Atlantic, August 25, 2020.

How Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism

 

The utopian ideal of globalization has imploded over the past decade. Rising demand in Western countries for greater state control over the economy reflects a range of grievances, from a chronic shortage of well-compensated work to a sense of national decline. In the United States, the dearth of domestic supply chains exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic has only heightened alarm over the acute infrastructural weaknesses decades of outsourced production have created. Post-industrial society, rather than an advanced stage of shared affluence, is not only more unequal but fundamentally insecure. Rich but increasingly oligarchic countries are experiencing what we might call, following scholars of democratization, a dramatic “de-consolidation” of development.
 
To reverse this decline, political forces on both the left and the right are converging on the imperative to use industrial policy—the strategic process by which governments, either through state support of industrialists or state-owned enterprises, build up and diversify domestic manufacturing. On the left, the Green New Deal represents a futuristic and ecologically sustainable industrial policy, one that undergirds a strong public sector, progressive distribution, a job guarantee, and efforts to correct historical injustices. On the right, policy ideas are more muddled due to the powerful grip of free market ideology, yet a vocal “communitarian” cohort across Europe and the United States is pivoting toward heterodox economics. “Globalism,” in the view of these populists, has eroded the economic sovereignty of nation-states, shrinking historically key sectors and unleashing new forms of anomie. Industrial policy thus looks to be an instrument for reaffirming national sovereignty and restoring the social bonds that producer-oriented economies ostensibly foster. While only the left addresses the climate crisis, both visions are concerned with the social value economic activity generates, in contrast to neoliberalism’s justification of unimpeded self-interest.
 
In their search for an alternative to neoliberal globalization, these competing visions reflect the enduring power of Fordism, the industrial system that launched mass production in the early twentieth century and shaped many of our expectations of modern life. Henry Ford would likely find his relevance to the current crisis of globalization a testament to his “producerist” philosophy. But as historian Stefan J. Link writes in his new book, Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order, Ford’s peculiar ideals “projected a political (and moral) economy that hardly anticipated the American consumer modernity that emerged after 1945.” Link gives a fresh analysis of an overlooked dimension of interwar history, tracing the singular influence of Ford’s innovations and ideas upon the final, cataclysmic stages of twentieth-century industrialization. Forging Global Fordism allows us to better explore the relationship between industrialism, political ideology, and global competition, while also shedding important light on our tumultuous present moment.
 
One of the key insights of Link’s book is that Fordism was as much a theory of social organization as a scientific system of productivity, and it was highly malleable within different political and economic contexts. To explore the varieties of Fordist experience, Link employs the framework of the developmental state—the stage of state history in which governments, seeking modernization, a more integrated domestic market, and faster economic growth, typically pursue capital formation and reinvestment in strategic industries that are shielded from global competition.
 
Situating the global spread of Fordism within Europe’s struggle to “catch up” to U.S. industrialization after World War I and prepare for the next conflict, Link shows how Fordist America, as well as Ford’s philosophy, animated what he terms European “postliberals” on the left and the right in their ambitions for autarky and dominion over “great spaces.” In doing so, Link explains how the “isolationist” 1930s set the course for modern globalization. “Rather than interrupt,” Link argues, “depression and war actually accelerated and intensified the global spread of Fordism,” due to the industrial policies of activist states such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
 
In their respective quests for machine tools, automotive material, and expert knowledge of mass production techniques—all of which informed the construction of “dual-use” factories—delegations from each country sought and obtained technology transfers from Ford’s famed River Rouge plant in Detroit throughout the 1930s. At the seeming apex of isolationism in the twentieth century, the Ford Motor Company provided critical blueprints and other forms of assistance that could be harnessed in equal measure for economic development and total war.
 
How did Ford become this seemingly improbable node in the industrial strategies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union? “To gain the forefront of industrial modernity,” Link writes, “all insurgents” against a faltering liberal international system “first had to turn for guidance to the most advanced nation. . . . Interim technological dependency on the United States—such was the wager of autarky—would be the price of long-term economic independence.”
 
