Pondering the Protocols of Zion
By Mark Evans
Gary Cooper, before the house committee on Un-American Activities,
was asked, by the Counsel for the Defense if he had ever read Karl Marx.
He answered No. When he was further questioned what he knew about Karl Marx,
he stated that he knew that Marx was "not on the level." It was
a red-blooded American answer, and he pulled it off. In all probability,
Gary Cooper did not have a copy of Das Kapital in his own library, and he
may never have even opened the book. But that did not matter. He was a great
American hero, an anti-Communist, and on the winning side. He had not sullied
nor polluted his mind trying to understand the insidious doctrines of Communism.
St. Paul said: "There are many voices in the world, and none
of them is without significance." That means that everything means
something, and that even false reports-disinformation and lies-are a significant
aspect of the whole picture. So in regard to The Protocols of Zion, we must
be willing to examine everything if we are to understand it. To have a fixed
idea about it without studying the relevant material, pro and con, is to
remain ignorant.
It is undeniably true that The Protocols of Zion are historically
significant and have left an indelible influence on the twentieth century,
no matter who wrote them. In all probability, they were derived from Maurice
Joly's book (1864) Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli, and Montesquieu,
and then altered and given an anti-Semitic spin by the Tzar's secret police,
the Ochrana, sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. According
to Conrad Heiden (Der Fuehrer, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1944), they were "the
work of General Rachovsky, the leader of the French division of the Ochrana."
Even before the first World War, they were used in Russia to justify
bloody pogroms by the proto-fascist Black Hundreds against the Jewish
villages of the Pale.
The document was brought to Munich after WW I by Alfred Rosenberg, who went
on to become the house philosopher for the Nazi Party. "Rosenberg,
despite his Jewish antecedents, gained entry into the Thule Gesellschaft
by showing the Protocols to Dietrich Eckart who proved wildly excited upon
reading the contents. An independent publisher, Ludwig Muller, of Munich,
was chosen to put out the first [German] edition" (Trevor Ravenscroft,
The Spear of Destiny ). Conrad Heiden makes the point that Hitler himself
put into practice the techniques of coercion and deceit described in the
passages of the Protocols.
Herman Rauschning quotes Hitler as saying, "I have read the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion-it simply appalled me. The stealthiness
of the enemy, and his ubiquity! I saw at once that we must copy it-in our
own way, of course. . . . It is in truth the critical battle for the fate
of the world" ( Hitler Speaks, London, 1939 ). Thus the Protocols are
significant because in them you may find the written codicils of Adolf Hitler's
Modus Operandi. The very things that Adolf Hitler accused the "Elders
of Zion" of doing, he himself was doing.
Let us assume as a working hypothesis that Conrad Heiden's account is correct,
that the Protocols were "doctored" by the Tzar's secret police
and given an anti-Semitic spin. We still find upon reading them that the
techniques of mass-manipulation and the agenda of total control described
therein have been fulfilled in the twentieth century (quite apart from Hitler),
as in no other century before. So much so that it is uncanny. Reading them,
we almost seem to be looking at the script for the future Orwellian World
that has become the real world. A few quotes will suffice:
"For modern society, a colossus with feet of clay, we shall create
an unprecedented centralization, which will unite all powers in the hands
of government. We shall create a hierarchal constitution, which will mechanically
govern all movements of individuals." "We shall surround our government
with a whole world of economists . . . Around us will be a whole
constellation of bankers, industrialists, capitalists and-the main thing-millionaires
because in substance every thing will be settled by the question of figures."
"We shall arrange elections in favor of such presidents as have in
their past some dark, undiscovered stain . . . then they will be trustworthy
agents for the accomplishment of our plans out of fear of revelations and
from the natural desire of everyone who has attained power, namely, the
retention of the privileges, advantages, and honour connected with the office
of president." "The president . . . will have the right
to propose temporary laws, and even new departures in the government constitutional
working, the pretext both for the one and the other being the requirements
for the supreme welfare of the State."
So we are obliged to adopt another working hypothesis: that although the
"Protocols of Zion" is a very poisonous document and has caused
great turmoil in the world and great suffering to the Jewish people,
it contains, unfortunately, "too much truth" about the manner
in which the masses have been manipulated by the media in the twentieth
century, and it contains an agenda for capitalism to conquer the world.
The unpleasant parallels between our present reality and the scenario projected
in this libellous forgery account for the staying power of the Protocols.
One may even understand, upon reading it, why the ignorant and unlearned
take the bait of the poisoned pill and end up believing that "Jewish
Bankers" are running the world.
We reject the notion that the world is being run by a "Jewish Cabal."
While it is obvious that there are Jewish elements within the power elite,
and that Zionists do control a piece of the Global Capitalist Pie,
it is manifestly untrue that banking and capitalism are a "Jewish"
conspiracy. Capitalism is not a "conspiracy"; it is a system.
The most pragmatic way to discover the nomenclature of the power elite would
be to somehow obtain the lists of the names of the stockholders of the "preferred"
or "Class A" stock of all of the prime banks (about fifty banks)
in the G-10 Nations and Switzerland. This information-the identity of the
"bondholding class"-is very difficult to obtain, since it is classified
information. It would, however, be a more fruitful-and faster-method for
discovering the hierarchy of the inner rings of the system, than by sifting
through reams of conspiracy literature and working out all the contradictions.
