Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch

secret police, the Okhrana. “Among these books,” Graves wrote, “was a small volume in French, lacking the title page, with dimensions of 5½ by 3½ inches. On the leather back was printed in Latin capitals the word Joli.” The book appeared to have been published in the 1860s or 1870s, and the preface was placed and dated to “Geneva, 15 October 1864.”
    What was in this small book was sensational. For Mr. X, leafing through it idly one day, was suddenly struck by the resemblance between the passage he was reading and something he’d seen in the Protocols . He began a line-by-line textual comparison, and the truth rapidly became clear: the Protocols were a substantial paraphrase of this book. And in many places not even a paraphrase, but a direct copy, a plagiarism. Whoever had composed them had done so after first reading this very publication. And if that were true, the Protocols couldn’t possibly be an account of an event that had happened thirty years after the “Joli” book was published.
    The French book was not about Jews at all; in fact, it didn’t even mention them. Its subject was French politics in the 1860s, the period of the corrupt Second Empire of Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon or Napoleon III. The emperor was no liberal—direct printed criticism of him was banned—and the small book bought by Mr. X was an allegorical satire of him written in the form of an encounter in Hell between two historical figures—Machiavelli and the French philosopher Montesquieu. The author was a Parisian lawyer, Maurice Joly, and the book had probably been published in Brussels and then smuggled into France. The fact that it was allegorical did not prevent the courageous Joly from being tried for sedition, fined, and imprisoned for fifteen months.
    In the book, Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu , the best, wickedest lines belong to Napoleon III in the shape of Machiavelli. He explains to the sidelined Montesquieu the need for the ruthless use of power, the control of business and the media, and how to set rivals against each other—all things the emperor’s enemies accused him of at the time. His is a language of total cynicism.
    Scholars suggest that Protocols One to Nineteen correspond to Dialogues One to Seventeen. 20 According to the historian Norman Cohn, a total of 160 passages, or two-fifths of the total text of the Protocols , is lifted directly from Joly. Readers will recall the excerpt from Protocol Twelve quoted earlier, concerning control of the press (see page 23) . They can now compare it with this, from Machiavelli in the Dialogues :
    I shall count on devoted journals in each party. I shall have an aristocratic one in the aristocratic party, a republican one in the republican party, a revolutionary one in the revolutionary party, an anarchist one, if necessary, in the anarchist party. Like the God Vishnu, my press will have a hundred arms, each hand of which will feel the nuances of public opinion.
    Whoever transformed the Dialogues into the Protocols couldn’t even be bothered to change the categories or the order in which they appeared.
    The Times refutation, written by Graves and titled “The End of the Protocols ,” appeared over three days in August 1921, and should, one might imagine, have brought the curtain down on the matter. Even the Spectator was now calling the Protocols a “malignant lunacy.” There were, however, a couple of questions remaining, of which the most interesting was, who had done it? Who had forged the Protocols , when, and why?

    From Nilus to Rachkovsky
    Zur Beek had claimed that the Protocols had been secretly transcribed by the Okhrana in 1897, taken back to Russia, and translated and studied by certain scholars, among them Sergei Nilus, who had published them in 1905. Nilus himself, it turned out, had another view. Or, rather, several other views. In the epilogue to the 1905 edition of his book, he had claimed that the Protocols were an