Detroit was the locus of America’s advancement, and thus “an antagonistic development competition” arose across the globe from the race to acquire its technology, engineering know-how, and organizational methods. Among the region’s firms, the Ford Motor Company was especially receptive to teams from both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; Ford’s own views may have aligned with the nationalist right, but business opportunities mixed with pride in the company’s reputation and state of the art facilities. Contracts with each country were complemented by a consultative, instructional approach, making Ford a target of reconnaissance beyond what the company might have intended. As Link details, several Ford workers—many of whom were European immigrants—migrated to Russia and Germany, and in some cases, particularly in the Nazi state, ascended to important positions within the war bureaucracy.
 
Ford’s pivotal role in the diffusion of technology stemmed from his distinction within U.S. industry. Ford was rightly regarded as a pioneer of mass production, which had generated unprecedented consumption in the U.S. economy while raising industry wages. Unlike Taylorist management, with its taxing fixation on individual employee performance, Fordism, Link explains, had “devised a system that turned lack of skill into a productive resource” that not only generated jobs but inculcated a collective sense of discipline within factory workers. Mass production, with its optimized flow methods that integrated repetitive, segmented tasks with scientific floor plans and automated machines, was not merely an achievement of Ford’s ingenuity. It manifested an economic philosophy that took on a special power for European postliberals seeking to emulate U.S. development precisely in order to undermine U.S. dominance.
 
At the center of Ford’s philosophy, according to Link, were particular, complementary notions of social progress and moral improvement with roots in Midwestern populism. Ford’s various press statements and publications during the 1910s and 1920s articulated a clear concept of social justice. Announcing the five-dollar day in 1914, his company stated that, “Social justice begins at home. We want those who have helped us to produce this great institution and are helping to maintain it, to share our prosperity.” Link notes that Ford tied this benefit to strict standards of personal conduct, and even for a time maintained an invasive “Sociological Department” to surveil workers. But this dynamic between rewards and responsibilities also reflected Ford’s view that the modern firm was a microcosm of society.
 
The “emphasis on justice, economic cooperation, and the cultivation of virtues,” Link writes, strongly “reasserted labor-republican notions of the nineteenth century,” including “the moral economy of the Knights of Labor” which “sought not to overcome capitalism through class struggle but to harness corporate organization and financial accumulation for the benefit of the laboring producers.” Visionary leadership, in Ford’s mind, inspired a synergistic relationship with labor, as exemplified by the core technicians whose creativity enhanced the scale and tempo of production. While it was incumbent upon workers to internalize discipline, the firm was obligated to envelop them within a communitarian culture, one that would recognize individual progress through interesting, advanced work, but would, above all, define the firm’s value on the basis of collective achievement.
 
Ford’s ideals thus corresponded, Link explains, to the German right’s fixation on the supposedly organic “reciprocity” between volk and leadership that was required of industrial progress. As a model of leadership and social organization, Fordism resonated deeply with postliberals seeking to mold capitalism and the masses toward a unifying political economy. As formulated by German rightwing theorists of the Weimar period, Fordism embodied Dienst: “an ethos by which individuals cheerfully submitted to a larger purpose or directed their energies to the presumed benefit of the Volk.” Refracted through a lens that exalted racial-national struggle, Fordism augmented early Nazi claims that National Socialism represented a true “socialism of leadership” (in the words of the economist Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld) and purposive “anti-capitalism,” as opposed to Marxism’s subversion of social order.

Crucially, Ford’s conception of social justice also deepened the postliberal right’s moral distinction between “productive” enterprises that rooted communities and the corrupting influence of global finance. Ford contrasted his motives to reinvest in production with the shareholder capitalism that shaped other firms, including Ford’s chief rival General Motors. According to Link, Ford believed his accomplishments “demonstrated that industry, released from the yoke of financial capital, could channel productivity increases into lower prices and higher wages.” Producers that constantly refined economies of scale thus had a social function that served the masses that distinguished them from other forms of enterprise, and entanglement with financiers would only undermine their “wealth-generating efficiency.”
 

