Peter Myers B.A.Hons B.Sc.
4th November 1999
Garry Greenwood's article on the Japanese Mahikari sect and the Protocols of Zion, in Exposure magazine Vol 3 No 6, implies a connection between Mahikari and Nazism. He mentions, for example, that the main Mahikari temple in Japan features swasticas (as well as the Star of David), yet swasticas are a standard symbol on Buddhist and Jain temples too, because these religions originated among the Aryan population of India. Would the Nazi party have featured the Star of David alongside the swastica? The Theosphical society does just that, for example on the front door of its shop in Melbourne.
Mahikari is an eclectic religion, blending elements from Christianity, Shinto, and Buddhism, and, as Garry Greenwood showed, also drawing on the Protocols of Zion. The latter is not surprising, however, because the Protocols is freely available in Japan. Not, as one might think, because the Japanese are anti-Jewish, but because the Protocols - whoever wrote it - seems to contain a manual on the Capitalist system. There is reason to believe that Japanese leaders have used its inside information to avoid pitfalls such as foreign debt (which, on the contrary, we are mired in).
Any discussion of the Protocols of Zion is very delicate, on account of the terrible tragedy which happened to Jews at Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Nazi ideology did make use of the Protocols, and for that reason this book has become the most tabooed publication in the world. Yet Stalin and Mao each killed about as many people as Hitler, but nobody has tried to ban the Communist Manifesto on that account. Nor has anyone tried to ban the New Testament on account of the Inquisition. It is dangerous to ban books: book-burning has always been the mark of fanatics. How can one understand Nazism without reading the Protocols? And Henry Ford persuaded the U.S. Senate not to join the League of Nations, on the basis of the Protocols. Specifically, articles 10 and 16 of the League Covenant provided for a world army, and Henry Ford likened this to the plans for world government described in the Protocols. How can one understand such an important event in our century's history, if one is not allowed to read the Protocols?
The Protocols was first published in Russia by Professor Sergius Nilus, who stated that he had received a copy via dissident Jews who were privy to a plot to destroy existing societies and create a world government. A copy was registered in the British Museum on 10th August 1906. The original is generally dated about 1897, year of the first Zionist Congress. The main attack on the Protocols is Norman Cohn's book Warrant For Genocide. The Protocols had three ma jor distributions: (1) in Russia among the anti-Bolshevik forces during the Revolution, from which it also spread to Japan (2) in Western Europe and the U.S. during the 1920s and 30s, and (3) by President Nasser in the 1950s & 60s.
The claim that the Protocols is a forgery has not been proved. It is based on parallel passages with a book written by French socialist Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, published in 1864, in which the Goy/Jewish terms are omitted. Yet in the case of the Gospels, parallel passages are taken as evidence, not of forgery, but of a common source in a third document. The forgery argument is unsustainable because the Protocols' sophisticated language (including words such as "perquisitions", "interpellation", "cognizance", "cassate", "rebutment", "apotheosis", "inexpugnable") and its great length show that it was meant for an extremely-highly-educated elite, whereas literature to rouse the masses to anti-semitism would have been much shorter and used simple language - as the Communist Manifesto does.
When I first read this book, I immediately noticed the correspondences between its information about Capitalism, and what Marx had written. During the 1970s, the works of Marx were widely available in bookshops, and most included his paper On the Jewish Question, which takes a line very similar to the Protocols. Nobody thought of suppressing this and other similar material of Marx then, and I have not seen any such demands since then either. Marx is not accused of antisemitism, because he himself was a Jew; his Jewish critics instead label him "self-hating", a label applied to all Jewish critics of Judaism, as if it suffices to rebut their argument. This classic technique of argumentum ad hominem is the propagandist's favourite weapon: the one-word reply. Ironically, the Protocols claims to be using the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche (deconstruction, the basis of fascism, the current fashion in our universities) to undermine the social order, by giving favourable treatment of them in the media (Protocol 2). Marx was not out to disparage Jews in a racial sense, as the Nazis did. Rather, he wanted to change them culturally. He argued that Jewish financiers had historically invented the Capitalist system, during the Middle Ages, and that they were still its backbone. The veracity of Marx' analysis has recently been endorsed by a leading Jewish writer, Israel Shahak, in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion, to which Gore Vidal supplied a foreword. Noam Chomsky (also Jewish) describes Shahak, on the front cover, as "an outstanding scholar, with remarkable insight".
