Protocol 1 ～ Dialogue 1

Tue Jul 8, 2025

23th June

If the written word is its own flesh and blood, self-contained and complete in its own meaning, then we can say that Sergei Nilus took a political text on the merits of conservatism and wrapped it in an eschatological prophecy about the end of God’s rule on earth.

Later, European agitators found his book, unwrapped the original document and redressed it in more secular clothing, and a less diffuse antisemitic system.

The Protocols themselves uses the Jews much as the Book of Job uses the character of Satan as a figure representing a position in the celestial world of politics: The symbolic antagonist.

Maurice Joly’s Dialogue in Hell

But there is a deeper layer here as well.

As has been thoroughly commented, the Protocols seems to have annexed a good deal of its material from an older text also from the 19th century, namely Maurice Joly’s Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.

It turns out that this text in itself is quite interesting in its own right. The reflections and refractions does not end there. Joly’s text revolves around the spirit of Napoleon III’s France - he was “prince-president” following his election 1948 to 1951 and monarch from 1852-1870 after a coup allowing him to reshape the constitution.

The turbulent years around 1848, he garnered support amongst both workers and peasants. But he reinvented himself as an autocrat after his election period expired. He firmly held his grasp onto power until his death. France and especially Paris was modernised under this auspices.

Maurice Joly’s story also mirrors another author commenting on Napoleon III, namely Victor Hugo and his Napoleon the Little.

The translation I am reading of Joly’s Dialogue is written by an interesting group in the Situationist camp calling themselves Not Bored. The foreword is very enlightening on the subtleties of the text. It also presents at least one account (by a Ukrainian historian) of how the Dialogue was taken up by a Hermann Goedsche who redeployed it in antisemitic garments: Biarritz: Ein Historisch-politischer Roman. Next stop: Russia.

NOT BORED - TRANSLATOR OF MAURICE JOLY’S DIALOGUE

Eventually, both Goedsche’s Biarritz and Joly’s Dialogue in Hell came to the attention of Matvei Golovinski, a Russian secret police agent and propagandist who was stationed in Paris, where his job was to write pro-Czarist articles for Le Figaro

What is interesting is the sheer density of meaning and purpose the core statements since Joly have experienced.

All of this could easily just be far-flung theories about the origins. I don’t think it matters all that much. The same punchlines are turned around in all directions over and over. That very fact relativises everything.

But I will hold on to the mental image of this Matvei Golovinski crafting pro-Czarist articles using the building material he has available.

Not Bored may have gotten the complexities right when they wrote:

NOT BORED - TRANSLATOR OF MAURICE JOLY’S DIALOGUE

A final note: it would not have mattered to Louis Bonaparte’s spies, police officers or judges if one of the books they detected, seized and suppressed in 1864 was a funny book. As long as it defamed and/or inspired hatred of the King, it wouldn’t matter if it was a funny book or not. And that’s unintentionally funny, because in this particular case, Joly’s book is in fact funny; deliberately funny, despite the apparent seriousness of its subject matter and the sobriety of its presentation. Its humor is not a measure of its author’s fear; it is instead a measure of his defiance, his refusal, his invincibility.

They are laughing at us because we don’t get the joke, and so we are losing the battle, the Russian spy and professional disinformer Golovinski might have realized, thirty years later.

Let’s give them something to laugh about, something that shows that we know how to joke around, too: let’s use Joly to make “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Protocol 1

(cross referenced with Joly’s Dialogue)

I have made a conscientious attempt to match paragraphs in the Protocols with similarly sounding paragraphs in the Dialogue.

I don’t know of there is a 1:1 relationship between the protocols and the dialogues. There are 24 protocols and 25 dialogues, at least in the translations I have gotten hold on.

Perhaps tomorrow or another day I will start to analyse the Dialogue in its own right.

Protocol 1 Pro-czarism 1st Dialogue
We will be plainspoken and discuss the significance of each reflection, and by comparisons and deductions we will produce full explanations. By this means will expose the conception of our policy and that of the Goys (i.e., Jewish definition of all Gentiles).
It must be noted that people with corrupt instincts are more numerous than those of noble instinct. Therefore in governing the world the best results are obtained by means of violence and intimidation, and not by academic discussions. The state of nature (Hobbes) is applied to all men. Bad instincts among men are more powerful than the good ones. Man has more enthusiasm for evil than for good; fear and force have more control over him than reason.

