9th August

The Protocols are at their pinnacle when they preach from a point where they have figured out that there is no clear division line between a free society and a despotism. Liberal institutions can function as mechanisms of oppression and probably better than a violent despot, as they have garnered the acquiescence of the people.

This feat is accomplished on a game of words. When Matvei Golovinski sticks to irony, he reaches further than when he caves in to a dull and obnoxious antisemitism.

10th August

The seventh Dialogue ended with Montesquieu provocatively asking Machiavelli how on earth he would accomplish the complete transformation from a free society to a despotism, and noticeably a people that had accustomed themselves to liberal rights over decades.

I remember a similar observation from Malcolm X in a speech once. From his travels in Africa, he learned that those peoples who had for some duration been able to shed colonial rule, reacted with more aggression against resumed threat of coming under the yoke again.

To have less than what you had yesterday is what motivates us to resistance. That is the assumption inherent here.

Machiavelli reacts cheerfully to the challenge. He knows that men and women under difficult circumstances gladly renounces on their everyday rights and pleasures.

Dialogue 8

● Montesquieu rebukes Machiavelli’s plan as presupposing existence of absolutism. ● Machiavelli is allowed a coup d’état in his thought experiment. ● Phase 1: Exploit civil war (assuming such a one) to stage a coup. ● Political legitimacy ascribed benevolent dictator as people are tired of strife. ● Instead of oppression, assimilate judiciary, voting system, the press in the machinery of control. ● Phase 2: Exterminate pockets of resistance. ● People will see society as vulnerable. Will allow violence. ● Army will become everyday presence. ● Army will be feared and hated by population, and will itself know that only the despot is on their side, if they remain loyal. ● Despot is viewed as innocent. ● Print new money bills with his image on. ● Make new constitution. ●

In the following Dialogue 8, he is handed a free society, however, for odd reasons, he asks for permission to use a trick: A coup d’état. So he proceeds from this premise:

• A republic
• Class wars have placed his society on the brink of, if not outright, civil war.
• He can fabricate a strong leader which rises like a comet and to the people’s relief, usurps power from the now dysfunctional government.

Civil war and a coup d’état

Well, I can of course see France in the time leading up to Napoleon III in this little thought experiment.

Once the future despot can operate in a milieu of civil strife, despotism is lurking in the shadows.

But Montesquieu grants his wish, perhaps knowing all too well that unless class differences are somehow resolved to everybody’s satisfaction, any Machiavelli can lean back and wait for his moment.

Class wars and the state’s stability

When we analyse societies, we invariably have a hard time figuring out where to make the first incision. Should the people be regarded as one struggling against an autocratic regime? Or are the people divided to the extent, that the king or queen spends considerable time actually keeping the peace?

Class divisions are very obvious fault lines, but what about cultural divisions? Gender, age, and ethnicity are also famous candidates. What if discontent is brewing wildly in a few towns? Who is responsible for quelling eruptions of anger which could typically lead to attacks on innocent people.

Machiavelli has his hopes invested in this analysis of civil disorder.

But what if the pot is stewing because the people’s anger has its origins in an insoluble political and economic situation and is merely displaced into rather feeble theories of race antagonisms? Then the “protector” of the people is unwittingly the cause of the violence he seeks to protect against.

The old idea of Hobbes state of nature visited upon again. It is not quite the same, though.

Hobbes presumes the mentality “I just want someone to fix society so I can handle my own affairs in peace again”. At least some fraction of the population seems willing to try to self-govern the group they come from.

The problem here described is that too many want to offer themselves up as electable politicians. Much worse, while only few people care for actually becoming politicians, most people overdose on ideas. If anything should mark an irreversible change in the sense that Montesquieu provides in this story, it is the fact that people spread ideas and read books.

Literacy changes the balance.

This means whole groups can be enemies of other entire groups for reasons not just religious. Now people can read themselves into a civil war.

Deception, not violence, keeps the despot in power.

