1st August
In today’s text, the Protocols are scurrying along with Machiavelli’s plan like a little puppet.
Golovinski seems to write from a position of prejudice against “the mob” and their base feelings unlike the wisdom of the aristocracy. He is convinced that the people are dogs and the nobles are responsible dog owners.
Joly of course does the same, but with the knowledge that his contemporaries will lambast the mindset of Machiavelli utterly for precisely that human outlook. (From a certain perspective, there is even the possibility that this idea is a prejudice against the aristocracy. Who knows, perhaps the different classes were more eye to eye than we believe).
Montesquieu, convinced that the new awareness of political rights will instil in people a resilience prohibiting despotism from ever returning, pushes Machiavelli to answer the question: How would you propose a society once turned liberal could ever return to despotism again?
Machiavelli’s answer is not very convincing (which Montesquieu reminds him in the following Dialogue 8).
Oddly, Golovinski adds little to this poor scheme he borrows. For the first time since starting to read the text, I start to suspect Golovinski’s purpose to be purely antisemitic and less about praising the aristocracy.
The plan
The overall plan is comfortingly simple: Produce chaos everywhere by constantly rocking the boat secretly. The people will be at each other’s throats, and soon realise they need a strong man to take the reins.
Circumventing all political parties and systems, the people will welcome such a saviour.
Foil the free markets by investing in speculation, which will destroy money reserves bound to actual value, land. Once in a purely fictitious realm of value, the private sector will be so sensitively tied to the existence of a strong despotic state that the oligarchy will be forced to support it. The slightest political trouble can crash the markets.
2nd August
Dialogue 7
● Torture is now second choice. First choice is theatrics and secretly fostering instability. ● Employ the mob’s prejudices to control them. ● Keep populace in an artificial reality. ● Paralyse individual initiative. ● All-sprawling Briareus: The super state. ● Deflate stable capital, inflate unstable capital reserves. ● Agriculture is an independent, stable value. ● Foreign policy: Incite wars. ● Press: Useful to power. ● Utilise rather than antagonise experts. ● Divide and conquer amongst civil servants. ● A people’s spirit can be changed in 20 years.
Machiavelli lays out his scheme pretty clearly in Dialogue 7. If I were to make a list of how his argument developed historically, it would look like this:
| Joly | Despotism is made possible through the monarch’s secret police. This secret institution is extra-judicial and reports directly to the despot as was the golden standard back then. |
| Golovinski | Despotism is made possible through a central organisation who understands all the mechanisms of society and uses their knowledge. An unchecked, private organisation which is not a state institution. |
| Today | Despotism is made possible through mental discipline. Discipline rules inside belief systems, but a state of anarchy exists between global, crashing belief systems causing tremendous friction. |
They are, after all, children of their era. Machiavelli (the real one) could not predict the amount of influence the population would gain. Joly could not predict the consequence of no central ruler. Golovinski could not predict the pure devotion to guiding principles and the real dynamics of modernity, at least not precisely.
They all foresaw some of the ailments and weak points of modernity, but it would take another hundred years for those powers to play out and manifest themselves.
| Dialogue 7 | Subtext |
|---|---|
Machiavelli: At first I must say that you are completely deceived about the application of my principles. In your eyes, despotism always presents itself in the decrepit forms of Eastern monarchicalism, but this is not what I imagine; in new societies, one must employ new procedures. Today, governing is not a matter of committing violent iniquities, decapitating enemies, stripping subjects of their goods, the liberal use of torture; no, death, despoliation and physical torment can only play secondary roles in the internal politics of modern States. |
Torture is no longer accepted. Perhaps it once was? Spain’s population once desired the Spanish Inquisition … as long as it punished according to the people’s own prejudices. |
| […] | |
| One believes me to be quite old and every day I am rejuvenated on the earth. | |
| Montesquieu: Are you joking? | |
Machiavelli: Listen to me and judge for yourself. Today, it is less a question of doing violence to men than disarming them, of repressing their political passions than effacing them, of combating their instincts than deceiving them, of proscribing their ideas than changing them by appropriating them. |
Disarm, cool them off, appropriate and change their ideas. |
The whole idea of changing the intellectual sphere, of poisoning the revolutionary energy is a fine argument. If anything, time proved it could be done.
