Conspiracy theories and literary ethics: Umberto Eco, Danilo Kis and The Protocols of Zion

Comparative Literature, Spring 1999 by Boym, Svetlana

Since ethics is precisely about one's relationship to others, it stands in counterpoint and in reaction to paranoia. Moreover, it is based on estrangement as much as on human solidarity. "Literary ethics," in this case, is not reduced solely to moral examples and the ethical behavior of characters, but highlights the ethics of storytelling itself. "Literary ethics" does not read literary discourse merely as a moral recourse,2 but offers a special kind of optics that focuses on the moments in texts when words are propelled into deeds, and when the relationships between general and particular, between abstract ideals or ideologies and singular acts, are called into question. In particular, self-conscious literary texts such as Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and Kis's "The Book of Kings and Fools" offer us ethical insights into, and unique heuristic tools for understanding, "secret books" and conspiratorial temptations. Is there a difference between paranoia with and without quotation marks? Is there a way out of the conspiratorial labyrinth? An alternative to paranoiac thinking?

1. The Making of the Protocols: Deadly Intertextuality

"Let us recall, for our pleasure and to remind ourselves, the main provisions of the Protocols . . . For an Aryan, nothing is more invigorating than to read them. It does more for our salvation than any number of prayers . . ." Thus wrote Ferdinand Ce line in 1937 in his Bagatelle pour un massacre (277-89; also quoted in Cohn 250). Reading the Protocols provides him with an acute spasm of paranoiac pleasure, the ultimate sadomasochistic fantasy of world domination in which he could play both dominatrix and dominated. It might even have been amusing had such thoughts remained the fantasy of a writer, and not an anticipation of the Holocaust. Ce line compares the reading of the Protocols to praying, but salvation in this case comes through hatred, not love.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the supposed revelation of an Anti-Christ and a secret plan for Jewish world domination, was first published in Russia in 1905 by a religious writer, Sergius Nilus. He claimed that the book's original was in Hebrew and that this was a rare recording of the secret protocols.3 In 1905-1907 the book inspired the bloodiest pogroms in Russian and Ukrainian history and later became Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra's favorite bedtime reading. In the early 1920s the book was published and widely discussed in France, Italy, the United States (with Henry Ford's generous assistance), Syria, Egypt, Persia, Palestine, Poland, Denmark and Sweden. In the Philadelphia Ledger the Protocols were called "the red Bible" of the Bolsheviks and said to contain a plan for world revolution. In London, The Times and The Morning Post discussed the Protocols with great seriousness and published several articles interpreting world history in light of the new revelation of a JudeoMasonic conspiracy.

In August, 1921, an even more spectacular revelation appeared in The Times, when Philip Graves, its Constantinople correspondent, published an article demonstrating that the Protocols were plagiarized from Maurice Joly's little known "Dialogues in Hell" (1864), a fictional political pamphlet directed against Napoleon III and written in the form of a dialogue between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. In the Protocols the part of Machiavelli, slightly rewritten, was attributed to the "wise men of Zion." Graves's evidence came from a certain Mr. X, a Russian refugee in ConstantinopleChristian Orthodox by religion, and Constitutional Monarchist by political conviction-who did not wish his real name to be known. A White Russian who had long been interested in the Jewish question, Mr. X had himself searched for the secret "Masonic organization" in Southern Russia, but the only conspiracy he had found was a monarchist one. In 1921 Mr. X purchased a number of old books from a former officer of the Okhrana, a White Russian refugee like himself. Among these books was a small volume in French lacking the title page. Glancing through it, Mr. X discovered, to his great surprise, that the fictional polemic of Machiavelli bore a very close resemblance to the "revelations" of the old men of Zion. Later this same rare French text was discovered in the British Museum with the name of its author-Parisian lawyer and enlightened French Catholic Maurice Joly-still attached. Joly had no Jewish connections whatsoever. In fact, the fictional dialogues between Montesquieu and Machiavelli in "Dialogues of Hell" were intended to criticize the government of Napoleon III. Subsequently arrested for anti-government propaganda, Joly committed suicide in prison. Although all copies of his pamphlet had apparently been ordered to be burned, one somehow ended up in the hands of the Russian secret police and another in the British Museum.