29th November

I have brought it up before, so I repeat myself. The Protocols are likely not numbered at all in the original text. The division into separate pages may be artificial, which could be a good reason they float around compared with the Dialogue. The English translation of Sergei Nilus’ book only have a line of asterisks serving as a dividing line, and even that at times is in conflict with the modern division which can happen at times in the middle of a paragraph, such as when the division is entirely lacking in Nilus’ book.

Another reminder to myself: Golovinski is only the hypothetical author of the Protocols according to a few investigating historians.

Protocol 17

● Defense lawyers should receive the facts of the case from the authorities and not question them. ● Free religious choice have undermined the Church. ● We will destroy the Papacy slowly and King of Israel will be the international pope. ● Erode the faith using critical journalism. ● Use citizens to spy on citizens. ● The police force have been reduced to writing reports. ● Punish those failing to squeal on their neighbour. ● Let the snitching simmer and presto: Corruption is no more.

Protocol 17 overlaps with the last part of Dialogue 16 and the first of 17.

The Protocols as usual has more to say on its subjects than the Dialogue. We sense the author angered at Joly’s blatant attempt at reducing Napoleon III to a sinister figure which is an unsurprising conservative reaction.

Controlling the lawyers

Both the Protocols and the Dialogue commences the section on lawyers with a sales speech which makes little attempt at hiding the true intentions.

Last week I noticed how Machiavelli in Joly’s usual comical fashion explains how in liberal states you simply can’t go about and put a gag in the mouth of lawyers who are in opposition to the incumbent president.

The people in these countries are much too tied to their investment in their institutions vis-à-vis liberal freedoms. And yet, the legal profession remains a problem …

Machiavelli can say “demoralise” in a satire, because it fits the irony. How immoral, to allow criminals to be defended!

The narrator presents the same argument, and we are left with the question: Ought the Protocols to be read in the same way? Awareness of irony? The problem is obvious: If the narrator seriously equates societal depravity with acquittal “on a technicality” as I believe is the expression in American action movies, where the same mentality underpins many scripts, then this Jewish narrator actually acts according to his conscience.

If it is the same tongue-in-cheek approach that Machiavelli uses in the Dialogue (which isn’t altogether that ironic meant when it comes from a certain political camp), then why be so heartfelt in his explanation?

At any rate, Golovinski tops off Joly’s suggestions with his usual creative approach to any subject.

Either Golovinski quotes from other sources (which they say he does) or he just injected his own opinion here. I think we can ignore the whole “Jewish” thing for the time being, unless of course there has been a Jewish precedent for advocating judging indicted people beforehand.

This is genuinely difficult.

Interpreting these sentences as a pro-authoritarian suggestion: The conservative sense of justice is a social one as much as the liberal sense of justice, only it bases its sympathies on the (upper/middle class) victims, not the (lower/middle class) victims. Well, not just victims, offenders too. Leniency for class crimes, harshness for violations against class interests.

Interpreting it as an attempt to smear “Jewish” theory, i.e. liberalism and socialism, only makes sense if such theory has ever advocated conviction without a fair trial. I doubt that.

But I should keep in mind that a Golovinski could very well have been sympathetic with Napoleon III, as he lent credence to a belief in the monarchistic ways by proving that a country can only seriously be improved with a divinely consecrated monarch at the helm.

The Protocols would actually make kind of sense as a gut reaction in that way.

The problem with the antisemitic interpretation is that “Jewish” science was particularly associated with anti-authoritarian views. Constantly the Protocols reminds us that the Jews via their belief systems has weakened the fabric of society by spreading a feverish urge to liberalise.

The bridge connecting anti-authoritarianism with their end goal of world domination is then this secret council (Henry Ford’s Sanhedrin) who awaited the opportunity to seize control, merely using liberalism and socialism as tools to erode away the foundation.

It sounds like what The International Jew sees in it, but the problem is that the Protocols constantly reminds us that the purpose of becoming masters of the world is to … protect the gentiles from themselves.

