Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch Page A
Authors: David Aaronovitch
Tags: General, Social Science, History, Conspiracies, World, Historiography, Civilization, Conspiracy Theories, Popular Culture, Conspiracies - History, .verified
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extract from a longer document, removed from the “Zionist executive archives” somewhere in France. Six years later, however, the picture had become more complex. In the 1911 edition, Nilus gave the following account:
In 1901 a now deceased acquaintance, Court Marshal Alexei Sukhotin of Tchernigov, gave into my possession a handwritten manuscript that detailed completely and clearly the secret Jewish-Freemason conspiracy that will surely lead to the end of our vile world. The person who gave me this manuscript assured me that it was a faithful translation of the original document. It had been stolen by a lady from one of the highest and most influential leaders of the Freemasons following a secret meeting in France . . . He mentioned her by name, but I have forgotten it. 21
No Basel Congress, no crack team of scribes in Frankfurt, but a postcoital robbery by a brave lady.
Other publishers had variations on the theme. A French translator, Roger Lambelin, claimed the Protocols were stolen from an iron chest in a town in Alsace (then part of Germany) by the mistress of a top Freemason. A Polish translator averred that they were stolen from the home of the father of Zionism, Dr. Theodor Herzl himself. Theodor Fritsch, a German, told readers that the text had been confiscated during a house search by the Saint Petersburg police, who gave it to Nilus for translation.
Hermann Bernstein was an American journalist and diplomat who, on his return from an assignment in the Far East in January 1919, was asked by his editor at the New York Herald to take a look at the Protocols . They had been brought in to the newspaper by a Dr. Harris Houghton, who was connected with the army intelligence department. Houghton was enthusiastic, saying the documents were his “prized possession” and had been given to him by his assistant, a young woman named Natalie de Bogory, who, in turn, had acquired them from Russian exile Boris Brasol. Hermann Bernstein took a look and, unlike Henry Ford and Ernest Liebold, saw at once that they were a crude hoax, bearing no relationship to Jewish custom or life.
Bernstein also understood how dangerous the Protocols were.
Instead of verifying them, he set about exposing them. In February 1921, as a result of his researches, Bernstein published a book called The History of a Lie . This detailed the transfiguration of the cemetery scene in Goedsche’s potboiler, but it also referred to a meeting in 1909 between Sergei Nilus and a French-Russian nobleman, Count Alexandre du Chayla. Although Nilus lived in a villa outside Moscow in a rather irreligious ménage with his wife and mistress, this encounter had taken place under the auspices of Archimandrite Xenophont at the monastery of Optina Pustyn in the district of Kaluga. After dinner, as du Chayla recounted later, the conversation turned to the Protocols . And here Nilus elaborated upon his earlier explanations. His mistress, said Nilus, was the woman who had brought him the manuscript, but she had acquired it in Paris from a “General Ratchkovsky,” who had given her a manuscript removed, he said, from the secret archives of the Freemasons in France.
Piotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky was no invention. A former student radical turned secret policeman, he was, from 1884 to 1903, the head of the external branch of the Okhrana, based in Paris. Rachkovsky was not a bureaucrat by nature. He was a speculator, a politician, an author, a provocateur, an employer of assassins and, most notably, a forger. In 1892, he forged a newspaper letter from the Russian radical exile Plekhanov, and the following week some letters supposedly from other radicals attacking Plekhanov. And in the same year, under the pseudonym Jehan-Préval, he published a book, Anarchism and Nihilism , which argued, among other things, that following the French Revolution the Jews had become the masters of the continent, “governing by discreet means both monarchies and republics.” This
In 1901 a now deceased acquaintance, Court Marshal Alexei Sukhotin of Tchernigov, gave into my possession a handwritten manuscript that detailed completely and clearly the secret Jewish-Freemason conspiracy that will surely lead to the end of our vile world. The person who gave me this manuscript assured me that it was a faithful translation of the original document. It had been stolen by a lady from one of the highest and most influential leaders of the Freemasons following a secret meeting in France . . . He mentioned her by name, but I have forgotten it. 21
No Basel Congress, no crack team of scribes in Frankfurt, but a postcoital robbery by a brave lady.
Other publishers had variations on the theme. A French translator, Roger Lambelin, claimed the Protocols were stolen from an iron chest in a town in Alsace (then part of Germany) by the mistress of a top Freemason. A Polish translator averred that they were stolen from the home of the father of Zionism, Dr. Theodor Herzl himself. Theodor Fritsch, a German, told readers that the text had been confiscated during a house search by the Saint Petersburg police, who gave it to Nilus for translation.
Hermann Bernstein was an American journalist and diplomat who, on his return from an assignment in the Far East in January 1919, was asked by his editor at the New York Herald to take a look at the Protocols . They had been brought in to the newspaper by a Dr. Harris Houghton, who was connected with the army intelligence department. Houghton was enthusiastic, saying the documents were his “prized possession” and had been given to him by his assistant, a young woman named Natalie de Bogory, who, in turn, had acquired them from Russian exile Boris Brasol. Hermann Bernstein took a look and, unlike Henry Ford and Ernest Liebold, saw at once that they were a crude hoax, bearing no relationship to Jewish custom or life.
Bernstein also understood how dangerous the Protocols were.
Instead of verifying them, he set about exposing them. In February 1921, as a result of his researches, Bernstein published a book called The History of a Lie . This detailed the transfiguration of the cemetery scene in Goedsche’s potboiler, but it also referred to a meeting in 1909 between Sergei Nilus and a French-Russian nobleman, Count Alexandre du Chayla. Although Nilus lived in a villa outside Moscow in a rather irreligious ménage with his wife and mistress, this encounter had taken place under the auspices of Archimandrite Xenophont at the monastery of Optina Pustyn in the district of Kaluga. After dinner, as du Chayla recounted later, the conversation turned to the Protocols . And here Nilus elaborated upon his earlier explanations. His mistress, said Nilus, was the woman who had brought him the manuscript, but she had acquired it in Paris from a “General Ratchkovsky,” who had given her a manuscript removed, he said, from the secret archives of the Freemasons in France.
Piotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky was no invention. A former student radical turned secret policeman, he was, from 1884 to 1903, the head of the external branch of the Okhrana, based in Paris. Rachkovsky was not a bureaucrat by nature. He was a speculator, a politician, an author, a provocateur, an employer of assassins and, most notably, a forger. In 1892, he forged a newspaper letter from the Russian radical exile Plekhanov, and the following week some letters supposedly from other radicals attacking Plekhanov. And in the same year, under the pseudonym Jehan-Préval, he published a book, Anarchism and Nihilism , which argued, among other things, that following the French Revolution the Jews had become the masters of the continent, “governing by discreet means both monarchies and republics.” This
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