28th July

As I read, a struggle between worlds is moving closer to me.

At its core, the question of aristocracy versus citizenry is an epistemological problem. Is an aristocrat better suited for public matters than a citizen by virtue of birth right, or is a citizen able to reach higher by virtue of being capable of changing himself, his surroundings and the ideologies he is immersed in?

In fact, is there even such a thing as “an aristocrat”? The modern answer is that they were the result of autosuggestion, self-hypnosis. Somehow history managed to convince a few thousand individuals that they were fundamentally different from the rest of us.

It is an argument which ignores any hereditary component, as well as arguments about the power of entitlement.

What do I think? To begin with, I think “the rest of us” is sidetracking the argument. The argument that addresses biology needs to be confined to a society where selective breeding works to separate two parts of society. Only then can we even begin to ask if that could even work.

Even if the answer is “yes”, selective breeding in humans can indeed work, there is nothing in the last couple of hundred of years that would convince me that the lines had not been blurred again.

Another cluster of arguments are of an ontological nature: Education matters. This argument shows up in the Protocols just as much. Exactly what the point is, is hard to say. If education can make aristocrats of us all, then any choice as to who should or should not belong to the ruling class is as good as a lottery.

From a societal point of view, this could actually make sense in a sick kind of way: Build a society by randomly assigning roles to each member. That would amount to asking a huge percentage of society to sacrifice themselves and enrol in the lower ranks for eternity. Once degraded, education will keep them down generation after generation.

I am not any better equipped through all my reading so far in answering the question.

I suspect the Protocols and the Dialogues are in slight misalignment. Since Sergei Nilus’ circulation does not entail numbering or accurate divisions in his book (The Great Within the Small, 1905 edition), the division into protocols may already suffer some artificial irregularity.

I will try my best. Protocol 5 seems to span last part of Dialogue 5, all of 6 and first part of 7.

29th July

Dialogue 6

● People’s right to change government comes from God. ● Industry works against despotism. ● Industry lowers chance of revolution.

The theme for today is religion, or rather, religious duty. Without it, society cannot stand, says Montesquieu. Religion is the harbinger of ethics, without which society will disintegrate, despotism or not.

Principles and laws of free will

Montesquieu goes on to exemplify his principle.

There is more than a little shadow from the reformation in the two positions. Either we only talk about God’s will or we talk about human will as necessary for demonstrating faith and devotion.

Joly wants to avoid a conflict between the common sense position that God can be counted on to want good things, and the right of the people to protest.

God has woven laws into nature. He creates through laws. Nature’s laws and natural rights are in relation, as they come from the same source.

Machiavelli pushes an obvious button: Does Montesquieu take God’s name in vain?

Montesquieu pushes back forcefully: Machiavelli is taking Common Sense’s name in vain.

Reacting with an accusation of arguing against common reason or taking God’s name in vain are not much different than the reaction of the papacy during the reformation. Controlling the narrative in everyday conversation, by controlling the limits of thought, what constitutes meaning, is a popular shortcut to winning a discussion.

Historians are hereby summoned to comment on the argument. If I read it correctly, this principle applies after the people had a taste of liberty and human rights. Popular uprisings (or lack thereof) in antiquity for instance are in this context irrelevant.

Machiavelli is forced to attack the very common sense behind it all:

As conservative as it gets: Leave the people in control, and chaos will ensue.

When we get to the protocols, Golovinski has taken this argument to a new level. He doesn’t just repeat the chaos theory. He lets it congeal into a new sinister system (which, from a political theory perspective is much more interesting).

Montesquieu is immune:

One ought to be struck by how peculiar it becomes that Montesquieu appeals to a metaphysical non-realism such as “rights”, while Machiavelli is given the role of a devil’s advocate. I suppose that is the “realist” part of the realist school which he belongs to. Why does it ring untrue in my ear? I suppose because I would have thought that odd metaphysical ideas waned over the years.

The Marxist argument against conservatism exactly revolves around the prevalent notion of the landed gentry who talks about their birthright. That, he says, is an appeal to a metaphysical reality. On the other hand, there is no denying that the enlightenment was an ideological movement. Natural rights, divine rights, eternal laws is a vocabulary that is meaningless without a transcendental aspect.

Montesquieu have faith in humanity that such extreme cases will not show up too often.