Fordism was thus especially appealing to National Socialists in search of a political economy that could extinguish Marxism and social democracy but arouse communitarian sentiments toward a project of national renewal linking industrial modernization with racial purification. It combined the “moral” and “economic” arguments used to further legitimate Nazi ideology. During the 1920s, Ford’s critique of finance capitalism in My Life and Work—his most popular book, discerningly ghostwritten by the journalist Samuel Crowther and published in 1922—“rationalized” the blatant anti-Semitism he expressed in other publications. Industrial progress, and the moral improvement ascribed to it, was juxtaposed with the rent-seeking of which he and European nationalists accused Jews. Postliberals of the Weimar right took notice, and their contempt for the war debts that were enervating domestic production fueled anti-Semitic discourses that seeded the German public’s growing association of Jews with economic insecurity and Germany’s post-Versailles “subjugation.” Alleging economic difficulties were the fault of a Jewish conspiracy, the Nazi party and its allies luridly differentiated a predatory, “foreign” capitalism from industrialism in proper service to the nation.
 
Beyond its uses for propaganda, Fordism was critical to Nazi industrial policy once Hitler secured his dictatorship in spring 1933. In Germany the Depression manifested most acutely as a “Great Balance-of-Payments Crisis”—the burden of large U.S. loans and the absence of a resilient domestic market were amplifying Germany’s structural weaknesses. Link explains that for the early Nazi regime, the question of how to reinvigorate stagnant industry was the same that had beleaguered the Weimar Republic. Germany faced a declining share of export markets precisely because U.S. firms, particularly those of Detroit, were becoming globally dominant. The prospect of surrendering to U.S. dominance in automobiles was tantamount to permanent subordination in the global economy, threatening underdevelopment.
 
In a rich analysis of the regime’s various strategies to coerce industry, Link shows that by embedding Fordist mass production within a “steered market economy,” the Nazi state accelerated industrial growth, stimulated employment, and recovered badly needed foreign exchange. Hitler’s regime converted a “makeshift system of trade management and capital controls” into a strategy that “fortified export promotion,” “elbowed industry into developing import substitutes,” “systematically privilege[d] strategic sectors,” and diverted “resources from consumption to rearmament.” It also entailed a stealth manipulation of U.S.-owned multinationals that affixed them to the state’s burgeoning military-industrial complex. The state wielded tariffs against U.S. imports while imposing capital controls that forced Americans to reinvest in Germany and increasingly substitute German materials for U.S. exports. Oddly, Ford initially held out when it came to plant expansion, but by the start of World War II his company’s German division “was responsible for almost one-fifth of German truck production.”
 
Fordism thus underpinned Hitler’s grand strategy of acquiring Lebensraum. In Hitler’s vision, Link writes, “mass production had a precise double role: it was necessary to create and sustain the armaments complex that would allow the conquest and control of territory in which industry would supply a vast contiguous market with a standard of living to match America’s.” The obsession with control over a vast geopolitical space, inspired in part by America’s genocidal pursuit of continental dominion in the nineteenth century, reflected Hitler’s fervid security concerns. In the prospective postliberal world order, a Germanized Europe would be “self-sufficient” through a combination of advanced industry and the supply, through frontiersmen and slave labor, of essential raw materials and foodstuffs from Eurasia. Intellectuals aligned with National Socialism, such as the journalist Ferdinand Fried and the jurist Carl Schmitt, would elaborate upon this reconfiguration of world order, envisioning a future where landmass imperia would largely supplant the commerce of liberal internationalism and naval-based colonialism.

 
In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, the challenge of adapting a still largely agrarian society to Fordism was far more formidable than what Nazi Germany faced. The Great Depression had compounded the problems of industrialization: the price for grain exports—the Soviet Union’s main commodity—was falling at the same time that the state determined it was necessary to speed up the purchase of U.S. equipment As in Germany, the fascination with Fordist America had percolated Soviet thought during the 1920s. It was so influential, Link writes, that a “common trope in the NEP [New Economic Policy] ideological arsenal”—Vladimir Lenin’s economic proposal of 1921—“held that socialism equaled Soviet revolution plus American technology.” But the implementation of Fordism was not just a matter of acquiring the materials and techniques of mass production, pressing as that was. It also constantly entailed ideological pivots and smoothing. The imperative to convert largely unskilled masses, with little exposure to industrial machinery, into disciplined workers required expert management to accelerate development.
 