Shahak explains how fanatical rabbis nurtured a hate for non-Jews over many centuries: "non-Jews ... are considered to be, literally, limbs of Satan" (p. 16). The Talmud interpreted the rules of compassion to apply only to Jews, and commanded that gentiles be enslaved (p. 95). The Jewish magazine Commentary has led the Far Right's attack on Rabin and other "post-Zionists". An article Reading the Israeli Electorate in the October 1996 issue said that under Rabin, "a professor who had compared the Bible to Mein Kampf and the Israeli Defense Forces to the SS was put in charge of reforming the history curriculum". An article Jewish Liberalism Revisited in the November 1996 issue, attacking Jewish liberals for their universalism, said "Jewish religious values, as expressed in the Bible, the Talmud, and later rabbinic literature, are ethnocentric rather than universalistic. In most traditional sources, Jews are commanded to assist the Jewish poor but not necessarily the non-Jewish poor, to return the lost objects of their fellow Jews but not the lost objects of non-Jews; and so forth." It is precisely against this ethnocentrism that Karl Marx was campaigning. Although Marx was anti-Zionist, the "red rabbi" who converted him (and Engels) to communism, Moses Hess, later denounced communism and went on to found the modern, secular form of Zionism, with his book Rome and Jerusalem.
The Protocols, allegedly a secret transcript of a series of lectures, identifies its author, not as the Jews per se, as commonly represented, but as the holders of Capital: "The despotism of Capital, which is entirely in our hands ..." (Protocol 1). This word, Capital, relates directly to Karl Marx' designation of the present economic systyem as "Capitalism" - he invented this word. In other words, the Protocols purports to be a secret document setting out the methods by which the Capitalist system is operated, by the very small, educated and privileged elite that controls it; an elite that would control and manipulate Jews as much as non-Jews. It is because this document may indeed be authentic, that it is so important; for if its accidental release indeed spilled the beans, then its discrediting is the disinformation campaign of the century. How did Karl Marx know about the secret role of Jewish financiers as major providers of loans for the governments of Europe, as evidenced in his papers The Jewish Bankers of Europe and The Russian Loan? He must have been informed by Jewish sources involved in this world of finance; just as the Protocols text was, according to Nilus, divulged by dissident Jews, presumably risking their lives to do so. Those who do take the Protocols seriously, and act on them, should always remember their debt to such courageous Jewish dissidents, and be careful not to target "Jews" per se. The fate of Yitzhak Rabin and Mordecai Vanunu shows the risk that dissident writers such as Ari Ben-Menashe, Victor Ostrovsky, Israel Shahak, and even Noam Chomsky, take.
It is dangerous to envisage some sort of collective authorship of the Protocols; it is safest to assume that, if genuine, it records lectures given by one person. Even if some Jews have aspired to world government, they are not the only ones to do so. There is also an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy, operating through the Round Table, the Council On Foreign Relations, and the Mont Pelerin Society, whose roots in the British Empire are described by Carroll Quigley in The Anglo-American Establishment. The British Empire's chief ideologist at the time of World War I, Lionel Curtis, stated its aim as reuniting the United States with the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world in one unchallengable World State (The Commonwealth of Nations, p. 701). The Germans, the Chinese, the Russians and the Japanese have all been accused of desiring world dominance. Other writers have called the Vatican a would-be world government.
Jews have by no means constituted the majority of communists, but their participation rate in the European revolutions of 1848, 1917, and 1968 (Paris) was many times greater (often 30 times greater) than for non-Jews. Why was this so? Because they had had a long tradition of being outsiders. They were an educated people, the most urban people in the world, who had studied the majority communities (Christian, Moslem etc.) in which they lived, and could see through the religious bigotry and ethnic chauvinism of their fellow non-Jews. Their unease had been compounded by Christianity's habit of portraying itself as Post-Jewish, i.e. that the Christian New Covenant began when the Old one "ended", when the Jews rejected Jesus. This concept of history gave the Jews no space in which to exist legitimately; and it was coupled with the New Testament's portayal of them, in the Passion scenes which defined that rejection, as Judas, Caiphas, and the mob which chose Barabbas, an exclusively evil guise which can only be corrected by the admission that the gospels were not, after all, written by or on behalf of God, but the work of man.
Christianity is thus not only partly responsible for Auschwitz, but also for many of the Jewish excesses in the early years of the Soviet regime, when their prominence in the Cheka (KGB) allowed them to vent their frustrations on their former Christian masters, in what the Anarchist leader Prince Kropotkin described (in a letter to Lenin) as a return to the religious wars of the Middle Ages. Lenin himself was Jewish, but secretly so, unlike Marx, and much more oriented towards dictatorship and careless of cruelty. He created the merciless Soviet state, which under Stalin purged the Jews of their high places, and whose record of killing was not inferior to Hitler's; but Lenin and Stalin came first. Volkogonov's biography Lenin, drawing on the newly-opened archives of the USSR, smashes all the illusions about this god. Yet could George Soros' recent expose of its evils of Capitalism be the equivalent of Kruschev's 1956 speech - the beginning of the end for it too?
