-Caveat Lector- RESPONSE TO THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION by Peter Hipwell <http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/evils/kookhate/X0003_ZIONREP1.html> (Michelle Klein-Hass) writes: > Peter, if you could post "A Dialogue between Machiavelli > and Napoleon III in Hell" it would be really great...that > is, if it's already in digital form. I have not seen it > and would be interested. Sorry, I don't have a copy: I'm not sure that it's ever been translated from the original French. However, here's the best information I have on the history of "The Protocols". This will clear up my memory-error about the name of the original and details the evolution of the text through a series of different versions produced for different reasons. [This is from the Time-Life book of "Manias and Delusions" in the "Library of Curious and Interesting Facts" series, highly recommended.] Unhappy with the authoritarian regime of France's emperor Napoleon III, Paris lawyer Maurice Joly wrote a satire in which two posthumous voices discussed despots. Niccolo di Bernardo Machiavelli, the kingmaking philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, advanced the case for political expediency and sly statesmanship; Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu, France's clear-thinking libertarian philosopher, argued the liberal line. "Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu and Machiavelli" (Dialogue in Hell between Montesquieu and Machiavelli) was published in Geneva in 1864, then in Brussels -- and was subsequently confiscated as soon as it trickled into France. Joly was given fifteen months in prison for his thinly veiled criticism, and his life thereafter was a sucession of failures that he finally found intolerable. In 1879, he killed himself, not knowing that he had inadvertantly acheived a kind of immortality after all. His creation would be revived and widely read, but in a monstrous form. Although it said nothing about races and religions, it would be used to fashion an instrument of insane prejudice, nightmarish persecution, and the murder of millions: the forgery known as "The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion". Puportedly the confidential minutes of a secret Jewish conclave held in Basel, Switzerland, late in the nineteenth century, the slim pamphlet first appeared in a St. Petersburg newspaper, "Znamya" (Banner), in 1903. The editor, Pavolachi A. Krushevan, was a notorious anti-Semite who later helped organize the so-called Union of the Russian People -- familiarly, the Black Hundreds -- that terrorized Jews and liberals during the crumbling reign of Czar Nicholas II. "The Protocols" was advanced by Krushevan and others like him as the deliberations of a powerful cabal of Jewish elders pondering a secret, diabolical effort to rule the world. Through conspiratorial networks, the document claimed, Zionists were shifting power into the hands of plutocrats, all of them Jews. Using political liberalism as a weapon to weaken authoritarian rule, they intended to discredit traditional governments, destroy non-Jewish private property, and subvert non-Jewish religions and values. According to "The Protocols", they already secretly controlled education, banking, politics and the press. In another century, the document boasted, their rule would be complete. Judaism would be the sole world religion and a Jewish king would reign over the planet, using police and doses of social welfare to keep the Gentile masses under control. The bogus plot could not have found a more receptive audience. Still locked in medieval religious beliefs, Russians at the turn of the century had begun to feel the psychic stresses of revolutionary change -- and the need to fix blame for the rising wave of political unrest and reversals of fortune. A conspiracy of Zionist Jews, especially one that had almost divine powers of manipulation, seemed to explain everything that was wrong with a suddenly terrifying world. To one mystically inclined czarist civil servant in particular, "The Protocols" came as revealed wisdom. Given a copy of the full text, Sergey Nilus incorporated it into the third edition of his religious tract, "The Great in the Small", published in 1905 -- the year of Russia's humiliating surrender to the Japanese and of the first, failed revolution in Russia. Nilus transformed the crude broadside into a handsomely published work, and -- more to the point -- put "The Protocols" into the hands of Czar Nicholas II, a noted anti-Semite himself. The message was clear: The forces of liberation and revolution that disturbed his world were not merely the expressions of a downtrodden people but part of a Jewish plot to take over the world. The fact that Zionists had actually conducted an international meeting in Basel in 1897 added credence to the slander. "Our year 1905," noted Nicholas, "has gone as though managed by the Elders." As the spurious tract shored up the self-serving delusions of the czar, it struck to the very core of Nilus' own spirit. A visiting Frenchman described Nilus reading to him form "The Protocols" one night in the lay quarters of the monastery at Optina Putsyn. "He read for a long time," the visitor recalled. "I felt a sort of fear. It was nearly midnight. The gaze, the voice, the reflexlike gestures -- everything about Nilus gave me the idea that we were walking on the edge of an abyss and that at any moment his reason might disintegrate into madness." So strong was Nilus' belief that he ignored the real possibility that the document was fake. "Let us admit that the Protocols are spurious," he told a visitor. "But can't God use them to unmask the iniquity that is being prepared?" Accordingly, he reprinted them in the 1911, 1912 and 1917 editions of his popular book. There, but for the 1917 Russian Revolution, the matter might have stopped. As the Red revolt declined into a punishing civil war, however, emigre czarists -- White Russians -- took copies of the spurious document