During the initial stages of this transformation, engineers who had trained during the late Tsarist period formed a substrata of tenuous factory leadership, subject both to threats and to penalties from party elites and antagonism from workers who rejected a hierarchy that cut against their notions of self-management. Soviet policymakers were determined to eradicate vestiges of craftsmanship and other forms of “backwardness” impeding the adoption of modern industrial organization, but they needed to maintain the loyalty of the workers. The overarching ideological premise of Soviet industrial policy, Link summarizes, was that “if capitalism was an anarchic system of jealous partitions, cross-purposes, and collective blindness, Soviet socialism would be a system of total and harmonic coordination,” and yet its implementation of Fordism fell far from that ideal.
 
Soviet policy, according to the party leadership, would distill Fordism to its scientific mechanisms, laying a foundation that would enable the country to obtain “economic independence” from the capitalist international system. This vision was consistent with Stalin’s pronouncement that socialism would be achieved first in one country. Beginning with the first Five-Year Plan in 1928, radical modernizers dominated Soviet industrial policy, leading to a punishing pursuit of Western technology transfers that resulted in horrific famine. Link insightfully argues that the decision to ramp up agricultural collectivization was not a tragic scheme born of ideological militancy and bureaucratic folly but instead a calculated risk to squeeze as much as grain export as possible out of the peasant population to pay for the machinery needed to build and bring online plants such as the Gorky Automobile Plant (GAZ). Like Hitler, Stalin understood the centrality of national auto works in a future war. National security, however it was framed, took precedence over the welfare of the Soviet—and especially Ukrainian—countryside.
 
For all the coercive strategies employed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Link meticulously notes that the assimilation of Fordism in both countries was incomplete through the beginning of World War II until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Soviet Union, in particular, had contended with a “hybrid industrial system” prone to frequent machine-based stoppages and enormous turnover. Continuing in the vein of the party-manipulated factory conflicts of the NEP era, the tendency of individual laborers to demonstrate “grassroots worker initiative” often further disrupted the mastery of flow methods. What ultimately ignited more rapid industrialization were the unprecedented demands of conducting total war.
 
Industrial policy in both countries thus took another radical turn. In Germany, Link writes, “high-profile production engineers, whose American credentials lent them authority vis-a-vis both the ministries and the firms, connected the state apparatus to the sphere of economic execution in the factories.” The rampant use of forced labor, which accounted for one third of the Nazi war economy, disposed of “reciprocity,” instead activating the most brutal and extreme authoritarian possibilities latent in Fordism. “Only where coercion and control was complete and the threat of violence was ever present could the assembly line achieve its disciplinary strength,” Link concludes.
 
The dramatic output of the Soviet Union after 1941, then, was all the more remarkable given the ferocity of Nazi military power. Despite the immense hardship and piecemeal progress of the 1930s, Link underscores that the Soviets had in fact laid the groundwork for the wartime conversion of facilities and production methods. “For the remainder of the war,” he writes, “the Soviet Union decisively outmatched Germany in the war of the factories in every weapons category except ships and submarines.” In a war of national survival, the simultaneous mobilization of the army to the battlefield and displaced peasants into the factories hastened the full implementation of a command economy in accord with Fordist methods. The range of armaments were restricted in favor of a relentless output of key weaponry that could wring maximum raw efficiency out of an unskilled, malnourished workforce. On this score, Link notes that although “the Soviet Union had less steel at its disposal than all the other belligerents, it built more tanks and aircraft per available unit of steel than all the other belligerents combined.” The book vividly captures how this rapid transformation of Soviet industry repelled Hitler’s exterminatory quest for Lebensraum.
 

While the world depicted in Forging Global Fordism seems at first blush far removed from our own, the book makes a convincing case that in all its various guises, it was Fordism—perhaps more than any other system of social organization—that shaped our present, and now deeply uncertain, world order. Reflecting on the postwar recovery in Western Europe, Link addresses a deeply unsettling legacy of National Socialist industrial policy: Volkswagen and other German automakers had been primed for mass production through the various forms of support and compulsion Hitler’s regime administered. Their energies no longer siphoned into a war economy, Fordist consumption in the American sense could finally take off in a democratic West Germany allied with the United States. Rather than consider the industrial strategies of the Nazi state in isolation—and therefore as merely reflecting the choices of a mercurial and fanatical chain of command—Link perceptively suggests that “historians might look to the many other authoritarian, activist, and development-oriented states of the twentieth century” for substantive comparison.
 
