Conspiracy theories are always, and especially in times of crisis, a kind of comforting solution, and the deeper the crisis, the shallower the logic in which conspiracy theories are spilled. Hannah Arendt says at one point in her work The Sources of Totalitarianism that if so many people believe in an obvious forgery such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, then "the task of the historian is no longer to expose the forgery."
The fact that a forgery is believed is, for Arendt, a fact "more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is a forgery." Why conspiracy theories sometimes break through the barriers of common sense so easily is a question that steps out of the zone where the historian is competent.
Since it is something that could be called a rational attempt by an impoverished man to explain his irrational fears that he believes threaten his existence, the problem is shifted, first of all, to the domain of psychology.
Modern means of communication raise panic to a higher level
If one believes in the eternal existence of the conspiratorial paratok, then the possibility that the cause of the existential stumbling is hidden in the mysterious tangle of secret societies seems very comforting, because in such a perception that evil presses on the whole world.
In the end, the comforted little man has nothing left but to waste the remaining days of his freedom in recognizing the processes that are working on his head and foreshadowing the coming of some secret powerful people to power. In the Balkans, this feeling has been incorporated into the collective identity over time.
A lot of warfare and frequent starvation, seasoned with the Catena Mundi myth, influenced the easy acceptance of that also very present Balkan myth about secret forces that are always working against us – from Sion to Brion.
That the fear of the rise of anti-Semitism is not unjustified is shown by the increasingly frequent warnings coming from representatives of the intellectual elite
Modern means of communication raise panic to a higher level. The Internet is teeming with websites and forums where colorful groups and individuals expose the vicious strategies that take place in conspiratorial processes whose ultimate goal is to take over the world.
In the paranoia of the aforementioned circles, the Masonic-Illuminati conspiracy appears as the most common conspiracy, which more and more interpreters prove with strong examples of semiotic-ritual presence in all power zones. Snobbish infatuation with ancient rituals and petty-bourgeois parties in mediocre variations of black masses are declared to be clear signs of impending doom.
Although these exotic stories generally do not exceed the tabloid significance and endless discussions of blog and forum leisure, the motif of the Zionist conspiracy that appears more and more often in such paranoia is extremely unpleasantly reminiscent of those times when Jews were marked as the culprits for the existential misfortunes of non-Jews.
The unquestioning belief in forgeries is not undermined by the statistics which show that even then the largest number of Jews were equally at risk as other ethnic groups. The question arises whether amateur and cheap contents, thanks to the power of the Internet, can influence the creation of a wider anti-Semitic feeling?
Essentially, the bulk of the pamphlet "Bagatele for One Slaughter" is an essentialist cry for a form of organic society in which folklore and masculinity hold things together.
As it is more than clear that the majority of the population does not build their opinion on the basis of serious sources but on easy and seductive media content, the answer to the question is much closer to affirmative than negative.
That the fear of the rise of anti-Semitism is not unjustified is shown by more and more frequent warnings coming from representatives of the intellectual elite. When one of the greatest literary critics and polyhistorians, such as George Steiner, said in an interview a few years ago: "I have children, grandchildren, and I wonder every day when we will have to pack our things again. It could happen that the survival of the Jews for a very long time becomes unbearable for people", then it certainly does not fall into the category of unreasonable fear as shown by insufficiently informed, insufficiently speculative or paranoid people.
George Steiner is one of the greatest connoisseurs of world literature and probably the greatest comparativist, which means that his specialty is the recognition of mechanisms that connect various topics, motives and phenomena, and such references give him the right to predict and warn.
Among other things, in the aforementioned interview, Steiner says that in a literary and cultural context, it could be said that there are three novels that shape the modern world: "One Hundred Years of Solitude", "Midnight's Children" and "The Tin Drum", and according to Steiner, "the overcoat" from of which these three works are based is the novel "Journey to the End of the Night" by Luj Ferdinand Selin.