to the outside world, using the arguments in "The Protocols" to demonstrate a link between the Bolsheviks and a Jewsih conspiracy -- and to persuade other countries to aid the disintegrating autocracy. By chance, when the Russian royal family was murdered at Ekaterinburg (later Sverdlovsk) on July 17, 1918, the czarina had only three books with her: volume 1 of Tolstoy's "War and Peace", a Bible -- and a copy of "The Great in the Small". This, and the wave of Russian refugees driven westward by the new regime, helped make Nilus' volume world famous. As they had in Russia, "The Protocols" found an eager readership in a Europe shattered by the First World War. In 1920, German and Polish versions appeared. When a British edition arrived, even the staid "Times" of London was moved. "Have we been struggling these tragic years to blow up and extirpate the secret organization of German world domination," asked an editorial, "only to find beneath it another, more danderous because more secret?" Then, in 1921, "Times" reporter Philip Graves was given a small weathered volume by a man he did not identify, who had obtained the book from an emigre officer formerly with the Okhrana -- the czarist secret police. On the back cover was stamped: Joli. It was Maurice Joly's long-lost dialogue, the armature around which "The Protocols" had been fabricated. "I did not believe that Sergey Nilus's Protocols were authentic," wrote Graves. "But I could not have believed, had I not seen, that the writer who supplied Nilus with his originals was a careless and shameless plagiarist." Virtually all of "The Protocols", he revealed, had been lifted from the Machiavelli role on Joly's satire, then crudely laced with contemporary references to make the text play in Russia. From various clues in the purloined text, scholars have concluded that the first transformation of Jol's booklet may have occurred as early as 1894, three years before the Zionist congress in Basel, and been intended less as an anti-Semitic tract that an attack on Sergey Witte, Russia's popular, progressive minister of finance. This adaptation has been attributed to a French poitical journalist, Elle de Cyon -- French for Zion -- who used Joly's Machiavellian arguements to make Witte seem a tool of Zionist plotters. In a distinctly Russian gambit, however, de Cyon's version was evidently stolen by Pyotr Ivanoivich Rachkovsky, the brilliant, conniving director of the Okhrana's Paris-based foreign branch -- acting on Witte's orders. Rachkovsky, recognizing a bombsheel when he saw it, appears then to have had someone amplify the anti-Semitic rant in the document and to have passed it to other hard-line conservatives back home -- Sergey Nilus among them. Rachkovsky died in 1911, ignorant of the terrible monster he had let loose in the world. Even Nilus, who died on the first day of 1930, never knew that his work had spread around the globe. Graves' establishing the real provenance of "The Protocols" discredited the vicious document in Great Britain -- but nowhere else. The plagiarized lie had acquired a life of its own, nourished by a growing sense that the turmoil of the times must have a human agent. "The Protocols" was used by Arab nationalists to fuel opposition to a Jewish state in Palestine. In the United States, auto industrialist Henry Ford published them in his virulently anti-Semitic Dearborn, Michigan newspapaer. (Public pressure finally forced him to apologize for the paper's policies.) Ironically, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin applied "The Protocols" in his own relentless persecution of the Jews. Nowhere, however, did "The Protocols" find more favour than in the propoganda and belief of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, whose delusions were permeated by the idea of a Jewsih conspiracy. Christianity itself, Hitler confided to close friends, was part of the fiendish plot. "I have read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," he once told an interviewer. "It simply appalled me. The stealthiness of the enemy, and his ubiquity! I saw at once that we must copy it -- in out own way, of course." After Hitler took power in 1933, the fraudulent document became a basic school textbook -- and a founding rationale for the Nazis' enduring horror, the virtual extermination of the European Jews. Wherever there have been fears to be played upon since, "The Protocols" has been trotted out. It was echoed in anti-Zionist attacks by the late Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev, who hinted darkly at a world Zionist plot before his army's 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and it was endorsed by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the late king Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and a host of other Middle Eastern leaders. They have been used to fan anti-Semitism in Japan and Latin America, and they remain a perennial favourite of such American groups as the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation. Even Russia's glasnost has helped propogate the lie: in the newly opened society where they began, "The Protocols" is once again available in printed form. Still, to see the real double-thinking madness illuminated by the forgery, one must go back to Adolf Hitler and his henchmen. "At his trial in Jerusalem in 1961," wrote historian Norman Cohn of Adolf Eichmann, the administrator of the Nazi's so-called Final Solution, he "maintained that Hitler himself was nothing but a pawn and a marionette in the hands of 'the Satanic international high-finance of the western world' -- meaning, of course, the mysterious, undiscoverable and omnipotent Elders of Zion." Back to document index Original file name: ZIONREP1 This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v. -- Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion <http://www.in-search-of.com/frames/new_world_order/zion.html> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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