International Jewish conspiracy

Spanish edition of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

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“”I've heard that if you become a Jew, you get automatic membership of a shadowy international conspiracy that controls everything. Which actually sounds quite good, but, then you have to weigh that up against the circumcision.

—Somegreybloke, Choosing my religion

The existence of an international Jewish conspiracy (or international Zionist conspiracy if you want to be a little more cagey) is an antisemitic canard which regularly features in various racist conspiracy theories and conveniently excuses any misdeeds carried out by gentiles, or indeed many larger systemic problems not necessarily inflicted by any one particular ethnic or religious group.

These dumb rumors basically say what you'd imagine: that an evil hive mind of ethnic Jews is working together to cause everything bad in the world, such as wars, economic meltdowns, left-wing politics, right-wing politics, income disparity, atheism (yes, you read that right), the impeachment of Donald Trump, the last time you got food poisoning at a fast food place, every time you stub your toe on a table, etc. Basically, you name it, and someone has probably blamed the Jews for it. In this way, it functions as a unified conspiracy theory.

Antisemitic conspiracy theories seem to have originated with hysterical claims from medieval Christians that Jews were kidnapping Christian babies and drinking their blood and spreading the Black Death, but the phenomenon really took off during the nineteenth century as various hacks decided to cash in by writing shitty books and pamphlets about secret Jewish plots to take over the world. The most (in)famous of these pamphlets is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which is now known by non-idiots to be a hoax.

The only way that the international Jewish conspiracy that antisemites believe in could actually happen is if the Jews all had their brains secretly connected together like the Borg from Star Trek. And we don't have technology sufficiently advanced to make that possible.

Origins

Antique and medieval claims of Jewish conspiracy

The blood libel, the conspiratorial slur that Jews kill gentile babies to use their blood in the preparation of Passover matzos, dates back to antiquity (even back to before the advent of Christianity, if we broaden the scope to any claims of human sacrifice). In medieval Europe, popular wisdom commonly blamed outbreaks of disease on Jews poisoning wells; such attitudes and accusations could lead to pogroms, murders, and the governing authorities forcing Jews to live in segregated areas of cities called ghettos.

Only in modern times did the Catholic Church stop assigning blame to the Jews for their purported deicide of Jesus Christ. In medieval Europe, anti-Judaists accused Jews of re-enacting Jesus's crucifixion and death by stabbing or mutilating the host, which Catholics regard as transubstantiated into the body of Christ.

Revisionist colonial American history: the "Franklin Prophecy"

See the main article on this topic: Franklin Prophecy

In 1934, an American magazine published that Benjamin Franklin delivered an antisemitic speech at the 1787 Constitutional Convention urging that Jews not be admitted to the United States. Franklin's purported rationale included that Jews: refuse to assimilate wherever they move, are vampires who must live among Christians, will attempt to financially strangle the country, will stream into the United States in such numbers that they will take over and rule the country (Sound familiar?). Franklin's so-called prophecy was allegedly recorded in a "private diary" of Charles Pinckney, Constitutional Convention delegate from South Carolina, that is now in the possession of the Franklin Institute. The Anti-Defamation League exposed the fraud in 1954, yet references to the "prophecy" still persist on neo-Nazi messageboards and on Usenet.

The language is characteristic of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century Antisemites and thus contains anachronisms that Franklin could have never written, as Benjamin Franklin died in 1790. In addition, Franklin himself was a contributor to the building fund for Congregation Mikveh Israel, Philadelphia's oldest synagogue.

Similar antisemitic sentiments have been falsely ascribed to George Washington.^{[citation needed]} Like Franklin, George Washington was sympathetic to Jews — indeed, writing a sympathetic letter to a Jewish congregation in Rhode Island in 1790:

... the Government of the United States ... gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. ... May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy."

But colonial North America was by no means free of antisemitism… as, for example, in this infamous quote from Thomas Paine's tract: Monarchy is ranked in scripture as one of the sins of the Jews, for which a curse in reserve is denounced against them.

20^th century claims of Jewish conspiracy

Nazi Party propaganda poster about "Jewish Bolshevism".