I do not stop to demonstrate such truths; only the scatterbrained coterie of Baron Holbach – in which J. -J. Rousseau was the great priest and Diderot was the apostle – has contradicted them.
Every man aims at power; everyone would like to become a dictator if he only could do so, and rare indeed are the men who would not be disposed to sacrifice the welfare of others in order to attain their own personal aims. It takes a man of nobility to sacrifice himself for others All men aspire to domination and there is none who would not be an oppressor if he could; all or almost all are ready to sacrifice the rights of others for their own interests.
What restrained the wild beasts of prey which we call men? What has ruled them up to now? In the first stages of social life they submitted to brute and blind force, then to law, which in reality is the same force, only masked. From this I am led to deduct that by the law of nature, right lies in might. The law is violence.

(Antithesis: The righteous ruler who rules by heart)		 What restrains the devouring animals that one calls men? At the origin of society, there was brutal and unchecked force; later it was the law, that is to say, force still, ruled by forms. You have consulted all the sources of history; everywhere force appears before rights.
Political freedom is not a fact, but an idea. This idea one must know how to apply when it is necessary, in order to use the same as a bait to attract the power of the populace to one’s party, if such party has decided to usurp the power of a rival. The problem is simplified if the said rival becomes infected with ideas of freedom, so-called liberalism, and for the sake of this idea yields some of his power. Freedom (the idea) is a disease.

For centuries the aristocracy (who understood the power of ideas) managed the balance of power.

But ideas are only weapons in a struggle above and beyond the ideas.

Idealising the common man, liberals relinquishes control

 Political liberty is only a relative idea; the necessity to live is what dominates the States as well as individuals.
In this the triumph of our idea will become apparent. The relinquished reins of government by the law of life are immediately seized by a new hand, because the blind strength of the populace cannot exist for a single day without a leader, and the new government only fills the place of the old, which has been weakened by its liberalism. A power vacuum ensues.

The old game (which the aristocracy understood) is once again afoot.
Nowadays the power of gold has superseded liberal rulers. There was a time when religion ruled. The idea of freedom is not realisable, because no one knows how to use it with discretion. Religion is stable.
Fancy ideas are not (liberalism)
It suffices to give the populace self-government for a short period for this populace to become a disorganised rabble. From that very moment dissensions start which soon develop into social battles; The population can govern just as well as they can perform surgery on themselves. They are oblivious to government.
the States are set in flames and their total significance vanishes. Whether the state is exhausted by its own internal convulsions, or whether civil wars hand it over to an external foe, it can in any case be considered as definitely and finally destroyed—it will be in our power. Free government leads to collapse of institutions.
The despotism of capital, which is entirely in our hands, will hold out to it a straw, to which the state will be unavoidably compelled to cling; if it does not do so, it will inevitably fall into the abyss. By then, politicians in desperation turns to big capital.

Once again back on political soil, quite a distance from Sergei’s own worries about clerical prophecies predicting the coming of Antichrist as a precursor to the final judgment.

Joly’s Machiavelli have no need to extol religion as a stable factor. Had Napoleon III been a staunch catholic, then he may have incorporated that trait in his Machiavelli.

But the hypothetical Matvei Golovinski did have reason to have his hypothetical World Jew laud religion as an aside. Since the Jew takes the place of Machiavelli, he is himself (oddly enough from an antisemitic point of view) unencumbered by religious demands. It makes sense, once we remember the Jew is modelled on Joly’s Machiavelli.

America, Freedom Etc.

“despotism of capital, which is entirely in our hands” … This statement must originate from someone who despises capital as a source of power as opposed to something else. If the words came from an old army officer: As opposed to courage on the battlefield. If an aristocrat: As opposed to heritage. If a king: Blood line.

The prediction is that any parliamentary process will self-implode sooner rather than later, at which point the politicians turn to pro-democratic forces with an ability to control the crowd: Capitalism, since the only alternative would be to go back to the former King with hat in hand and admit defeat.

It is relevant that from this perspective, the fixation on freedom is fundamental and pure. Once it mixes with speculative capitalism, it is perverted and corrupted.