Pacification of strong sentiments is and has always been central to government.
I am of the quite modest opinion that two sides always exist to that coin. Is any tempering of revolutionary thinking to be seen as a trick? To the revolutionary, you are either a sister or a traitor. This is the bewitchment that swallows us in our fervour. The fire engulfs us and we act like rabid animals, biting at anything that tries to control us.
And yet, note that we are still within the realm of the rational. It is our rational capability that makes us see through any attempt at appeasement as a traitorous deceit aimed at lobotomise us, take away the anger that grips us.
Rationality is a mental faculty in the service of behaviour.
Killing individual initiative
A reference to the insight that revolution requires leaders, the matter of initiative is taken up next.
| Dialogue 7 | Subtext |
|---|---|
Machiavelli: Permit me. Here is the moral part of politics; in a little while we will come to the applications. The principal secret of government consists in weakening the public spirit to the point of completely disinteresting the people in the ideas and principles with which one makes revolution these days. In all eras, peoples – like individual men – are paid with words. Appearances are almost always sufficient for them; they do not demand more. Thus, one can establish artificial institutions that respond to a language and ideas that are equally artificial; |
E.g. (slow) reforms rather than revolution |
One must saturate the people to the point of exhaustion, to the point of disgust. |
If politics is too technical, debate requires expertise. |
| […] | |
One of the great secrets of the day is knowing how to seize hold of popular prejudices and passions so as to introduce into them a confusion of principles that render all understanding impossible |
Antisemitism is desired. |
One simple suggestion is to thwart one revolutionary thinking with the advent of several other, conflicting ones, and secretly or overtly support incompatible ideologies. Are the principal dividing lines along economic or sexual or racial lines? Fund media outlets that sets a shrill tone and keeps the groups in mutual fighting, and you can keep your job another day.
Usually the more intellectual debaters can easily see through such a ploy, but if the media is filled with uneducated voices, most people will rather react just as Joly predicts.
| Dialogue 7 | Subtext |
|---|---|
Above all, I must strive to destroy the parties, to dissolve the collective forces wherever they are, to paralyze individual initiative in all its manifestations; then the level of the people’s character will fall by itself and all arms will soon weaken against servitude. |
The real road to serfdom. |
| […] | |
| Absolute power will no longer be an accident; it will become a need. | |
| […] | |
A great many of these results can be obtained by the use of simple police and administrative regulations. |
It is too early to tell if Joly really saw the government of Napoleon III as based on these precepts. Later Dialogues will provide a more complete picture.
The role of consensus is missing from Machiavelli’s account.
Well, missing is not entirely correct. He more than allude to how one is to deceive the population, but even between the lines, it is not obvious that he understands that initially a despot can easily grow out of the same revolutionary matter as his compatriots. The division grows over time, and it is not even obvious whether he or his former comrades slid from the revolutionary creed.
Now comes the rare mention of a secret state, which is probably just Joly’s idea of a secret police on steroids.
| Dialogue 7 | Subtext |
|---|---|
[…] a monster called the State, a new Briareus whose arms extend everywhere, a colossal organism of tyranny in the shadow of which despotism will always be reborn. |
Very much embraced by the Protocols. |
What he learned from capitalism
I am not sure what to make of his economic circus.
| Dialogue 7 | Subtext |
|---|---|
With the help of regulatory power, I would institute, for example, immense financial monopolies, reserves of the public fortune, which would depend so narrowly on the fate of all the private fortunes that they would be swallowed up along with the State's credit the day after any political catastrophe. You are an economist, Montesquieu: weigh the value of this arrangement. |
I assume the idea is to threaten the nation with political disaster if anybody rocks the boat. |
As the leader of the government, my edicts and ordinances (all of them) would consistently tend towards the same goal: annihilating the collective and individual powers; |
|
excessively developing the preponderance of the State by making it the sovereign protector, promoter and remunerator. |
Private fortunes are basically money not under the despot’s control. Free market capitalism’s strongest bulwark is exactly the reverence for private property. Money is power, except power is power even more.