Machiavelli recalls his words in The Prince:

After the coup comes the battle for retaining power. In this special case, Machiavelli would venture violence to quell unrest. People will understand as they have just gotten out of a major turmoil and need safety.

Exception: Violence against pockets of resistance

Calculating everything, he deems the price worth the gain

Now he turns his attention to a special part of the plan. The army.

The army: Public enemy no. 1. The true weapon of the despot.

Knowing full well that the army consists of individuals who senses the prevailing winds just as much as everybody else, he concocts a scheme for getting them to do his bidding and keeping them loyal at the same time.

Sounds like a gamble. Why would the army fear the population and why would it not evict the incumbent tyrant if he had harmed their country?

Next idea is a bit of self promotion.

The face on the hundred dollar bill

Public image is his main concern, it seems.

There is something certifiably old school about Joly’s mentality (given he wrote in the 1860s). Lie to the press, deceive, blame bad things on someone else, take credit for good things.

A hundred years later we have grown quite accustomed to this kind of propaganda. Posters with Saddam Hussein in the streets, banners with Kim Il Sung and statues of Lenin and Stalin.

Public iconography which influence is immeasurable, at least as seen from our Western eyes.

I don’t know what to think of it yet. Reality is a boat, it is like my little island here adrift in the ocean. In times of trouble, one may glance up at the billboard of the fearless leader and think to oneself “please don’t mess up this time! Your aptness in steering out of trouble is all we have, since you have taken all other powers from us”. Or it may conflate with religious ideas in the vein of God’s chosen on earth.

That’s on the optimistic side. In everyday life, those statues and murals will be worn out, emotionally as well. “Could you step aside for a moment, fearless leader. I am trying to solve a problem here”.

The new constitution

Montesquieu leaves the matter and addresses the issues of a new constitution. Of course people would demand a constitution, or even start to write one themselves while the new despot is busy fighting rebels.

Machiavelli wants to take Montesquieu down from his ivory tower, rather than just always say “political rights”. He asks for a list of hallmark traits about democracy, which Montesquieu prefers Machiavelli himself to name. Even as he merely sets each trait forth one by one, we have a good hunch that they suddenly are not that inviolable anymore. We know we can be deceived.

Montesquieu is content, and purports that Machiavelli cannot forbid such a long list of rights without consequences.

Machiavelli informs him that he would put all of these in the constitution, but apply none of them.

Montesquieu is perplexed.

Give them bread and circus (and the right to have bread and circus), but never let them infringe on the sovereignty of the leader.

Montesquieu is not convinced. He sees the slippery slope of devastation of rights (clearly representing a bourgeois perspective).

It is worth keeping in mind that Machiavelli’s despot is a sinister character. He seeks power for the sake of power. This makes him a fabrication. Golovinski’s Jewish council is an alteration of this aspect of Machiavellianism, unlike the tzar or the aristocracy who had a genuine Christian interest in providing for their people (seen from an autocratic perspective).

Without political rights and without the right to reject their ruler, what can stop the despot from taking all they have?

Taking their wealth is the bourgeois concern underlying their strong motivation in this argument.

But that itself is a slippery slope. Being politically aware in the liberal sense is not being aware of your right to certain goods. It is being aware of the distribution of political rights.

Machiavelli senses this and sets forth a dark image of a politically indifferent people.

In this dystopian world, Machiavelli foresees a fundamental change of the game and human consciousness in such a way that looking back will seem unnatural and foreign.

What kind of dystopia are we talking about?

As it stands, in today’s political philosophy, there is an unbreakable connection between wealth and government style.

What Machiavelli (and Golovinski even more) is playing at, is the obvious problem: If wealth derives from despotism rather than principles of freedom, how would the majority of the world choose?

This unsolved problem does not go away at all just because you make the capitalist, physiocratic assumption that only free markets will lead to growth.

In fact, every day that someone teaches us about free markets as epitomising our personal freedom, we train ourselves to despotism. We adjust our political compass to a new north on the dial. We rehearse the moment when the institutions of liberty can finally be subverted without us noticing anything on the bottom line.