It is worth recalling that the rise of different activist states in the 1930s all had a common focus on public works and infrastructure. This structural feature fed back into the international race to grow economies of scale that centered on the innovations, supply chains, and value-added inputs of national auto industries. Once we step back from Link’s close reading of the factors that established Fordism in the central antagonists of World War II, we can more fully observe the developmental state in all its various incarnations, from liberal democratic to totalitarian. Its successes have depended not just on the implementation of Fordism, but on the particular ways the state oversees the Fordist relationship between industry and labor.
 
That contingency helps put the ascent and subsequent post-industrial underdevelopment of the United States in historical, comparative perspective. Among the activist states of the twentieth century the most successful was Roosevelt’s New Deal, and it benefited significantly from the fact that Fordism had already matured in the United States. Because America maintained its edge in technology and industrial capacity, the shift to a war economy enabled it to outgun Nazi Germany while sparing Americans the levels of sacrifice that the Nazi, Soviet, and other war economies inflicted on their populations. Fordist manufacturing, in turn, became inextricable from conceits about the American Century; for decades it defined U.S. growth and the postwar idea that growth would ensure shared prosperity. Although Ford himself was virulently anti-union, a more assertive regulatory state that supported union rights molded, rather than blotted out, his producer populism.
 

In retrospect, the historic labor-capital compromise of the postwar era transformed the “cooperation” that Ford extolled into technocratic, state-mediated industrial relations. When that system was abandoned, most abruptly in the United States, in pursuit of a flexible, high-tech “knowledge” economy, industrial policy was subject to the new political taboo against strong government. In turn, industrial policy became the domain of China—now the world’s largest car manufacturer—and a few other late twentieth-century developmental states, while the much heralded new American economy became concentrated in a handful of globalized U.S. cities, barely reaching de-industrialized regions.

 The international and domestic political tensions this policy regime has produced give the lie to the midcentury promise of permanent, self-sustaining, and inclusive economic growth. In a tacit negation of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, Link concludes that “the type of development competition that spread Fordism . . . will continue to be with us, shaping a global economic order that is ever contested, never finished.” One might add that elites who ignore signs of underdevelopment in democratic societies overestimate the durability of institutions and norms in the absence of a collective stake in where the economic future lies.

 Taken together, these historical insights suggest that the resurgence of rightwing populism today may reflect a final, belated crisis of Fordism. It thus poses a distinct philosophical and policy dilemma. The paradox of the Fordist era for Western countries is that it symbolizes the historic conversion of oppressive factory work into an unequalled period of shared prosperity and economic democracy. On the one hand, the manufacturing jobs of the past were hardly what we think of as good jobs today, and many disappeared through automation rather than trade deals. On the other hand, the zenith of manufacturing correlated with high rates of unionization, a stronger public sector, and levels of taxation that encouraged reinvestment.

  In some quarters the left has developed a tendency toward nostalgia for this period of more broadly shared prosperity. An important inference to be drawn from Link’s book is that we must resist a too simple embrace of its industrial policy, for it can easily ramify in ideologically unfavorable directions. For the communitarian right—not so far removed ideologically from the postliberals of the interwar period—the Fordist era represents not social democracy but the cultural cohesion and natalist values that paternalistic corporations once encouraged. As much as most conservatives have assailed the welfare state, it is conceivable that some will embrace industrial policy—and thus some version of a steered economy—in response to the cumulative pressures of underdevelopment and a more unstable phase in global affairs.

 History warns that this particular turn toward dirigisme can quickly cohere with illiberal and belligerent visions of national renewal. To militate against this outcome, progressives will have to redouble efforts to frame the Green New Deal as the surest way to create millions of new, decent jobs that revitalize the economy. By invoking U.S. mobilization during World War II, and the cooperation upon which victory depended, any left committed to an egalitarian future must ultimately reconcile the traces of Henry Ford’s world in the new one being born.

  

The World Henry Ford Made. By Justin H. Vassallo. Boston Review , October 14, 2020.

Princeton University Press