I can see the point of the goal, but his arguments are not that easy to follow.
The centre of the storm.
Overall, Joly seems to have a grand version of the secret police in mind. The underlying assumption is control rather than chaos.
Joly simple does not consider that despotism can be a group effort. The despot is always in centre.
I think this is a trait he halfway shares with Golovinski’s mad plan in the Protocols, only we sense that the Jewish council edges closer to chaos than Machiavelli’s does.
Golovinski’s council is the next step away from Joly’s despot: Constantly we are reminded that we are mentally unequipped to fathom their thought patterns. Their ideas reach us in the form of advanced sociological ideas, and we are fooled. But the real understanding requires a super brain our gentile minds are incapable of following (with the only competition being the aristocrat as the Übermensch).
Joly’s despot is a maniacal control freak. Golovinski spreads the singular despot out on a group of manipulators, but still dreams of retaining control. Both are miles away from the frothing democratic chaos of today.
Golovinski has sensed the reality that ideology can act as a despotic centre, but he still lingers on to a group of responsible actors. He cannot grasp the full consequences of the fact that a conviction is to blame for dissolving his beloved feudal society. There is no leader, no secret cabal. Only a slow democratic descent by a multitude into the depths of hell. Montesquieu laughs.
Both despotic forces fear the landed owners because they both regard land is the only real value.
| Dialogue 7 | Subtext |
|---|---|
| the aristocracy has disappeared as a political force; but the landed bourgeoisie is still an element of dangerous resistance to the government because it is independent; | … even more independent than industrial magnates. |
| it would be necessary to impoverish it or even ruin it completely. | |
To do this, it would suffice to increase the taxes that weigh upon landed property, to maintain agriculture in a state of relative inferiority, to favor commerce and industry to the limit, but principally speculation, because the too-great prosperity of industry can itself become a danger by creating a too-great number of independent fortunes. |
|
One would react usefully against the great industrialists, against the manufacturers, by the excitation of a disproportionate luxury, by the elevation of the rates of pay of salaried workers, |
Sedate the people with material goods. |
Machiavelli focusses solely on diminishing the power of independent actors. His scheme entails arguing for increasing workers’ salaries.
It sounds anti-Marxist, but perhaps the idea is to addict people to consumerism to dampen their revolutionary energies. The plan sounds confusing. Raise salaries. Raise prices on daily necessities. Keep people in poverty and let them become consumerists?
That would of course create industrial magnates. His idea is that speculation will hollow out or scatter private capital concentrations.
Foreign policy: War
Let me start with the quote from the Dialogues:
| Dialogue 7 | Subtext |
|---|---|
It is useless to add that the perpetual maintenance of a formidable army, ceaselessly engaged in foreign wars, must be the indispensable complement of this system; it is necessary to reach a situation in which – in the State – there are only proletarians, several millionaires, and soldiers. |
Poverty is the controlling means. |
| […] | |
Machiavelli: So much for the internal politics of the State. Outside, it would be necessary to excite – from one end of Europe to the other – the very revolutionary ferment that one represses at home. |
|
[…] liberal agitation outside justifies repression inside. Moreover, one would keep alive doubts about the powers, which one could – to one’s liking – order or disorder. The point is to use political intrigue to tangle up all the threads of European politics so as to play by turns the powers with which one deals. |
Very Machiavellian, but hardly sufficient. |
It is a retro-fitted argument for sure, but that does not invalidate it in any way!
