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The late Will Eisner, the great American master of comics, regarded this, his last work, as his most powerful. This nonfiction book in graphic-novel style examines the outrageous fabrication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports to be the blueprint by Jewish leaders to take over the world. Hatched as an anti-Semitic plot by the tsar's secret police to deflect widespread criticism of the Russian government, the forgery, first published in 1905, succeeded beyond the propagandistic ambitions of its originators; the lie became an internationally accepted truth. Presenting a pageant of historical figures including Tsar Nicholas II, Henry Ford, and Adolf Hitler, Eisner exposes the twisted history of the Protocols from nineteenth-century Russia to modern-day Klan members to Islamic fundamentalists. The Plot unravels one of the most devastating hoaxes of the twentieth century.… (more)
User reviews
I identify three sections: the first half lays out the history of how a tract critical of Napoleon III became the source material for an anti-Jewish work commissioned by the Russian
The next section lays out the evidence, showing side-by-side comparisons of "Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu" and the "Protocols." What would otherwise be a fairly tedious textual comparison is carried remarkably well by the dialog beneath.
Finally, the book (with sad, ironic humor) shows multiple times through history when various exposés "put an end to the 'Protocols' at last. And we see the weary conclusion: that the "Protocols" is more a symptom of antisemitism than its cause.
The
It also made me wonder what other "facts" we have unthinkingly accepted
Created
Conservative and reactionary Russians who fled the country after the fall of the Csar in 1905 brought this text with them all over the world, including the United States. Here, the notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford came upon it, and republished it as fact in a newspaper he ran, in order to undermine worker organizing in his factory. It also made its way into Germany, where another notorious anti-Semite got ahold of it: Adolf Hitler. It thoroughly influenced his thinking, and his mad scheme to unify all of Germany under one state. According to the Protocols, Jews were undermining states worldwide, so Hitler came up with a terrifying solution to how to deal with a non-German population that refused to be assimilated within his state's borders. It was these three men who are responsible for the immense popularity of the text.
Meanwhile, this book has been publicly debunked as a fraud. Many times. It is the great lie that will not die. No matter how thoroughly it is debunked, it lives on in the cover of the dimness of reactionary assholes and anti-Semites. Because it never mattered whether it was true. You can trace a thread of anti-Semitism throughout history since Rome, where the Jews were vilified and crucified for being anti-colonial fighters.
Buy or borrow this book (I got it used for $3 including shipping on abebooks.com). Make your friends and family read it. Kill the lie that has been holding back not only Jews, but the liberation of humanity. Don't think so? Reexamine who uses this text: Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford, Csar Nicholas. They all thought that the perpetuation of this book would keep them in power. It's time to bury this embarassing lie.
The book loses a star because it was too short. I want to know much more about the effects of the Protocols. How has the lies perpetuated in The Protocols helped to put in things which are "common knowledge" about Jews (such as that they are bankers who control everything)? How have the Protocols been used recently? If any readers of this review know about a longer-form text that I could read about this topic, please drop a comment below with the book.
My only regret is that, as a graphic novel, it will not be taken seriously enough.
It amazes me that these sort of conspiracy theories still persist despite overwhelming evidence to show the fraudulent nature of their very sources. Eisner does a good job showing how these pernicious myths have a way of surviving even the most through debunking, however, so I'm not sure how or when such an event is likely to happen. For its part, though, The Plot does a good job helping out the cause.
If you already know all these facts, then the second way of looking at it takes priority: as a narrative & graphic work. Since I already knew all the history, this was how I had to primarily evaluate it, and frankly, I can't say it worked for me in this respect. For the most part the book favours a perhaps overly didactic tone, which leaves the people and events that appear on stage as little more than cardboard cut-outs, and it often inserts reproductions of publications or lengthy quotes, which often leaves little room for any art. From a narrative standpoint, I'd say the only parts that work are when Eisner himself steps in as a character and the book moves to a more personal level.
Overall, I can't say I enjoyed it. Sure, it makes a quick summary of the facts behind the forgery, but I never found the scholarly works to be that difficult of reading. All of which leaves it to stand, or rather fall, on its merits as a narrative work.
However, if you are looking for a clear and well-developed criticism of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," made for laypeople, you will most likely enjoy this book. Certainly Eisner is to be commended for telling history in an untraditional way, and using the graphic novel medium to not only provide documentation. The side by side comparisons of "Dialogues in Hell" with "Protocols" was a nice touch, for example.
The work, which includes a foreword by Umberto Eco and an historical afterword by Rutgers political science professor
Published under many titles, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion purports to outline a plot for world domination developed at an 1897 secret meeting of Jewish leaders. Its author, Mathieu Golovinski, drew heavily on an 1864 French anti-Napoleon III pamphlet Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu by Maurice Joly; according to Eco, other sources include Eugene Sue's Le juif errant and Le mysteres du people and Hermann Goedesche's 1868 Biarritz (which itself plagiarized a critical scene from Alexandre Dumas' 1849 Joseph Balsamo).