Almost all literary experts agree that the work of this "unseen Nazi", as Steiner considers him, should be divided into the period of creation of the mentioned novel and the novel "Death on Credit", a work whose greatness and honor no one questions, and the later period from whose pamphlet texts "School for Corpses" and especially "Bagatele za jedan pokolj", which is still considered one of the fiercest anti-Semitic pamphlets, came to the fore due to scandalous political incorrectness.
The Jews are certainly the big "culprits" for the artistic, scientific and ideological destruction of the era from the end of the XNUMXth century to the beginning of the Second World War
Although in addition to the Jews, Selin's targets of attack in this text are new artistic trends ("blackened" music and fine arts), film, communism, Cocteau, the Jew, Proust, the English, Freemasons, the Pope, unexpectedly, and Hitler, who, according to Selin, did not offer a revolution of National Socialism but pan-Germanism and Malogrjanism, anti-Semitism simply oozes from this text.
In essence, the bulk of the pamphlet "Bagatele for One Slaughter" is an essentialist cry for a form of organic society in which folklore and masculinity hold things together. Apart from anti-Semitism and racism, Selin's other accounts do not represent a problematic statement, one part is aesthetic and the other ideologically oriented, which is not only permissible but also implied for a writer.
The claim, on the other hand, that the greed of Jews and the primitiveness of blacks are destroying civilization, truly make Selin an "unseen Nazi". But the content of this pamphlet far exceeded the anti-Semitic standard based on the then widespread mystification about the conspiratorial ambitions of Jewish financial power.
In the text, Selin literally goes wild, listing racist qualifications that overtake each other: "Those informant eyes pale and lying . . . That tight smile, those flaring nostrils: a hyena... Those vultures want your blood!”.
Can this amount of passion expressed in Selin's hatred of Jews be explained, as is often attempted, by some event from the writer's life, such as the fact that his beloved wife was kidnapped by a Jew? What seems like a more likely explanation, however, is the wide-ranging conflict that reigned between Selin and the world.
When someone is so in favor of an organic society, then every variety and diversity of the world, as it prevailed during Selin's life, is an extremely frustrating environment.
The Third Reich as a concept of the final end of the nation-states, showed the justification of the Jewish fear of the collapse of the nation-state system
Which is to say, Selin saw his era as a particularly crisis period of civilization, and its feverishness certainly caused a strong feeling of powerlessness in someone who wanted to resist this multiplication of ideas.
The Jews are certainly the big "culprits" for the artistic, scientific and ideological destruction of the era from the end of the XNUMXth century to the beginning of the Second World War. In addition, their existential strategy relied on financial affairs and city life, which is contrary to the organic vision of the world dominated by the pastoral ideal.
All in all, Selin's hatred of the Jews was based on his deeply ideological principles. Among other things, he also had apologetic performances in which he admired the Jews, which is lightly presented as proof of the ambivalence of this writer.
But, in that admiration, Selin strictly selected those characteristics that are typical for him, which are part of the traditional Jewish heritage and which, like any deeply traditional structure, are closer to an organic society.
Thus, among other things, Selin gives recognition to the Jews for preserving the substrate of their race, endogamy and solidarity, which is to say - what binds, homogenizes and ultimately isolates the ethnos.
It was precisely the lack of domesticity that imposed a strong sign of internationality on the Jews, and it is an extremely frustrating phenomenon for every racist and nationalist. Even some great minds, such as Schopenhauer, disputed the political rights of the Jews, because as this philosopher says, they "are not at home anywhere".
More precisely, why do we choose one among many problems when there are other problems that are equally problematic?
Hannah Arendt will put precisely that Jewish undomestication at the very top of the reasons for the strengthening of anti-Semitism, which in her opinion grows stronger with the weakening of national states, or more precisely with the emergence of ambitions to dominate other nations.
