[FRIAM] oversight

[Roger Critchlow]

I've been drawn back into Umberto Eco's *The Prague Cemetery*.  The
original document of racial replacement theory is *The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion*, a forgery produced in the 19th century at the behest of
the secret service of a European country that no longer exists and may even
have been defunct by the time the forgery was delivered.  The forgery
claims to describe a conspiracy of jews to take over, but as Eco notes it
looks a lot like an earlier document that claimed to describe a conspiracy
of jesuits to take over, which itself resembled a scene in Alexandre
Dumas' *Joseph
Balsamo* which described a conspiracy of magi led by Cagliostro plotting to
take over during the 18th century.

As wikipedia summarizes:

> *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion* (Протоколы сионских мудрецов) or *The
> Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion* is a fabricated
> antisemitic text <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitic_canard> purporting
> to describe a Jewish <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish> plan for
> global domination. The hoax <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoax> was
> plagiarized from several earlier sources, some not antisemitic in nature.
> [1]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#cite_note-FOOTNOTEGraves1921-2> It
> was first published in Russia
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire> in 1903, translated into
> multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of
> the 20th century. It played a key part in popularizing belief in an international
> Jewish conspiracy
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Jewish_conspiracy>.
> Distillations of the work were assigned by some German teachers, as if
> factual, to be read by German schoolchildren after the Nazis came to power
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machtergreifung> in 1933,[2]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#cite_note-Segel-1995-3> despite
> having been exposed as fraudulent by the British newspaper *The Times
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Times>* in 1921 and the German *Frankfurter
> Zeitung <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurter_Zeitung>* in 1924. It
> remains widely available in numerous languages, in print and on the
> Internet, and continues to be presented by neofascist, fundamentalist and
> antisemitic groups as a genuine document. It has been described as
> "probably the most influential work of antisemitism ever written".[3]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion#cite_note-FOOTNOTEBronner20031-4>


The idea that there is a cabal of elite others who are manipulating history
to their benefit and your detriment is not a grass roots paranoia, it is a
deliberate fiction that was invented and has been propagandized off and on
since the end of the 19th century.  It is not a "white people" thing, that
white people spontaneously do from an innate xenophobia.  It is a
sociopathology that some people find profitable to encourage.

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