Our internal alarm bells stop ringing over political injustice. Instead we slowly adapt ourselves to the civil rights as a substitute: Will they take away my property?

11th August

To me, racism and antisemitism are not broad phenomena. Their major characteristics are lack of sophistication and unbridled anger. I know this is a poor notion which misses all the racist dark matter in our universe consisting in endearing patronisation. Nevertheless, it is the first candidate for racism that is easy to spot.

Unfelt racism such as systemic racism is of a completely different category, and must be dealt with in different sciences.

I am starting to see more and more signs of this boorish antisemitism in the Protocols that is simply primitive anger put to words. The author lashes out. He kept behind a veil of ridicule, but if his imagination fails him, he resorts to vileness instead. I don’t think he wants, frankly. I think he tries to add something to Joly’s way of thinking, but in the end he misses the opportunities he passes by.

What also seems striking, is that the more he promulgates simple antisemitism, the more ludicrous the claims become. A secret council of Jews able to punish whole nations sounds about as serious as claiming that Darth Vader is really up in the skies, ready to exterminate entire planets with his Death Star.

Internationalism and globalisation

One major development that marks the difference between the authors of the Dialogue and the Protocols is the rise of global economies and the decline of countries strong as fortresses. Economy and social movements weigh heavier on Matvei Golovinski’s mind than on Maurice Joly’s.

Golovinski (if he is indeed the author) was, as previously mentioned, nobility. Russia is not Germany, and antisemitism in Russia occurs to me as of a very different nature than the Nazi antisemitism.

Given their disparate histories (Protestantism and enlightenment versus Orthodoxy and autocracy), and given that antisemitism has at least one big root in religion, how could those two flavours ever be alike?

Obviously, the aristocracy would have other sympathies than Hitler’s voting demographic.

But the allergic reaction to speculative sociology and global economies and markets were to some degree shared between them.

(Jewish) science scares everybody. Money as a source of power scares everybody. The fact that wise Monarchs need to listen to advisers who are themselves influenced by philosophies, scares those who do not see the logic in those philosophies.

For centuries it took a sword to change the world. Suddenly common folks can spew ideas that spread like fire.

You can’t kill a nation, but you can kill those corrupting the nation.

Freemasonry of course stand out visibly as really a constitutionalised opposition to the old ways (ignoring a lot of argumentation for and against that viewpoint).

Being Jewish is hardly an institutionalised anything, except of course, culturally and religiously.

It is a plain mystery to me how anyone can conceive of a Jewish powerful oligarchy while walking around in poor Jewish cottages in the Pale of Settlement.

Unless the mind connects rumours of the detrimental effects of a few particular high ranking Jews with the sight of poor Jews. We “see” the potential in them for the same kind of disruption of society.

Which is why the concept of race and heritage are prone to political overtones that are dangerous if they take on a cultural significance on their own. Once a word triggers an avalanche of associations, it has started to grow unwieldy. Prejudices are nurtured.

Protocol 9

● Ten years to temper the people’s awareness of rights. ● Shadow of freedom, equality, fraternity. ● Super government will act as legislature, judiciary, executive. ● Amidst instigated unrest, the mob will desire a despot. ● Confound the laws (constitution) to the point of breaking them (it).

There is a bit of cut-up happening between the Protocols and the Dialogues currently. Most of what is discussed in the Protocols have a counterpart in the Dialogues, but not in a linear fashion, and certainly not mapping cleanly to a Dialogue counterpart. I will have to cut things up a bit.

However, the last part of this Protocol, Golovinski seems to diverge on a rail of his own.

Golovinski would do wise in sticking to the twenty years given by Joly. Let another generation grow up in a new environment, unless he plans on accelerating the generational turn as B.F.Skinner proposes in Walden Two.

Machiavelli talks about how to avoid giving specific rights from a long list, by not explicitly naming each and just keep them all under an umbrella of “rights”.

I have chosen to match that sentiment with the one in the Protocols here, which dilutes freedom, equality, fraternity to weaker versions. Maybe not the best fit, but I think it reveals how Golovinski has more experience in the rhetoric of the times which could erode any topic to smithereens by simply widening the concepts involved to grand abstractions.

