Russian Documentary Resurrects Portions of Imfamous Antisemitic Propaganda
ICC NOTE: Recently a Russian television station premiered a documentary which had previously been shown in 2012 connecting conspiracy theories to the sinking of the Titanic. At the time the previous documentary spoke of them in the past tense connecting the Jewish community to the sinking of the Titanic. The latest incarnation of the documentary however has eliminated the time frame and replaced it to be considered for today’s time. While this would not be considered to be a big deal in many respects, both versions of the documentary though took various portions and ideas from the infamous “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. The protocols is a false propaganda piece that was distributed in the early 20th century among Russian and European people to spark Antisemitism. Like many other former Soviet and Russian propaganda they are created with a kernel of truth mixed in with lies, making the piece difficult to ignore. This was what occurred with the protocols as it ushered in the beginning of Antisemitism on the continent. The fact it has re-emerged in Russia today is troubling for the future, especially in connection to the latest anti-religion laws.
8/9/2016 Russia (Window to Eurasia) – Last Friday night in prime time, Moscow’s REN-TV presented what it says was a documentary about the sinking of the Titanic in 2012 that suggested that the sinking of the ship was the result of a Masonic conspiracy with, in the words of one viewer, “a clearly expressed anti-Semitic subtext.”
Aleksey Zheleznev suggests that this represented “a reanimation in Russia of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a vicious anti-Semitic forgery that animated the Russian far right at the end of the imperial period and retains support among Russian marginal to this day (grimnir74.livejournal.com/7380359.html andcursorinfo.co.il/news/xussr/2016/08/07/-v-rossii-reanimirovali-protokoli-sionskih-mudrecov/).
The Moscow television show, he points out, was a remake of a film prepared for the centenary of the loss of the Titanic in 2012. That film suggested that a shadowy “Group of 300” consisting of Jews, Masons and Illuminati had sunk the ship in order to provoke chaos and bring to power “a universal government’” controlled by themselves.
The notion that such a conspiracy existed, of course, was a central theme of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and completely absurd. But when REN-TV showed it in 2012, it spoke about all this in the past tense, as something that had happened in the years before World War I and therefore quite distant from today’s world.
What makes the new showing disturbing, Zheleznev says, is that the revised version of the film shown at the end of last week drops any reference to this time frame and thus presents this “content” outside of time and thus important for the present day, especially since it links the sinking of the Titanic to more recent events.