Financial Obligations: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as Presented in Behold a Pale Horse pp. 319-322

Protocol 20

After the shortest of Protocols I think we come to the longest. This Protocol is six pages long and it is predictably unfocused. This week we’ll focus on the tax plan set forth by the Elder. 

I think my favorite thing about when conspiracy theorists get into financial conspiracies is that they have no idea what they are talking about. We saw this when I covered None Dare Call it Conspiracy; as soon as Allen attempted to dive into financial ties it he was lost. Economics is never as simple as balancing a checkbook, but it is an easy way to enrage people who pretend to be concerned about deficit spending and that sometimes “the poors” get stuff for free. 

The conspirators here are going to redesign an entire economic system from the ground up. They are going to do this in order to hide the fact, that in the real world, the Russian Tsar is out of money but that we shouldn’t worry about that because the Jews are behind it. 

The elder begins oddly, well oddly for this book, “…which I put off to the end of my report as being the most difficult, the crowning and decisive point of our plans.”

Since when has this been a report? The entire thing has been framed as the directions and instruction of the Elder to the Cabal. The myth is that these are the minutes of a meeting taking place in a cemetery in Prague; it’s never been a report. The only thing that almost makes the leap is that it’s a copy of the minutes made by an agent of the Okhrana; but then we wouldn’t be using the “I” if that were the case.

The other odd thing is that this isn’t the end either.  There’s still five Protocols left in this book. I wondered if this was one of those cases where the plagiarst copied directly from the Joly work without checking it–but no. Financial plans begin on page 113 and there’s still 40 pages left there. 

Let’s move past that…the Elder addresses a topic that I am always curious about–how is the conspiracy funded? The original Men In Black (1997), had a fun scene where Agent Kay explained that they held patents on things like velcro and CDs for funding. But nowhere else do we actually see this. How is the Flat Earth conspiracy funded? Who paid for the 9/11 inside job? What was the line item for faking the Moon Landing? 

Then again, why does it need to be funded in the first place? If the cabal controls everything there isn’t a need they have to pay for things, they just take it. You could hide such purchases in the nebulous world of “credit” and just make it vanish. Of course, given that the larger scope of this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is that the Jews control the gold and diamonds–the funding of the conspiracy isn’t that much of a problem. 

The point of this protocol isn’t to explain how “they” are funding the operation but why the Russian government has no money. Remember how we read this: everything the Elder is going to recommend we are supposed to hate. This is going to be important to remember because the Elder’s recommendations will actually make sense to a lot of us. 

The first rule is that “…the king will enjoy the legal fiction that everything in his State belongs to him (which may easily be translated into fact), will be enabled to resort to the lawful confiscation of all sums of every kind for the regulation of the their circulation in the State.” 

First, the phrase “legal fiction” does not mean imaginary. Think of a corporation like Microsoft. Microsoft is real in the sense that it produces products, has employees, and can be located. The “corporation” though is a legal arrangement, it’s fictional in that a person can’t touch it. When the elder says that the king enjoys this legal fiction, it’s within the power of the king, When it gets translated into fact, that power has been enabled. The Elder is merely describing a standard autocrat here–they own everything in the state, there is no private property. 

What this is actually about is an appeal against the Socialism that was sweeping Europe at the time. We know this because of the last part of the sentence, “regulation of their circulation in the state.” This is very similar to the modern “you will own nothing and be happy;” mantra that conspiracy theorists repeat but take out of context and still fail to understand. Legally, the Tsar owned your house, but he had little need for peasant hovels and goats. The moral panic surrounding the Socialist movement was that your neighbor, or gasp, a poor person would also need your goat. 

The elder then makes the claim that the rich will be taxed at a higher rate than the poor. In this the elder is repeating something not from Karl Marx, but from Adam Smith who wrote that it is “not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue but something more than in that proportion.”

