Liberty: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as Presented in Behold a Pale Horse pp. 328-329

“In our hands is the greatest power of our day—gold: in two days we can procure from out storehouses any quantity we may please.”

We wrap up our discussion of economics that the plagiarist clearly doesn’t understand with this sentence. This has to be an odd read for Cooper because Cooper sold gold on his radio show. He was one of the first people on the conspiracy right to really push the idea that gold was going to get us through the coming apocalypse. Here, the Elder is telling us that gold is their servant. This means that any transaction involving gold benefits the Cabal, and Cooper supports this. Now, of course he doesn’t, he hasn’t read this but rather inserted it into his book. I say this not to defend him but to attack him. He just knows that his fans like the Protocols so he put it in (though I doubt that they’ve even read it). The gold is the last straw for me, there’s no way that he’d include this and jeopardize his revenue stream.

As I said though, we are done with economics. The cabal controls the gold, and in a world (late 19th very early 20th century) a good deal of the world is still using gold as the backing of their currencies. The entire section on economics means nothing if this one group controls the resource that is the foundation of economic principles.

What’s strange is that people are going to read this book and then move on to reading books like the “Creature from Jekyll Island” which are place the hands of all evil as stemming from the US Federal Reserve Bank. They’re going to believe this, because they think that currency is “fiat” that the fed just makes it up. The only other option that they have is the gold standard which is controlled by the people they hate. As I said, they don’t understand economics they just need to blame something for the despair in their own status.

The elder moves on to a very long sentence on the nature of freedom. It’s so long, it runs twelve lines, and as far as I can tell is grammatically correct. I’m not going to quote the whole thing, but I’ll provide a taste:

“…that freedom of the person in no wise consists in the right to agitate oneself and others by abominable speeches before disorderly mobs, and that true freedom consists in the inviolability of the person who honourably and strictly observes all the laws of life in common, that human dignity is wrapped up in consciousness of the rights and also of the absence of rights of each, and not wholly and solely in fantastic imaginings about the subject of one’s ego.”

That is roughly half of the Elder’s monologue. This is something we, the reader, are supposed to hate. In the original Joly text the twelve lines are only three as Machiavelli reassures Montesquieu that his (actually Napolean III) rule will be great, “Liberty does not consist of license; just as dignity and strength do not consist of insurrection and disorder. My empire would be peaceful within and glorious abroad.”

The point being made by Machiavelli is that the words themselves do not mean what the mob thinks they do. “Liberty” the mob is merely the ability to do what they want. The elder writes that this is not the freedom to make people angry with speech, but something more.

Again, I am a little lost here as to the point that the Elder is trying to make that we are supposed to hate. I agree with Machiavelli’s point, and Machiavelli’s opinions were informed by Roman and Greek philosophers. I know a bit about these people, I know Aristotle especially because his Nichomachean Ethics directly inspires a section in Machiavelli’s Discourses; and Aristotle believes that the rule of the people would quickly degenerate into lawless anarchy (Plato argued that democracy was anarchy) when corrupted. The problem, philosophically, was that liberty qua liberty was not a virtue. It needed to be for something, with a rational basis or there was little difference between humans and beasts.

I think, again, that the plagiarist doesn’t quite understand that the criticism means only that it has something to do with liberty. Strength isn’t just exercising force, it has to be about something or, to repeat, the individual is just an angry boar. In a very technical meaning, yes, liberty is the ability to function without restraint, but we live in a civilization and that, by itself, confers a higher responsibility.

The original has Machiavelli then discussing that peace abroad is essentially making war with other states. This is entirely dropped from the Protocols. Machiavelli makes the argument that internal peace will be served by great public works while external peace will be in security. It’s evidence that Joly has read Machiavelli, especially his Discourses on Livy; and I think that even the plagiarist must have realized that he was out of his depth. It’s different than earlier though; earlier Serge Nilus either believed he could follow the economic commentary, or he knew that his readers could not, and it wouldn’t matter.

In this section (Dialogue 22) it’s not that it’s hard to understand but that it is exactly what the Russian Tsar was doing. Machiavelli talks of Hannibal and Scipio and their wars. The Tsar had both WWI and the war with Japan—which were both disastrous for Russia. Especially the latter because it was not just a loss of material and territory but of reputation as Russia was the first “European” country to lost a battle against an “Asian” country. The public works problem is the Trans-Siberian railroad started by Nicholas’s father Alexander. This was largely an economic failure and diversion of resources. The plagiarist cannot reference these ideas, because while they may have worked in Rome, Carthage, and even in 18th century France; they were failures in Russia. A clever writer could spin it, but Serge Nilus is not a clever writer, he’s barely a competent one.