Trump's Dangerous Conspiracy Theory (Republished with permission of The Atlantic)
Blame the “international banks.” controlled by the Jews is the central concept of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Russian: Протоколы сионских мудрецов) or The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is an antisemitic fabricated text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The forgery was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. According to the claims made by some of its publishers, the Protocols are the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemonyby subverting the morals of Gentiles, and by controlling the press and the world's economies.
Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies that were distributed throughout the U.S. in the 1920s. Adolf Hitler was a major proponent. It was studied, as if factual, in German classrooms after the Nazis came to power in 1933,[1] despite having been exposed as fraudulent by The Times ofLondon in 1921. It is still widely available today in numerous languages, in print and on the Internet, and continues to be presented by some proponents as a genuine document.
From Wikipedia Article On The Protocols of the Elders of Zion)
When Donald Trump took the stage in his own defense on Thursday, he didn’t just denounce the women who had accused him of sexual assault; he didn’t merely attack the media outlets that had aired their stories. He came out swinging, denouncing his foes as tools of a global conspiracy against decent Americans:
It's a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful large corporations and political entities. Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit, Flint, Michigan, and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and all across our country. Take a look at what's going on. They've stripped away these towns bare, and raided the wealth for themselves, and taken our jobs away, out of our country, never to return unless I'm elected president.
The Clinton Machine is at the center of this power structure. We've seen this first hand in the Wikileaks documents, in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks, to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global interest powers, her special interest friends, and her donors.
So true. Honestly, she should be locked up. She should be.
This sort of rhetoric comes back into style every few decades in America. Politicians tell Americans that a sinister conspiracy is to blame for their misery. In 1951, for example, Joe McCarthy inveighed against “a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” And there’s an odd comfort to conspiratorial thinking: Instead of finding themselves at the mercy of complex forces that grind ahead to a logic of their own, conspiracy theories encourage audiences to detect the machinations of puppet-masters pulling the strings. If there’s a small group of people to be blamed, then their work can be stopped, or even reversed. The human mind is a spectacular tool for discerning patterns; so superb, in fact, that it can create patterns where only randomness prevails.
But the specific conspiracy matters, too. Trump was speaking to local communities suffering from a feeling of dislocation, a sense that they have lost control of their own destiny and are at the mercy of shadowy forces. He charged that Clinton and other corrupt politicians are plundering the American heartland, despoiling it as part of a cabal of “international banks” and “global interests,” taking American wealth and funneling it abroad.
That language has a complicated history in America. It has sometimes been used by those who loathe the lords of finance in straightforward and uncomplicated ways. But at least as often, it has been invoked by politicians trafficking in thinly disguised anti-Semitism or over bigotry, encouraging their audiences to chase the money changers from the Temple.
In the 1880s, a Populist pamphlet, The Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People, told the story of the nation’s takeover by a “bankers’ government” as the seven acts of Shylock. Language like that could be found throughout the Populist revolt of the 1890s, although not everyone embraced it. The Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, took pains to insist that his use of such language should not be taken as support for anti-Semitism, as he ran for president in 1896. “I do not know of any class of our people who, by reason of their history, can better sympathize with the struggling masses in this campaign than can the Hebrew race,” he said. Not all of his supporters agreed. A New York crowd packed into Cooper Union to hear the Rothschilds denounced by Mary Ellen Lease, a Populist stump speaker: “A London Jew has been made the receiver of these United States,” she thundered.
In the depths of the Great Depression, Father Charles E. Coughlin took to the airwaves to denounce “international bankers and those in league with them.” At the height of his popularity, when this rhetoric found its widest resonance, Coughlin depicted a Christian society held hostage by money changers—but insisted that the Jew “is just as much a child of God as the best of you are.” But after his fall from grace, his speeches grew darker and more conspiratorial still, and he crossed over into explicit anti-Semitism, blaming Jews for America’s ills.
Trump’s campaign is now being run by Steve Bannon, lately the executive chairman of Breitbart, which has been accused with some frequency of peddling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. But there was nothing in Trump’s speech on Thursday to suggest he was deliberately deploying anti-Semitic tropes. Indeed, as his supporters often hasten to point out, his own daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are Jewish.
The trouble is that—as has so often been the case this year—the language Trump has chosen to employ carries with it heavy cultural baggage. And whatever he intends, there are Americans who will find it frightening to hear these images revived—and others who will feel emboldened by their use to go where Trump himself did not.
From the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum On Line Data Base (https://www.ushmm.org/)
PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION
'A Dangerous Lie: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' opened in the Gonda Education Center at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in April 2006.
— US Holocaust Memorial Museum
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