We support colour revolutions all over the world so that we do not have one at home.
Or do we support them, so other countries can have one just like our own?
This is one of those discussions we vainly try to have regularly, the question of motives.
And of course, this game of accusations about motive is of course what both the Dialogues and the Protocols are all about.
We haven’t seen this kind of “liberal” agitation for a few decades now, and likewise the police brutality against revolutionary “liberals” are not exactly commonplace either.
The press and the experts
Even in the 1860s when Joly wrote, it was clear that the press was a suitable tool for mass inculcation of thought patterns.
| Dialogue 7 | Subtext |
|---|---|
You have already seen, in the rapid indications that I have given you, the important role the art of speech is summoned to play in modern politics. I am far from disdaining the press, as you will see, and I need to make use of the grandstand; |
Simpleton idea: Force the press to speak nicely about the regime. |
| […] | |
When one makes decisions that could appear unjust or reckless, it is essential to know how to enunciate them in good terms, to support them with the most elevated reasons that derive from morality and the law. |
Use reason to promote very subjective preferences. |
The press as a mouth piece. This is the simplistic version Joly has in mind, I think.
Golovinski could sense that reality wouldn’t be that simple. Calling the press a mouthpiece is reversing the setup. An ideological press uses politicians as voice to fill its columns, not the other way around.
Joly misses the important part, namely that the press has surpassed the despot in crusading against infidels.
Golovinski could see that the press eerily revolved around certain “artificial” topics, and he could also conclude that no obvious party controlled the agenda. Unable to figure out from where it came, I think he contended with toying with the idea that a “secret” council controlled the debate.
Perhaps generic systems theory got closer to the mark. Tensions and equilibrium states between intellectuals, the press and politicians together constitute the gravitational three-body system that we call “debate”.
Next he turns to the role of experts. Since one can always rely on an academic to be able to start to talk, but not to finish, he immediately categories experts as harmless to this overall plan.
| Dialogue 7 | Subtext |
|---|---|
The power of which I dream – quite far from having barbaric customs, as you can see – must attract to it all the forces and the talents of the civilization in the heart of which it lives. It must surround itself with publicists, lawyers, jurisconsults, practical men and administrators, people who thoroughly know all the secrets, all the motives of social life; who speak all the languages, who have studied man in all his milieus. It is necessary to take them everywhere, no matter where, because such people render astonishing services through the ingenious procedures that they apply to politics. It is necessary to bring along with them a world of economists, bankers, industrialists, capitalists, men of vision and millionaires, because everything will actually be resolved by numbers. |
Pacify critics through inclusion. |
Opinion makers and voices with influence.
Calling these proposals pillars is probably overdoing it. But nevertheless, compared with today’s climate, his creative ideas are quite interesting.
Especially the part about perpetual war outside its borders.
3rd August
The chaos despot versus the realist despot
I think this title is an apt description of the contrast between this fictional image of the Jewish conspiracy and an actual autocrat.
The Chaos Despot. His reign is compatible with democracy, obeys the laws, in fact he even obfuscates the laws. He is one, he is legion, but his many-faced nature is hidden in the shadows. He is popular, elected and vanquishes his opponents on all battlefields of the media.
He is basically the Joker in the Batman franchise.
He is elected, because nobody can manage to convince the populace that the brittle situation, which has already been stretched to the limit, can remain stable without him. War and chaos reigns outside the borders.
It’s a fancy, at least in the way it is written. One has an eerie sense of it being a reality today, but in a much more unsystematic way.
But any political system will exhibit systemic inclinations that are unintentional, and thus appear to be the result of a secret plan.
Any political system following the rules of democracy will strike the onlooker as conspicuously toying with the rules, if this spectator happens to disagree with the policy.
The democratic backsliding
The contrasting notion is Montesquieu’s that the political system itself will survive political battles and the ebb and tide of victory.
Today there is talk about democracy backsliding. There is a metric for that: Democracy index, where various factors are accumulated to a score indicating health of debate, election process and whatnot.
