Review 22.5
11 April - 24 April, 1997

In my last Tzadik column, I made reference to the rise of irrational conspiracy cranks, some of whom draw inspiration from the supposed operations of those UFOs hovering above our back gardens, poised to make the ultimate Native Title claim. I noted that some cult-watchers had warned that the coming few years before 2000 will bring out of the woodwork a wide range of end-time nutters, "some of whom might even turn to violence to usher in their millenial vision". I was, when writing, thinking of outwardly directed violence; equally, if not more likely, however, is the prospect of inwardly directed violence, of the type we have just seen in California, where 39 members of the Heaven's Gate group "voluntarily" ended their earthly lives on the promise that they would soon be entering the heavenly realms via a space craft tailing the Hale-Bopp comet.

However nutty some of the Heaven's Gate people might have seemed, we should avoid the assumption that "cultists" are all brainwashed dupes who have lost the ability to see reason. Perhaps conditions in some new religious movements are ideal for those who seek to take advantage of people's psychological fragility, but the truth is that people believe "odd' things for all kinds of reasons.

A few years ago I was speaking on anti-Semitism to a meeting of the Friends of the Hebrew University. I'd rounded off the usual core beliefs of anti-Semites: ritual murder, usury, the International Judeo-Bolshevik Conspiracy Pty Ltd, Holocaust Denial, etc. Someone in the audience asked: "But surely, these people don't really believe this rubbish?" The questioner naturally assumed that in the absence of obvious mental illness, no one could possibly believe that world affairs were being directed by a secretive cabal of Rabbis living in the Prague Cemetery (which, I believe, is the last known postal address of the Learned Elders of Zion).

Well, yes, they do. They certainly don't spout this nonsense just to be nasty. Most Holocaust Deniers genuinely believe that there were no gas chambers, that atrocities have been exaggerated by pro-Jewish propagandists, that the Nazis had no deliberate policy of extermination, and they believe this as matter-of-factly as you or I might believe that John Howard isn't doing such a bad job, or could be doing better, or as the Heaven's Gate disciples knew that once the poisoned apple sauce set in they would be joining a little spaceship and meeting their Maker.

We all know of people holding radically different views to ours, yet still we find it hard to believe that sane people can believe what we take to be rubbish. In the same week as the Heaven's Gate mass suicides, Channel Seven aired a program on end-time prophecies, hosted by David McCallum, aka Ilya Kuryakin from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. It is some measure of the intellectual bankruptcy of much of our TV culture that this rag-bag of fantasies from Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, Jeane Dixon and Elizabeth Clare Prophet (who has her own funny views on the Jews) should be passed off as informing viewing.

A friend tells me that the next day, a colleague who had watched this nonsense came to work (a major Australian semi-government authority), convinced that the world was about to end. What was the point of going on? asked this woman (who has a middle management role), if the Great King of Terror was about to descend from the sky? And her husband, who had recently set himself up in his own business, felt the same. This was, I should remind you, happening in Melbourne, this month. Eventually, her colleagues sat her down and explained to her the implausibility of what she had seen. But for a while, she was deeply shaken by the whole affair.

And so she should have been. Do television programmers assume that people will automatically dismiss as fanciful such so-called documentaries when they are presented to viewers as factual and authoritative? Again, this comes back to the fallacious assumption that it is "safe" to air such nonsense because sensible people would never take it seriously. But they do. Let me make a prophecy, here and now. Sometime before the end of the century, someone is going to make a prime-time television documentary about the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, fronted by some forgettable hack who was last seen on Hogan's Heroes or F-Troop. This program is going to outline the notorious history of this anti-Semitic concoction, but point to its "amazing" prophetic insights (which are, frankly, no more or no less accurate than Nostradamus's notoriously vague musings) and conclude that even though it wasn't "ordinary" Jewish people who were responsible for penning this weird tract, it was probably someone like the Rothschilds, or the Freemasons, or the Alliance Israelite Universelle, or some other poor schmuck.

Am I paranoid? Well, there are already books out there on your bookshop shelves - bestsellers, no less - that argue the Protocols are authentic. Holy Blood, Holy Grail, one of the first in the interminable series of "exposes" of Jesus's supposed secret life post-cross (yes, yes, he went to France), says that the Protocols were written by a body known as the Priory of Sion. Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, written by the late Stephen Knight, claims that the Protocols were written by high-ranking Freemasons. Both of these books are bestsellers, both received respectable reviews in respectable publications, both take care to condemn the anti-Semitic uses to which the Protocols had been put ... before lauding them as authentic.

Indeed, what we may be seeing here is the development of a conspiracy theory that relies on all the primary texts of anti-Semites, while at the same time actively disavowing anti-Semitism. Let me now make a further prophecy. The hack chosen to front this program on the Protocols will probably be Jewish, and will begin with the words. "No people has suffered more from this terrible document than my own. Nevertheless, there is no denying its remarkable accuracy over the years."

Please, let it not be Ben Gazzara.