| "Hitler
doesn't strike me as suidical." This morning I walked all the way over to Blockbuster Video in humid superheat while wearing pants. That was silly of me. BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO HAS BROKEN SAINTS. ... In four seperately-rentable discs. Clever move, Blockbuster. I didn't rent them, but I did rent "Why We Fight." Great movie, must-see brain food, but it didn't tell me very much that I didn't already know: the Military-Industrial Complex depends on Congress to survive, policy is made largely by think-tanks, economic imperialism is easy imperialism, war will happen more often the more it's allowed to be profitable, warmakers don't want pictures of flag-draped corpse-crates on television, the all-volunteer army exploits young people's self-interest then turns around and expects them to practice self-sacrifice, blah blah blah. The real benefit I got out of the Blockbuster visit was picking up a documentary I'd never even heard of: The Protocols of Zion by Marc Levin. The Protocols, if you weren't aware, is basically the one book most reponsible for propagating hatred of Jews. It's a late-19th, early-20th-century ripoff of earlier, sarcasm-filled, anti-Jesuit and anti-Napoleon III literary works spun together by various Russians with an anti-Semitic flavor. It purports to be the minutes of a meeting by a bunch of elder Jews as they describe their plan to take over the world. The fact that it's been examined and entirely debunked numerous times over the decades somehow hasn't harmed its popularity. The documentary, by a Jewish filmmaker, explains the book's significance while trying almost in vain to figure out why it's been so popular for so long in so many places. I say "almost in vain" because while it doesn't give you a particular reason or list of them, it gave me enough information to piece together a reason myself. The information it gave meshed with what I already knew and came out so compelling to me that I had to jot it down as the movie went along. Afterwards I stitched together something like this: Jews, if you weren't aware, enjoy truth. Seeking truth, identifying truth, pointing fingers at things not true. In a manner of speaking, they were the first reality-based community, which naturally attracted the ire of the power- and/or faith-based communities into which they happened to wander. For a long time, faith-based Christians cornered the hate market on Jews. Then along came the last throes of imperial Russia. A hundred years ago, Russia still had a czar, Moscow was still the self-declared Third Rome and tiny emerging Japan had just bitten a chunk out of the empire's eastern half. Nicholas II, simultaneously a member of the power- and faith-based communities in his functions as Emperor and member (later Saint) of the Russian Orthodox Church, felt he needed someone, some group to blame for his country's problems. He feared for the stability of the monarchy in the face of his people's liberal rumblings. Nicky soon came across the Protocols, arguably written by one of his own Jew-hating secret service men for the express purpose of convincing him of a Jewish conspiracy. The book pinned the blame for the degredation of the empire on those annoying truth-seeking Jews and their contemptible progressive ideals. Even if the czar didn't wholeheartedly buy into it, many of his followers sure did. The Protocols basically said that freedom of speech, of the press, of voting, human rights and any form of government that wasn't a monarchy were just illusions used by the Elders to control people. Even the idea of Darwinism was a Jewish plot. And just to get the point across that Jews were evil, the book also said they spread pornography, subversive behavior, brainwashing, economic warfare, international economic strangulation and distracting amusements -- because fun, like anything that doesn't keep you productive, is bad. All of this lead to the master plan of a global war both started and miraculously stopped by the Elders of Zion in order to control the world. Lies, all of it, and heavily-plagiarized ones at that. It couldn't be published if it were written today, not just because it's a laughably overblown excuse for anti-Semitic propaganda but because it copied so heavily from previous unrelated works. The clear implication from this favorite book of Russian reactionaries and/or monarchists was that the only way you knew you weren't living under a diabolical world-ending Jewish conspiracy was if you had an autocratic Christian king -- and wouldn't you know it, Russia already had one. The thing to do, as implied by the Protocols to Russian readers, was knock down anything that went against Nicholas II for the protection of the state and the people. He was sort of like that magic rock that keeps tigers away. And then came 1917. If you weren't Communist, that was the point at which you probably fled the country. Many fled carrying the Protocols and, I imagine, screamed a lot to their new neighbors about how the Revolution proved everything the book said. Adolf Hitler was a good listener. So was Henry Ford, radio preacher Father Coughlin, and recently a whole bunch of fundamentalist Muslims. Especially fundamentalist Muslims. The documentary noted that the Protocols are fantastically popular among them to the extent that Hamas mentions it in their mission statement. If you ever wonder why "they hate us," look no further than the Protocols. To them, American imperial ambitions -- or to some, Western culture in general -- look frighteningly like the fictional conspiracy plot they've had drilled into them since birth. It's a little like if a corporation developed reactors to produce unlimited electricity from the natural energy of Earth at the expense of slow, permanent ecological degredation. The Internet would be aflame with worries about the impending rise of Shinra, the explosive proliferation of genetically-modified monsters and a dark-energy meteor strike. But I digress. The reason I came up with, the one the documentary never said in as many words, is that the Protocols are still popular and Jews still hated because of the clash between a constant search for truth and a fearful grip on unchanging stability. Power-based and faith-based communities are of the latter, staying the same for as long as possible for their own benefit. Anything that challenges them is either inferior, seeking their destruction or both. Reality-based communities, however, are all about change and adaptation by gathering new information and winnowing out the truth in it. "But wait a sec," you say in second-person. "Are you implying that Jews don't count as a faith-based community?" See, that's the strange thing. Fundamentalists of any stripe are of course faith-based, but I've come to realize that religions in general need not be. In the documentary, asides with the director and his father touched on how Jews try to leave the world better than when they entered it. "Go do good" was the motto of the director's grandfather. It's impossible to improve the world without changing it, it's impossible to change the world without adapting it to a new situation or idea and it's impossible to adapt the world to anything without a whole lot of knowledge about that thing. Therefore, to improve the world one must keep seeking knowledge. The strongest, most resilient and most basic type of knowledge is what we call truth, therefore to best improve the world one must keep seeking truth. That's the ideal of a reality-based community. Faith-based communities, religious or not, are content with the stability of their particular forms of order and are even violently protective of them. Power-based communities ride the fence and occasionally step off into either side to exploit opportunties to sieze more power. It's as though, since we've deliberately stalled our natural evolution, our mental evolution has compensated by branching into those communities. Something to think about. Me, I'm done thinking for the moment. I started this post nearly three hours ago intending it to be a documentary review. I need a shower and some dinner, in that order. |