It’s very amusing to read the Adam Smith Institute try and weasel out of that direct quote from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 

The reasoning is, again, straight from Smith. Because the rich enjoy more privileges from the state in the form of protection and maintenance they should pay more. Park illegally in one of the wealthier neighborhoods of my city and you’ll find a traffic ticket very quickly, unlike parking illegally in my neighborhood (though not my street–I live on an ambulance route and that’s a special case). The Elder first concentrates on property for this reason. Then he quickly moves over to taxing capital as well. 

We should be quite aware that what’s happening is a response to the Socialism of the late 19th century, the word “capital” gets brought up quite frequently as a reference for people that know “Das Kapital” is a book but have never read it. 

One of the most interesting things that comes up in this Protocol is why progressive taxation makes sense. The Elder is concerned with the idea of revolution and he claims that burdening the poor with the highest of taxes is the seed of revolution. This is an odd turn for a cabal that seemed, throughout this book, to have no concern over the public other than dominating them. Now, he seems to care for the people in such a way that he will prevent revolution by throwing them a lifeline, “such a measure (progressive taxation) would destroy the hatred of the poor man for the rich in which he will see a necessary financial support of the state.” 

The poor will not hate the rich, because their taxation (on both property and capital) will support the very things that they need. A plan like this could amend some of the wealth inequality in our current world. People like me might see that people like Musk actually contribute something to the general weal rather than not being just obscenely wealthy but also parasites on the system. 

As a book plagiarised for the general public I’m not quite certain what the point of this is supposed to be. Is an early 20th century beet farmer in Western Russia supposed to read this and then think, “Those dastardly Jewish overlords! Attempting to make the local Duke and I equal! I’ll die before he is forced to share borscht with me!” 

We’re supposed to hate this, but I can’t see one reason that we should. Was the lie of unregulated capitalism rampant in Tsarist Russia? I cannot see that the fictional beet farmer would think to themselves that hard work was going to elevate them beyond the rank of peasant farmer. That’s a lie sold to the poor in societies with representative governments not monarchies. 

Individualism: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as Presented in Behold a Pale Horse pp. 312-314

Depression saved me. I had a roommate one that was very into Ayn Rand, and he kept telling me that I needed, NEEDED, to read the Fountain Head. I took one look at the size of the book, and in my depression spiral, said ‘no.’ It was too big, too long, and my depression wasn’t going to let me read it. I should also explain that at this time I was reading the History of Florence by Niccolo Machiavelli; and a history of Rome that argued that the fall of Rome was due to the change in the Legions from different forces to one large mobile army (I’m not exactly convinced of that argument). Still my brain took a hard pass on Ayn Rand. 

For a class I had to read her “Anthem,” which is significantly shorter, but, somehow just as preachy. I found her prose to be trite and terrible. The idea, that some force prevented people from saying the word “I” (this is the revelation at the end of the book) was absurd. If the word “we” is used in the singular enough it adopts the same meaning. The metaphor is bad. 

Conspiracy theorists on the right of politics laud individuality as a virtue. They claim that groups like the World Economic Forum, the UN, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Illuminati are working to subvert the very concept of individuality. Our Elder is, oddly, doing the opposite. He wants to destroy collectivism, “In order to effect the destruction of all collective forces except ours we shall emasculate the first stage of collectivism–the universities, by re-educating them in a new direction.” 

I, was not prepared for this. So much of this book is a blueprint for conspiracy tracts that follow it–that  I was entirely expecting the collectivism to be the goal. The Elder wants to demonize Universities because they teach working together, so we, as the reader, are supposed to want this. Mind = blown.

Then again…this protocol seems to be all over the place. He wants to destroy collective education in order to drive a wedge between the established order (the monarchy of the Russian Empire) and the people. Ok, fine, I get what the goal is there, but then he argues that “when we are in power we shall remove every kind of disturbing subject from the course of education and shall make out of the youth obedient children of authority, loving him who rules as the support and hope of peace and quiet.” 

