The Greatest Conspiracy Theory Ever Told — And the Real Conspiracy Nobody Talks About
They fabricated a Jewish conspiracy to justify a global crusade against us Jews.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay written by Andrew Pessin, a professor at Connecticut College and author of the book, “Anti-Zionism on Campus.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
We’re all aware of the most influential antisemitic book in modern history, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Appearing in the early 1900s, then adopted and disseminated by the A-Team of International Antisemites — Russia and the Soviet Union, the Nazis, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and so on — this famous forgery purports to be the minutes of a secret meeting held by the “Elders of Zion” behind the scenes of the First Zionist Congress1 in 1897.
Of course, there are no such Elders and there was no such meeting, and large chunks of the text were directly plagiarized from an 1864 book sketching Machiavelli’s political philosophy, but those facts, though widely known from at least 1921 onward, didn’t stop the book from spreading around the world and directly inspiring Hitler’s genocidal Final Solution, Hamas’ jihadist Final Solution (they quote from the “Protocols” as if it were factual in their foundational charter), and the long, ongoing campaign of Russian-Soviet anti-Zionism.
And what about this book inspires such deadly behavior?
It reveals to the world the great conspiracy of the dastardly Jews plotting to control the world and subjugate or destroy all the non-Jews, explaining in detail exactly how they will do that (by controlling the banks, the media, governments, starting wars, and so forth). When faced with that dastardly evil-doing, who wouldn’t respond by attempting to annihilate the threat?
Of course it’s all delusional nonsense, demonstrably false nonsense, which is why all rational, clear-headed, decent people recognize in the “Protocols” not the documentation of a conspiracy but what is pejoratively referred to as a “conspiracy theory” — one deliberately designed to incentivize hate and violence against the Jews.
The irony, of course, is that all the attention paid to the “Protocols” — believed by tens of millions, to this very day, to be factual — obscures the increasingly apparent fact that there actually does exist a global conspiracy, a literal conspiracy, an actual conspiracy, albeit in precisely the opposite direction.
Sometimes working together, sometimes working in parallel, sometimes centrally directed, sometimes dispersed, sometimes secretly, sometimes very much in the open, collectively there is an enormous body of individuals, organizations, and governments who have all been working toward the same inglorious end for well over a century now.
In other words, it’s not that the dastardly Jews are conspiring to subjugate or eliminate the peoples of the world. It’s that the peoples of the world (or at least enormously large constituents thereof) are actively conspiring to subjugate and (in too many cases) to outright eliminate the Jews.
Let’s examine their protocols.
Ground Zero for this conspiracy is of course pre-Soviet Russia itself, whose rampant, pervasive, and often violent antisemitism produced the original conspiracy-theory “Protocols” in the first place, and in so doing launched the actual conspiracy against the Jews. We might call the mysterious unknown forgers of the “Protocols” the original Elders of Anti-Zion.
The degree to which the “Protocols” then influenced Hitler and the Nazis is well known. But Hannah Arendt2 suggests that the “Protocols” didn’t merely instill in them their genocidal hatred of the Jews for their alleged plot to subjugate the world, but in fact directly inspired them to launch their own plot to subjugate the world. She quoted Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, saying:
“The nations that have been the first to see through the Jew and have been the first to fight him are going to take his place in the domination of the world,” then added her conclusion: “The delusion of an already existing Jewish world domination formed the basis for the illusion of future German world domination.”
“This was what [head of the Nazi SS] Himmler had in mind when he stated that ‘we owe the art of government to the Jews,’ namely, to the Protocols which ‘the Führer [had] learned by heart’.”
See the neat Nazi trick here: Accuse the Jews of conspiring to world domination, which then justifies, in “self-defense,” your attempts both to destroy the Jews and to dominate the world yourself. The entire Nazi machinery, then, from its massive propaganda operations through its killing fields and camps, was one large conspiracy to subjugate and eliminate the Jews.
Nor may we overlook the essential role played in this conspiracy by the scholars, the intellectuals, the professors, the ones producing the relevant ideas and arguments that motivate the leaders and then become the propaganda that mobilizes the masses.
Whether scholarship can ever be “purely objective” is a question for another time, but not relevant to the fact that “scholarship” can be intentionally weaponized to advance one’s political aims or, more modestly, can become corrupted by one’s ideological commitments. That’s a fancy way of remarking that Nazi “scholarship” was directly involved in advancing the conspiracy against the Jews.
