How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Perhaps the most famous twentieth-century conspiracy theory revolves around The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was at the basis of Nazi ideology. The Protocols is an early-twentieth-century hoax, supposedly written as an instruction manual to Jews as a plot for world domination. Scholars have discovered that it was liberally plagiarized from Maurice Joly’s 1864 book, A Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a political satire set as a debate in hell between Montesquieu, who makes the case for liberalism, and Machiavelli, who makes the case for tyranny. Machiavelli’s arguments for tyranny are transformed, in The Protocols, into arguments made by the “Elders of Zion,” supposedly Jewish leaders bent on world domination.