One cannot set aside the feeling that the authors have eyed America as the prime example of demise of republicanism and its discontents.

It cannot be disputed that during the American civil war, it was industry that gave the North a solid lead over the more traditional South. That equates to money and a massive war industry playing a decisive role. But whether or not that is in conflict with the original spirit is disputable. Jefferson would not have approved. A master must have his estate run by old fashioned means, well, slaves. But capitalism is older than the Boston Tea Party and intrinsic to the work ethics of New England protestants.

But not so for the voice in the Protocols. Capital to that voice corrupts a noble spirit.

Quite an echo of a much older conflict: The Reformation.

Protocol 1 Pro-czarism 1st Dialogue
Of anybody who might, from motives of liberalism, be inclined to remark that discussions of this kind are immoral, I would ask the question, why is it not immoral for a state which has two enemies, one external and one internal, to use different means of defence against the former to that which it would use against the latter, to make secret plans of defence, to attack him by night or with superior forces? Why should it then be immoral for the state to use these means against that which ruins the foundations and welfare of its life? Liberal states have committed atrocities against “5th column” citizens, without it being considered immoral. Once constituted, the States have two kinds of enemies: enemies within and enemies without. What weapons can they employ in a war against foreigners? Do the two general enemies reciprocally communicate their battle plans so as to mutually place each other in a position to defend themselves? Do they prohibit nocturnal attacks, traps, ambushes, battles of unequal numbers of troops? No, no doubt they do not and such combatants would make us laugh. And do you not want one to employ these traps, these artifices, all of these strategies that are indispensable to war, against [internal] agitators? No doubt one would use less rigor, but basically the rules are the same. Is it possible to use pure reason to lead the violent masses that are only moved by feelings, passions and prejudices?

The argument in the Dialogue is this:

  • Internal enemies are met with the same kind of methods that external enemies are.
  • Here Machiavelli is really speaking about Napoleon III, and his readers will easily recognise their resident monarch. In other words: Joly’s readers will spot the irony in this statement as a simplistic Machiavelli spouting baseless faith in the usurper’s brutality.

The argument in the Protocols is different, but moulded over Machiavelli’s answer:

  • In matters where the state itself is threatened (i.e. the institutions of the state), foreign enemies are countered with violence and domestic individuals with police coercion or, in the case of treason, death. Unacceptable to Joly’s republicans, but around the turn of the century, liberalists in America were not much better in their power grabbing. This twists the whole situation, as Joly can expect his readers to cringe in revulsion, while Matvei Golovinske can exploit that the balance has shifted somewhat.
  • A third kind is organised crime. Larger than individuals, perhaps even international of scope, but certainly a non-state actor.
  • Yet other kinds are the ideologies of liberalism and socialism which by their very destabilising natures can subvert the state.

Even today, it seems difficult to figure out how sovereign states are to counter attacks by global non-state actors or propagandists. We institute grand disinformation counter centres and censure social media algorithmically. We police the political ether through aligned main stream media narratives. We treat encroaching foreign ideologies as plagues that must be managed.

My principal difficulty in reading the Protocols lies in the fact that the voice is misaligned from the cast in the play. This is without doubt a consequence of adapting Joly’s Machiavelli to Tsarist Russia’s autocratic needs.

Indisputably, the viewpoint represented is not that of capitalism, liberalism or socialism.

“Jews” is obviously a meaningless word. Numerous poverty-stricken working Jews in the Pale of Settlement were of course not intellectuals en masse promulgating liberal or socialist shifts in society. Their voices are out of the picture.

The fixation on Jews follows that of Masons, as I learned the other day. I need to follow that trail some other time.

The next fragment seems to be Matvei Golovinski’s own elaborations.