I could understand why the reporters at Dearborn Independent would pose the question “what do all those Rothschilds want with all that power?”, because they are too far removed from real monarchism to understand it. But Golovinski who is in the service of such power? No.

The Jews and the aristocracy are constantly reflecting each other somehow I haven’t figured out.

And how do the ultra antisemitic, ultra conservative circles in Russia factor into this? Was it given to them or did they write it? Unless I can find some of their texts for comparison, it is hard to say.

I think the translators of Joly’s book were closest to the mark when they wrote in the preface:

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.”

And I think that is simply all: Golovinski is taunting Joly specifically.

The Clergy

It will be interesting to see how the question of faith plays out.

A few mental preparations:

France ~ Joly: The republican norm which rose to prominence in the years preceding the French Revolution was separation between state and church. In the Ancien Regimé the church’s power was immense and its economic power even more so. (Note: Catholicism had its power because it enjoyed legitimacy from the people. Never forget that the crowd cheered when books were burned and Calas executed). Joly is on the side of republicans against an emperor who has the church’s support as he gave it back some of its lost powers.

Russia ~ Golovinski: The orthodox faith is a quintessential factor in the power structure of tsarist Russia. Waves of liberalism and particularly socialism and anarchism endangers the church’s position.

Joly has Montesquieu praise the Bible for introducing the moral code that heralded the coming of freedom of thought. Machiavelli calmly responds that the church has always been the guarantor of political power.

And what will Golovinski answer?

The Dialogue is worth quoting, because Golovinski must have read it too.

I imagine his reaction when he first reads Montesquieu (who in the story is the naive philosopher) praise the liberal powers of the Bible, followed by Machiavelli’s abuse of the church.

I doubt Golovinski did a lot of engineering. He eloquently formulated his gut reaction. It doesn’t take a genius to prefix any idea with “we destroyed .. with theory we invented, which the gentiles can’t see through”.

But he does often deviate from the script. Those deviations might be significant, they might not.

In this case, Joly spends the time reminding how the church supports the political status quo (which is wonderful in Golovinski’s view) while the Protocols points to the destructive power of accepting other religions in the country.

Religious tolerance is like saying that the foundation of a religion is faith in some divine reality rather than the divine reality itself. Religion from a liberal and socialist standpoint is something good for the moral habits of the population but otherwise just a freak phenomenon of the brain that people seem obliged to indulge in.

Long before the revolution, atheistic books were burned in effigy around France as the likes of d’Holbach, Diderot and Voltaire directed their attacks at the very reality of Catholicism. Many leading figures were quite used to live in exile for a number of years until things had calmed down.

Why? Because they denied the reality of the miracles. Coming up with a number of other explanations were not enough. It mattered whether miracles were a psychological mechanism or actually took place in objective reality.

Hence the strong orthodox reaction to the influx of sociological views on religion.

No, Golovinski does not seriously believe that “The King of Israel will become the true Pope of the universe, the Patriarch of the International Church”. This is about something else.

I am certainly willing to entertain the possibility that Golovinski feels and perhaps even believes what he is accused of by posterity. But then I demand that all the extraneous pieces fit together.

In this case, it is the part about stopping bloodshed. Note that the deal is to actually stop the hypothetical bloodshed. The fake part is about his/their motives for doing so.

Golovinski blindly copies and adapts a little. He looks at the clock and awaits the end of his shift.

The only power in the world able to demolish the coherency of religious bonds is political theory, the rise of the intellectual masses in conjunction with a massive outreach to the peasantry.

Always back to theory, the eternal Jewish science. In that way, the Protocols feed perfectly into the beliefs of the authors of The International Jew.

It’s pretty much Joly’s text, but some left out, some added.

Joly has the despot reveal how he uses to press to stir a liberal frenzy directed at the church’s sway on catholics.

Golovinski is running close to 1:1 with the text, except he just points the finger at the Jews and adapts the text to the circumstances.

Golovinski is of course quite able to discern between Jews and the flood waves of anarchism, liberalism and socialism. He is a propaganda professional after all.

The Police and the Snitch

The author gets creative when he transforms Joly’s massive police force to a citizens corps of squealers. A police force is quite unnecessary to know all about society.

