12th November

From a certain vantage point, I can almost see how TIJ’s reaction to the imprint of a Jewish ruling class has the ring of a typical liberal reaction to the idea of a responsible aristocracy.

Choosing the Jew as the negative stereotype to match the aristocracy is in many ways a brilliant move. The myth of the Jew supports the mirror image of the aristocracy.

Wiser, less prone to impulse and fancy, calculating. These are the same qualities that TIJ complains about. They outright admit that the Jew is collectively more clever and their only wish is that they would start to act in a responsible manner.

In fact, having said that, I can hardly even label it a liberal reaction! They are seriously wanting their lords back! (But in a better version).

Hereditary values and codes play a key role as well. Certainly a hallmark of the aristocracy, it also meshes well with the purported idea that Jews have ambitions of world domination dating back to the Sanhedrin.

13th November

As I did with the Protocols, so I shall do with The International Jew.

The world reads them and struggles with a question of antisemitism. Are they, and how much are they? The same approach is applied to nazism itself: Have can we easily dismiss their rabid antisemitism.

I find this approach trivial and useless. Rather, I would prefer to take the antisemitism out of the equation and examine the result. All of a sudden, you have on your hands an overwhelming amount of people who complain about social science and social economy have changed the world, how international finance (or even widely national) have rendered the ordinary citizen in despair. How speculation and profit-first approaches to life have hollowed out core values.

It sounds like ordinary discontent, but can’t be. Something else happened, and I am not satisfied with the explanations I have found so far.

14th November

I guess our species have become accustomed to roam in herds.

We have a herd mind (not a hive mind). Or at least the neural circuitry ready for it.

We can sense when the herd is changing direction. At that junction we can either remain passive or actively lean on two strands of behaviour. Either we surrender to the arousal of the moment, the collective mood, or we seek lonelier pastures.

Or as said, not act at all. In that case, the mood can rise to hysterical levels and the force of the public sentiments beats on our eardrums. It can drive us insane.

When this pressure is felt widely, and we feel something of a foreign nature is pressing on our world, we have a third option for action as well: We can band together and exert a counter pressure, but we do so against a perceived enemy with hypothetical characteristics.

What is worse, we ourselves now trigger that very neural circuitry, the flocking instinct. Our little band of brothers produce a new surge foisted on their intellectual neighbourhood.

Standing waves develop in the fairly small chamber that our circles move in.

15th November

From chapter 10 onwards, TIJ opens up the bag and starts to present to us the Protocols as they have read it.

I chose to read it alongside Maurice Joly’s Dialogue in Hell, as it was plain for people already in 1920 when TIJ wrote their articles that the Protocols was a perverted imitation of the Dialogue.

And for good reason. The Dialogue speaks with the voice of the prime enemy of the aristocracy by being a thinly veiled attack on the despot of the day, Napoleon III. The French Revolution after all triggered a conservative counter-reaction across Europe.

The most important project of the Protocols is to illustrate that the mob cannot rule on their own. That they will fall prey to any elite who surpasses them in intellect. Hence the Jews.

In other words, the whole of the Protocols can be reduced to “Give up liberalism (and socialism and anarchism) and revert to obedience towards your ruler, or accept that you will be fooled and become enslaved once again.”

Or at least this is my takeaway for the chapters I have read so far, 1-15.

16th November

TIJ - Ch. 10 - An Introduction To The “Jewish Protocols”

● The Protocols captures the essence of Jewish imperialism. Irrelevant whether it was actually written by Jews. ● Purpose: Undermine existing obedience in people. Replace with a new obedience towards a new aristocracy. ● The attack is targeting ordinary people, not the upper ranks of society. ● Honesty is a gentile (folk) trait. The (Jewish) aristocracy must remain Machiavellian in nature. ● Protocols must be an internal oral exchange, if not a secret oral tradition since dawn of times. ● Protocols divulge a profound insight into human nature. ● The Gentiles are rightfully called stupid. ● Reading the Protocols makes you understand the human maze. ● Knowledge about the Jews’ plan is the road to freedom.

I must be honest and say that what you bring with you when commencing a book largely determines the outcome of your reading.

Had I started reading the Protocols with the attitude of TIJ, I may very well have reached the same conclusions.

First though, a warning against treating anything as a serious theoretical subject:

The object of a future science is often discussed internally among those who are to become its proselytes, especially when the science is a spin-off from another science.