Protocol 1 Pro-czarism
Can a sound and logical mind hope successfully to govern mobs by using arguments and reasoning, when there is a possibility of such arguments and reasonings being contradicted by other arguments, although these may possibly be ridiculous, but are made to appear more attractive to that portion of the populace which cannot think very deeply, guided as it is entirely by petty passions, habits, and conventions, and by sentimental theories? Political mysteries, passes absurd resolutions, thus sowing the germs of anarchy in the government. Not rationalism, but faith in rationalism is a fad, a modern whim.
The uninitiated and ignorant populace, together with those who have risen from among them, get entangled in party dissensions which hinder all possibility of agreement even on a basis of sound arguments. Caving in to modern demands of democracy is inviting the wolves to feast.
Every decision of the masses is dependent on a chance or prearranged majority which, in its ignorance of political mysteries, passes absurd resolutions, thus sowing the germs of anarchy in the government. No way of discerning between a manipulated result and a genuine one.
Politics have nothing in common with morals. A ruler governed by morals is not a skilled politician, hence he is not firm on his throne. He who wants to rule must have recourse to cunningness and hypocrisy. The great human qualities of sincerity and honesty become vices in politics. They dethrone with more certainty than the bitterest enemy. These qualities have to be the attributes of the Gentile countries, but we are not in the least forced to be guided by them. Our right lies in might. The word “right” is an abstract idea established by nothing. This word signifies no more than “give me what I want in order to enable me to prove thereby that I am stronger than you are.” This is the moral essence of Realist tradition in Thucydides over Machiavelli to early 20th century. The view that everyday morals have no utility between states.

Idealism in international relations works from the necessity of ethics, and is scorned by realists.

No Jewish philosopher ever said ‘might is right’. Right to self defence probably, yes, like most other nationalities. But Right is Might is a remnant from medieval feudalism.

At this point, the Protocols start to put effort into the notion of a grand manipulation. The voice from now on regularly reminds us about the secret society’s intentions of acquiring dominion over the world through cunning and turning liberalism against itself.

This “world council” is a very schizophrenic entity. Sometimes they want world power to be rich, sometimes to save the world from the plebeians who have made a mockery of government by doling out voting rights to everybody and their dog.

Protocol 1 Pro-czarism 1st Dialogue
Where does “right” begin? Where does it end? In a state where power is badly organised, where the laws and the personality of the ruler are rendered inefficacious by the continual encroaching of liberalism, I take up a new line of attack, making use of the night of might to destroy the existing rules and regulations, seize the laws, reorganise all the institutions, and thus become the dictator of those who, of their own free will, liberally renounced their power and conferred it on us. Our strength under the present shaky condition of the civil powers will be stronger than any other, because it will be invisible till the moment when it becomes so strong that no cunning designs will undermine it. The Dialogue clearly references Napoleon III here.

The Protocols inaugurates its prime idea: The image of a manipulative global council.		 Moreover, do you not see that this word “rights” is infinitely vague? Where does they begin and where do they end? When will rights exist and when will they not? I’ll cite some examples. Here is a State: there is bad organization of the public powers, the turbulence of democracy, the powerlessness of the laws against agitators, disorder that reigns everywhere until ruin is precipitated. An audacious man springs forth from the ranks of the aristocracy or from the heart of the people; he breaks up all of the constituted powers; he puts his hands upon the laws, he revises the institutions and he brings 20 years of peace to his country. Did he have the right to do what he has done?
From the temporary evil, to which we are now obliged to have recourse, will emerge the benefit of an unshakable rule, which will reinstate the course of the mechanism of natural existence, which has been destroyed by liberalism. The end justifies the means. In making our plans we must pay attention not so much to what is good and moral, as to what is necessary and profitable. The council will reinstate Machiavellian conditions again. You see that, in the States, the principle of rights is dominated by the principle of [self-]interest, and what can be extracted from these considerations are the ideas that good can come from evil, that one arrives at the good *through evil, as one cures with poison, as one saves life by cutting with iron.