The backsliding is real, they say.
What the Protocols are saying in a cruder way – the arguments are 150 years old, after all – is that perhaps we ought to turn that story around.
Democratic backsliding is not the result of autocracy on the rise, at least not in our sense.
Rather it is the result of a sizeable group of people deviously using the system to advance a situation that is not encompassed by the system, not predicted by the system.
Unlike Machiavelli’s despot who singlehandedly takes over the system, Golovinski looks for a secret society masking their actions as random movement within the political free world.
The idea is that the division of power is not that immune to manipulation after all.
The fact that many interest groups try to work within the confines of the system only proves it is working, according to Montesquieu. It looks messy with all the lobbying and money transfers going on, but in the end, many forces even out to a broad political direction fairly in line with the just as confused electorate.
But you can modernise the argument.
Forget the Jews. They were a literary device based on a common prejudice at a time where intellectualism was frowned upon by a sufficiently large portion of the population.
In fact, forget a secret council. Replace that with a consensus. Who says there have to be a beneficiary at all? The division of power has been effectively foiled, if you can exert pressure on the shared consensus and all the tripartite divisions of power will be influenced.
But isn’t that just the will of the people then?
Is it?
Is nationalism the will of the people? Or do our hive mind suffer periodic intellectual epidemics?
| Protocol 6 | Subtext | Dialogue 7 |
|---|---|---|
Soon we will start organising great monopolies — reservoirs of colossal wealth, in which even the large fortunes of the Gentiles will be involved to such an extent that they will sink together with the credit of their government the day after the political crisis takes place. |
With the help of regulatory power, I would institute, for example, immense financial monopolies, reserves of the public fortune, which would depend so narrowly on the fate of all the private fortunes that they would be swallowed up along with the State’s credit the day after any political catastrophe. |
|
| Those among you who are present here to-day, and are economists, just calculate the importance of this scheme ! | You are an economist, Montesquieu: weigh the value of this arrangement. | |
We must use every possible kind of means to develop the popularity of our Supergovernment, holding it up as a protection and recompenser of all who willingly submit to us. |
One people, one country, one leader (one party). | |
Copying Joly’s already slightly shaky logic does not improve it.
In the last paragraph one can see how we are approaching Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies in history. The enamoured people, whose loyalty to the king has been supplanted by one to the party and the leader.
| Protocol 6 | Subtext | Dialogue 7 |
|---|---|---|
The aristocracy of the Gentiles, as a political power, is no more, therefore we need not consider it any more from that point of view. But as landowners they are still dangerous to us, because their independent existence is ensured through their resources. Therefore it is essential for us, at all costs, to deprive the aristocracy of their lands. |
Bourgeois wealth is not controlled. | the aristocracy has disappeared as a political force; but the landed bourgeoisie is still an element of dangerous resistance to the government because it is independent; |
To attain this purpose the best method is to force up rates and taxes. These methods will keep the landed interests at their lowest possible ebb. |
Repeats Joly directly. | To do this, it would suffice to increase the taxes that weigh upon landed property, to maintain agriculture in a state of relative inferiority, |
| The aristocrats of the Gentiles, who, by the tastes which they have inherited, are incapable of being contented with a little, will soon be ruined. | Interesting little scorn of the aristocracy. | |
At the same time we must give all possible protection to trade and commerce, and especially to speculation, the principal way of which is to act as a counterpoise to industry. |
to favor commerce and industry to the limit, but principally speculation, |
|
| Without speculation industry will enlarge private capitals and will tend to raise agriculture by freeing the land from debt and mortgages, advanced by agricultural banks. | Industry can be good… | because the too-great prosperity of industry can itself become a danger by creating a too-great number of independent fortunes. |
It is essential that industry should drain the land of all its riches, and speculation should deliver all the world’s wealth thus procured into our hands. By this means all the Gentiles would be thrown into the ranks of the proletariat. Then the Gentiles will bow down before us, in order to obtain the right to exist. |
… or bad, if combined with speculation? |
This “us” which is to receive the fruit of speculation is surely enigmatical. Probably wealthy Jews are really what he has in mind, but his conception of the process of speculation muddled.