Some assert that the true authors or the effective practitioners of
the Protocols are the secret society known as the "Bavarian Illuminati,"
founded by Adam Weishaupt, professor of Canon law at the University of Ingoldstadt.
I have yet to see any serious documentation that actually proves that the
Order of the Illuminati, established in Bavaria in 1776, went on to become
the core of the power elite, the class of owners and managers of
capital who control the world today. There is also no proof that the Illuminati
drafted the Protocols unless General Rachovsky himself, of the Paris Bureau
of the Ochrana, was a member of the Illuminati. The classic work on the
Illuminati is Proofs of a Conspiracy, by James Robison, first published
in 1798 and republished by the John Birch Society. LaRouche, incidentally,
characteristically labels James Robison as a British Agent in the pay of
Lord Shelbourne, and the Birchers, in turn, assert off camera that the LaRouchies
are dupes of the Illuminati.
A fairly substantial body of right-wing "conspiracy literature"
exists along these lines. Books like World Revolution, by Nesta Webster,
Pawns in the Game, by William Guy Carr, Fourth Reich of the Rich, by Des
Griffith, Behold A Pale Horse by William Cooper, and the recent Space Aliens
from the Pentagon, by William Lyne, brimming with "factoids,"
are interesting reads-if you like "ConspirLit," (a form of Science
Fiction), but they are not academic, are occasionally anti-Semitic, and
are less than fully convincing. By all means, the objective reader
should study Norman Cohn's important work, Warrant For Genocide, (Harper
& Row, New York, 1966) for an articulate expression of a position that is
antithetical to the books listed above.
On the other hand, no less a scholar than James Billington, the librarian
of Congress, has established in his magnum opus, Fire in the Minds of Men-the
Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, the reality and the continuity of the
secret society known as the Illuminati beyond the 1780s (when many scholars
assert it was suppressed ), into various permutations in the nineteenth
century. Antony C. Sutton, a conservative academic, (author of a scholarly
three-volume work, published under the imprimatur of the Hoover Institution,
Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development), asserts in his book
The Order that Skull and Bones, the elite "senior fraternity "
at Yale (George Bush is a member), was founded in 1831 as an adjunct to
the Bavarian Illuminati. There is also the little paperback To Eliminate
the Opiate, now exceedingly hard to find, by the Orthodox Rabbi, Marvin
S. Antelman, (Zahavia Ltd., New York-Tel Aviv, 1974), that asserts the existence
of the Illuminati, a Masonic conspiracy composed of "abandoned"
and "godless" Christians and Jews. So the jury really is out on
this aspect of the subject. There is no voice that is without significance.
Since the turn of the century, when the Protocols was written, the
plutocracy has done a marvelous job of shrouding its own existence in an
aura of mystery. The class struggle did not develop quite along the lines
that Jack London envisioned in his polemical tracts, WAR of the CLASSES,
(1905) and The Iron Heel, (1906). Jack London was one of those socialists
who came to believe, like Lenin, that you can't make an omelette without
breaking eggs. Jack London, in 1905-6, presciently foresaw the coming of
the black-shirts and brown-shirts of the twentieth century and named them
after the Black Hundreds, who, armed with the Protocols, had just
appeared on the scene in Russia in 1903. Let us imagine that members of
the ruling class read those books, found them disturbing, and altered their
methods somewhat to transform the final conflict London described in those
two tracts. The transnational elites realized that, like the working class,
they must stick together and organize. Clandestinely, the elites
of the advanced capitalist nations were inducted into that mighty ruling
class union, the I.B.I.W., the International Brotherhood of Illuminated
Wise-Men, and the Class-War was artfully sublimated into a Right vs. Left
war between the twin contenders, Fascism and Communism, which could
be easily managed financially and even profited from on a global scale through
a variety of established Machiavellian techniques. Again, this may be a
fantasy, but it is an hypothesis. The Protocols have proved useful to the
ruling classes throughout the twentieth century as an elaborate smokescreen,
primarily as a "bible" for ignorant anti-semites and fascist cadres,
whose cultural and economic angst has been channeled into scapegoating the
Jewish race, instead of the capitalist system. In more recent times, since
the holocaust, the Protocols are still useful as a means of deflecting criticism
away from the institutions of finance capitalism, since these are supposed,
by the ignorant who read the Protocols and examine the rosters of the boards
of directorates of banks, to be entirely under the control of "International
Jewish Bankers." Thus many Progressives, who justly oppose racism
as a great evil, are wary of addressing the issue of monetary reform, since
it is such a loaded issue.
In closing, several things should be clear to every one: First, there
is a problem inherent in the capitalist system that makes it a very bad
system: it is a system that keeps the wage-earner, as well as the welfare
recipient, in a state of neo-feudal bondage, while the owners of Capital
employ the use of compound interest, the arbitrary division of the joint-product,
and many other tricks to reap enormous dividends from their investments.
Second, that Finance, i.e., Banking Capitalism, is the "First Person"
of the Capitalist Trinity (see Diagram p. 7), and that it may actually be
the weakest link-the Achilles heel. And third, that all objective, clear-thinking
people ought to address themselves to the issue of understanding Money,
and to the cause of Monetary Reform, that we might throw off these medieval
superstitions, as well as this medieval system.
PrisonArchives
- - Archives
- - North Coast HOME- - To
the Editor