Jeremy Corbyn falls for one of the twentieth century’s most poisonous myths

In 1920, the London-based printer Eyre & Spottiswoode published the first English language edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion under the title The Jewish Peril.

Allegedly the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders, set out under twenty-four headings or “Protocols”, the eight-page long text reads like a manifesto cum pop philosophical tract.

Near the beginning of Protocol One, we are told that too much political freedom has been allowed to common folk giving an outsize influence of “the rascality, the slackness, the instability of the mob” in Western political life.

To arrest this decline, a new world order had to be established with Jews in total control of all spheres of human experience.

Take this section on the press – “Literature and journalism are two of the most important educative forces, and therefore our government will become proprietor of the majority of the journals”.

The book was reviewed in positive terms by some of the most well-known newspapers and magazines of the day.

On the 8th May, The Times carried an editorial calling for a public inquiry into the document’s contents: “Have we been struggling these tragic years to blow up and extirpate the secret organisation of German world dominion only to find beneath it another, more dangerous because more secret? Have we, by straining every fibre of our national body, escaped a “Pax Germanica” only to fall into a “Pax Judaeica”?”

A week later the Spectator called it “one of the most remarkable productions of their kind”.

The book was later exposed as a fraud (ironically, by The Times in 1921) – most of it ripped off from a French horror romance from the middle of the nineteenth century.

The Protocols expressed a point of view shared by some of the most influential British public figures of the age. In an article published in the Illustrated Sunday Herald in February 1920, Winston Churchill blamed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia on the Jews: “This worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstruction of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality has been steadily growing”.

He continues: “There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and the bringing about of the Russian revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all the others”.

It’s not difficult to see why the Protocols had immediate mass appeal. They fell on already fertile ground – for those who lived in that time of vast upheaval, confused and frightened of the accumulated debris effected by rapid industrialisation, the growth of romanticising nationalisms and revolutionary political ideologies, it must have been comforting to learn that “these tragic years”, as The Times puts it, were not inflicted on humanity by mere randomness or human error but by a controlling, diabolical intellect.

Some people – activists on the far left for example – are still falling for such poisonous myths. Unfortunately, among them is the leader of the Labour party who hopes to be Britain’s Prime Minister.

In The Times today, columnist Daniel Finkelstein revealed that the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn wrote a foreword to a book written in 1902 by the economist and historian John Hobson called “Imperialism: A Study”, which was republished in 2011 by Spokesman Books.

Very few British thinkers were as influential in giving an intellectual basis to the popular notion that Jewish power took a controlling interest in world affairs as John Hobson.

After spending some years as a teacher in Exeter and Faversham, John Hobson, moved to London in 1887. He fell into social circles influenced by nascent creed of Fabianism and wrote several books on the state of capitalism as he saw it.

He was then sent to cover the Second Boer War as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. It was then that the dry thinking that characterised his early intellectual development took on a rather different tenor.

In his essay “Capitalism and Imperialism in South Africa”, published in 1900, he wrote: “Most of the financiers were Jews, for the Jews are par excellence the international financier… They went there [South Africa] for money… They fastened on the Rand… as they are prepared to fasten upon any other spot upon the globe… Primarily they are financial speculators taking their gains not out of the genuine fruits of industry, even the industry of others, but out of construction, promotion and financial manipulation of companies”.

What he observed in South Africa, or thought he saw, infects his thinking in the much lengthier Imperialism: A Study.

For Hobson, the dynamic of imperial expansion marched in lock step with the burgeoning power of international capital, and to its sole benefit.

He notes: “While imperial expansion was attended by no increase in the value of our trade with our colonies and dependencies, a considerable increase in the value of our trade with foreign nations had taken place”.

Cui bono? For Hobson, it was obvious. In his chapter, “Economic Parasites of Imperialism”, he writes: “The only possible answer is that the business interests of the nation as a whole are subordinated to those of certain sectional interests that usurp control of the national resources and use them for their private gain”.

Hobson then continues with aplomb: “Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European State, or a great State loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connexions set their face against it?”

Most of the foreword itself is typical Corbyn blather – a rambling overview of two centuries of world history that takes in the excesses of British Imperialism, US-led interventions in the Middle East and one startingly tin-eared reflection on the former Soviet Union – “its allies often acted quite independently”.

Corbyn glosses Hobson’s analysis of the development of the British Empire over the course of the nineteenth century as “not very revolutionary”. But he nonetheless continues: “What is brilliant, and very controversial at the time, is his analysis of the pressures that were hard at work in pushing for a vast national effort in grabbing new outposts of Empire”.

Hobson is widely read for all kinds of reasons and you will find his writing on many university reading lists. But here’s the rub. Hobson is regarded with caution in academic circles over precisely the commitments Jeremy Corbyn chooses to praise – this notion that the “pressures… hard at work” derived largely from Jewish financiers.

Indeed, Tony Brewer in his 1990 text Marxist Theories of Imperialism notes: “Without [the financiers’] directing intelligence, the [Hobson’s] theory loses its distinctive character, and becomes merely a list of pro-imperialist forces; it cannot offer any explanation of the pattern of timing of Imperialist advance”.

So there we have it – another major contribution to something we knew about Corbyn already that his distrust of international elites, often articulated in crude ‘greedy banker’ slogans is rooted in a worldview dating back decades that drips with anti-Semitism.