The idea that the Jews control the world is not a new one…

Today, many people use the word ‘Zionist’ as code for ‘Jew’. Before the First World War, the euphemism was ‘international financier’

Over the last eighteen months or so, many people in the West have felt emboldened to speak in hostile terms of Jews, feeling that this is now acceptable. They are however careful to avoid the word ‘Jew’, preferring to speak of ‘Zionists’. This term is also used by those who wish to suggest that the news media, film industry, banks and other bodies are all controlled by powerful Jews, who are thus able to manipulate entire countries and bend them to their will. This has led to the acronym ZOG being bandied about, which stands for ‘Zionist Occupation Government’. It means a supposedly independent government which is secretly being operated by an international group of Jews. There is nothing new about such a conspiracy theory and the only thing which has changed over the years is the coded terms used to refer to Jews. Most people are aware that simply announcing out loud that the Jews are taking over the world is apt to cause eyebrows to raise and so a substitute expression is always required.

The idea of the ‘international financier’ was becoming very popular by the end of the Boer War, appearing even in important and well-received books on economics. Just as today the word ‘Zionist’ is often used as being almost a synonym for ‘Jew’, so a century ago the phrase ‘international financier’ was popular for the same purpose. John Atkinson Hobson was the author of works which allow us to see clearly how this code was used. An economist with an interest in social science, Hobson covered the Second Boer War for the Manchester Guardian, which of course later changed its name and became the Guardian newspaper which we know today. For Hobson, it was obvious who was responsible for the Boer War, which was fought in South Africa between 1899 and 1902. It was the Jews. The Manchester Guardian at that time was as radical and progressive as the Guardian is today and yet there was no compunction about engaging as a journalist somebody like John Hobson, with his openly anti-Semitic views. It was quite acceptable in the aftermath of the Boer War for those on the left wing of British politics to attribute the war to the greed of Jewish bankers.

John Hobson’s major work, Imperialism, was published in 1902, just after the Boer War, and is still consulted today for the insights which it supposedly provides into capitalism’s search for new markets. Jeremy Corbyn, whose leadership of the Labour party was dogged by allegations of being soft on anti-Semitism in the party, wrote a glowing introduction to the 2011 edition of Imperialism. In this book Hobson, a renowned economist, helpfully explains what is really meant, in the context of the Boer War, by ‘international financiers’;

International financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race, in a unique position to control the policy of nations.

Hobson goes on to talk of the power of the Rothschilds and in an earlier book writes of, ‘a class of financial capitalists of which the foreign Jew must be taken as the leading type’. He says too that the financial system of the world is run by men;

United by the strongest bonds of organisation, always in closest and quickest touch with one another, situated in the very heart of the business capital of every state, controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience, they are in a unique position to control the policy of nations

There are no prizes for guessing the ‘single and peculiar race’ to which these financial wizards supposedly belonged!

Hobson had a bit of a bee in his bonnet about Jews. He expressed the idea neatly of the Jew who cared only for his own ethnic group and who was concerned solely with the acquisition of money, when he wrote in the late nineteenth century that the Jew was, ‘almost devoid of social morality’. He meant by this that Jews owed allegiance only to their own people, as opposed to society in general. He went on to say that,

The superior calculating intellect which is his national heritage, is used unsparingly to enable him to take advantage of every weakness, folly and vice of the society in which he lives.

In the early years of the twentieth century, at about the time that Hobsons magnum opus was published, a strange book began circulating in Russia. It purported to be the minutes of a meeting of powerful Jews who outlined their master-plan for world domination. It was to be achieved by sapping the morals of the gentiles and also gaining economic control of businesses and banks. This nonsense was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and it was hugely popular with anti-Semites, of whom there were not a few in Tsarist Russia. After the Russian Revolution, copies of the book were brought out of Russia by defeated ‘Whites’; those who had been fighting against the Bolshevik takeover of the country. It was at this point that something strange happened.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a mishmash of material from dozens of sources, including the writings of Machiavelli; all cobbled together to make a barely coherent whole. Once it appeared outside Russia, the White exiles and refugees represented it as being the blueprint for the Bolshevik revolution. In short, the revolution was portrayed as a Jewish plot, one which would spread to the rest of the world. Having seized Russia, the Jews would now try the same trick in America and Britain. It was known at that time in some quarters as the ‘Red Bible’. There were attempts to set up communist regimes in Germany and Hungary in 1919 and so the idea of Bolshevism spreading west from Russia was not in itself farfetched.

It is fascinating to see how fears about the ‘international financier’ have mutated into the modern condemnation of ‘Zionists’, combined with the same fear that Jews are working against the interests of the average man in the street by encouraging immigration and sabotaging the economies of those countries which refuse to cooperate with their schemes. The more things change, the more that they stay the same!