Perhaps nothing better documents that fact than Max Weinreich’s 1946 book, “Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People.” Suffice merely to quote Hannah Arendt, again, in her review of the book:
“Dr. Weinreich’s main thesis is that ‘German scholarship provided the ideas and techniques that led to and justified unparalleled slaughter,’” ideas which included, of course, the “race science” that justified the alleged Aryan supremacy and Jewish degeneracy that in turn justify the Holocaust.
Arendt then went on to say, “It is also true, and Dr. Weinreich is right to insist thereon, that Hitler showed one of his crucial insights into the nature of modern propaganda when he asked for ‘scientific’ arguments and refused to use the standard crack-pot ones of traditional anti-Semitic propaganda.”
The scare quotes around the word “scientific” are the key: It’s easy for decent people to reject obvious crude raw hatred, but dress it up in “science” and it goes down far more easily.
So what we have here, then, are the professors providing the intellectual ammunition in the conspiracy against the Jews.
Collectively, a large new cohort here of the Elders of Anti-Zion.
Nor was it only the Nazis (and large swaths of the German population), of course. Most of the countries they captured were soon co-opted, sometimes involuntarily but often enough willingly, to participate in the conspiracy.
Nor did the conspiracy spread only to the countries captured by the Nazis.
Famously the Palestinian religious and national leader, the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, spent the war years in Berlin collaborating with the Nazis. Photographs of him enjoying a visit with Hitler and visiting concentration camps with Heinrich Himmler3 populate the internet, these scenes being breaks perhaps from his jobs, which included spreading Nazi ideology to the Arab and Muslim world through Arabic language propaganda and recruiting Muslims to participate in the Nazi military campaign.
Though the long independent history of Islamic antisemitism prior to the 20 century cannot be overlooked, neither can one overlook the explosive fuel added to that already burning fire when Nazi ideology was poured onto it. From this point onward much of the Arab and Muslim world was officially part of the now truly global conspiracy against the Jews launched by the “Protocols.”
The Nazis, fortunately, did not endure, though they bequeathed many followers even to this day. But next taking the reins were the Soviets, who, though opposed to much of the Nazi ideology and bitter enemies of the Nazis themselves, unfortunately shared the relevant ideology that they themselves had launched some decades earlier — and then literally shared it, around the globe.
Here the work of Izabella Tabarovsky (a scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism and contemporary Left-wing antisemitism) is essential.
In a series of articles — including “Soviet Anti-Zionism and Contemporary Left Antisemitism” (2019), “The Cult of Antizionism” (2023), and “Zombie Anti-Zionism” (2024) — she meticulously documents the gargantuan ceaseless effort the Soviet Union made to attack the Jews by delegitimizing the newly born State of Israel.
Lest you think this was merely “anti-Zionism,” not “antisemitism,” the effort itself (she explains) was rooted in the “Protocols,” and some of the original Soviet propagandists were “admirers of Hitler and Nazism and used Mein Kampf4 as … a source of ‘information’ about Zionism” (2019).
Indeed, “anti-Zionism” derives for many directly from their antisemitism; if you start with the antisemitic delusion that the dastardly Jews are conspiring to subjugate the globe, then “anti-Zionism” follows immediately, both logically and psychologically: The State of Israel will just be for you the diabolical mechanism through which the Jews advance their diabolical scheme.
Thus with the Soviets began another organized campaign, a veritable industry — a conspiracy — which in time produced “hundreds of anti-Zionist and anti-Israel books and thousands of articles,” published in the USSR, with “millions of copies entering circulation in the country” (2019).
But the campaign wasn’t restricted to the already vast-in-itself USSR.
“Many were translated into foreign languages — English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic and numerous others,” in order to be disseminated all over the globe through the Soviet Union’s powerful state-owned media apparatus, “whose goal was to ‘spread the truth about the USSR in all the continents’” (2019).
This “truth” was thereby spread in particular to the many Third World nations that were becoming “decolonized,” many of which were in the Soviet orbit.
And the translation into Arabic, in particular? The Soviet Union, closely allied with the Arab countries for many years, widely propagated its conspiracy all over the Arab world as well. But in this case it involved quite a bit more than just the translation and dissemination of virulently antisemitic, anti-Zionist tracts, important as those were in their own right.
Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Communist official to defect from the Soviet bloc, offered some striking revelations in a 2003 Wall Street Journal article and subsequent interview.