Apparently one can have a theory of Jewish World Power concurrently with others not even believing it exists. The object of the science of Jewish World Power, is… Jewish World Power. How it operates and is spread.

Because the science exists, the object of it must exist too.

Thought is self-producing and self-consuming. Hegel would agree.

Writing is a physical act, and as such, it requires attention and awareness, the very ingredients of reality.

Once the sphere of the science of Jewish World Power exists, it is self-perpetuating. It becomes a matter of understanding itself, its own premises. Jews are almost tangential to it.

Delving into the tenets of the curriculum:

Anarchists are ruled out (they would hardly enslave the world). Liberals are ruled out (too old to still be alive since the time of the French Revolution). That leaves socialism, (but in an authoritarian guise… bolshevism).

The pieces seem to fit. Revolutionary liberals must be walking corpses by now, and certainly, the peace-loving liberals in American industry cannot be accused of dissolving the bonds that keep the old aristocracy in place. There is no such thing in America, and remember, the Protocols are not particular to Russia.

And forgeries are out too:

So TIJ is fooled in much the same way as most modern readers are fooled. TIJ thinks the text is to Jewish benefit, the rest of the world think it is antisemitic, and for the same reason: It speaks of one type of aristocracy vacating the premises for another.

The first aristocracy, having conditioned the cattle to be obedient, watches helplessly as the cattle is swayed by an upcoming ruling class.

It is exactly this contempt for ordinary people that fools everybody.

It fits with the image of the Jews themselves being full of contempt for gentiles (putting the gentiles in a purely defensive position when they commit genocide).

And that fits with our idea of an antisemite, so the text must primarily be antisemitic.

But as TIJ themselves notice, Jews are surprisingly sparingly singled out as objects, only implicit as subject. The voice is certainly that of an upcoming autocracy, yes, but that is the voice of the new political religions taking over the obedience of the subdued peasantry.

The confusion is complete when TIJ tries to figure out who is the victim of this sinister plan to take over the world:

Who is the victim of modernity? The question is vexed.

Liberalism crops up more frequently than socialism and anarchism as a main problem (because those were the “illnesses” that Russian authoritarian leadership faced most prominently around 1900).

TIJ cannot for their life figure out how old-school liberalism could ever be a problem. Freedom to build something with your own hands.

That MUST be a different kind of “liberalism”. It cannot possibly be good ol’ American liberalism.

Sergei Nilus sees another monster in Ford’s beloved liberalism.

SERGEI NILUS, THE GREAT WITHIN THE SMALL

This manuscript first saw the light of day only at the end of 1905 in the 2nd edition of my book […]. At that time, the all-Russian fire of the so-called “liberation movement” was in full swing, which with exceptional clarity and force justified our confidence in the authenticity of the “Protocols.”

The End of the World is coming: People start to believe in liberalism!

This explains the focus on brainwashing:

As is well-known the mob (we the people) don’t know from which end a book should be read.

All the more embarrassing it then becomes that TIJ in a recent chapter completed this picture of a town of angry peasants with pitchforks when they demanded, not equal status with the Jewish aristocracy, but that their present aristocracy treated their subjects with better care.

Fully aware of a lesser intelligence (fortifying their belief that a really sinister plan soaring above their conceptual powers is unfolding) and fully aware that in big politics, very non-protestant Machiavellian values dominate, they quote the “aristocracy” and hope for some kind of revolutionary insight to dawn upon their readers:

The paragraph in question in Protocol 1 begins with:

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.

Compare with Dialogue 1:

MAURICE JOLY - DIALOGUE IN HELL BETWEEN MACHIAVELLI AND MONTESQUIEU, p.19 - FIRST DIALOGUE

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.

In the latter quote, Maurice Joly splendidly exemplifies the animosity felt between the two irreconcilable camps; those who favour freedom over geopolitics and those who favour power politics over freedom.

The speaker is of course Joly’s Machiavelli, who makes no pretensions about the nature of the human animal.

MAURICE JOLY - DIALOGUE IN HELL BETWEEN MACHIAVELLI AND MONTESQUIEU, p.20 - FIRST DIALOGUE

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.

I found my notes on Protocol 1:

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.

Ideologies

Themes like these will never die. I know people living today with aristocratic leanings. They still refuse to think of their fellow men as being capable of moral conscience.

If the bourgeoisie seized power and used it to unleash their own animalistic selfishness, then the realist tradition is in essence correct, and the aristocracy (both Jewish and original) caricatured in the Protocols are acting properly when they either refuse to relinquish power or struggle to gain it.

