Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (58 page)

This book has taken a long time to write. When my wife, Sarah Powell, first made a joke about feeling like Dorothea Brooke in
Middlemarch
, I went back to Eliot and discovered that Edward Casaubon’s ever-delayed
Key to All Mythologies
was indeed a precursor of this book, at least in its early stages. Casaubon’s project, like his soul, “went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.” Sarah and the girls have had to put up with a lot and for a long time.

So, too, have my patient, ever-encouraging agent, Georgia Garrett, and the ebullient Dan Franklin at Cape, who punished wing-flapping with excellent lunches and then supplied the wonderful Rebecca Carter as editor. I am grateful, I suppose, to Kevin Jarvis for launching me on this journey. Quite how grateful will depend on sales. I am indebted to Chris Brougham, though only he knows why. Francis Wheen consciously supplied me with Dudley Collard and—less deliberately—with an example of how writers can write, and my hugely valued colleague at
The Times
, Danny Finkelstein, read the manuscript and made invaluable suggestions. Eamon O’Connor procured me a priceless DVD.

Finally, I couldn’t have coped without the Yankee friends of my middle age, John Lahr and Stephen Grosz, one of whom effortlessly solved an immense problem I was having with structure, thus clearing the way, while the other dipped deep into his own discipline, psychoanalysis, to bring things to a conclusion. Unbelievably, much of this was accomplished whilst eating porridge.

NOTES

Complete publishing information on sources here referred to only in part may be found in the bibliography.

Introduction: Blame Kevin

1
Russ Kick, ed.,
Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies
, 5.

2
James McConnachie and Robin Tudge,
The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories
, xi.

3
Richard Hofstadter,
The Paranoid Style in American Politics and other Essays
, 29.

4
The Skeptic’s Dictionary
,
http://skepdic.com/occam.html
.

5
Skip Willman in Peter Knight, ed.,
Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in PostWar America
, 25.

6
Ibid.

7
Lewis Namier,
Avenues of History
, cited in Daniel Pipes,
Conspiracy
, 38.

8
Robin Ramsay,
Conspiracy Theories
, 38.

9
Daniel Pipes,
The Hidden Hand
, 325.

10
Guardian
, February 4, 1999.

11
David Ray Griffin,
The New Pearl Harbor
, 26.

12
http://smithmag.net/2006/08/10/korey-rowe-the-loose-cannon-of-911
.

13
Morning Star
, March 26, 2005.

1. “The Uncanny Note of Prophecy”

1
Cited in Norman Cohn,
Warrant for Genocide
, 166.

2
State Department Decimal File 861.00/5339.

3
More than a decade later, the issue of the Jewishness of Soviet Communism still preoccupied British diplomats. In the recently published diaries of Reader Bullard, British consul in Saint Petersburg from 1931 to 1934, there is constant mention of the Jewishness of various party and state officials, as well as of the apologists from abroad who defended the Stalin regime. Buller himself was a liberal, but his diary records an article in the
Listener,
of May 2, 1934, in which a Professor Hyman Levy argued that the Soviet system was the opposite of fascism. Buller remarks, “I have ceased to expect a Jew to criticize anything in Soviet Russia. I understand their point of view. The Russian Jew was bottom-dog before the Revolution, and now he is a member of the ruling class, with the diplomatic service, foreign trade, journalism, and propaganda largely in his hands.” Reader Bullard,
Inside Stalin’s Russia
, 264.

4
Binjamin W. Segel,
A Lie and a Libel
, 51.

5
Marsden version, 184-85.

6
Richard S. Levy, Introduction to Binjamin W. Segel,
A Lie and A Libel
, 7.

7
Quoted in Cohn, 149.

8
Cited in Cohn, 149.

9
Levy, 120.

10
Cited in Cohn, 168.

11
Marsden subsequently produced his own translation of the
Protocols
. It’s the one sitting on my desk as I write this, bought from an American mail-order company. In an anonymous preface, the edition tells readers that Marsden was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks and his health ruined. He came back to Britain but died suddenly after covering the empire tour of the Prince of Wales. “His sudden death,” says this edition, “is still a
mystery
.” Marsden version, 6.

