Get Your Authoritarian and Totalitarian Dogs off My Yard!

Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Bandoxa, Wednesday 14 January 2026

Our service provider OpenAI could not process my prompt due to a moderation system. Please try to rephrase it changing potentially problematic words and try again. What a pile of dreck!

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,  oh boy, what a title! The minutes resemble the most boring bar mitzvah planning committee meeting in known history. Instead of arguing over chopped liver versus sushi and bara brith, they’re plotting to control the entire planet. And the punchline? It’s fake. A total forgery. A hoax so clumsy it makes a three-euro bill look like the genuine article. Yet this thing refuses to die. It’s like an unfortunate relative who keeps showing up at Thanksgiving with the same tired stories.

Picture this: late 19th century, Russia. The Czar’s secret police,  the Okhrana, basically the KGB’s cranky grandfather,  are sweating bullets. The peasants are restless. Revolutionaries are plotting. The whole empire feels like it’s one sour borscht away from exploding. It could fill the whole of the fuggin universe. So what do they do? They need a scapegoat, fast. And who better than the Jews? And because the Celts are too far away? Anti-Semitism in those days was already the national pastime,  like baseball, but with fewer rules and more pogroms.

Enter Pierre Ivanovitch Ratchkovsky, the Paris branch manager of this delightful spy outfit. This guy was a real piece of work,  staging fake bombings, whacking his own enemies, writing phoney revolutionary letters, then using them to say, “See? We need more crackdowns!” Ring a bell? He sits down in some dingy Parisian café, probably with a croissant in one hand and malice in the other, and cobbles together this masterpiece of plagiarism. He lifts huge chunks from a 1864 French satire by Maurice Joly,  a book attacking Napoleon III, mind you, not a word about Jews. He mixes in bits from a cheesy Gothic novel about rabbis meeting in a Prague cemetery. Voilà! Instant world-domination blueprint, now starring “the Jews” and not the Celts.

He ships it off to a Russian mystic named Sergey Nilus. Nilus translates it. He published it in 1903 in a putrid nationalist rag. The publication is called Znamia (The Flag, aka The Flag Shaggers). Nothing says “subtle” like a newspaper named after a patriotic tablecloth. And just like that, the Protocols are born. They describe 24 fake “meetings”. In these meetings, shadowy Jewish elders never get names, dates, or even decent catering. These elders explain how they’re gonna enslave the goyim. They plan to control the press. They intend to wreck Christianity. They aim to run the banks like a giant casino where the house always wins.

Here’s Protocol 12: “We’ll own the journals, so we own the public mind!” Protocol 17: “Bye-bye Pope, see ya in a few years when Christianity’s toast!” Protocol 21: “We’ll replace money markets with government credit,  imagine the power!” And metaphors? Oh, they use vivid imagery like full monster movies. They mention poisonous snakes and spiders weaving webs. Wolves eat Christian sheep, and an invisible hand moves chess pieces like God playing checkers with the universe.

Now, you’d think once people noticed it was stolen from a book about Napoleon, the French was so dreadful. It had Russian grammar sneaking in like a tiptoeing spy in a bad rug. You’d expect it’d be laughed off the stage. Nope! In 1920, even The Times of London went, “Hey, this looks prophetic!” A year later? Their guy in Constantinople, Philip Graves, reads it, compares it to Joly, and shouts, “Forgery! Plagiarism! Get this schmutz outta here!” Then, in the 1935 Bern trial in Switzerland, Jewish groups sued Nazis for spreading it. Witnesses confirmed, “Yeah, Ratchkovsky cooked this up to distract from the Czar’s trouble, strife, and shit storms.”

But does the truth stop it? Ha! Pull the other one! By 1917, it’s a bestseller. Henry Ford, the man who made cars affordable and hate profitable, printed it in America. Hitler loved it so much he quoted it in Mein Kampf. He hands it out like candy and blames Jews for everything. This ranges from losing WWI to the price of sauerkraut, schnapps and wurst. Goebbels? He’s the propaganda barrow boy, aka the promotions guy.

And today? Still kicking. In the Arab world, it’s almost like a Penguin Classic. Hamas even includes bits in its charter. They cite a fake recipe to justify burning down the kitchen. Holocaust deniers wave it around: “See? The whole thing was a Jewish plot to get Israel and reparations!” Conspiracy nuts online treat it like the Bible of “they’re out to get us.”

Some of the absurd, over-the-top antisemitic caricatures were inspired by this garbage. These include spiders, octopuses, and world-controlling elders. They seem straight out of an achingly bad pulp novel.

So why does this lie that wouldn’t die… refuse to pop its clogs and bugger off? Because hate loves a good story and a cartoon villain. It’s the ultimate comfort food for the paranoid: “It’s not my fault the world’s a mess,  it’s them! The invisible chess masters!” As Woody might say, “I don’t mind dying,  I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” But this forgery? It’s been dying for over a century, yet it still shows up at the party.

In the end, the real protocol is simple. People will believe anything if it lets them hate. They do this without looking in the mirror. Oy vey. What a world. What a stupid, tragic, endlessly recycled world.

Many thanks for reading.

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