Well, Joly’s police force is dreamt up as constituting half the population, so the difference between the two is largely academic.

In the next section it becomes apparent that these squealers is what the Protocols calls “agents”.

This is worth keeping in mind. The word agent could simply designate someone who out of a “sense of duty” offers their services to a cause they supposedly believe in.

Perhaps they aren’t even aware that they are “agents”. “Useful idiots” is the usual term, usually spoken by people being useful idiots to some opposing ideology.

There is the usual oddity in Golovinski’s text that simply doesn’t fit.

“The bearers of false reports will be severely punished, in order to prevent abuse being made of the privilege of report.”

Perhaps it lends credibility to a text that apart from the ideas of utterly confused Westerners is clearly not meant to be taken seriously. (The Jews wants to resurrect the Davidic line of kings … to protect the gentiles from themselves and the ideas of liberalism they hold so dearly but was supplied by a snake in paradise, namely the Jews).

Perhaps the Protocols allows the author a short moment of breathing space in the pressure cooker of Russian society two decades before the fall of the Romanovs.

Who are these Jews?

Let’s for arguments sake assume that Golovinski is an intelligent person who madly hates the Jews for all that he accuses them of.

Today we read the Protocols and shouts loudly how they accuse the Jews of setting up a secret police. Which reality would that correspond to?

Written before the Soviet system was in place, the only Russian candidate would be the tsar’s secret police, which is hardly an accusation that Nicholas II would have cherished.

Perhaps we can speculate about a general fear in the Russian public about Jews squealing to the authorities when they witnesses irregularities. Even then it sounds speculative.

“Jewish” is a euphemism for speculative capitalism, for global control of domestic affairs. That was most apparent in The International Jew.

To a lot of people it was far more than a euphemism. It was a real connection, and once you had a face, there was something for the lower classes to tack their animosities on which followed a much more medieval pattern: Jews drink blood, kill babies etc. People accusing Jews of killing babies rarely also accuses them of influencing international agreements with socialist ideologies and vice versa.

Talking about the Okhrana

Now things start to get really weird.

According to various speculations cited by the Lexicon, Matvei Golovinski himself was hired by the Okrana.

Golovinski was a strange fellow, if we are to judge from the reports of this living.

MATVEI GOLOVINSKI FROM THE LEXICON:

While studying jurisprudence, Golovinski joined an antisemitic counter-revolutionary group Holy Brotherhood (“Святое Братство”). Upon graduation, he worked for the Okhrana, secretly arranging pro-government coverage in the press. Golovinski’s career almost collapsed and he had to leave the country after his activities were publicly exposed by Maxim Gorky. In France, he wrote and published articles on assignments of the Chief of Russian secret service in Paris, Pyotr Rachkovsky.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Golovinsky switched sides and worked for the Bolsheviks[citation needed] until his death in 1920.

1. If he worked for the Okhrana, why did he so openheartedly write about their activities? Propagandistic trick? Or mimicking the popular consensus of the Okhrana?
2. What does it tell us about his character that he worked as a propagandist for both the Okhrana and later the Bolsheviks (allegedly)?

The fact that he holds little regard for revolutionary theories stands to reason. That he blames Jews for everything is frankly not that obvious. He could be a skilled manipulator tapping into prevailing prejudices for a higher purpose.

Compared with the International Jew, he is indeed playing a completely different game. He is constantly referring to the psychology of revolutionaries and constantly deriding our belief in freedom.

I think the trick is to know which head of the Golovinskiean Hydra is speaking at any time.

More than once I have concluded that he mirrors and merges both of Joly’s main actors as well as both the aristocracy and the anti-establishment forces into the same narrator.

The research quotes The Telegraph who quotes a Russian historian having investigated Golovinski’s life:

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Later he was charged with a more important mission. Reactionary circles in Moscow, dismayed at the progress being made by modernisers in the court of Nicolas II, hit on the idea of a forgery that would demonstrate to the tsar that the rising tide of capitalism in Russia was really a Jewish conspiracy aimed at overthrowing him and the old order.

