The “Protocols”
While Zionism thus took shape in the Eastern ghettoes during the last century and at the start of this one emerged as a new force in international affairs (when the British Government offered it Uganda), the world-revolution, in those same Talmudic areas, prepared its third “eruption.” The two forces moved forward together in synchronization (for Zionism, as has been shown, used the threat of Communism in Europe to gain the ear of European rulers for its territorial demand outsideEurope). It was as if twin turbines began to revolve, generating what was in effect one force, from which the new century was to receive galvanic shocks.
According to Disraeli and Bakunin the world-revolution had come under
Jewish leadership around the middle of the century, and its aims then
changed. Bakunin's followers, who sought to abolish the State as such
because they foresaw that the revolutionary State might become more
despotic than any earlier despotism, were ousted and forgotten. The
world-revolution therewith took the shape of Karl Marx's Communist
Manifesto, which aimed at the super-State founded in slave-labour and in
“the confiscation of human liberty” (as de Tocqueville wrote in 1848).
This change in leadership and aims determined the course of the 20th Century. However, themethods by which the existing order was to be destroyed did not change;
they continued to be those revealed by Weishaupt's papers published in
1787. Many publications of the 19th Century showed that the original
Illuminist plan continued through the generations to be the textbook of
the revolutionaries of all camps, as to method.
These works propagated or exposed the destructive plan in various ways,
sometimes allegorical, but always recognizable if compared with the
original, Weishaupt's documents. In 1859 Crétineau Joly assailed Jewish
Leadership of “the secret societies.” His book reproduced documents
(communicated to him by Pope Gregory XVI) of the Italian secret society,
the Haute Vente Romaine; their authenticity is beyond question. The
Haute Vente Romaine was headed by an Italian prince who had been
initiated by one of Weishaupt's own intimates (Knigge) and was a
reincarnation of the Illuminati. The outer circle of initiates, the
dupes, were persuaded that “the object of the association is something
high and noble, that it is the Order of those who desire a purer
morality and a stronger piety, the independence and unity of their
country.” Those who graduated into the inner degrees progressively
learned the real aims and swore to destroy all religion and legitimate
government; then they received the secrets of assassination, poison and
perjury first disclosed by Weishaupt's documents.
In 1862 Karl Marx (whose Communist Manifesto is recognizably Illuminist)
founded his First International, and Bakunin formed his Alliance
Sociale Democratique (the programme of which, as Mrs. Nesta Webster has
shown by
quoting correlative passages, was Illuminism undiluted). In the same
year Maurice Joly published an attack on Napoleon III, to whom he
attributed the identical methods of corrupting and ruining the social
system (this book was written in allegorical form). In 1868 the German
Goedsche reproduced the same ideas in the form of an attack on Jewish
leadership of the revolution, and in 1869 the French Catholic and
Royalist Gougenot Des Mousseaux took up the same theme. In that year
Bakunin also published his Polemic Against The Jews.
In all these works, in one form or another, the continuity of the basic
idea first revealed by Weishaupt's documents appears: namely, that of
destroying all legitimate govemment, religion and nationhood and setting
up a universal despotism to rule the enslaved masses by terror and
violence.Some of them assailed the Jewish. usurpation of, or succession to the leadership of the revolution.
After that came a pause in the published literature of the conspiracy
first disclosed in 1787, until in 1905 one Professor Sergyei Nilus, an
official of the Department of Foreign Religions at Moscow, published a book, of which the British Museum in London has
a copy bearing its date-stamp, August 10, 1906. Great interest would
attach to anything that could be elicited about Nilus and his book,
which has never been translated; the mystery with which he and it have
been surrounded impedes research. One chapter was translated into
English in 1920. This calls for mention here because the original
publication occurred in 1905, although the violent uproar only began
when it appeared in English in 1920.
This one chapter was published in England and America as
“The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”; I cannot learn whether
this was the original chapter heading or whether it was provided during
translation. No proof is given that the document is what it purports to
be, a minute of a secret meeting of Jewish “Elders.” In that respect,
therefore, it is valueless.
In every other respect it is of inestimable importance, for it is shown
by the conclusive test (that of subsequent events) to be an authentic
document of the world-conspiracy first disclosed by Weishaupt's papers.
Many other documents in the same series had followed that first
revelation, as I have shown, but this one transcends all of them. The
others were fragmentary and gave glimpses; this one gives the entire
picture of the conspiracy, motive, method and objective. It adds nothing
new to what had been revealed in parts (save for the unproven,
attribution to Jewish elders themselves),but it puts all the
parts in place and exposes the whole. It accurately depicts all that has
come about in the fifty years since it was published, and what clearly
will follow in the next fifty years unless in that time the force which
the conspiracy has generated produces the counter-force.
It is informed by a mass of knowledge (particularly of human weaknesses)
which can only have sprung from the accumulated experience and
continuing
study of centuries, or of ages. It is written in a tone of lofty
superiority, as by beings perched on some Olympian pinnacle of sardonic
and ancient wisdom, and of mocking scorn for the writhing masses far
below (“the mob” … “alcoholized animals” … “cattle” … “bloodthirsty
beasts”) who vainly struggle to elude the “nippers” which are closing on
them; these nippers are “the power of gold” and the brute force of the
mob, incited to destroy its only protectors and consequently itself.