Where Joly’s argument maintains that people will loose interest in the political concepts, but the concepts will remain largely the same (What does politics matter to me? What does liberty mean to me), Golovinski sees that the concepts themselves change over time like all ideas. As weapons they will rust sooner or later.

Totalitarianism in the guise of both Nazism and Bolshevism are probably the immediate candidates we all can think of.

What strikes me as curious in this universe is that both are presented as a consequence of liberalism.

Without factional wars, there would never have been a loophole for populism. There would never have been the civil war that was a prerequisite for the coup that is talked about later.

The two texts are quite unanimous about the process: As society breaks down, a plethora of ideologies fight together, which only adds to the real development of the psyche of the population at large. In the end, the majority will accept peace at any price. May the best dictator win the elite game of civil war.

Two major themes from Dialogue 8 seem to either be ignored in this Protocol 9, or I have failed in establishing the correspondence.

1. Printing the despot’s face on coins and bills.
2. Make the army the culprit in keeping the resistance down.

In neither case, the Protocols provide excessive verbiage on the matter of money and verifiable revels in dreams of violence. Either Golovinski is more sophisticated than Joly or less. Either I see it and belong to the same level or I miss it.

The sheep and the shepherd

I have tentatively decided that the passage quoted above the wall between the aristocracy and the army should match Joly’s wall between the army and the people, but as all can see, they are widely different.

Well, I am getting used to the author of the Protocols pondering what to say to each paragraph, and creatively invent something.

And read what he says: He presents another soliloquy bemoaning the irreparable breach in the alliance between the politically “blind” peasant and the politically “experienced” lord. The shepherd and the sheep will never again be bound to each other. The sheep have learned to think just enough that they resent their guardians.

Is that the sum of his bitterness? A rift in his dream world?

And what about the sheep? Did they ever learn Montesquieu’s institutional government? Did they ever learn to protect themselves from the wolves, who come to them as protectors and educators?

Golovinski wiggles and writhes all he can to escape the strait jacket of modern liberal thought.

While Machiavelli tries to weaken our belief in the inviolability of the interpretation of principles, the Protocols simply leaves the imprint of a chaos always ensuing from polemics. Whenever something is under debate, the matter is swamped in opinions, which are really only resolved when someone forcefully comes forth with an interpretation.

When the political circus is viewed from the outside, it is easy to accuse it of being wholly influenced by lobbyists, sly orators and vulgar humanist theory which all the weak representatives agrees with like automatons.

Perhaps this is the simple story behind the Protocols. Somewhere someone cannot for the life of him see what all the liberal and socialist fuzz is all about.

As a critique, it is pathetically unserious.

I find the Protocols intriguing for what they try to do, not how they do it, and certainly not for the perpetuation of the ascription of ideas that challenge the status quo to a cultural group.

For the time being I will have to content with not gaining ground in understanding the antisemitism of Nazi Germany any more than before.

Is the anger arbitrary or does it intertwine with the narrative? Does it take a fertile soil in the population in the form of intricate notions of betrayal, backstabbing, deceit or exploitation?

I will continue reading these words and try to take things apart. If nothing else, it should be educational.

Loosely I juxtapose the Dialogue’s brief moment where violence will be accepted by society – the days after a coup closes an epoch of civil war – with the Protocol’s revelling in underhand threats which are obviously ridiculous.

On what planet have the Jew ever had this insane kind of power?

Golovinski shows his late 1800s frame of reference: How will a secret society change the world? Through bombs in subways. Anarchism writ large. In other words, this secret society has the following characteristics:

1. Worldwide and well connected. Not even the Jewish as an ethical group fits the bill.
2. Organised with strict internal discipline, enough to be an army. The Freemasons in some fantasy version.
3. Able to punish entire countries … by blowing up things in cities, like a scaled up version of the Unabomber.

These are just phantoms and creative writing.

PARADISE LOST