Speaking abstractly, are violence and cunning evils? Yes, but it is quite necessary to use them in governing men as long as men are not angels.
We have in front of us a plan in which a strategic line is shown. From that line we cannot deviate unless we are going to destroy the work of centuries. To work out a suitable scheme of action one must bear in mind the meanness, instability, and want of ballast on the part of the crowd, its incapability to understand and respect the conditions of its own existence and of its own welfare. One must understand that the might of the crowd is blind. and void of reason in discrimination, and that it lends its ear right and left. If the blind lead the blind, they will both fall together into the ditch. Consequently those members of the crowd who are upstarts from the people, even were they geniuses, cannot come forward as leaders. of the mass without ruining the nation. Only a person brought up to autocratic sovereignty can read the words formed by political letters. The people abandoned to itself, to upstarts from the masses, is ruined by party dissensions which arise from greed of power and honours and which create disturbances and disorder. Anything can be good or bad according to the usage that one makes of it and the fruit that one can derive from it; the end justifies the means and, if you now ask me why I – a republican – give preference to absolute government, I would say to you: witness the fickleness and cowardice of the populace in my homeland, its innate taste for servitude, its incapacity to conceive of and respect the conditions of free life; in my eyes, it is a blind force that dissolves itself sooner or later if it is not in the hand of a single man. I would respond that the people, left to their own devices, would only know how to destroy themselves; that they would never be able to administrate, judge or make war. I would say to you that Greece only shone in the eclipses of liberty; that, without the despotism of the Roman aristocracy, and that, later on, without the despotism of the emperors, this brilliant civilization would never have been developed.

The Mob And The Despot

The Protocols and the Dialogue are only loosely in lockstep for the rest of this part.

Machiavelli turns to history and a long line of tyrants and benevolent dictators for life from Greek and Rome. The Jews lavishes scorn on the plebeian rabble who escalates from a drunken state of nature into the halls of government without changing much.

Protocol 1 Pro-czarism
Is it possible for the mass to discriminate quietly, and without jealousies to administer the affairs of state, which they must not confuse with their personal interests? Can they be a defence against a foreign foe? This is impossible, as a plan broken up into as many parts as there are minds in the mass loses its value, and therefore becomes unintelligible and unworkable. Alone an autocrat can conceive vast plans clearly assigning its proper part to everything in the mechanism of the machine of state. Hence we conclude that it is expedient for the welfare of the country that the government of the same should be in the hands of one responsible person. Without absolute despotism civilisation cannot exist, for civilisation is capable of being promoted only under the protection of the ruler, whoever he may be, and not at the hands of the masses. The foundation of democracy, i.e. cooperation, is its very weakness.
The crowd is a barbarian, and acts as such on every occasion. As soon as the mob has secured freedom it speedily turns it into anarchy, which in itself is the height of barbarism. Give Russia a Duma, and infighting will get the better of it fast.
Just look at these alcoholised animals stupefied by the drink, of which unlimited use is tolerated by freedom ! Should we allow ourselves and our fellow creatures to do likewise? The people of the Christians, bewildered by alcohol, their youths turned crazy by classics and early debauchery, to which they have been instigated by our events, tutors, servants, governesses in rich houses, clerks, and so forth, by our women in places of their amusement — to the latter I add the so-called “society women” — their voluntary followers in corruption and luxury. Our motto must be “All means of force and hypocrisy.” … turned crazy by classics and debauchery …?!
Only sheer force is victorious in politics, especially if it is concealed in the talent indispensable for statesmen. Violence must be the principle, cunning and hypocrisy must be the rule of those Governments which do not wish to lay down their crown at the feet of the agents of some new power. This evil is the only means of attaining the goal of good. Therefore, we must not stop short before bribery, deceit and treachery, if these are to serve the achievement of our cause. This is Machiavelli’s cunning which is intelligence, but repurposed into a new setting, resulting in an antisemitic slant.
In politics we must know how to confiscate property without any hesitation, if by so doing we can attain subjection and power. Our State, following the way of peaceful conquest, has the right of substituting for the terrors of war executions, less apparent and more expedient, which are necessary to uphold terror, producing blind submission. Difficult passage: Is this a feudal remnant or is it meant to butcher sympathy for the narrating voice?
Just and implacable severity is the chief factor in State power. Not only for the sake of advantage, but also for that of duty and victory, we must keep to the programme of violence and hypocrisy. Our principles are as powerful as the means by which we put them into execution. That is why not only by these very means, but by the severity of our doctrines, we shall triumph and shall enslave all Governments under our super-Government. It suffices that it should be known that we are implacable in preventing recalcitrance. The same difficulty: The severity is called just, but the programme is called hypocritical.
Even of old we were the first to cry out to the people, "Liberty, equality, and fraternity." Words so often repeated since that time by ignorant parrots flocking together from far and wide round these signposts: by repeating them they deprived the world of its prosperity and the individual of his real personal freedom, which formerly had been so well guarded from being choked by the mob. The Terror during the French Revolution was a result of disbanding the protection of the state.
The would-be wise and intelligent Gentiles did not discern how abstract were the words which they were uttering, and did not notice how little these words agreed with one another and even contradicted each other. Liberty or equality or fraternity… which is it?
They did not see that in Nature there is no equality and that she herself created different and unequal standards of mind, character and capacity. It is likewise with the subjection to Nature’s laws. “One law for the lion and ox is oppression”
These wiseacres did not divine that the mob is a blind power, and that the upstarts elected from its midst as rulers are likewise blind in politics; that a man intended to be a ruler, although a fool, can govern, but that a man who has not been so intended, although he might be a genius, would understand nothing of politics. All this was left out of sight by the Gentiles. At the same time, it was on this basis that dynastic rule was founded. These words speak for themselves.