The key to understanding the barrier between Jews and Christians is provided by Hyam Maccoby, author of The Sacred Executioner: this is a book about human sacrifice. In the Ancient World, it was common to dedicate great buildings to a god by burying a sacrificial victim in their foundations: the Great Wall of China would have many. Maccoby's insights relate to those of Rene Girard about the linkage between violence and the sacred. Certain epic acts in the past - "heroic" acts - have "sacra mental" value for us as we relive them. The Catholic mass is the sacrifice of the mass, in which Jesus is a hu man sacrifice. Jesus' body is recreated on the altar (a place of sacrifice, a sacred barbecue) by the priest and communally eaten by the community. This act goes back thousands of years: Jesus himself was a fig ure in the mould of Osiris, and James Frazer showed in The Golden Bough that other annual gods symbolising the vege tative cycle of spring and harvest, died, were ritually eaten by their devotees, and were reborn next spring.
For Jews, the chief sacrifice was Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac, commemorated at the Rock of Ages, the main sacred site of Judaism, the site of the First and Second Temples, although non-Jewish ones may have preceded them. Maccoby points out that in the Bible story, Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac to Yahweh, when an angel appears giving him a lamb as a substitute. But it looks as if Isaac was saved by an editor rather than an angel: a later scribe, re-copying the manuscript, changed the story: the site is sacred because Isaac is buried there. So now we have two human sacrifices: that of Isaac, inaugurating the Jewish Covenant with Yahweh; and that of Jesus, inaugurating, from the Christian point of view, the New Covenant, i.e. ending the Old one. And according to the New Testament, the sacrifice of Jesus was done by the Jews, symbolised by Judas, the mob choosing to free Barabbas rather than Jesus, and the High Priest. So there is a fundamental contradic tion between Judaism and Christianity, in terms of their foundation sacrifices. No amount of apologising by the Pope can overcome this contradiction, because every crucifix points to it; every cross is offensive. The only way would be to abandon the New Testament and the notion of a New Covenant breaking the Old: this would be the end of Christianity.
But there is a third sacrifice. The Nazi genocide of the Jews, symbolised by Auschwitz, is also a human sacri fice, that human sacrifice which has been made the foundation of the modern state of Israel. That is why the Israelis can never get over it or forget it: it has sacramental value for them. They must forever mark the Nazis and the Germans as sacred executioners, just as Christians themselves mark the Jews in this way.
The assassins of Rabin are willing to risk a third world war in the Middle East, to build the Third Temple. The First (Solomon's) was destroyed by Babylon (Iraq) in 586BC, the Second by Rome in 70AD, but the raised platform built by Herod, the Temple Mount, remains, and upon it are the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, a shrine marking the site whence Mohammad ascended to Heaven. The holiest site of Judaism is the third-holiest site of Islam, after Mecca and Medina. But Zion has waited 1900 years for this moment; will Islam be allowed to stand in the way?
Rebuilding the Temple is the major goal of the Zionist movement, and quite possibly of Freemasonry. Roger Kamenetz, in The Jew in the Lotus (a book about a coming-together betwen Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism), writes "Both Muslims and Jews consider the same site, the Temple Mount, to be sacred ground, just as now Muslims and Hindus were claiming the same temple site in Ayodha" (p. 163). The demolition of the mosque and Dome and rebuilding of the Temple would be a terrible loss of face for Islam - a threat to its very existence. After Carthage fell to Rome, Jerusalem became the main Semitic city, and many Phoenicians, scattered around the Mediterranean, appear to have converted to Judaism (Lionel Curtis, Civitas Dei, Book 1, pp. 96-103); a wholesale conversion from Islam to Judaism cannot be ruled out. An expansion of its borders is openly canvassed in Israel, according to Israel Shahak (op. cit., pp. 8-13); this would fulfil Genesis 15:18: 'On that day Yahweh made a covenant with Abram, saying, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates"'. As for relations with Arabs, they are indicated by the story of Ishmael, born to Abram's Egyptian slave.
Judaism was once a major proselytsing religion in the Roman Empire; it was only the schism caused by Christianity, and the loss of many of the converts to it, which put an end to such missionary activity. The Fall of Jerusalem to the Roman army in 70AD, and the destruction of the Second Temple, had a devastating effect on the early Christians (see S.G.F. Brandon, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church). It enabled the "Hellenistic" faction, associated with Paul and Rome, to triumph over the "Jewish" faction, associated with James and Jerusalem (Robert Eisenmann, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians and James the Brother of Jesus). It facilitated the momentous shift of religious centre from Jerusalem to Rome. Prior to the destruction, Christians worshipped in the Temple, and both Jewish and Gentile Christians venerated it as their chief shrine. Now, with Rome in disarray, a rebuilt Third Temple could similarly become the chief shrine, not only for Jews but for Christians too. The emotion generated by this historic shift would probably be a catalyst for a cultural shift, in the Western world as a whole, away from the current Hellenism (now called New Age) and back to Hebraism.