Golovenski is having a difficult time “writing” this section. On the one hand the Elder is going to demonize the established order, but on the other hand he’s not going to teach anything which goes against the authorities in charge. Previously, the Elder has argued that he would make puppets of the established rulers, so how does driving the wedge between them and population serve that plan? Again, I don’t think that the audience of this book has really read the content of the book. They’ve skimmed it, and I would certainly doubt that very few of them have made it this far. 

The Elder then makes a curiously ironic declaration, “Each state of life must be trained within strict limits corresponding to its destination and work in life.“

His edict is that people will be educated in hyper-specific categories. People will only be educated in the spheres that will serve them in their lives. This is interesting because the current conspiracy crowd is in favor of this kind of thinking. Ever since William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” it has been a mantra amongst the conspiracy crowd to demonize higher education, especially of the generalize liberal arts variety. If you’ve ever encountered someone arguing that people ought to be in trade schools, this is the fruit of that tree. Yet, here the Elder is arguing pro-specialized education so that we are supposed to hate it. 

Then, of course, the elder entirely contradicts himself, “daring these assemblies, on holidays, teachers will read what will pass as free lectures on questions of human relations, of the laws of examples, of the limitations which are born of unconscious relations, and finally, of the philosophy of new theories not yet declared to the world.”

He wants the people to read speculative philosophy–which I am interpreting as the socialist literature of the day given the context of the protocols. So, at first the elder wants to ban collective education but then he wants us to embrace the most theoretical of it. This game is getting tired at this point because it’s hard to really pinpoint what it is that the conspiracy wants. Normally, I would say that this is the point of the contradictions and obfuscations–so that the reader can fill in whatever they want as being the tool of the conspiracy and the solution to it. I won’t do it here because our author does not appear to be clever enough to accomplish that. 

The entire Protocol is really concerned with “thought control.” This is what Orwell was trying to warn us about in 1984–not the mis-characterized version that pundits bring up but in the actual reading of 1984. The point was to control the thought process of the population, so that the word “knife” would mean six different things thus restricting the ability of the people to express themselves. The Elder is short on details because those don’t really matter in this fiction, what matters is that anytime someone criticizes the authority of the people in charge, they can be demonized as being brainwashed by “them,” which in this case is the “Jews.” 

The Elder closes with an ellipses that is complete nonsense; then he writes, “In France, one of our best agents, Bourgeois, has already made public a new programme of teaching by object lessons.” 

What? “Bourgeois” is a person? I have to guess that the point of this comment is to get people to analyze the French educational system, but to make comparisons against a stereotype of the French from all of the problems they’ve encountered since their Revolution. Even if that’s the case, we should be given longer than a single oddly constructed sentence about it. As I said in the Gary Allen book, the Robison book, and even in the larger Cooper book: these conspiracy theorists could use an editor. 

Anti-Masonry: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as presented in Behold a Pale Horse pp. 305-12

Protocol 15

I remember as a kid being fascinated by a book cover that transformed step by step the symbol of the Freemasons into the Star of David. I didn’t know precisely what it meant, I was sitting in the corner of the Waldenbooks at the local mall (because I’m old). I don’t remember the title of the book but just remembering the cover can tell me what the book was about. Here the elder makes an explicit reference to other secret societies and names the Masons. It leads to an interesting problem. 

First off, the Elder claims that there will be a coup d’etat which has been “prepared everywhere” for the “the same day” that will usher in the world government. It’s a plan, and it’s one that has been done before. Given that the original work is French in origin this has to be a reference to the arrest of the Templars. The Knights Templar (who I brought up last post as well) were arrested in one day in simultaneous raids whereever the French King had influence. It was done in this manner so that the Templars could not flee to other strongholds to warn the others. Still, this did not work, because the word “simultaneous” is going to have a bit of difficulty working in all of Europe in the 14th century. Clocks aren’t even a thing yet. In the original work, this universal coup d’etat, is actually a reference to what Machiavelli writes in “The Prince.” He writes in Chapter VIII that a ruler ought to perform all of their brutalities at once in order to get them over with, rather than prolong the people’s awareness of methods that may seem vicious or excessive so that the people forget.