Machiavelli is quite the cynic.

God, the law-maker, has got you covered. Stability cannot come from injustice. Justice and rights are the basis for a stable society.

Like a physical system, the scales will work in such a way that a people is kept in misery until they learn the basic political laws of equality and freedom. The rat will stay in the maze until it evolves into more than a rat.

As an argument, it is potent and dangerous, and hard to prove or disprove.

We cannot deny that proving this claim is a wet dream for our society.

Science (in the popular mind) is dangerous because its currency is indisputability or irrefutability. Ironic, since nothing in the theory of science itself will allow for such a false certainty, and certainly not in the social sciences. Referring to mythical and hard to prove underlying laws is insufficient.

But Joly’s Machiavelli is not a science theorist. All he can do, and indeed all he need to do is test his opponent’s false certainty. He does that a little, but leaves the matter hanging.

30th July

Industrial societies

Joly lets Montesquieu meander into a rather odd submission to a purely bourgeois fancy for industrialism as the fruit of Christian ethics.

Machiavelli is right that citizen-driven societies used to be unstable, says Montesquieu. That changed with the advent of Christianity and with the industrial and mercantile age.

Charles III fought to diminish the influence of Catholicism in rural Spain to boost the industry, following the enlightenment ideal of the king leading society through change (against the reactionary aristocracy).

But Charles III was not a protestant, so I suppose as a counter argument against change coming only from Christianity, Joly would disregard it. Incidentally and ironically, even Charles had to admit that boosting the economy by 800 percent only made the upper middle class richer. The lower classes were as poor as ever.

Rhetorically, “industry” terminates further discussion. Nobody can deny the power of industrialism to change society. Montesquieu may not like it, but he knows that if industry says “no despotism”, there is no force in the universe that can maintain despotism.

We can see how this powerful argument leaves Golovinski in a tough spot. In the Protocols, he will have to counter this apotheosis of industrial power as a liberal force.

It gets “worse”:

Ouch!

Take that, anti-liberalists!

31th July

Protocol 5

[Reminder to myself: Matvei Golovinski may be completely fictional as the author of the Protocols, but I use him as a hypothetical writer with specific intentions. If he does not exist, someone else with the same aims probably did.]

Seeing how the Protocols functions as a devil’s choir to Joly’s book, I can better grasp how it repeats the important points from Dialogue in Hell and twists them out of orbit. He doesn’t steal Machiavelli’s arguments against Montesquieu and modernise them. He synthesises the two into a hybrid that we would find agreeable by modern standards, and then utterly smashes the image of a functioning society based on those principles, which we all hold sacred.

The purpose: To mock our core beliefs. To invalidate them.

One can see the centrality of religion in that word, cosmopolitan. Even though patriotism and religion ought to be absolute positive words, the very fact that intellectuals have argued in favour of the same principles as used to be the domain of the popes and metropolitans is enough to break the chain of obedience. Reason is nothing. Obedience is the working principle.

Corruption is rampant, if by corruption we understand lack of feudal fealty. “Sickness”.

Jesuits and Jews and the orthodox Christians.

I remember how catholic Spain around the times of Philip V and Ferdinand VI (before Charles III) under the still strong influence of the Inquisition executed Jews who abandoned the Christian faith in public Auto-da-fés and evicted the Jesuits from the country. In Portugal the Marquis of Pombal also exiled the Jesuits (but for quite non-religious reasons).

Seen from an old Christian perspective, Jews and Jesuits are simply bad news. Jesuits do seem to play a central role in education. Perhaps Golovinski really rubber-stamps Jesuits in his usual ironic way?

Phraseology

Golovinski utterly rejects Joly’s reverence for transcendental principles of right. He calls it clever phraseology.

Joly begs this kind of rebuttal when he lets Montesquieu swoon over the divinity behind the rather metaphysical right.

I think it is quite obvious what Golovinski is trying to do here.

He scares believers who blindly trust in the neutrality of proper elections using their own prejudices against Jews to associate free elections with mass manipulation.

The Jews are effectively accused of a divide and conquer tactic. Given how we – the liberated people – no longer can tolerate despots who appease resistance using divide and conquer, this red flag is transferred to the Jews. Collateral damage. Sorry Jews, but nobody likes you anyway, especially not the stupid, hateful mob.

