It is no surprise to learn that there are still people who believe in the PROTOCOLS OF ZION, the long discredited document outlining a Jewish plot for world domination written by Czarist secret police to fulfill an agenda that disappeared with the royal family. Nor is it a surprise that a Nazi mail-order concern can’t keep it in stock. It is a surprise, though, to learn that newsstands in post 9/11 New York do a brisk trade in it. Marc Levin’s documentary, also entitled PROTOCOLS OF ZION, takes a look the people who snap it up and in the process, it sheds much needed light on why such people in a free society with media that puts the lie to the skewed picture of Judaism offered in the Protocols, choose to believe the latter rather than the former.
Levin is certainly not the first filmmaker to deal with organized hate at home and abroad. One need look no further than the powerful 1991 documentary BLOOD IN THE FACE by Anne Bohlen, Kevin Rafferty and James Ridgeway, or its more polished cousin, MR. DEATH, THE RISE AND FALL OF FRED A LEUCHTER, JR., an arguably even more insidious true story rendered by Errol Morris in his distinctly arch and mannered style. But without doubt where those films and others relegate the phenomenon to the lunatic fringe with little penetration to the mainstream, Levin shows us something far more disturbing. He takes the audience on a very personal journey not to confront the people who believe the Protocols, but to do something much more difficult, and in some ways much more dangerous, to open a dialogue with them.
That journey takes him to the usual places, but not to the usual talking heads of sociologists or historians. He doesn’t talk to the head of the Nazi party in America, for example, instead he visits that Nazi mail-order business in the back waters of West Virginia. He doesn’t talk to an anti-Western Imam, he talks to young men, born and raised in the USA and completely assimilated, leaving a mosque after a particularly dicey day in the Middle East. Context is given with clips of not one but two multi-part series on Arab television promulgating the Protocols as gospel and depicting Jews as murderers, and with is the an interview of a six-year-old girl, also on Arab television, who spouts a particularly virulent anti-Semitic spiel that is as heartbreaking as it is ugly. Aside from Levin’s preternatural ability to not lose his cool, what sets this examination of hate apart is the man- and woman-in-the-street interviews and the causal, unquestioned beliefs of people who believe with perfect faith, for example, that no Jews were killed on 9/11 because they were warned to stay away from the Towers that day. With a multi-cultural cross section as broad as it is diverse and mutually rancorous, he shows us what we don’t expect, like the rabbi who doesn’t want Levin to make the film because the subject matter is too dangerous and will burn him. The most chilling moment, though, is when a woman who has converted to Judaism recalls that her single biggest concern was what would happen if things turned bad, would her children be safer if she remained a gentile. That someone in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century would even think to ask the question speaks volumes and none of them comforting.
If Levin’s visit to a neo-Nazi’s mail order warehouse begins as just another look at White Power and swastikas 60 years on, it becomes something else as Levin, who hasn’t made his religion a secret, chats with the entrepreneur about his stock (combat boots with swastikas on the treads to leave a distinctive trail are big) and his belief system. When his host, an affable enough guy when he isn’t spouting his hard-line rhetoric, opines that he didn’t think that Hitler was the suicidal type. Levin, without irony, points out that Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. The camera lingers on the neo-Nazi’s face as he tries to process this and the audience reaction of laughter is predictable, even a relief. The guy’s ignorance is a given considering his politics, but the depth of that ignorance about his most cherished hero makes for a twist like a knife in the gut. Where does anyone begin to get through to someone like that? And he’s one of the “nice” ones.
With PROTOCOLS OF ZION, Levin never for a moment pretends that he’s taking a scientific survey of the state of intolerance in the United States and this was a brilliant choice. The impersonal statistics and jargon of professional social scientists involved in such a study would fail in having the same emotional urgency about what is lurking in the lower depths of the collective subconscious and of how it’s bubbling up. Instead he gives it a voice and shows us who’s listening and why. And while there is a conversation with a militant who has changed his mind thanks to a friendship with Levin’s father, there is also the conversation with the publisher of an Arab-language newspaper, who himself does not put credit in the Protocols, but printed them anyway with a small disclaimer at the end because it would have been trouble for him not to print them and even more trouble to do more in the way of a disclaimer. It brings up the deeply unsettling question of who is being led by whom in continuing to propagate the lie. This is an unflinching and often terrifying look at a particularly insidious type of hate that has for too long flown under the radar of mainstream attention. It’s difficult viewing, and a revelation.
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