This kind of thinking must not hurt our feelings. It is essential in understanding where the Protocols come from.

Once it was obvious that havoc would ensue if you did not keep the common man down. Puritan protestants whose entertainment consisted in a public hanging hardly convinced an educated aristocracy that on these people you could build a stable society.

But in 1920s liberal America, the scoreboard had flipped. Gramsci makes something out of the fact that America started from fresh, that they didn’t have a “parasitic class” who contributed nothing but twisting ideology. In this fresh climate, a new normal could easily be established, one in which only production had value.

Werner Sombart viewed Jewish mentality as a great spur for capitalism. Max Weber saw the protestant ethic as its basis.

This “physiocratic” axis understands man as more or less inventive depending on how much he is oppressed by greater powers.

Machiavelli’s “realist” axis sees man as more or less cruel to others depending on mow much he is kept in check by greater powers.

The latter viewpoint has vanished from Henry Ford’s universe. Maybe from ours as well.

That means he is even blind to the core tenet of the Protocols, namely that a good aristocracy is about to be replaced by a bad one (the Jews), and the method for that is exactly the exploitation of the vanity of the mob. They believe they know how to think for themselves, and hence their hubris allows the wolves to enter and devour their feeble brains.

Fast forward to today, and we immediately ask ourselves if our present unshakable belief in freedom comes from the fact that a new aristocracy (perhaps even Jewish!) has succeeded in fulfilling the simple needs of the third estate, or if we are truly lords of our own estate in an ideological sense.

In the other hand, the realist view is constantly under fire in a postmodern world as a self-fulfilling prophecy that doesn’t explain human behaviour but constitutes it.

Wages

Next comes a passage that TIJ ought to have seen as the anticapitalist sentiment it really is. I will quote the passage in full from Protocol 6:

MATVEI GOLOVINSKI - PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION, p.23 - PROTOCOL 6

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. 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. 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.

The statement must be seen from the perspective of the nobility in Russia. Their impression of society’s heavy stone castle being built across a quagmire of feelings that can change over time is almost palpable. When herd stampedes, society becomes a dangerous thing.

Henry Ford is standing there left with a bunch of accusations he needs to divert.

• Is he in fact boosting economical speculation? Economical risk taking?
• Is he encouraging love for high quality industrial products?
• Is he participating in a system that on a whole causes prises to rise? Where does supply-demand factor into this?
• Is he pretending to help the lower classes with jobs and solve economical problems purely for unselfish reasons?

If Americans see the Protocols and get the idea that “hey, this is happening here too”, he needs to be able to point in another direction.

Of course Henry cannot possibly see himself in that role, and the claim is at its core ridiculous. And yet, once we factor in the modern idea of “systemic” phenomena, the scales start to move. Henry arrived at a system where the dice was already loaded. He just threw it and saw how much could be gained. He was the biggest work horse driving the cart of social change.

Who changed it?

(And what is so wrong with the obvious answer: Nobody?)

Misreading the text - self-reflection

Here is something for me to reflect on:

TIJ can read the Protocols and feel that it fits perfectly with their preconceptions. So do I.

There are a few occurrences in the text that does not fit TIJ’s narrative, and there are a few that doesn’t fit my version. In both cases, we do not feel it is enough to topple our conviction.

Why should I be right? Completely misunderstanding what is going on is not something new, not to me, probably not to TIJ either.

Well, for one thing, I am open to changing my view anytime I can defend it. Whereas TIJ needs to put a large fraction of statements in quote (“liberal” this, “liberal” that), I can keep that down to a few instances of bad language.

Even before starting out, I laid bare the setup, that most likely the Protocols was written by someone who floated it in the virulently antisemitic Black Hundreds cadre.

Perhaps I am just as emotionally disturbed as any other reader. TIJ fixates on the talk about gentiles. I fixate on the surprisingly frequently recurring moments of appraisal of the bond between ruler and ruled.

I stand by that analysis.

True, if anybody came to me and informed me that the Protocols were not written around 1900, and not in Russia, but rather, say 1920, Germany, then that may very well have a big impact on my view of the text.

Well, in any case, either the Dialogue would have to be a rip-off of the Protocols or vice versa. The overlap is massive, down to choice of words.

It is very hard to dismiss statements such as these:

MATVEI GOLOVINSKI - PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION, p.33 - PROTOCOL 10

When we injected the poison of liberalism into the organism of the state its political complexion changed; the states became infected with a mortal illness, that is, decomposition of the blood, There remains only to await the end of their agonies. Liberalism gave birth to constitutional governments, which took the place of autocracy — the only wholesome form of government for the Gentiles.