Summing up: Golovinski is simply a professional writer hired to make a convincing case to Nicolas II that the liberal influences he allows is far from beneficial.

That would explain the lack of emotions compared with the likes of The International Jew and Goebbel’s Der Angriff.

If the idea was to make Nicholas think that there really was a cabal of Jews orchestrating political movements, the document needed to look like it was seriously written by Jews.

But I don’t see that. Armed with that story, it falls flat on several occasions.

Nicolas is said to at least have ordered an investigation into the document, but that tells us nothing about the outcome. Perhaps he immediately suspected it to have originated from his conservative friends.

All the sympathies expressed in the document are squarely conservative. The revolutionary stirrings are only described as a temporary measure.

For a moment, I will consider this backstory and then see how much sense it makes. I will imagine Nicolas reading the following passage:

Nicolas would have loved reading this implicit indictment. If he dared to act anti-liberal and allows snitches, his reign would be comparable to a Jewish despotism. Nice.

Another possibility: They used the document to influence Nicolas politically. A conservative latent dream.

This theory actually makes a kind of backwards sense.

The Protocols are brimful of suggestions and hints at how to control the unruly masses. A gentle message to Nicholas II?

As to the purely antisemitic interpretation, I stand by my conviction that the logic breaks down when these Jews act oddly responsible as rulers.

What are these theories of superhuman rights? The Geneva Convention and the Bill of Rights? Or aryan theories? Not the latter, since those aren’t concerned with liberties but destinies.

So phase 1: Make people believe in liberal rights and wait until the police breaks down or is corrupted. Phase 2: Make people shed these rights themselves, once the necessary institutions have been destroyed.

Sure, but what then is the message exactly? “The Jews killed the world!”.

Well, perhaps, but I find it hard to ignore the much more salient message: Faith in liberty and rights lead to lack of duty which is the real reason for corruption.

And there it is. These “Jews” exploit our own corrupt tendencies. Ever since the invention of the State Duma have we had to struggle with these tendencies which the aristocracy kept at bay previously.

The Jews have a plan for world domination?

I dare anybody who in the Protocols see a kind of rabid antisemitism like a child lashing out in anger to explain what the hell is going on in sentences like the one here.

Let me rephrase the matter: Does this hypothetical Golovinski himself believe in a grand Jewish conspiracy? And irrespective of the answer, why would he write the Protocols in the first place?

Indeed, the as of yet unanswered question: Why would he write the Protocols in the first place?

Antisemitism? Hate felt for the Jews for what they are doing to his beloved country, or perhaps even doing to any and all empires of the past?

There are all sorts of reports on Golovinski, but not a lot of coherent insight.

30th November

Central to both The Dialogue and the Protocols is the theme of paranoia.

One cannot trust anything. All that you feel, hear or see is fabricated by a deceitful master, whose motives lies beyond conjecture.

Why, until now, Joly has not once speculated on Machiavelli’s motives. He has not outright said that the emperor wants to take despotic power for personal gain or any other reason. All he needed to do to provoke our liberal feelings is call out that he wants to take power.

Sowing distrust in an autocratic empire is his motive.

Sowing distrust in the liberal order could very well be the motive of the Protocols… if you could catch them in a serious statement at all.

Today?

Today we have grown very accustomed to the oddity that all we hear and see is fabricated for a purpose. We seem to thrive acceptably well in that environment.

Algorithms feed us political interpretations we have grown dependent upon, and it doesn’t bother us.

Is a liberal deceit really better than a despotic one?

1st December

The world had grown more fuzzy from the era of Joly to the era of Golovinski.

The good thing about a despotic ruler is that he is a singular man controlling very material people. It’s all real, and you know where to direct the gun.

He operates by a sleight of hand that leaves the spectators in a state of bewilderment and amazement.

But the purely democratic society? Where subterranean cultural waves only becomes visible when the waves break into political leadership, and where all sorts of changes can happen in the dark when voters simply change their mind secretly?

The Protocols can easily wreak havoc in our tender society.

PARADISE LOST