Modern antisemitic conspiracy theories depicting an elaborate secret hierarchy of controlling Jewish influences largely take their cue from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a 1903 tract purporting to be the manual of a Jewish secret society planning world domination. It is still widely circulated and occasionally cited as "evidence" by various clueless antisemites, despite being exposed as a fraud as early as 1921.

Max Weber (1864-1920), one of the founders of sociology, believed that antisemitism was abhorrent but also expressed concern that the over-representation of Jews in the leadership of European radical groups would inflame anti-Jewish sentiment.

Automobile manufacturer Henry Ford further popularized the conspiracy during the 1920s by publishing the Protocols and antisemitic articles in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and distributing hundreds of thousands of copies of the Protocols. Ford's antisemitic articles were later collected and published as a four-volume treatise entitled The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.

Ford's enthusiastic endorsement of an international Jewish conspiracy proved extremely popular in Weimar-era Germany. Ford provided substantial financial backing to Adolf Hitler in the 1920's and his writings were a significant influence on the formation of the Nazi party and its grassroots support. By 1933, when the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was standard reading in German schools. Hitler admired Henry Ford and even emulated him by creating his own automobile, the Volkswagen.

Hitler further propagated the Jewish conspiracy in Mein Kampf and other propaganda blaming Jews for the rise of both communism and capitalism, and for Germany's economic decline following the First World War. Despite this, individuals of Jewish descent controlled less than 1 percent of Germany's most powerful banking and credit institutions, and were significantly overrepresented only in private banking (personal banking for rich individuals). (As for communism, see the section: antisemitism and anti-communism.)

Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco similarly believed in a conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons, and communists intending to establish a world government. He often made reference to a vast "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy."

Millenarian antisemites

Fundamentalist Christians of an antisemitic bent have promoted theories that intermingle the End Times with a worldwide Jewish conspiracy where the anti-Christ is believed to be a Jew. Perhaps the most popular promoter of this lunacy was Nazi sympathizer Gordon Winrod. Winrod explained this brand of the conspiracy thusly:

A Jewish Antichrist in the end of this age, pre-supposes an international system of Jewish government. There can be little doubt that such a system, based upon the Jewish Money Power, has already been created -- and is ready to step into the open and assume control of world affairs as soon as the time is ripe.

Modern variations

Conspiracists hating other conspiracists because other conspiracists hate the wrong world-controlling minority group (based on the Blind men and an elephant parable).

The myth of an international Jewish conspiracy remains common among far right-wing conspiracy theorists, Neo-Nazis, some hardline communists, Islamic extremists, black supremacists, and other racist lunatics, and has been further perpetuated in recent years by these lunatics' rantings through the ease of posting on the Internet.

Variations on these conspiracies that may not appear overtly antisemitic often have a latent antisemitism about them, as the words "Globalists", "Illuminati", "New World Order," "Zionists", "international bankers", "international monetary elite", "financiers", "Cultural Marxists", or "cultural elites" (among other terms) are Mad Libbed in for "Jews" and "international Jewry". Antisemitic conspiracy theorists often focus on Zionism and the founding of Israel, or on denying the existence or scale of the Holocaust and claiming it is a myth fabricated or exaggerated to serve Jewish interests.

Individual theories vary widely. Many claim that "international Jewry" is in control of the Freemasons, Illuminati, and other real or perceived secret societies. Often the international Jewish conspiracy is portrayed as an active part of, or the major power behind, that greatest of all conspiracies, the New World Order. Much as many religious fundamentalists often use "Goddidit" to explain that which they cannot explain, conspiracy theorists will often use "Jewsdidit".

Antisemitism and anti-communism

For more information, see: Cultural Marxism

“”I myself was dubbed a Jew by Die Gartenlaube and, indeed, if given the choice, I'd just as gladly be a Jew as a 'Herr von'!

—Friedrich Engels, unbothered

Anti-communists in Europe and North America often associated Jews with Bolshevism or communism in general. Among the modern proponents of this association is David Duke, who claims that communism is a Jewish conspiracy.

