11th December
I had to revisit an old history book to remind myself how Nicholas I of Russia despised Napoleon III.
Why, one should ask? One despot to another, they ought to have been best buddies, seen from our vantage point.
Napoleon III belonged to a new breed of political man who knew how to navigate the populist waters. Maurice Joly reminds us repeatedly how the despot would take advantage of the plebiscite to make his reign seem legitimate. Well, he did and he was indeed very popular.
What kind of man would ask people if it was okay to rule them? Does this Napoleon guy have to barter for the monarchy? Nicholas abhorred the way the world developed, and he did all in his power to stop it.
And yet, Napoleon III is still an autocrat by modern standards. He merely founded his power on the very people he served, not divine law.
12th December
One should not assume that people always want democracy and rulers secretly always yearn for autocracy.
When reading the tragic story of the Habsburg emperor Joseph II, we are reminded about Machiavelli’s lessons in The Prince.
MACHIAVELLI - THE PRINCE, CHAPTER 6
It must be understood that nothing is harder to establish, more uncertain in success,
or more dangerous to manage than a new system of government. The reason is that the reformer will have enemies among those who benefitted from the old system andonly lukewarm supporters among those who might benefit from the new one.This hesitation stems partly from fear of their opponents, who have existing laws on their side, and partly from the general skepticism of
the people, who do not truly believe in new things until they see them in action.
Not too complicated in his world view, he of course cannot imagine a whole nation in thrall of ideology.
Joseph II succeeded his mother to the throne, the renowned Maria Theresa who was absolutely not a fan of liberalism. She was a strong monarch, though, and while his youthful years went by, he had to stand in wait and accept her cautious and pragmatic approach. Once she died, he seemingly erupted in his reformational fervour.
In less than ten years he tried to upend the Austrian society with liberal reforms across the board (the strongly feudal Hungarian society too, which was an even worse move).
In the end, it backfired. He met opposition from all layers of society, from nobility over clergy to common man. In the end it broke him and he felt he was a failure.
13th December
On the matter of framing: “We” keep talking about having poisoned the Gentiles. The way it is used deserves a closer examination.
One example is when it is said that “we” destroy the Gentiles, while it is understood that they do not apply the same tactics on their own soil, Mother Russia. They warn that even Russia is in danger of losing its course, but quite often the real targets are implied to be other states and foreign political movements.
Russia. The last orthodox country standing. The last to embrace liberalism. This is the vantage point the Protocols are written from. Someone who sees liberalism as heralding a new dark age.
I think it is obvious to a modern reader that the Protocols are neither written by nor narrated by Jews. Almost nothing would fit that interpretation.
What’s more, I think it was obvious to a 1905 reader as well, at least a Russian one.
If the Protocols hold any efficacy, its trick was its flamboyant espousal of a language which at once struck the reader as being both daring and intelligent. Perhaps a rallying cry for those whose real opinion could easily be revolving around “Jewish science”.
The Protocols came to existence during a particularly difficult period for the Jews in the Pale of Settlement and surrounding areas. The first two Aliyot (an Aliyah is a migration wave of Jews) came mostly from Russia. Those became the settlers already present when Theodor Herzl began selling the idea of a home in Palestine.
Serfdom, emancipation and pogroms.
If we zoom out and look at Russia at the time, it becomes apparent that something else is going on: Emancipation.
Russia abolished serfdom in 1861 (Alexander II), and thus with the stroke of a pen pushed millions of people from solid ground into open sea. We all know that emancipation is good, so how could they lead to pogroms?
Polonsky in his history mentions:
More recently the work of Hans Rogger, John Klier, and Shlomo Lambroza has demonstrated that the
pogroms were largely spontaneous in characterand were above alla response to the growing stratification in the countryside which followed the abolition of serfdom.Most Jews did not benefit from the commercialization of Russian agriculture, but some did, and a small number, such as the sugar refiner Israel Brodsky in Kiev, became very wealthy. The apparent prosperity of the Jews provided an easy explanation for those
who could not understand why the abolition of serfdom had not been followed by an improvement in the peasants’ lot.
Russians would attribute the cause of misery in words like these:
In Svyatopolk-Mirsky’s view, the abolition of serfdom had left the peasants powerless in the face of the Jews:
In a word, in all spheres of public life,
the Jews are a sinister force directed against the Russian peopleand the existing order of things, a force against which, in the eyes of the people, neither individual citizens nor the state can prevail.
It sounds familiar to my ears.
And not just Jews, Kulaks too were becoming visible in the eyes of workers and peasants.
The attack on the Jews would be followed by attacks on the so-called kulaks, the merchants, and landowners. “In a word, if the authorities stand by passively, we can expect the development in the near future of the most terrible socialism.”
Perfectly in line with every shovelful of dirt I have unearthed so far.
And yet, everybody seem to miss the central point here …
Our primary problem with reading Nazi literature and texts like the Protocols and Henry Ford’s International Jew is that we simply cannot free ourselves from our own prejudices, in this case the positive ones that freedom is always good.
A surprising number of nationalities in spe are actually willing to try anything once. Why did the Jews stand out as the guilty party? We can fumble around with explanations revolving around their role in trade, but all those explanation miss one important aspect:
Before the Jews became the primary candidate for explaining why the system of emancipation failed, there is a hidden corollary: That it ought to work.