The Third Reich as a concept of the final end of the nation-states, showed the justification of the Jewish fear of the collapse of the nation-state system. Arendt explains this seemingly contradictory conditionality of Jewish security and strong national states as follows: "The representatives of the nation, whether the Jacobins from Robespierre to Clemenceau, or the representatives of the Central European revolutionary governments from Metternich to Bismarck, had something in common: they were all sincerely concerned with the balance of power in Europe. They, of course, tried to upset that balance, each in favor of their own country, but they never dreamed of monopolizing the continent or of completely destroying their neighbors. The Jews could be used not only in the interest of this precious balance, they even became a kind of symbol of the common interest of the European nations".
Long before Hannah Arendt and Diderot, he saw the Jews as a useful link for connecting Europeans of different nationalities, and Humboldt, following the emancipation of the Jews through the French Revolution, noted "that the Jews lost their universality when they became French."
That is why all those who dreamed of a Europe as imagined by Selin were for the destruction of something that was proof that universality and ethnic harmony could exist in a system of nation states. It is not out of place to remember all this today, when the supranational idea of globalization and increasingly pronounced anti-Semitism are pulsating simultaneously.
In this reminder, today when the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are believed again, it is necessary to start from the question that common sense must ask in the face of every falsification, the one that starts from a questionable basis - why exactly.
Balugdžić reminds them that "in addition to the Jewish Rothschilds, there are Christians Blair, Rockefeller, Armory and Carnegie"
More precisely, why do we choose one among many problems when there are other problems that are equally problematic? The exceptional Serbian diplomat Živojin Balugdžić, who was, among other things, Miloš Crnjanski's boss in the embassy of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in Berlin, often pointed out in his texts the arbitrary selection made by the antisemites in proving the Jewish financial conspiracy.
Balugdžić reminds them that "in addition to the Jewish Rothschild, there are Christians Blair, Rockefeller, Armory and Carnegie". Benjamin Netanyahu reacted in a similar way to the recent outburst of Gunter Grass, asking the writer of "Tin Drum" why he chose Israel as a country that threatens world peace.
History makes us wonder if the choice of Israel from a large number of countries whose regimes and rulers threaten peace in the world is the same matrix by which the Jews were once singled out from the multitude of financial powerhouses.
Indeed, what makes Iran, North Korea, Pakistan with its nuclear power and unstable political system, and finally, or at the beginning of everything, the United States of America less of a threat to world peace?
Seductive neo-gothic narratives for the masses
That every era has a significant number of paranoids who are convinced they are living in the last days of the free world is a fact that undermines the seriousness of conspiracy theories. Which is to say, the feeling that some secret power structures operate in parallel has been a constant since the time when regular power structures were formed.
Selin's expectation that he would finally achieve a monopoly over the continent, after the failure of the fascist project, turned into regret for the missed opportunity.
By the way, it was precisely the regular power structures that suited their brokering business the most by infatuating themselves with elaborate tales of conspiracies. That we seem to be contemporaries of a very institutional and public brokerage is shown by the mechanisms of the International Monetary Fund and large banks, which was presented to us on several occasions in recent years by a top authority in economic sciences such as Jozef Stiglic.
But the broad masses are closer to the seductive neo-Gothic narratives about the devil's work in the Bohemian Forest and Masonic lodges.
Jinger's testimony
After the failure of the fascist project, Selin's expectation that he would finally achieve a monopoly over the continent turned into regret for the missed opportunity: "History does not serve the same dish twice. Europe cannot be made now! As long as there was a German army, it could be built. With the German army, the last German army. We missed it!".
To finish with the Jews meant to finish with the essential proof of centuries-old preservation of ethnic identity without authentic soil
It didn't matter to Selin what was destroyed in the attempt to create such a Europe, he was at least touched by the fate of the Jews in that terrible experiment. Not only did she not touch him, but, as Ernest Jinger testifies, on one occasion in a Parisian cafe where these two lovers of Nazism were sitting, Celine shouted to the German soldiers entering the cafe: "What are you doing here when you haven't finished your job with the Jews yet!" ?”.
Finishing with the Jews meant finishing with the essential proof of centuries-old preservation of ethnic identity without an authentic soil and especially the proof of the connection that such an unrooted ethnos had among different peoples.
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