YMMV / The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

• Fandom VIP: Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford (until he denounced his previous stance), Muammar Gaddafi, and Osama bin Laden among others.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Developed a large following in Germany and the United States after Red October, and in the Muslim World after the creation of Israel.
• Misaimed Fandom: Lacking nearly two millennia of coexistence and religious villainization of Jews, the Japanese concluded from the Protocols that wealthy and influential Jews sound like very useful, powerful allies to have on one's side, and helped them migrate to Japanese-occupied China. They were quite annoyed to find out this wasn't the case, but they allowed the Jews to stay. Anti-Semitic slurs nevertheless filtered into Japanese social spaces widely even as late as the 1990s, as portrayed in Tokyo Vice.
• Older Than They Think: As often happens with conspiracy theories, the Protocols are largely plagiarized from an earlier version attacking a different target. In this case, Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864) by Maurice Joly, in which Machiavelli is not Jewish but a thinly-disguised expy of Napoleon III who defends authoritarianism and wants to Take Over the World. More plain antisemitic material was added from the chapter "The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel" in Hermann Goedsche's novel Biarritz (1868), which circulated in late 19th century European conservative circles as a supposed true account.

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