According to him, it was the infamous Soviet spy service, the KGB, that “dreamed up” the Palestine Liberation Organization, including hand-picking and training Yasser Arafat, its most important leader, a task in the service of which “the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.”
Through their training of Arafat they gave him “an ideology and an image … remold[ing] him as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a ‘personal hero’ for him — the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz … and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews.”
The KGB continued to finance and guide the Palestine Liberation Organization over many years in its violent campaign against the Jews — in addition, of course, to being the primarily military backer of the Arab countries engaged in their ongoing war on Israel. In a 2006 article, Pacepa stated:
“In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel ... As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me … We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel …”
“According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.”5
Mission accomplished, one can only say. And naturally a key role in accomplishing that mission was played by everybody’s favorite antisemitic forgery:
“In the mid 1970s, the KGB ordered my service … to scour the country for trusted party activists belonging to various Islamic ethnic groups, train them in disinformation and terrorist operations, and infiltrate them into the countries of our ‘sphere of influence.’ Their task was to export a rabid, demented hatred for … Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for Jews felt by the people in that part of the world.”
“Before I left Romania for good, in 1978, my [service] had dispatched around 500 undercover agents to Islamic countries … [B]y 1978 the whole Soviet-bloc intelligence community had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world. In the mid-1970s we also started showering the Islamic world with an Arabic translation of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ …”
And lest you think this Soviet-driven conspiracy against the Jews is somehow all in the past, consider current President of the Palestinian Authority (itself an outgrowth of the Palestine Liberation Organization), Mahmoud Abbas, currently serving the 20th year of his four-year term.
In 2016, The New York Times reported that Abbas had served as a KGB spy in Damascus in the early 1980s. This was entirely plausible given that he had earned the equivalent of a Ph.D. degree in 1982 in Moscow, with a dissertation that both cast doubt on the Holocaust and, in one of an uncountable number of common anti-Zionist talking points, attempted to prove that Zionists were closely affiliated with the Nazis.
If you are wondering where he got these antisemitic ideas, Tabarovsky describes the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies, which awarded him his degree, as “the linchpin of Soviet ‘Zionology’” (2023), the latter word in square quotes to indicate that the enormous slew of “scholars” producing the onslaught of antisemitic anti-Zionist propaganda saw themselves as engaged in a “scientific” endeavor.
Just as “Hitler’s professors” had produced antisemitic “science” then disseminated it wherever they conquered and into the Arab and Muslim world, so too the Soviet “scientists” (call them “Brezhnev’s professors”) did exactly the same — with the Soviets going further to establish the Palestine Liberation Organization, “educate” and train its leaders, and finance and guide its virulent anti-Jewish activities (including terrorism) for decades.
Needless to say, their quest to fuse the long history of intense Islamic antisemitism in those regions — itself perhaps characterizable as a centuries-long systematic effort (i.e., a conspiracy) to subjugate the Jews — with the more modern “Protocols”-conspiracy antisemitism was enormously successful, thus producing the intense Arab and Muslim Jew-hatred, with its concomitant desire to subjugate and eliminate the Jews, we see today.
Needless to say, too, with the Soviet campaign above the Elders of Anti-Zion grew in number dramatically.
Two items of particular note concerning the campaign.
First, it was carefully and intentionally crafted. The goal was to delegitimize Zionism, the Jewish national endeavor, so deliberate efforts were made to link that endeavor to and identify it with Nazism (as Abbas did above), to identify it with any number of terrible things (racism, fascism, imperialism, colonialism, militarism, and so forth), and accuse it of assorted horrible crimes (such as genocide and later apartheid).
In service to that end, it shared the relaxed attitude toward “truth” of the “Protocols,” meaning that “truth” was pretty much optional. Particular impetus to the effort was given by Israel’s stunning victory over the Soviet-backed Arabs in the 1967 Six-Day War, which promptly motivated the Soviets to shift their emphasis from the military war against the Jews and their national endeavor toward advancing the “cognitive war” instead.
This they did as guided by their “scientists,” the “Zionologists,” by going all in with their newly created “Palestinian” identity led by their newly created Palestine Liberation Organization. The plan now became to reframe or reconceive the entire conflict in the region.
Prior to 1967, much of the world understood it as a conflict between the Jews and the Arabs, the minority Jews struggling against the more powerful majority Arabs, the Jews a David versus the Arabs’ Goliath.
