In this week’s Jesus and Mo strip, “climes”, Moses is finally leaving his quarantine with the boys. But as a parting shot, he pulls Mo’s leg.
Moses is of course referring to the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian Tsarist anti-Semitic forgery describing a Jewish plan for world domination. (You can find the English translation here.) It’s still bandied about by some anti-Semites as evidence of Jewish perfidy; as Wikipedia describes,
The 1988 charter of Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist group, stated that the Protocols embodies the plan of the Zionists. The reference was removed in the new covenant issued in 2017. Recent endorsements in the 21st century have been made by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrima Sa’id Sabri, the education ministry of Saudi Arabia, and a member of the Greek Parliament, Ilias Kasidiaris.
Mo falls for it:
sub
Progress after a fashion, I suppose. Thank God/Yahweh/Allah for small favors.
The Protocols was also a fave of Gerald L.K. Smith, far-right director of the Christian Nationalist Crusade and founder of the original “America First” Party.
What does PTO mean?
I think part of what drives this “Protocols” thing is how it sounds – it’s like “Objectivism”, or Scientology- it simply _sounds_ so out-there, so intriguing – even like the D. B. Cooper story, and like conspiracy theories…
Um, “please turn over”. Apologies if I misread your intended remark.
Ah that makes sense now!
The other part of the comment was just extra.
Personal Time Off?
In the 1890s, Monsieur Taxil wrote books about Freemasons that contained the wildest conspiracy theories he could think of. His objective, in which he succeeded, was to get his work endorsed by Catholic clergy. Then, he embarrassed them by confessing the hoax. But that did not mean people stopped believing his stories…
> “The crimes I laid at their door were so grotesque, so impossible, so widely exaggerated, I thought everybody would see the joke and give me credit for originating a new line of humor. But my readers wouldn’t have it so; they accepted my fables as gospel truth, and the more I lied for the purpose of showing that I lied, the more convinced became they that I was a paragon of veracity.
Then it dawned upon me that there was lots of money in being a Munchausen of the right kind, and for twelve years I gave it to them hot and strong, but never too hot. When inditing such slush as the story of the devil snake who wrote prophecies on Diana’s back with the end of his tail, I sometimes said to myself: ‘Hold on, you are going too far,’ but I didn’t. My readers even took kindly to the yarn of the devil who, in order to marry a Mason, transformed himself into a crocodile, and, despite the masquerade, played the piano wonderfully well.”
I find it absolutely mind-blowing how much damage that forgery (The Protocols) has done, and is still doing.
“The Protocols” appear to be the ‘Mother of all Conspiracy Theories’ title hands down.
WWII true story.
After the Japanese gave Russia a bit of a hiding in 1905, some Russkie POWs told the Nipponese of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.
Fast forward to WWII. The Nazis demanded that Yamamoto’s crew hand over the few Jews that the Land of the Rising Sun held captive. “No way,” responded the reps. of the most powerful Eastern slave-promoting imperialists, “these Jews are really powerful!”