The destructive idea is presented in the form of a scientific theory,
almost of an exact science, argued with gusto and eloquence. In studying
the Protocols I am constantly reminded of something that caught my eye
in Disraeli's dictum, earlier quoted. Disraeli, who was careful in the
choice of words, spoke of “the destructive principle” (not idea,
scheme, notion, plan, plot or the like), and the Protocols elevate the
theory of destruction to this status of “a fundamental truth, a primary
or basic law, a governing law of conduct” (to quote various dictionary
definitions of “principle”). In many passages the Protocols appear, at
first sight, to recommend destruction as a thing virtuous in itself, and
consequently justifying all the methods explicitly recommended to
promote it (bribery, blackmail, corruption, subversion, sedition,
mob-incitement, terror and violence), which thus become virtuous too.
But careful scrutiny shows that this is not the case. In fact the
argument presented begins at the end, world power, and goes backward
through the means, which are advocated simply as the best ones to that
end. The end is that first revealed in Weishaupt's documents, and it is
apparent that both spring from a much earlier source, although the
Protocols, in time, stand to the Weishaupt papers as grandson to
grandsire. The final aim is the destruction of all religion and
nationhood and the establishment of the super State, ruling the world by
ruthless terror.
When the Protocols appeared in English the minor point, who was the
author of this particular document, was given a false semblance of major
importance by the enraged Jewish attack on the document itself. The
asseveration of Jewish leadership of the revolutionary conspiracy was
not new at all; the reader has seen that Disraeli, Bakunin and many
others earlier affirmed it. In this case the allegation about a specific
meeting of Jewish leaders of the conspiracy was unsupported and could
have been ignored (in 1913 a somewhat similar publication accused the
Jesuits of instigating a world-conspiracy resembling that depicted alike
in the Protocols and in Weishaupt's papers; the Jesuits quietly
remarked that this was false and the matter was forgotten).
The response of official Jewry in 1920 and afterwards was different. It was aimed, with fury, at the entire substance of the Protocols; it did not stop at denying a Jewish plot, but denied that there wasany plot,
which was demonstrably untrue. The existence of the conspiracy had been
recognized and affirmed by a long chain of high authorities, from
Edmund Burke, George
Washington and Alexander Hamilton to Disraeli, Bakunin and the many
others mentioned in an earlier chapter. Moreover, when the Protocols
appeared in English conclusive proof had been given by the event in Russia. Thus the nature of the Jewish attack could only strengthen public doubts; it protested much too much.
This attack was the repetition of the one which silenced those earlier
leaders of the public demand for investigation and remedy, Robison,
Barruel and Morse, but on this occasion it was a Jewish attack. Those
three men made no imputation of Jewish leadership, and they were defamed
solely because they drew public attention to the continuing nature
of the conspiracy and to the fact that the French revolution was
clearly but its first “eruption.” The attack on the Protocols in the
1920's proved above all else the truth of their contention; it showed
that the standing organization for suppressing public discussion of the
conspiracy had been perfected in the intervening 120 years. Probably so
much money and energy were never before in history expended on the
effort to suppress a single document.
It was brought to England by one of the two leading British correspondents of that day in Moscow, Victor Marsden of the Morning Post (the significant story of the other correspondent belongs to a later chapter). Marsden was an authority on Russia and
was much under the enduring effect of the Terror. He was in effect its
victim, for he died soon after completing what he evidently felt to be a
duty, the translation of the Protocols at the British Museum.
Publication in English aroused worldwide interest. That period (1920 and
onward) marks the end of the time when Jewish questions could be
impartially discussed in public. The initial debate was free and
vigorous, but in following years the attack succeeded in imposing the
law of lese majesty in this matter and today hardly any public man or
print ventures to mention the Protocols unless to declare them “forged”
or “infamous” (an act of submission also foretold in them).
The first reaction was the natural one. The Protocols were received as
formidable evidence of an international conspiracy against religion,
nationhood, legitimate government and property. All agreed that the
attribution to Jewish authorship was unsupported, but that the subject
matter was so grave, and so strongly supported by events subsequent to
the original publication, that full enquiry was needed. This remedy,
“investigation,” was the one advocated by many leading men 120 years
earlier. In this instance the attack was in effect again on the demand
for investigation, not simply on the allegation against “the Elders of Zion.”
The Times (of London) on May 8, 1920 in a long article said, “An impartial investigation of
these would-be documents and of their history is most desirable … Are
we to dismiss the whole matter without inquiry and to let the influence
of such a book as this work unchecked?” The Morning Post(then the oldest and
soberest British newspaper) published twenty-three articles, also calling for investigation.
In The Spectator on August 27, 1921, Lord Sydenham, a foremost authority of that day, also urgedinvestigation: “The
main point is, of course, the source from which Nilus obtained the
Protocols. The Russians who knew Nilus and his writings cannot all have
been exterminated by the Bolsheviks. His book … has not been translated,
though it would give some idea of the man … What is the most striking
characteristic of the Protocols? The answer is knowledge of a
rare kind, embracing the widest field. The solution of this ‘mystery,'
if it is one, is to be found where this uncanny knowledge,on which prophecies now literally fulfilled are based, can be shown to reside.” In America Mr. Henry Ford, declaring that “the Protocols have fitted the world situation up to this time; they fit it now,” caused his Dearborn Independent to publish a series of articles of which a million and a half reprints were sold.
Within two years the proprietor of The Times was certified insane
(by an unnamed doctor in a foreign land; a later chapter will describe
this episode) and forcibly removed from control of his publications,
and The Times published an article dismissing the Protocols as a plagiarism of Maurice Joly's book. The proprietor of the Morning Post became
the object of sustained vituperation until he sold the newspaper, which
then ceased publication. In 1927 Mr. Henry Ford published an apology
addressed to a well-known Jew of America; when I was in the United
States in later years I was told by credible informants that he was
persuaded to do this, at a moment when a new-model Ford automobile was
about to be marketed, by hostile threats from dealers on whom the
fortunes of his concern depended......read more