The Elder then makes a pronouncement concerning what he will do with the secret societies, “Every kind of new institution of anything like a secret society will also be punished with death; those them which are now in existence, are known to us, serve us and have served us, we shall disband and send into exile to continents far removed from Europe.” 

I feel this is reasonable. Remember a “secret society” is just a private club that does not publish its membership. Because of books like Robison’s though, this has taken on a more sinister meaning. I suppose that because they have served they will continue to serve, just somewhere else. The Elder doesn’t say where they will be sent, only out of Europe. Given that this work is being written for a Russian audience, they could mean America, China, or Japan. I admit that wanting this detail is odd, but the practicalities of these conspiracy theories is a source of amusement to me. Do colonial areas count? Would Ethiopia or India count as “non-European” to the Elder? 

The Elder makes this strange comment, “In this way we shall proceed with those goy masons who know too much; such of these as we may for some reason spare will be kept in constant fear of exile.”

It’s more of the same, but I don’t get why the Elder says “for some reason” they will keep them in fear of exile. He’s the omnipotent ruler of the secret cabal which controls the world. Shouldn’t he know why? The problem with this book is that it’s poorly written while its source material is not. It’s very clear that the Golovinski did not understand Joly’s work nor the Philosophical work that inspired Joly. 

Most of this protocol is a justification for absolute authority. It’s rather uninteresting in that vein because we should understand that the Elder is just trying to inscense the readership. However, they’re not trying to incense the reader against autocracy, but the steps prior to it. They can’t ban the secret societies until they’ve taken power, so in the meantime the Elder is going to do the opposite, “we shall create and multiply free masonic lodges in all the countries of the world, absorb into them all who may become or who are prominent in public activity, for in these lodges we shall find our principle intelligence office and means of influence.” 

Did the Elder forget the earlier part where all of these people are going to be exiled? It seems that such organizations would be useful in maintaining the absolute power of the cabal. He later writes that such authority over these lodges means that any plots that arise against them will, in actuality, be their own plots by their own agents. Disbanding this, according to every fictional world that I ever read like this, just means that they will find their own places. The entire diatribe against secret societies is very reminiscent of the complaints that Robison had of “New Masonry” in his book. There were too many new lodges and too many people in them that talked about forbidden topics (religion, politics, women). 

The elder then writes, “though it be nothing more than the stoppage of the applause they had, and to reduce them to a slavish submission for the sake of winning a renewal of success…”

This isn’t the first time we’ve ended a paragraph on an ellipses, but it’s just as infuriating. Is there a thought that this is meant to hold the place of? Or is this just supposed to leave an impression? I think the latter, but the problem being we have to guess. The story of the Protocols is that this was an intercepted document of instructions to the rest of the Cabal. If that is the case then there is no justification for the ellipses. It makes as much sense as the ellipses and rhetorical questions in “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.” 

This protocol concludes with the worst attempt at self-justification I’ve read outside of a business ethics’ student’s final paper, “As you see, I found our despotism on right and duty; the right to compel the execution of duty is the direct obligation of a government which is a father for its subjects.

No, the Elder has not done any of this. All the elder has done is listed a series of actions that he will take: get rid of the secret societies, exile the membership of those that he found useful, abolish legistlature, replace the judiciary at the age of 55, and abolish the right of appeal. Those are things that he will do, but he’s only justified them as the path toward power there has been no reasoning at all. 

Philosophically the argument is nonsense. A right is that which the government has a duty to protect. We have a right to free speech thus the law has a duty to protect it. Rights are claims that individuals make against others. Duties are obligations, you do not need a special right to perform a duty. Duties must be performed, that’s the ontological nature of the word “duty.” 

The entire section (that doesn’t concern secret societies) reinforces my belief that the plagiarist knows what political philosophy sounds like but doesn’t understand the words. 

Duma(ss): The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as presented in Behold a Pale Horse pp. 295-297

Protocol 10: I want to take one step back before we get into Protocol 11 to quote the end of 10. The Elder is pointing out the various methods by which you can divide the people against their government through the use of “torture, by starvation, BY THE INOCULATION OF DISEASES, by want, to the Goyim see no other issue than to take refuge in our complete sovereignty in money and in all else.”