Even if written before the Dialogue, it is and remains a political text first and foremost.

I hereby return the burden of proof to those defending different analyses.

Those self-conceited aristocrats

TIJ has arrived at the part about Jewish wolves in sheep’s clothes:

It could fit with a Henry Ford-like industrialist, but is of course read as fitting socialism. “Working class” points directly to Marx. Here is however one example where I must defer to knowledge about time of writing. If that is pre-1900, then liberalism to my knowledge was on par with socialism as a candidate for disruption. Perhaps “movements that thought they could do better than the aristocracy” would be a fitting description.

Referring to Protocol 14, but more likely Protocol 15, they hit their toes on the arrogance of the aristocracy - any aristocracy - operating on a wider scale than the town or the local tribe.

MATVEI GOLOVINSKI - PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION, p.55 - PROTOCOL 15

It is just in this difference of mentality between the Gentiles and ourselves that we can easily see the mark of our election by God and superhuman nature, when it is compared with the instinctive bestial brain of the Gentiles. They only see facts, but do not foresee them, and are incapable of inventing anything, with the exception, perhaps, only of things material. From all this it is clear that nature herself meant us to lead and rule the world.

I mustn’t forget that my purpose here is the rediscover my nazi roots. If I want to unite with the mentality, I need to evolve.

Another approach is turning to linguistics: “When listening to Jews talk, is the difference between “them” and “us” an explicit belief in their belief system or it is a feature of their language?”.

The lovely part being that if we can make “them” aware that they are a “them”, then they will have no choice but to use language in accordance with that new reality.

Sample from Protocol 8

TIJ finds various quotes they feel confirm the theory:

MATVEI GOLOVINSKI - PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION, p.26 - PROTOCOL 8

Meanwhile, as long as it is not yet safe to fill government posts with our brother Jews, we will entrust these important posts to people whose record and characters are so bad as to form a gulf between the nation and themselves, and to such people who, in case they disobey our orders, may expect judgment and imprisonment. And all this is with the object that they should defend our interests until the last breath has passed out of their bodies.

I remember the passage from Protocol 8. The corresponding passage in Joly is in Dialogue 7 (“whose antecedents and characters place an abyss between them and other men”)

The Protocols merely follows suit with the Dialogue almost verbatim.

(The theme resurfaces in Protocol 10 where the president himself is depicted as a scandalised puppet with a Panama-canal-like disaster project behind him).

But I won’t lie. Exactly such passages lends much more credibility to TIJ’s interpretation than mine.

The reason I do not read it as they do, is that I break the text down in chunks of two kinds: (1) where the Protocols adds something new not in the Dialogue, and (2) where they merely follow suit.

Collectively, all the (1) types of passages convey a very clear sense that the Protocols have something to say. Conversely, most of the (2) types are the very ones rich on references to Jew’s actions.

In other words, Golovinski (our hypothetical author) either just prefaces each sentence with “We caused” to negate the result, or he actually produces something on his heart.

Sample from Protocol 1

And I found it in my own print of the book, so quoting from there instead:

MATVEI GOLOVINSKI - PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION, p.6 - PROTOCOL 1

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.

Now, just to discuss the actual notion that Jews were behind every disruptive social movement, I point to the easily overlooked latter part about protecting people’s freedom from people. If these are Jews, they struggle to act according to their conscience and save the gentiles from themselves. First they incite to rebellion, then they lament the loss of a submission?

No, the paragraph makes sense, if it is spoken by someone placing himself exactly in the gulf between Joly’s Machiavelli and Montesquieu, except whereas those are the combatting voices in Joly’s Dialogue, in the Protocols they are replaced with “old aristocracy” and “new aristocracy”, and we only directly hear the voice of the latter.

But aren’t they Jews then? Isn’t the Protocols exactly about the postulate that Jews are taking over the world?

Perhaps. If we say that, we must be aware that unlike the TIJ, who contributes everything to the Jewish nature, the narrator in the Protocols misses no opportunity to blame new waves of political ideology.

TIJ completely ignore the latter part of the quoted sentence: “The presumably clever and intelligent Gentiles did not understand the symbolism of the uttered words; did not observe their contradiction in meaning; did not notice that in nature there is no equality”

The Protocols is political theory. The International Jew is not.