But particularly, European fascists believed that Jews were peddling Marxism, in part because one of the founders of Marxism was ethnically (though never religiously) Jewish. It may have been named after Karl Marx, but Friedrich Engels (not Jewish, for those keeping track) contributed plenty to the foundational texts, too (e.g. the Communist Manifesto in part, The Principles of Communism in whole, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific in whole, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in whole, and Das Kapital volumes two and three in part). It was Engels who financially supported Marx so he could write his theories at all. Now, although Marx and Engels wrote the first Marxian theory together, they were far from the first "communists" in history (see: communism § early forms). They even acknowledged this themselves, with (for example) Engels writing about the "utopian socialists" who came before Marxism in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

As well, some prominent Communist leaders during the Russian Revolution were Jewish. The most frequently cited is perhaps Leon Trotsky, who was the only Jewish person on the Council of People's Commissars in 1917. There have been reports by scholars as to what proportion of the Bolsheviks were Jewish. David Stuart Lane writes they were only a "small minority" within the "heterogeneous" Bolsheviks. Thomas Henry Rigby and Jeffrey C. Herf estimate that about four or five percent of the total membership was Jewish from about 1917 to the 1920s; this put the category of "Poles, Latvians and other Baltic peoples" as more "over-represented" in the party than Jews were.

This, of course, varied wildly between time periods and what organ of the party is considered; one could piece together a conspiracy by cherry-picking select (possibly brief) time periods for any number of demographics within any number of sub-bodies within significant organizations. Within very small party organs, there is greater opportunity for proportional "over-representation" because, for example, a body consisting of just ten people means each individual is ten percent of the entire body, so a shift of even just one person could mean a very radical shift in relative demographic proportion. The Bolsheviks changed leadership and organizational structure all the time. If one selects only the most extreme instances of "over-representation" within a group, omitting others, they can paint a misleading picture. Latvians, for instance, made up more than half of the Cheka (Bolshevik secret police) commissaries at one point in time (1918). Returning to Herf, he further writes:

[Benjamin] Pinkus estimated the percentage of Jewish members of the party in 1940 at 4.3 percent or less. By 1939, only 10 percent of the Central Committee was composed of Jews. After Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev had been ousted from the leadership in 1926, no Jews remained in the Politburo. In the Stalin era in the 1930s, Lazar Kaganovich became the only Jewish member of the Politburo — the exception that proved the rule. Of the 417 people who constituted the ruling elite of the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s (members of the Central Executive Committee, the party Central Committee, the Presidium of the Executive of the Soviets of the USSR and the Russian Republic, the ministers, and the chairman of the Executive Committee), 27 [individuals], or 6 percent, were Jewish. This proportion decreased radically in the 1930s, partly owing to the purge trials, which had strong anti-Semitic over-tones. During the Holocaust, the Stalin regime said very little about Nazi policies aimed specifically at Jews.

To the extent that Jews could have been uniquely attracted to the Bolsheviks, one of the factors that increasingly would have caused this despite initial opposition among many Jews to the faction was the fact that the Bolsheviks were eventually the major party that wasn't causing or aiding attacks against Jewish communities in repeated murderous pogroms so often as others were. So, that was a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy: by violently alienating Jews from the rest of society (in part by, you know, straight-up massacring them), the antisemitic wing of the anticommunists propped up their own bogeyman, pushing one of Russia's then-largest minority groups under the influence of the Bolsheviks.

A similar thing is said to have taken place with the minority Latvians of the Russian Empire. The Finnish author Jukka Rislakk writes: "Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised independence, Kerensky and the White generals did not, and therefore many Latvians decided to support Lenin — even with gun in hand. … In all, 8,000-9,000 Latvians joined the Red Guard in Russia. The Latvian Red Riflemen believed that only a Bolshevik victory would free Latvia." Rislakk notes that not just Jewish people, but also Latvian and Chinese people were blamed for the Bolsheviks' revolution by Russian chauvinists. To pin it all on minorities alone, much less any especial few minorities, is a very crude and reductionist response clearly motivated by Russian nationalism, however. Though the proportion varies between time and bureaus, we can say with certainty that a substantial part of the Bolsheviks were Russian (78 percent of the Bolsheviks in 1907 per D.S. Lane; 72 percent of the party in 1922 and 65 percent in 1927, per T.H. Rigby).