12
Cohn, 170.

13
Neil Baldwin,
Henry Ford and the Jews
, 49.

14
Ibid., 59.

15
Ibid., 81-85.

16
Dearborn Independent
, January 22, 1921.

17
Baldwin, 140.

18
Cohn, 284.

19
Marsden version, 293.

20
Stephen A. Bronner,
A Rumor Against the Jews
, 85.

21
Hermann Bernstein,
The Truth About the Protocols of Zion
, 31.

22
Cited in Cohn, 88.

23
Bronner, 91.

24
Levy, 16.

25
Douglas’s
Plain English
was full of surprises, some of them hilarious. The anti-Semitic Conservative MP Captain A. H. M. Ramsay—interned during the war against Hitler—records in his book
The Nameless War
, “According to a letter published in
Plain English
on 3rd September, 1921: ‘The Learned Elders have been in existence for a much longer period than they have perhaps suspected. My friend, Mr. L. D. van Valckert, of Amsterdam, has recently sent me a letter containing two extracts from the Synagogue at Mulheim. The volume in which they are contained was lost at some period during the Napoleonic Wars, and has recently come into Mr. van Valckert’s possession. It is written in German, and contains extracts of letters sent and received by the authorities of the Mulheim Synagogue. The first entry he sends me is of a letter received: “‘
16th June, 1647. From O.C. (i.e., Oliver Cromwell), by Ebenezer Pratt. In return for financial support will advocate admission of Jews to England: This however impossible while Charles living. Charles cannot be executed without trial, adequate grounds for which do not at present exist. Therefore advise that Charles be assassinated, but will have nothing to do with arrangements for procuring an assassin, though willing to help in his escape. In reply was dispatched the following: 12th July, 1647. To O.C. by E. Pratt. Will grant financial aid as soon as Charles removed and Jews admitted. Assassination too dangerous. Charles shall be given opportunity to escape: His recapture will make trial and execution possible. The support will be liberal, but useless to discuss terms until trial commences.
’ ”

26
.
Segel, 68.

27
Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 307-8.

28
Cohn, 254.

29
Levy, 42.

30
Quoted in Segel, 83.

31
Ibid., 89.

32
Segel, cited Cohn,
Warrant for Genocide
, 151.

33
Levy, 32.

34
Hannah Arendt,
Origins of Totalitarianism
, 357.

35
Levy, 35-36.

2. Dark Miracles

1
Quoted in Leonard Schapiro,
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union
, 384-85.

2
Report of the Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center. Trial
, 22.

3
Ibid., 23.

4
Isaac Deutscher,
The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929
, 174.

5
Ibid.

6
V. I. Lenin,
Collected Works
, vol. 36, 594-96.

7
J. Arch Getty and Oleg U. Naumov,
The Road to Terror
, 36-37.

8
Trotsky’s wife, quoted in Deutscher, 249.

9
Deutscher, 342-43, 352.

10
Getty and Naumov, 43.

11
Trotsky, quoted in Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn,
The Great Conspiracy Against Russia
, 75.

12
Trial Report
, 26.

13
Ibid., 27-28.

14
Ibid., 29.

15
Ibid., 31.

16
Ibid., 36.

17
Ibid., 43.

18
Ibid., 169.

19
Ibid., 47.

20
Ibid., 119.

21
Ibid., 60.

22
Ibid., 62.

23
Ibid., 65.

24
Ibid., 185.

25
Pravda
, August 21, 1936, quoted in Robert Conquest,
The Great Terror
, 98.

26
Trial Report
, 539.

27
Ibid., 541.

28
Ibid., 550.

29
Lion Feuchtwanger,
Moscow 1937
, 149.

30
Central Committee, secret resolution, cited in Getty and Naumov, 255.

31
Getty and Naumov, 293-94.

32
Joseph Davies,
Mission to Moscow
, 45.

33
Ibid., 44.

34
Feuchtwanger, 135.

35
Ibid., 147.

36
John D. Littlepage and Demaree Bess,
In Search of Soviet Gold
, 102.

37
Dudley Collard,
Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others
, 82.

38
Ibid., 93.

39
Ibid., 90.

40
Ibid., 99-100.

41
Ibid., 102.

42
Ibid., 107.

43
Feuchtwanger, 137-38.

44
Ibid., 162.

45
Dmitri Volkogonov,
Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary
, 376.

46
Ibid., 388.

47
Trotsky, letter to Smirnov, cited in Getty, 62.

48
Sotsialistichesky Vestnik
, no. 5 (243), March 14, 1931, 11-12. Cited in University of East Anglia document website:
http://www.uea.ac.uk/his/webcours/russia/documents/ambamonch.shtml
.

49
Chuyev, cited in Getty and Naumov, 3.

50
Extract of diary published in Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds.,
Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s.

51
.
Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn,
The Great Conspiracy Against Russia
, 79.

52
Collard, 8.

53
Cited in Getty and Naumov, 51.

54
Feuchtwanger, 173-74.

55
Keynes, talk for BBC Radio, 1936.

56
François Furet,
The Passing of an Illusion
, 155.