Perhaps Protocol 16-24 will make me change my mind.

Sample from Protocol 15

The corresponding quotes are from Protocol 15 respectively 10:

MATVEI GOLOVINSKI - PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION, p.55 - PROTOCOL 15

By such means we have cut to the very root of protest against our orders so far as the freemasons themselves are concerned. We preach liberalism to the Gentiles, but on the other hand we keep our own nation in entire subjection.

For the second quote, Maurice Joly had a passage in which Machiavelli pointed out that you need a despot to write a coherent constitution.

MAURICE JOLY - DIALOGUE IN HELL BETWEEN MACHIAVELLI AND MONTESQUIEU, p.57 - NINTH DIALOGUE

Machiavelli: And where have you ever seen a constitution that is truly worthy of the name, truly durable, been the result of popular deliberations? A constitution must come fully formed from the head of a single person or it is merely a work condemned to nothingness. Without homogeneity, without the liaison of its parties, without practical force, it would necessarily carry the imprints of all the weaknesses of the views that presided over its redaction.

The subversive point is of course that Machiavelli (Napoleon III) ought to trust his fellow men a bit more. Golovinski must reverse it. His actual belief is that the lower and middle classes will never be able to rule.

MATVEI GOLOVINSKI - PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION, p.32 - PROTOCOL 10

The system of government must be the work of one head, because it will be impossible to consolidate it, if it is the combined work of numerous minds. …

If such plans were to be discussed and altered by repeated submissions at the polls, they would be distorted by the results of all mental misunderstandings, which arise owing to the voters not having fathomed the depth of their meanings.

That is the reason why we must not throw the great work of our leader to be torn to pieces by the mob, or even by a small clique.

TIJ close to getting it

At one point TIJ touches upon a real insight:

They got that backwards.

Dearborn Independent have a hard time facing the Protocol’s constant bashing on liberal ideas. The Jews are here to sabotage the free world and turn us all into debt slaves.

The methods described are not those of the aristocracy, but the side effects of substituting ideologies. True, the aristocracy gains nothing on it. They are certainly losing the grip on the world, which I can imagine Golovinski saw as well.

What is gaining power steadily is a new ideology. People who view themselves differently and hence cannot go back.

The Protocols is built over the Dialogue, which raises the central question: Can humans once again be enslaved after having gained liberal rights?

The Dialogue poses the question with tongue in cheek, since Napoleon already had accomplished that feat.

The Protocols changes the playing field: Will liberal rights enslave people, if they are pushed by a pack of wolves much more insidious than the herds who until recently governed?

In other words: Did the liberal revolutions pull a fast one on us?

Politics is about the nature of the world and our place in it, and the most profound questions are as open for reinterpretation as ever before.

The aristocracy’s dying words as given in the Protocols is a dire warning that a new caste of superhuman rulers will replace the old one, but we do not have the intelligence to see it.

Perhaps a bit over-admiring, once we know that they merely flip a lot of signs in the Dialogue, which adds irony to an already ironic text.

The real feeling of insight of course comes from being exposed to a philosophy that are not easily swayed by nice words such as “liberty, equality, fraternity”.

The fact remains that we are more entrenched than ever in a world of propaganda. The only issue is that nobody is able to decipher its true ramifications, even those who themselves propagandise.

TIJ certainly sees Marxism as once such foolish virulent philosophy.

Isn’t TIJ’s own transgression a “venial sin” to use their own words? In the end, can you really blame them for being infected with a suspicion about the huge machine which every day keeps man in conceptual shackles?

Who is the evil one? Those who incite to riot and mass disturbances to shed their chains, or those who resists change, warning that one in twenty of those rioters are quite willing to subdue their brothers and sisters with even stronger force than the present rulers?

The modern maze

“They give a clue to the modern maze”.

That very talk about influences which we do not understand is unsettling.

With a little effort, we can all be made to “see” it. Surely we will wildly disagree if the Jews or indeed anybody at all is behind those influences. Perhaps there isn’t an originator.

Perhaps the world is just full of books which slowly erodes old ties and ties new ones. New sinews and blood ties which end up becoming old shackles as they age. Perhaps those very books starts processes which takes decades to blossom into new momenta.

No cunning plan behind anything, just a lot of blind people leading a lot of blind people. And and insane amount of social momentum.

TIJ sticks with the simpler version:

I have to disappoint those dear writers at the Dearborn Independent.

Enlightenment was what brought us to despair in the first place.

PARADISE LOST