I have come to understand the shocking degree to which antisemitism was ordinary and ubiquitous.

Stating that someone “promotes” antisemitism is a gross misnomer. You cannot promote what is already widespread.

Antisemitism was transformed using a systematisation built into the prevailing regime which made it more dangerous than ever before.

What matters is not the Jews, but the mysterious face people thought manifested itself in the Jews.

It changed over the course of history alright. But what the spectators watching humans garrotted and burned saw in 1700s catholic Spain, was most likely not the same as what the German soldier obeying orders saw in the concentration camps.

So far the previous passage has been the most direct reference to actual Jews (“20 centuries”) in the Protocols. At first I wondered why, but I have a hunch Golovinski is preparing to refute the “Per me reges regnant”-quote.

In other words, he needs to defile something sacred and revered: God’s throne on earth.

The monstrosity that we hail as king is in fact the hideous face of a council of the abnormal people, the hereditary enemies of Christ.

Golovinski perverts and defiles all he can grab hold of. He loves to pick fragments from one sentence and repurpose them in a recognisable way in a deviously filthy way. God’s all-powerful hand versus being in the hands of the power of gold, in other words: Avarice.

Reducing liberalism to avarice is a common conservative rhetoric. Freedom as a cover for greed.

Golovinski soliloquizes and ad libs on his favourite theme: How gold and luxury made the public feeble and indifferent to politics and leadership.

Joly’s flamboyant devotion to industry is largely frowned upon by Golovinski. Industry simply results in the oppression, not the freedom of the populace.

The Protocols puts the finger on a sore point of any democracy: The sheer amount of farsightedness any and all voters must possess for manipulation to be impossible, makes coordinated manipulation inevitable.

Liberal political theory has always had a problem when scaled up beyond the village. As direct democracy cedes ground to representative democracy and the centre looses sight of the periphery, dissension runs rampant.

An end to initiative

Golovinski is having a field day. Joly simply hands him arguments directly transferable to the Protocols. They even say the same thing under the same circumstances.

Don’t forget that to Montesquieu these accusations are rather abstract. Sure, a people can tolerate a couple of decades of despotism exploiting the benefit of the doubt built into the open democratic process. But in the end, any tyranny will fall as no people in the long run will endure abuses.

Machiavelli (and the Jews) laughs at that prospect. Revolution takes initiative, and in an arena of egotistical career politicians the collective voice is a pure cacophony. Their claim is that revolutionary consensus cannot reach critical mass if manipulators of the world can confuse the unified voices.

Finally real antisemitism?

For the first time, Golovinski adds very little to Joly’s already quite cunning Machiavelli.

This is the first deliberation that serves little other purpose than to stamps Machiavelli’s cynical mentality on the Jewish conspiracy.

However, even so, I still sense a distinction between them.

Joly’s Machiavelli is still advocating despotism. After all, it is still meant to apply to Napoleon III which is the dark star of the show.

The Protocols’ supervillain has ceded from the spotlight completely. In fact, Golovinski could postulate that the entire Jewish secret council was nothing but on allegory on the persuasiveness of certain modern political philosophies and still the entire text would have the same force.

The irony of the text would even stand out better in that case. A text that points a crooked finger upon our own society and cringes in revulsion over the way we have defiled our own philosophies. We are to blame for turning the real Montesquieu on his head and of making a mockery of our own ideals.

That is exactly the nature of the accusation levelled upon the lower classes by the aristocracy: That we have no principles and thus can be swayed to do anything. Us talking about divine rights is the biggest dishonesty of them all.

Rather than thinking this is the UN, we should probably turn to global projects and institutions like the WTO, IMF, media conglomerates and think tanks with global influence.

Any political system will have to take a stance on how much dissension can be tolerated. But no Western society can in good conscience exonerate itself from flirting with the schemes laid out by the Protocols.

Europe is praising freedom of speech while combatting disinformation using tactics that leaves a bad taste in the mouth of any thinking individual.

While we disavow the Protocols in our eagerness to signal our disapproval of the antisemitism of our own societies hundred years ago, we handily also avoids the humiliating predictions it produced. In fact, it even helped facilitate an entire nation to loose control of their hate in a democratic country.

PARADISE LOST