Without that presumption, looking for an explanation becomes futile. If you simply do not expect to find a saboteur anywhere, you do not look for one.
We changed when we took the responsibility of the world on our shoulders. Sadly we didn’t grow larger.
It is this point that the many a conservative author circles around. In their perspective the emancipation itself is the problem. The mental distortion that the masses would be ready to govern themselves.
Realist school liberalists could argue that abolition of serfdom was necessary to prevail as a society. Probably true, but that does not change the fact that 1861 set off pogroms from around 1880 and onwards which later set off Jewish migration which again set off the Palestinian Nakba and a century of violence.
Today we can blame Alexander’s government for scapegoating, but that shoves aside the real main problem: Us, we, the masses. We are the fissile material that pogroms are made of. No exceptions.
The Protocols offers so many pieces that simply do not fit into the primitive picture of “traditional” antisemitism that I feel obligated to redraw the painting.
14th December
Today’s protocol reminds us of yesterday’s extraneous pieces that do not fit our modern narrative.
There is a little bit of Dialogue 17 left to match, and Protocol 19 continues where 18 left off.
Protocol 19
● The people cannot indulge in politics. ● Instead they can report their woes and the government will try to rectify. ● Political agitation is merely the barking of a dog in presence of an elephant. ● Put political prisoners next to murderers and people will conflate them. ● Ideology makes people think that they die for the sake of everybody.
| Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Ch. 19 | Subtext | Dialogue 17 |
|---|---|---|
We will prohibit individuals from becoming involved in politics, but, on the other hand, we will encourage every kind of report or petition submitting suggestions for the approval of the government which deal with the improvement of social and national life. Thus, by these means, the mistakes of our Government and the ideals of our subjects will become known to us. |
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We will answer these suggestions by accepting them or, if they are unsatisfactory, by producing a sound argument to prove that they are impossible of realisation and based on a short-sighted conception of affairs. |
Those cunning Jews are planning to set up a society where suggestions for improvements can be delivered to the ruler by anybody and the government will consider and possibly implement the realistic suggestions. Pure deception.
| Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Ch. 19 | Subtext | Dialogue 17 |
|---|---|---|
Sedition is no more than the barking of a dog at an elephant. In a government that is well organised from a social point of view, but not from a point of view of its police, the dog barks at the elephant without realising his strength. The elephant has only to show its strength by one good example for the dogs to stop barking and to start wagging their tails as soon as they see the elephant. |
I have nothing to add here. The adoration for the benevolent monarch is poorly veiled.
| Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Ch. 19 | Subtext | Dialogue 17 |
|---|---|---|
In order to deprive the political criminal of his crown of valour, we will place him in the ranks of other criminals on an equal footing with thieves, murderers, and other kinds of repulsive malefactors. |
In my kingdom, the insolent journalist would be confounded in the prisons with the simple thief and hauled before the correctional jurisdictions. […] side by side with the forger, with the murderer. |
|
Then public opinion will mentally regard political crimes in the same light as ordinary crimes and will place the same common stigma on both. |
[…] public opinion – upon seeing the conspirator treated just like the ordinary malefactor – would end up confounding the two types in the same scorn. |
Maurice Joly wisely addresses the trick by the government that crimes of conscience should be treated radically different than crimes of gain, but they are not under the Napoleonic regime (I need to look that up).
Golovinski does little more than reiterate that the purpose of knocking politically active people off their moral pedestal is to reprogram society to not admire them.
Apart from that, the Protocols merely copies the Dialogue, though I don’t doubt he shares sentiments with the hypothetical Machiavelli of Joly’s story.
| Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Ch. 19 | Subtext | Dialogue 17 |
|---|---|---|
We have done our best to prevent the Gentiles from adopting this particular method of dealing with political crimes. In order to attain this end, we have made use of the press, public speaking, and cleverly thought-out history school-books, and inspired the idea of a political murderer being a martyr, because he died for the idea of human welfare. Such an advertisement has multiplied the number of liberals and has swollen the ranks of our agents by thousands of Gentiles. |
Once again liberalism is described as a poison, a crowd of deceptive agents that we all know are up to no good.
The language is a bit obscure. Those fighting and dying for human welfare are dying for ideas. What is more, they are dying for someone else’s ideas. Luckily, in the motherland (Russia) the secret agents outmanoeuvres the liberal movements and reestablishes a new kind of monarchy (presumably with their own king David) which will take advantage of their best social engineering skills to protect the people from themselves. Never again a liberal or democratic nationwide movement.
Assuming the text is antisemitic, it must be possible to connect to pieces somehow.
In essence, as far as I can tell, we are back to The International Jew and the Nazi idea about all political theory arising from the people in opposition to either autocracy (Russia) or national identity (Germany) being Jewish.
In other words, for these people, having a ten hour argument with a communist who is not Jewish at all, would perfectly fit into their perception of arguing with Jews! The author of the Protocols is occupied with the ideas that break down social order (and so is Henry Ford), less than the Jews themselves.
The real racism must have taken place at a much lower level, and I am starting to suspect that it was the fusion of the two widely different levels that lit the flames.
Just like Nicholas I was no Napoleon III and Napoleon was no Nicholas, even though to our modern eyes they are both autocrats, we cannot just lump the two types into one label.
Why not? Because the guard rails that must ensure we never walk down the same path is different for the two types of antisemitism.
PARADISE LOST