The advent of Rosa Luxemburg in Germany seemed, to European fascists, to lend credence to the notion of "Jewish Bolshevism", even though several other prominent leaders of the Spartacus League were not Jewish (including Clara Zetkin, Franz Mehring, and Karl Liebknecht). Some of the Jewish leaders other than Luxemburg who may be cited as proof that the November Revolution in Germany was a Jewish conspiracy played a marginal role, such as Gustav Landauer (who was actually a pacifist). There is also the key fact that the revolution was in the first place sparked by (largely non-Jewish) war-weary sailors in the Kiel mutiny. This has parallels to the October Revolution in Russia as well, which was fueled by the Bolsheviks exploiting low war morale and general war-weariness. In Germany, the stab-in-the-back legend attributed this low morale and its consequences to the Jews, among others.

There is the case of the Polish Communist Party in the 1920s: the country had a (relatively) very large Jewish population, at about 10 percent of the general population (with much higher percentages in some regions of the country). Paul Hanebrink, in A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, points out that: "20–40 percent of the members of the Polish Communist Party in the 1920s were individuals of Jewish origin. But only about 7 percent of Polish Jews voted for the Communist Party during this time. According to the most thorough analysis of the electoral data from this period, 'Jews were no more Communist than Catholic Poles.'" Somebody forgot to tell 93 percent of one of the continent's then-largest Jewish populations about the Jewish communist conspiracy. He adds that, in fact: "In the east and southeast of the country, a much greater part of the party’s support in the 1920s came from Belarussians (43 percent of the Communist vote in central and eastern Poland) and Ukrainians (46 percent of the Communist vote in the south) looking for a political outlet to express resentment about their treatment in the Polish nation-state."

The nuances of these historical events are often lost regardless of their re-stating. In no small part, that's because the haunting propaganda-image of "Jewish Communism" is the crux of what's being impressed. Hanebrink also wrote about how it only required a kernel of truth (i.e., that there were some prominent communists who were Jewish) to succeed as a dehumanizing propaganda tool utilized by people who often played fast-and-loose with the actual facts (even labeling non-Jewish non-Bolsheviks as being "in on the Jewish Bolshevik plot"). Grains of truth only serve to obscure the deceit underlying the caricature. Or, as Sartre put it: "They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."

Jews and business

For more information, see: Kevin MacDonald § Jews control the media

Modified Ben Garrison cartoon claiming that Jews control the global monetary system.

Believers in an international conspiracy often claim that Jews are secretly running the United States government in collaboration with Israel. They point to examples of wealthy Jews in the financial sector and other industries (the Rothschild family regularly appears in these theories), and to the apparently disproportionate numbers of Jews involved in the movie industry in Hollywood. On the other hand, such a period of "Jewish" domination in American cinema includes the Golden Age of American cinema in which a great number of movies of high quality with excellent writing (often by Jews) and acting (likewise). Contrary to the myth that Jewish involvement in culture must lead to its debasement, the Jewish studio bosses established a production code that precluded profanity, nudity, gratuitous violence, and the mockery of all religions. The same studio bosses excoriated the moral rot of juvenile delinquency and organized crime, even using Christian clergy as characters to that end, as in Angels With Dirty Faces, in which a Catholic priest better fits the culture of the Irish-American community than would a rabbi.

If it is even true that Jews are disproportionately represented in business, one must be careful to note that correlation does not equal causation. In the Western world until the 19th century, the largely Christian populations obeyed a religiously-motivated prohibition on charging interest on loans, with the role of banker historically falling on Jewish businessmen who were sometimes even specifically licensed by sovereigns to charge interest. To assume that the disproportionate number of Jews involved in finance proves they're engaging in a Zionist conspiracy through manipulation of capitalism is to ignore the historic role of Jews in banking due to the Christian prohibition against usury. This is reflected in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, where the villain Shylock is a Jewish money lender demanding the exorbitant price of a pound of flesh for defaulting on his loan.

More recently, there have been conspiracy theories targeting financier George Soros, whose actions including promoting liberal democracy in eastern Europe and opposing Brexit in the UK are seen as part of a Jewish conspiracy to impose western rule on Eastern Europe and deny the will of the British people.

In the Muslim world

This canard is also common in parts of the Islamic world, especially among Palestinian resistance movements. For example, the founding charter of Hamas asserts the existence of a Zionist conspiracy, working internationally through secret organizations such as the Freemasons as well as the government of Israel, and cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the embodiment of their plans. Although conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews in general are widespread throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, they are certainly not unanimously accepted: in example, Hassan Nasrallah (the general-secretary of Hezbollah until his death) argued that rather than Israel controlling the United States, it was the other way around.

