The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Will Eisner, W.W. Norton paperback, 2006, 148 pages, $14.95

By Donald H. Harrison

The late Will Eisner's graphic history , The Plot, finally has been brought out in a paperback edition. In easy to read cartoon format, the book documents how anti-Semites in Imperial Russia hatched the idea of persuading Czar Nicholas II to resist modernization and westernization of his country by describing such ideas as part of an international Jewish conspiracy for world domination.  One thing they could be certain of: Czar Nicholas II hated Jews.

Accordingly, the Russian reactionaries Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky and Ivan Gorymikine eventually found a man who had become quite good at forging anti-Semitic documents both for Russia's Secret Police and the Holy Synod, a right wing Christian extremist group.  For his activities, Mathieu Golovinski had been exiled from Russia, but Gorymikine and Rachkovsky were able to use their influence to bring him back to Russia.

His efforts to produce a convincing document proving a Jewish conspiracy were unsuccessful until Rachkovsky pulled down from his book shelf  The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu by Maurice Joly.  It had been written in 1864 in a thinly disguised attempt to undermine the government and credibility of Napoleon III. Golovinski used this as a model in 1898  to write The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.  In fact, passage after passage of the Protocols are plagiarized from Dialogue—which Eisner graphically illustrated in this book.

Once the Protocols were produced, someone whom Czar Nicholas II trusted had to be enlisted to pretend to be the author. Sergius Nilus, a court mystic who some compared to Rasputin, accepted that role, publishing Protocols  under his name in 1905 in a book then known as The Great in the Small.

Translated into many languages, the Protocols influenced many well-known people, including Winston Churchill, then a young member of the Parliament.  In a 1920 article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald, Churchill suggested that there was a competition for the minds of Jewish people, pitting Zionists on one side of the equation and such "International Jews" on the other as Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxembourg and Emma Goldman whose collective  goal is the "overthrow of civilization" and "the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality."

Another famous figure, Henry Ford, purchased the Dearborn Independent in 1920 and began serializing The International Jew based on the Protocols.

A year later, in Constantinople, Russian emigre Mihail Raslovlev approached Philip Graves, a correspondent for the Times of London. Seeking payment for his detective work, Raslovlev said he had proof that the Protocols were a forgery.  He produced copies of both the Protocols and The Dialogue and together the two men did a side-by-side comparison.

In the opening pages of Dialogue, Machiavelli says:

The evil instinct in man is more powerful than the good.  Man leans more toward the evil than the good; fear and power have more control over him than reason...All men seek power, and there is none who would not be an oppressor if he could; all, or nearly all, are ready to sacrifice the rights of others to their own interests.   What restrains these ravenous animals that we call men?  In the beginnings of society, it is brute force, without control; later, it is the law, that is, force again, ruled by certain forms.  Political liberty is only a relative idea...

Here is a passage from the opening of Protocols: 

It must be noted that men with bad instincts are more in number than the good, and therefore the best results in governing them are attained by violence and terrorization, and not by academic discussions. Every man aims at power, everyone would like to become a dictator if only he could, and rare indeed are the men who would not be willing to sacrifice the welfare of all for the sake of securing their own welfare.  What has restrained the beasts of prey who are called men?  What has served for their guidance hitherto?  In the beginnings of the structure of society they were subjected to brute and blind force; afterwards to law, which is the same force, only disguised.  I draw the conclusion that by the law of nature right lies in force. Political freedom is an idea but not a fact.

Eisner illustrated Raslovlev and Graves finding 16 other such convincing comparisons.  In 1921, The Times published an expose showing how the one was plagiarized from another, but the story did not kill the beast.  Anti Semites continued to find it useful, most notably Adolf Hitler who wrote in Mein Kampf: "To what extent the whole existence of this [Jewish] people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In 1926, Henry Ford was threatened with a libel suit, so he issued a retraction, saying that he had learned the Protocols were a forgery and that he deemed it his duty "to make amends for the wrong done to the Jews as fellow men and brothers by asking their forgiveness." 

In 1933, the Nazi party in Switzerland published the Protocols, prompting a defamation lawsuit against them by the United Jewish Communities.  The courts ruled in favor of the Jewish community and against the Nazis saying "ways ought to be found to forbid such defamation."  In South Africa, a court came to a similar ruling.  Nevertheless, the group libel was published and republished all over the world.  In 1964, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee headed by Senators Thomas J. Dodd and Kenneth B. Keating issued a report describing the Protocols as "one of a number of fraudulent documents that peddle the myth of an 'International Jewish Conspiracy.'

But these were sand castles built against the waves of anti-Semitism. Eisner's book illustrates how Protocols continued to be published  in many languages, figuring in numerous demonstrations and acts of anti-Semitism around the world.  Eisner even told of visiting a campus demonstration in San Diego in 2001 in which he saw a pamphlet urging people to read Protocols "for the truth about the Jews."

Eisner's book portrays the Protocols as a many-headed hydra that just cannot be killed by the truth.
One of the answers to the riddle of Protocols'  longevity is answered right on the back cover of the book, where it says $14.95 USA $19.50 Can.  These are fair prices, no doubt, but how many people who are gullible enough to believe Protocols in the first place will be willing to shell out any money at all to read a learned response—even one illustrated by a cartoonist so famous that the industry has named its awards for cartooning excellence "The Eisners"?  

Think about it, the presses of the anti-Semites pump out the Protocols for free—even adapt them for viewing on Arab television—while the forces of reason try to persuade only those people who, one by one, are willing to invest in the truth.  Which strategy is more effective?