His economic view seems to support the notion that without speculation, capital becomes healthy. It supports agriculture.
Some confusion seems to arise from both Machiavelli’s presentation and the Protocols’ presentation.
| Protocol 6 | Subtext | Dialogue 7 |
|---|---|---|
In order to ruin the industry of the Gentiles and to help speculation, we will encourage the love for boundless luxury, which we have already developed. |
One would react usefully against the great industrialists, against the manufacturers, by the excitation of a disproportionate luxury, |
|
We will increase the wages, which will not help the workmen, as at the same time we will raise the price of prime necessities, taking as a pretext the bad results of agriculture. |
Joly leaves out the “not help workmen” part. | by the elevation of the rates of pay of salaried workers, |
We will also artfully undermine the basis of production by sowing seeds of anarchy amongst the workmen, and encouraging them in the drinking of spirits. At the same time we will use all possible means to drive all the Gentile intelligence from the land. In order that the true position of affairs should not be prematurely realised by the Gentiles, we will conceal it by an apparent desire to help the working classes in solving great economical problems, the propaganda of which our economical theories are assisting in every possible way. |
Joly mentions wars. Golovinski does not. | The interests of the people, and even a kind of zeal for liberty, for the great economic principles, could easily cover over – if one wishes – the real goal. |
The same jumble of ideas not obviously working together. How can one encourage love for luxury while keeping people in poverty?
I do note, however, that Golovinski uses the phrase “increase the wages, which will not help the workmen”. Again and again he stresses the aristocratic point of view that they really wanted to help their “constituents”.
Today most of these arguments are only lukewarm. However, only four decades later they hit the mark remarkably precisely.
4th August
I can’t help wondering what the Protocols would have looked like if they had been written today.
My head is spinning with thoughts.
What is the Briareus today?
My attempt at breaking it down into qualities, from material to ethereal.
- Something real underlying an entire society of societies. An institution, an organisation, a bureaucracy. A military industrial complex? An educational system?
- Something implicitly assumed in our everyday conversation, which relies on the existence of the institution: They protect us. They guarantee our choice of life. A set of expressions that are easy to repeat and oft used in the press. These mantras refers to something factual in society.
- A mentality not necessarily linked to the reality. Our freedom, our way of life. Abstracts.
None of that brings me any closer to a suggestions. “Jews” may have fitted the bill in 1890, but certainly not today.
I remember a quote from Harry Truman:
Harry Truman - Merle Miller: Plain Speaking, p. 355, What Ruins a Man:
“If a man can accept a situation in a place of power with the thought that it’s only temporary, he comes out all right. But when he thinks that he is the cause of the power, that can be his ruination.
Montesquieu can ask: Can the man ever replace the institution? Can he penetrate the frame and disband it?
5th August
Postmodern argument
Machiavelli and the Jew have both abandoned physical power to take up economical power and wearying democratic mindset through debate.
The postmodern angle concentrates on cognitive walls being secretly erected around our cultural behaviour through indoctrination.
Golovinski exists in a universe where land is real, where the mob is violent, but controllable by theories.
Joly exists in a universe where institutions can be perverted through the people taking on the vestiture without understanding the philosophy.
Did any of them predict the violence driven by citizens in Nazi Germany?
Or even more to the point: Can a leaderless flock herd the wrong way?
Historians
I think historians misjudge the Protocols. There is venom and spite in it, but if it is directed at Jews, it is because the author in the Jews saw your face and mine. Everything we stand for – institutionalism, stripping the aristocracy of birth rights and the king of personal power – is to the author of the Protocols seen in speculative “Jewish” philosophy.
PARADISE LOST