The all caps section is out of place here because at no point in the ten protocols so far have we seen this. The method is, as we know, something the Cooper has used throughout the work. I had been working under the assumption that Cooper never read the Protocols, that he was just using to pad out his work, but now, we know two things: that he has read this book and that he’s anti-vaccination. He thinks vaccination was a tool to divide the government against the people. This, however doesn’t make sense within his conspiracy–if “they” truly want us to be slaves then they should not wish to sow this discord. It’s the first time we’ve seen an open hostility to vaccination and it’s added by him to this work. The phrase does not appear in the Joly book that this is plagiarized from, nor would it have been an issue in Pre-Revolution Russia for the Protocols to have adopted it. I think Cooper added this. 

Protocol 11:

The Elder has determined that a president that can be controlled is needed for the people to follow in the previous protocol, now we turn to the legislature in order to secure a revolution in the state. This section leaves the French under Napolean III and brings us to Russia under Tsar Nicholas II. 

Again, remember how to read this, what the Elder recommends is what we are supposed to hate. Here, the Elder is saying that there shall be a state legislature through which the people’s rights will be vacated. The recommendation, which is very confusingly worded, will take the rights and offer them as proposals to the legislature which will them become decrees of the President in words only–as per the last protocol–not in effect, thus guaranteeing the revolution.

Following? Good, because I’m pretty sure I understand. What I’m more confident about, is the attempt here to undermine the power and concept of the legislature. By framing the need for such a body as necessary to the Elder the effect is to make the reader dislike the concept. The Tsars did this toward the end of the Russian Empire. Both Alexander III and Nicholas II; established a body in the imperial court called the “Duma.” They did this in response to the clamoring of revolutionaries who demanded European style reforms, e.g. Democratic representation. Alexander establishes a Duma, then dissolves it, he does so again, Nicholas does it as well. Everytime the Tsar gives the people this inch, they take it back within a year or so. 

From a practical point of view, this is foolish. You could give the people their legislative body and then just neuter its authority–which was the case anyway. The Duma was the lower house in the Russian court, the upper house were all appointed ministers and thus beholden to the Tsar’s will. The Duma had no authority as anything other than advisory. They could claim that the people of Kamchatka desire something, but there was no compulsion for the Tsar to obey.

The Elder is claiming that the presence of the legislature allows the subversion of the people’s will because its recommendation to the president will be the thing that allows the ratification of the dreaded “constitution” which will then suck away everyone’s rights. The legislature must, according to the reader, be abolished. 

“The goyim are a flock of sheep, and we are their wolves. And you know what happens when the wolves get hold of the flock?…”

I did not add the ellipses. That’s from the document, and it’s lazy. 

I point out that Cooper’s original disclaimer: that we should read the word “Goyim” as “Cattle” as a way to pretend that the work isn’t anti-Semitic makes no sense here. We’re supposed to read this as “The cattle are a flock of sheep…”? I guess that’s better from a racial sense but now we’re mixing metaphors and confusing two animals; wolves can attack a herd of cattle. My point is that the covering for anti-Semitism only works in a pretend manner. 

The Elder than promises us that the plan can move forward now that the foundation is set. We shall see, because so far–there is very little foundation at all. Just the insinuation of control. 

Calls to Action: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as presented in Behold a Pale Horse; pp. 281-284

Protocol 5

The way the Protocols works is that it alternates between two tones. The first tone is the one that we expect, it’s the plan of the Elders to rule the world of the goyim (or “cattle” according to Cooper’s disclaimer). The other is his complaints about the world and how the current world stands in the way of their plans. Most people point out that the real danger in the Protocols is the first tone. This makes sense when we consider that the publishers of the Protocols are trying to expose the plan of the Elders. The reader, knowing the plan, can stop it. 