Despite Eisner's title, the story of The Protocols is hardly a secret. That the Tsar's secret police – the Okharna – had commissioned the fabrication in 1905 has been public knowledge nearly as long as the forgery has been circulating. That other tyrants – and would-be tyrants – continue to use the forgery to hide their own shortcomings and further their ambitions is also no secret.
The story of the forgery was uncovered by The Times of London – the mouthpiece of the British establishment in those pre-Murdoch days – in May 1920. During the 1930s, courts in Switzerland and South Africa ruled that The Protocols were defamatory and fined local publishers. In 1964, Senators Thomas Dodd of Connecticut and Kenneth Keating of New York, members of the Judiciary Committee's Internal Security Subcommittee, traced the history of The Protocols.
Despite this publicity and judicial action, the libel persists. After the Tsar fell, the White Russian counterrevolutionary émigrés brought the forgery with them into exile. Henry Ford's The International Jew, published in his Dearborn Independent, borrowed heavily from the forgery; it sold more than 500,000 copies in the U.S. until he was forced to recant under threat of libel suits. Hitler used The Protocols to justify anti-Semitic legislation and suppression of all opposition to the Third Reich. Stalin and Khrushchev used it to justify their pogroms.
More recently, Egyptian television drew on The Protocols in a widely distributed soap opera. Last year, Wal-Mart carried an edition of the forgery at its e-store until pressure from the Anti-Defamation League and other human rights campaigners forced its removal.
The forgery continues to circulate because it provides a simple focus for a group's feelings of powerlessness. Almost-haves in Egypt, Moscow or Orange County are given a cartoonish villain to blame for their frustrated ambitions. Answering this cartoonishness makes The Plot important.
Eisner (who died in January 2005, aged 88) is one of the form's seminal figures. His 1938 The Spirit broke the frame of the 6 panel page. Not only did he vary the size of his panels, but text and action could extend beyond the panel. He laid the ground work on which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would develop their great work at Marvel. His protégés included Jules Feiffer, Bob Kane and Lou Fine.
Forty years after The Spirit, he is credited with inventing the graphic novel. Before his 1978 A Contract with God – which is actually a set of four connected stories – extended storytelling in sequential art was limited to a 16 page form. Working with fewer than 100 frames (on average) a story, artists and writers were tied to simple storylines and flat characterizations. By breaking those limits, Eisner gave Art Spiegelman (Maus), the Pinis (Elfquest), and Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Neverwhere), among others, space to tell more fully developed stories.
In The Plot, he traces the story from Joly to Golovinski to Hitler to the Klan to Russia's neo-tsarist black shirts Pamyat to Hamas to America's Christian Identity movement. Contrapuntally, he follows efforts to expose the forgery, picking up the thread with Phillip Graves' 1921 articles in The Times of London. Within the limits of the story itself, his hand, both as writer and draftsman, is deft, his pacing is cinematic.
Still, The Plot is imperfect. The story Eisner tells is dry and does not easily lend itself to his graphic dynamism: think Classics Illustrated rather than Spiderman. He is forced by the nature of the story itself to be talky rather than active. At the same time, he chose to devote an inordinate number of pages (17 of the text's 122) to a side issue: point-by-point comparison of Joly's Dialogue with The Protocols; the pages could have been used better tracing the connections between the groups who have continued to circulate the forgery. These quibbles aside, though, The Plot is a good note on which to end a stellar career.
Jews, of course, care about this forgery because it attacks us directly; all people of faith need to combat its circulation because by attacking one group on the grounds of its religious identity it diminishes all faith groups. Norton has been pitching The Plot to rabbis and synagogue educators; however, the book needs to be part of the religious education curricula at every church, masjid, ashram and wat in the country as well.
I know very little of comic books and graphic art, so the name Will Eisner does not have that magical ring for me, that it apparently has for some others, and I approached this book with no preconceived idea of the author/artist's skill. Judged solely on its merits as a story, I found The Plot to be an engaging narrative, up until the final section, in which passages from the Protocols and the earlier French work from which it was largely copied - Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu - were presented side by side. While I can certainly understand why Eisner would choose to present these passages for the reader to compare (the Protocols seem lifted almost in their entirety), page after page of direct quotes felt like a rather obvious and cumbersome device, and interrupted the flow of the story.
That small criticism aside, I found this book to be both enlightening and disheartening, and can only applaud the author's attempt to present the truth to the world in such an accessible format. I know that I will be thinking of it for some time, wondering at the seeming indestructibility of anti-Semitism, and the ability of fiction to trump fact...