9/11

For more information, see: 9/11 § It was carried out by Mossad to galvanize American support for Israel and destroy their enemies

Various antisemitic 9/11 conspiracy theories sprang up in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — especially among Neo-Nazis and Islamists — claiming that a Jewish or Israeli conspiracy was behind the attacks, or that the whole incident was faked in order to serve Jewish and Zionist interests. A common myth, spread by racist websites and chain emails, is that hundreds or even thousands of Jewish employees in the World Trade Center were forewarned of the attacks and missed work on September 11th 2001.

Alt-right and neo-Nazis

StoneToss being StoneToss.

In the 21st century, the idea that Jews secretly conspired to spread political correctness and to enable mass immigration by non-white people (especially Muslims) is often advocated or alluded to online by Neo-Nazis, sometimes not calling themselves Nazis but instead using paper-thin euphemisms like "white nationalist" or "alt-right". For example, alt-right Twitter accounts with Groyper avatars will often use memes like "the Goyim know", meaning: non-Jewish people are starting to learn about this supposed Jewish conspiracy. The neo-Nazi Kevin MacDonald is a key proponent of this theory, and is sometimes cited by its adherents. Neoreactionaries like "Mencius Moldbug" (who is part-Jewish) push basically the same idea, but with Jews replaced by liberal/progressive elites, who they term "communists". Jews on the alt-right (a rare breed) sometimes combine the two theories, claiming that liberal diaspora Jewish elites, but not conservative Jews like them, are the primary driving force behind mass non-white immigration to the West — rather than, say, businesses looking to keep their labor costs down and/or recruit more skilled professionals (on the "pull" side), or immigrants seeking a better life (on the "push" side), or Mexican or Libyan gangs (acting as people traffickers for undocumented immigrants).

Sometimes the far right further suggest that Jews are trying to increase non-white immigration in order to achieve a goal of "white genocide". However, what they actually seem to mean by "white genocide" is simply a loss of 100% pure white "blood lines" as inter-racial dating and marriage — which neo-Nazis absolutely cannot stand — becomes more and more common. It never seems to occur to them that the observed trends of a significant number of diaspora Jewish men "marrying out" of their ethnic group or religion, and diaspora Jewish couples having few or no children, do not fit in with this demographic domination theory. Depending on whether the theory is aimed at religious Jews or all Jewish people, regardless of their religion or lack thereof, the trend for many Jewish immigrant families to gradually turn atheist over the generations could be argued to not fit in with the theory either.

Other random Jew-haters

In Bobby Fischer's later years, he became a very vocal believer that the Jews controlled the United States and that they should be rounded up, executed, and those that remain made slaves.

It is widely suspected that claims of vast lizard conspiracy by eccentric conspiracy theorists are in fact a thinly-veiled way of discussing a Jewish conspiracy, as best demonstrated by David Icke. Before foregrounding lizards, Icke wrote more overtly about an international Jewish conspiracy. His claims of innocence aren't helped when his website publishes a photo of a member of the Anti-Defamation League with the caption "Our job is simple — to brand anyone who exposes Israel and the Rothschilds as a racist. Er, that's it."

See also

• Antisemitism
• Holocaust denial
• Holodomor § As an excuse for antisemitism
• New World Order
• Cultural Marxism
• Rothschild family
• List of conspiracy theories
• Evil Jew
• 9/11 conspiracy theories
• Zionist Occupation Government
• Louis Thomas McFadden

External links

• See the Wikipedia article on Antisemitic canard.
• See the Wikipedia article on Economic antisemitism.
• Anti-Semites Exploit Anti-Government Sentiment, ADL
• The Ultimate Jewish Conspiracy Theory, David Aaronovitch
• Judeo-Bolshevism: Fact from Fiction, William Vivare (Mischling Review)
• Anti-Semitic Elmo Gets Prison Time for Girl Scout Extortion, TIME (Yes, you're not hallucinating.)
• Local Jew Feels Left Out Of Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy, The Onion
• Do you know about... The Hibernian Conspiracy?