Page:The History of a Lie (1921).djvu/13

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE HISTORY OF A LIE
9

France, the Scandinavian countries, Japan and the United States, basing all their arguments on the “Protocols” vouched for by “the Russian mystic” Sergius Nilus, see in the present chaotic conditions the absolute fulfillment of the prophecies outlined by the so-called “Wise Men of Zion” years ago. The propagandists are violent and vicious, foaming at their mouths, appealing to the basest passions, insinuating, accusing, pointing their fingers at “the source of all evil”—at the Jews who constitute but a fraction of one per cent of the world’s population, and who are in Europe to-day, after the close of the World War, more wretched and miserable than ever before,—persecuted, hounded and starved.

What are these mysterious Protocols? How did they come to “the Russian mystic” who revealed them in 1905, and which have now been exhumed from obscurity for the purpose of enlightening the world, and which point to the Jews as the cause of all unrest, chaos and confusion?

Nilus, “the Russian mystic,” is credited with several versions of how he had secured the Protocols, and his stories flatly contradict one another. In 1905 he said that the Protocols were given to him by a prominent Russian conservative whose name he did not mention, and who in turn had received them from an unnamed woman who had stolen them from “one of the most influential leaders of Freemasonry at the close of a secret meeting of the initiated in France.” Then, several years later, Nilus wrote that his friend himself had stolen the Protocols from “the headquarters of the Society of Zion in France.” Several years afterwards, in a new edition of his book, Nilus said that the “Protocols” came from Switzerland and not from France. This time he named his Russian conservative friend, Sukhotin, who had died