As close to predestination as we can get.
The father used to instruct the son in the meaning and in the course of political evolutions in such a manner that no one except the members of the dynasty should have knowledge of it, and that none could disclose the secrets to the governed people. In time, the meaning of true political teachings as transmitted in dynasties from one generation to another was lost, and this loss contributed to the success of our cause. Political wisdom goes from father to son.
Our call of “Liberty, equality, and fraternity” brought whole legions to our ranks from all four corners of the world through our unconscious agents, and these legions carried our banners with ecstacy. In the meantime these words were eating, like so many worms, into the well being of the Christians and were destroying their peace, steadfastness and unity, thus ruining the foundations of the States. As we shall see later on, it was this action which brought about our triumph. It gave us the possibility among other things of playing the ace of trumps — namely, the abolition of privileges; in other words, the existence of the Gentile aristocracy, which was the only protection nations and countries had against ourselves. Note: Liberalism itself is the illusion. The Jew only invented the idea. Shame on us for believing it.

Basically he just takes the events of the world and tags a conspiracy theory on them

Note: Link to religion as foundation
On the ruins of natural and hereditary aristocracy we built an aristocracy of our own on a plutocratic basis. We established this new aristocracy on wealth, of which we had control, and on science promoted by our scholars, Our triumph was rendered easier by the fact that we, through our connections with people who were indispensable to us, always worked upon the most susceptible part of the human mind, namely, by playing on our victims’ weakness for profits, on their greed, on their insatiability, and on the material requirements of man; for each one of the said weaknesses, taken by itself, is capable of destroying initiative, thus handing over the will-power of the people to the mercy of those who would deprive them of all their power of initiative. Greed and materialism are incompatible with government.

Money must be subordinate to royal blood.
The abstractness of the word “freedom” made it possible to convince the mob that the government is nothing else than a manager, representing the owner, that is to say, the nation, and can be discarded like a worn-out pair of gloves. The fact that the representatives of the nation can be deposed delivered these representatives into our power and practically put their appointment into our hands. The very existence of elections mean that no sitting government has an inherent right to govern.

I have an inkling about how to approach the task. Three things I must remember:

  1. The Dialogue is written by a humorist who wants to shake Napoleon III’s despotism. He uses the figure of Machiavelli for this purpose, but according to the translators, by irony and subtlety. On the face of it, Machiavelli makes good arguments.
  2. The Protocols is written by a humorist who wants to consolidate the Tzar’s strength. He uses the figure of a secret Jewish conspiracy for this purpose.
  3. The Protocols were included in a book by an Orthodox who saw in them a completely different set of signs and portents, namely such as would predict the end of the world.

Machiavelli is an interesting figure. He is not a warrior. He (i.e. Joly’s version of him) prides himself on ability to use cunning in politics.

Cunning. This is the common denominator between the fictional Machiavelli and the fictional Jewish world council.

Machiavelli lauds the tyrant for his strength, but himself resorts to cunning. The two capacities are fairly clearly delineated.

The narrating voice in the Protocols unite the same two traits, but unlike Machiavelli who really talks about two different people - himself and the despot - the voice in the Protocol seems to incorporate both. The council uses both force and cunning. Perhaps the voice merely praises a subject-less imaginary leader which is the one being praised every time autocracy is mentioned.

Today was a long day.

I am getting used to swimming in meaning without hope of solid ground under my feet.

But it tires me.

PARADISE LOST