This isn’t correct. The real danger in the Protocols is the second tone. In the last two posts, I pointed out that the Elder had a problem with intellectuals being their real obstacle. The plan, according to the Elder, was not to stop the intellectuals but to inject so much vocabulary and “-isms” that the words would become meaningless and ideas would lose meaning. So what is the audience going to do? Stop the development of ideas? No. They are not, they are going to demonize intellectuals because all the existing “-isms” that they do not understand or like; are going to be considered products of the conspiracy. It’s a way to demonize any aspect of society because the conspirators already have it. The Elder complains about things in such a way that his audience will view the world as already having been lost. The future plan is just the icing on the cake. 

The elder writes at the beginning of 5 that they will use the administrative state, which already exists, to “regulate mechanically all the actions of the political life of our subjects by new laws.” 

Here we have two things we are supposed to hate. The addition of new laws, but also the administrative state which no one likes. I don’t like needing six points of identification to get a license, I don’t want to register my dog with the city, or get a parking pass at work. It’s worse if I identify the administrative state as a tool of the Elders, but it’s also worse if I know that they are going to use it to rule my life. 

It’s a rather subtle and clever way of making this kind of point, which is probably how Maurice Joly was able to get it published in its original form. The real target of the Elder is the educated. The Elder claims that his people have no equal in “analysis, observation, on delicacies of fine calculation, in this species of skill we have no rivals, any more than we have either in the drawing up of plans of political action and solidarity.”

The Elders are the intelligentsia, and by this claim, the believer is told a very important lesson. The smart people who disagree with them do not disagree because they are smart; e.g. the believer’s ideas are bad, but the people who disagree with them are the enemy. 

I attended a wedding once where someone approached a medical doctor and me to call us “liberals” as an insult. I merely regarded the accusation with confusion while the MD just shook his head dismissively. That action, while only a minor interruption is the fruit of this seed. The intelligentsia understand math, planning, and politics; because of this, we are the enemy of the common people. 

The Elder continues from the above quote: “In this respect the Jesuits alone might have compared with us, but we have contrived to discredit them in the eyes of the unthinking mob as an overt organisation, while we ourselves all the while have kept our secret organisation in the shade.” 

I wasn’t expecting this turn. Most conspiracy works have to make an arbitrary decision as to who is in charge of the whole thing. This book, Cooper’s book, has been a mess. It’s been the Illuminati, the JASON, the CFR, etc. David Icke has picked the Illuminati, and the Protocols has decided it’s the Jewish Cabal. Usually, the other groups are involved in a hierarchy. In Robison, we saw that the Illuminati worked within Masonry. Here the Protocols are saying the Jesuits are rivals that have been exposed as an affront to decent civilization.

In a complete non-sequitur, the Elder begins a discussion about gold and capital. It’s very typical conspiracy bullshit but it doesn’t belong here. I expect this from Cooper because he cannot help himself. Each protocol seems to have a theme, and I remember that in the last protocol, there was an abrupt subject shift as well. That shift though at least continued through the end of the Protocol. Here there is a brief interlude about gold and using money to oppress people, and then we go right back into demonizing intelligence. 

Most of it is the same plan that he’s been talking about: make the people too educated to do anything. The Elder warns, “There is nothing more dangerous than personal initiative; if it has genius behind it, such initiative can do more than can be done by millions of people among whom we have sown discord.“

That is a call to action. No one thinks that they are not a genius, especially in the U.S. The elder is saying that the most dangerous person to the conspiracy is a genius who just decides to do something one day. Someone, who is informed of the conspiracy by this book and then acts. That is a dangerous person, which is why the Elders’ efforts are directed at educating away the initiative. Make the people feel that there are no simple solutions by offering more perspectives, and then they’ll clamor for a despot to rule over them to solve their problems.  

Someone reading this drives to a grocery store in Buffalo NY, or a Mosque in Christchurch NZ, or a summer camp in Otoya, Norway; with an assault rifle and begins murdering people. They have a simple solution and are not tools of Elders. Here is the danger of this book.