Book Review: The Plot by Will Eisner

The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Will Eisner

Seeking a way to manipulated the fickle Czar Nicholas II, Russian bureaucrats needed a justification for blaming the country's problems on Russian Jews rather than the repressive government. Mathieu Golovinski, a minor official with a track record in forging evidence, was commissioned. Golovinski found The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a French propaganda piece meant to discredit Napoleon III's corrupt government. Golovinski freshened up the vocabulary and shifted the target to a supposed Jewish conspiracy to take over the whole world. Thus The Protocols of the Elders of Zion came into existence. To get it to the Czar's attention, they passed the text on to a Russian court holy man, Sergius Nilus. He incorporated the text into his own book The Great and the Small before The Protocols became an independent work in the early 1900s. The book spread worldwide, especially after the Russian Revolution caused a dispersal of Russian aristocrats fleeing the Bolshevik tyranny. By the 1920s, The Dialogue in Hell was rediscovered and The Times of London had an article detailing the obvious plagiarism. In spite of constant debunking, The Protocols is still in publication and people are still willing to believe, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, that it accurately describes what Jews are like and what Jews are planning. Such a belief is eminently ridiculous but people often grasp at straws in order to justify their prejudices.

This book documents (in Eisner's typically evocative graphic format) the history of The Protocols. It's the last graphic book that Eisner made and is the product of twenty years of research. The case against The Protocols is irrefutable, as is the sad fact that some people still give it credence. Eisner goes over the various publications all over the world in the last half of the twentieth century all the way up to 2003 when the book was published.

Highly recommended--It's important to be informed about this nonsense and to be able to refute it.