But after 1967, the Soviets began stressing the same propaganda terms with which they had been framing their more general battle against the West. During much of the Cold War and the period of global decolonization, they proclaimed themselves to be “anti-colonialists” supporting “national liberation movements” against the “imperialist” West, and so now the Middle East conflict was deliberately reframed as one in which the indigenous (newly invented) “Palestinian people” were fighting off the “imperialist-colonialism” of the invading Jews.
Overnight, the “Jewish-Arab” conflict became the “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, where the Israelis looked big and strong and the Palestinians puny and weak, thus instantly reversing the “David-Goliath” framing. Some go so far as to say that the very “Palestinian” identity was formed or crafted in this period precisely to play this role, with the Soviets, via their work with the Palestine Liberation Organization and Arafat, being the central agent.
In other words, the whole thing was a psy-op — an extremely successful one that, to this day, brings the political Left across the globe into the global conspiracy against the Jews.
The second point is once again to emphasize the role of propaganda (in particular, as produced by the “intellectuals,” the “scientists,” the “professors”) in developing and advancing this conspiracy. In addition to the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies Tabarovsky also discusses the “KGB-supervised Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public” (2019), itself producing the literature then translated into other languages and distributed abroad by the Novosti Press Agency, “a news service and an important arm of Soviet foreign propaganda.”
But now to get a more “vivid picture of Moscow’s approach to solving its Zionist problem” we can glimpse at just one example of the many that Tabarovsky (2019) examines, an article from 1969 or 1970 entitled “Anatomy of Israeli Aggression.” Written by Yevgeny Yevseyev, “one of the key ideologues of … Soviet anti-Zionism — the so-called Zionologists,” the article reports on yet another Soviet conference, the “Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples” occurring in Cairo in 1969.
“Protocols”-style, the article frames Zionism as part of an imperialist global conspiracy against the national liberation movement and communism, affiliated with and a continuation of Nazism, and inevitably engaged in “genocide, racism, perfidy, duplicity, aggression, annexation,” and therefore, in essence, an enemy of most of the globe. The goal was thus to mobilize “world public opinion” by disseminating information about alleged “Israeli atrocities.”
If all that sounds familiar, it is because you are aware how the anti-Zionist “progressive” world approaches Israel to this very day, only it was all hatched quite deliberately over the past five decades. What we see in this article is literally a sketch of the playbook — the protocols — of the campaign to destroy the Jews and their national endeavor.
And just as we saw with the Nazis, the campaign against the Jews would borrow many of the methods allegedly laid out by the Jews themselves in the fabricated “Protocols” — while being motivated by (falsely) accusing the Jews of being guilty of them!
And lest you underestimate the true scale of this campaign against the Jews, note that this article was published in the “World Marxist Review — the English edition of the Prague-based Soviet theoretical journal ‘Problems of Peace and Socialism.’ Published in 40 languages and distributed in 145 countries, the journal reached an estimated half million of the most committed leftists around the globe” (2019).
Another way to think about the scale of this: At its peak, the Soviet Union was more than a thousand times bigger than the sliver which is the State of Israel, with nearly a hundred times its population in 1967 (a particularly salient year in the anti-Zionist conspiracy). If it were just the Soviet Union versus Israel, it already would be an enormous Goliath against a tiny David.
But it wasn’t just the Soviet Union; it was the Soviet Union, the entire Arab and Muslim worlds, and most of the Third World. We have nothing less than an actual mammoth global campaign to subjugate the Jews and destroy their national endeavor, all based on the fabricated (and delusional) allegation of that tiny population’s conspiracy to subjugate the behemoth instead.
The First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, was a pivotal event in the history of the Zionist movement. Convened by Theodor Herzl, it established the World Zionist Organization and outlined the goals of the movement.
A Jewish German-American historian and philosopher, and one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century
A German Nazi politician who was the 4th Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a leading member of the German Nazi Party, and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany
A 1925 autobiographical manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, which outlines many of Hitler’s political beliefs, his political ideology and future plans for Germany and the world
“Russian Footprints.” National Review.
This explains so much, especially all the western imperialism nonsense (it was never a significant factor in the Middle East; the period between the two world wars notwithstanding). This should be widely disseminated throughout Leftistan, assuming they’re even open to seeing how they’ve been duped.
PS - my admiration for Israel in the face of such overwhelming odds cannot be overstated.
Horrendously fascinating! The Russians are still threatening the world. It is miraculous that you have overcome these evils! I admire you so much and you will continue to beat them.