Another alternate history scenario: No Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Historically the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were the most evil legacy of Tsar Nicholas II, and certainly his only enduring one unless we count one of the most idiotic Disney movies. They were a hoax made to justify things like the Odessa and Kishinev Pogroms, in order to present Russia as the victim of a hypothetical Jewish conspiracy. They happen to have also been a cheap thing for any anti-Semite to mindlessly copy without bothering with the hoaxed nature of said protocols. If the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had never been written by the ministers of Nicholas the Bloody, what would have happened to 20th and 21st Century anti-Semitism? It wouldn't kill it off by any means of the word, but it would deprive it of one of its most enduring lies and their evil results.

IMHO the absence of the Protocols would have at least some significant changes in terms of the history of a particular idea, but I'm not sure what those changes would be. Perhaps anti-Semitism retains a more religious (meaning Christian ideas of deicide and Christ-Killers) edge instead of the 'secular' one the protocols left. I rather doubt that this would erase the Holocaust as the architects of that movement had a specific chain of events which might or might not occur in this scenario for reasons unrelated to the absence of a hoax. The history of ideas is still an area of history, so I'm asking this simple question: for want of a hoax, how might hatred have been altered, if altered it would be at all?

Comments

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

If Tsar Nicholas' regime had not crafted the Protocols, some other sonofabitch would have. Late 19th century Europe was on the cusp of an age of truly Titanic confrontation, and the most vulnerable of the gentile population was very ready to focus their anxiety and loathing on a population within their midst that was something alien to most of them. There's a reason that Reform Judaism emerged in Germany as an effort of well acculturated Jews in the professional class to make Judaism seem less of a foreign and threatening entity to Germans...and there is a reason why it did not work.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

True. I do wonder, however, if a non-state agency or something other than Tsarism would have done so as seemingly convincingly as the Tsar did. I do think that without the Protocols that this by no means forestalls Nicholas II's Pogroms. He had to find some means of making his regime's pitiful failures 'make sense'. So.........fair point. If not in Russia, it might have been in Vienna.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

FYI. Antisemitism was quite a fashion in France late 18XX. Google Panama scandal, Clemanceau, Dreyfus, etc.
You don't need to get Russian Tsarism to fake something on the basis of French stuff...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's true, but that still means that Russia wouldn't be the ones to follow up things like its Nicholas II-era pogroms with the Protocols. The world would have been spared that combination.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

"most evil legacy of Tsar Nicholas II"
Why's that?

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Do you have another candidate?

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

Errr... Bin Laden? Hirohito? Jack the Riper?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Because this one went on to influence so many other evils. Most obvious among them are the Nazis and the Holocaust. Nicholas II had other nasty aspects of his regime, but most of them were overshadowed by both the total collapse of his regime and by the immensely worse actions of his successors Stalin and Lenin.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

No, it's just as simple as that: why Russian Tsar?

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

There were pogroms before the Protocols, and after. Fashions come, fashions go. Anti-semitism never goes out of style.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

Jews were kicked out of Spain far before Brits labeled the process with a word from Russian.
They're bent on Russia, anyway.
Some years ago London city authorities seemed pretty keen to control local homeless - they appointed one of them to be 'Tsar'.
God save the Queen!

[merig00.livejournal.com]

This might have been beginning of "world domination" conspiracy but definately not the first "non-religious" anti-semitism.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

Please don't get me wrong, dudes.
Ain't I pro-Tsarist :), ain't I jew myself.
Ain't I have illusions on the account of so-called 'popular education', widely practiced around me.

I just find it funny that antisemitism is associated with Russia while it was Europe who by most and large hosted it.
1321, Jews expelled from France.
1349, Netherlands. 3/4 of jewish population killed.
1492, Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal. En masse.
etc., please help yourself with Googling, Wikipeding, or just guessing.
Those years Russia have had neither antisemitism, nor the jews themselves while most of West-European cities allowed jews in ghettos only...
I dare to suggest that Adolf was so 'successful' in his 'initiatives' because Western&Central Europe has a centuries-long history of antisemitism ending up with most notorious Henry Ford overseas.

Take care, folks.
Fact-checking, fact-checking and one more time fact-checking!

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Hard to have antisemitism when you're too busy being conquered by Mongols.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

Following this logic, Russians are bound to have antimongolism. Which isn't in place. Strange, huh?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's the argument that bad acts in one place negate those in another place. Russia absorbed the great bulk of the world's Jewish population in the wake of the partitions of Poland, and in the Pale of Settlement created one of the more grotesque forms of anti-Semitism. Including, I might add, regular pogroms on a scale not equalled until the Shoah.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

That's wrong, too. It's Western Europe who absorbed the Jewish population. Many Jews've been baptisted, there were cross-marriages, etc. Many stayed Jews, e.g., in Germany - until Adolf was brought to power.
It is also true that another part of Jews moved to Germany and Poland (in case of the later was acquired by Russia). In Yekaterine the Great's times the whole population of Russia was ca 40 mio plus 5 mio polaks. Make your guess how many Jews were there.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

Given that the NWO myth is a bad re-write of PEZ, I feel safe in speculating that we might have been spared Ron Paul and his fellow conspiracy theorists.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure the Tzar wrote them. From what I've read, they were more likely written and planted by political operatives who didn't have as direct access to Nicolas himself to sway the Tzar away from more radical policies, simply by associating the policies with Jews. Also, the pograms might have already happened before the Protocols were crafted.

I'm not saying this particular forgery isn't influential and long-lasting, only that it might not have affected the time-line as you suggest.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I admit it, it was me, with my time machine. You have to understand though, if hatred of the jews did not reach the correct tipping point, Hitler is never able to rally enough support to get elected and Germany does not start world war 2. Instead, Russia and europe eventually go to war, with russia quickly overrunning a much less militarized eastern europe. Japan never attacks the US so the US also remains fairly neutral. Russia secretly captures a certain Albert Einstein who never flees Germany and forces him in secret to create for them nuclear weapons which then they use to easily conquer a nonmilitarized United States and the rest of the world. The present where I come from is cold... so cold...

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

If there were no Protocols, the regimes of Europe would've found other excuses to persecute Jews. It's not the Protocols themselves that caused that persecution. The reasons were deeper.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

If you read the thread carefully, you'll see that the regimes of Europe WERE persecuting jews all way long, stopping for a break.
Antisemitism isn't dead there, either.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm saying... daddy. The persecution went on and would go on with or without the Protocols.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I agree with that. I was asking how the absence of the Protocols changes the persecutions.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

I guess my answer is, it doesn't/wouldn't.