The Elders of Zion and the Masters Discourse
November 21,
2002
By Israel
Shamir
The troublesome concept of the Hidden Hand or
the Elders of Zion is superfluous and unnecessary.
“The latest controversy to involve the Arab
World concerns a TV program A Rider without a Horse that started
airing on Wednesday, Nov. 5th, the first day of the holy month of
Ramadan on several Arab satellite channels. The source of the
controversy is that the program is partly based on "The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion", the old forgery originating in Tsarist Russia”,
writes Qais S. Saleh, a business consultant from Ramallah on the
excellent website CounterPunch[1]. Expectedly, Saleh condemns the broadcast
and warns the Palestinians and the Arabs to stay away from the bad
old wolf of anti-Semitism, or, as he put it, “the trend of
importation of anti-Semitic bigotry”.
Saleh’s view coincides with that of Michael
Hoffman, on whose site the Protocols can be found. Hoffman thinks
Arabs have no need to import anti-Semitic arguments from the old and
far-away sources, provided they have a fresh round-the-clock local
source: actual behaviour of the Jewish state and its Jewish
citizens. It is much more convincing than old
tales.
However, the Protocols are still with us and
still entertain minds. Recently, the leading Italian novelist and
thinker Umberto Eco contributed his opinion on the subject to the
Guardian[2]. Eco “explains” the popular feelings
towards the Jews: “They … engaged in trade and lent money - hence
the resentment towards them as "intellectuals". In my limited
knowledge, it is not the intellectuals who lend money, but bankers
and loan sharks, while true intellectuals find their behaviour
repulsive. Probably Eco has a different definition of ‘intellectual’
up his sleeve. “The ill-famed Protocols of the Learned Elders of
Zion were a rehash of serialised fictional material, and prove their
own unreliability, since it is hardly credible that "the baddies"
would reveal their fell purposes so blatantly”, - concludes
Eco.
One can forgive a business consultant from
Ramallah, but Umberto Eco could notice that his definition would fit
some other books, for instance, Gargantua and Pantagruel, an even
older forgery, pretending to be a real chronicle of the Giants
family, and built on ‘serialised fictional material’. Don Quixote,
Pickwick’s Club, 1984 of Orwell – all these books “pretend” to
describe real events to the same extent. They are ‘forgeries’, as
they are ascribed to somebody else: Don Quixote to Sid Ahmed
Benengeli[3], and Gargantua to Maitre Alcofribas
Nasier[4].
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are best
described as 'pseudo-epigrapha', rather than 'fake'. They belong to
the same category as Tomas Friedman's Letter of President Clinton to
Mubarak. After all, pseudo-epigraphic genre is an old and venerable
one. It is even better to consider the Protocols, 'a political
pamphlet'.
In this essay, we shall attempt to find out
why the Protocols refuse to lie down and die. We shall stay clear
from the usual question, “who wrote it”. Its real author remains
unknown, and it is difficult to imagine this person, for the
Protocols are a literary palimpsest. In the days of yore, a scribe
would write his composition on a piece of old parchment, previously
removing an older text. The erasure was rarely total, and a reader
was treated to an integrated version of the Golden Ass and Fioretti
of St Francis. In the Protocols, there are layers of old and even
older stories, and it precludes meaningful quest for ultimate
creator. Every text should be treated on its own merits,
disregarding the question of authorship. Although, Jorge Luis Borges
wrote that the author is an important part of a text. Indeed, if we
would know the Protocols contain real blueprint of some Jewish
elites, we would have our answer ready in minutes. But Protocols
were published in the end of 19th-beginning of
20th century “as found”, as apocrypha. They became a
great bestseller and still stay there, though in some countries
(notably the Soviet Union), mere possession of the text was
punishable by death.
The Anonymous author of the Protocols
describes a master-plan for vast restructuring of society, creation
of a new oligarchy and subjugation of millions. The final product is
not too different from the one described in a contemporary piece of
writing, The Iron Heel by Jack London, the great radical from
Oakland, California. However, London expected harsh cracking down,
while Anonym’s way to subjugation leads through Machiavellian
manipulations and mind control a la Orwell’s 1984. (Orwell’s homage
to the Protocols is even more striking as it is rarely
noticed).
The difficulty of the Protocols is in an
uncanny dissonance between its uncouth language and deep social and
religious thought. It is a rude parody-like rendering of a satanic,
subtle and well-thought out plan, wrote the Nobel Prise winning
novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn[5] in his (written in 1966 and published in
2001) analysis of the Protocols.
“The Protocols … show a blueprint of a social
system. Its design is well above abilities of an ordinary mind,
including that of its publisher. It is a dynamic process of two
stages, of destabilization, increasing freedom and liberalism, which
is terminated in social cataclysm, and on the second stage, new
hierarchical restructuring of society takes place. It is more
complicated than a nuclear bomb. It could be a stolen and distorted
plan designed by a mind of genius. Its putrid style of an
anti-Semitic grubby brochure [intentionally] obscures the great
strength of thought and insight”.
Solzhenitsyn is aware of faults of the
Protocols. “Its style is that of a filthy leaflet, the powerful line
of thought is broken and fragmented, mixed up with ill-smelling
incantations and psychological blunders. The system described is not
necessarily connected with the Jews; it could be purely Masonic or
whatever; while its strongly anti-Semitic current is not an organic
part of the design”.
Solzhenitsyn makes a textual experiment,
removes words “Jews”, “Goyim” and “conspiracy” and finds many
disturbing ideas. He concludes: “The text demonstrates impressive
foresight on the two systems of society, the Western and the Soviet
one. While a strong thinker could possibly predict the development
of the West in 1901, how could he grasp the Soviet
future?”
Solzhenitsyn braved the Soviet regime, dared
to write and publish the mammoth Archipelago Gulag, an indictment of
the Soviet repression, but even he stalled and did not publish his
research of the Protocols. He asked it to be published after his
death only, and it was printed against his will in a very small
number of copies in 2001. Let us follow Solzhenitsyn’s line of
thought and gaze into the crystal ball of the Protocols, while
temporarily discounting its “Jewish line” and paying heed to the
idea of creating a new system, not necessarily a Jewish-dominated
one. The master-plan begins with reshaping of human mind:
“People’s minds should be diverted (away from
contemplation) towards industry and trade, and then they will have
no time to think. The people will be consumed by the pursuit of
gain. It will be vain pursuit, for we shall put industry on a
speculative basis: what is withdrawn from the land by industry will
slip through the hands of workers and industrialists and pass into
the hands of financiers.
The intensified struggle for survival and
superiority, accompanied by crises and shocks will create cold and
heartless communities with strong aversion towards religion. Their
only guide is gain that is Mammon, which they will erect into a
veritable cult”.
Foresight of Anonym is amazing: in the days
of the Protocols’ publication, Man was still the measure of things,
and full eighty years would pass, until Milton Friedman and Chicago
School would proclaim Market and Profit as the only guiding
light.
The tool for enslavement of minds is the
media, writes Anonym. “There is a great force that creates the
movement of thought in the people, and that is the media. It is in
the media that the triumph of freedom of speech finds its
incarnation. Through the Press we have gained the power to influence
minds while remaining unobserved. We shall erase from the memory of
men the historical facts we do not want them to know, and leave only
those we wish”.
Years will pass since the publication until a
small group of people who control our discourse while remaining
unobserved, the media lords, would rise. The free discussion of the
media barons, Berlusconi and Black, Maxwell and Sulzberger, Gusinsky
and Zuckerman is banned from the media they own, while their
cooperative affinity remains impressive. The freedom of discourse
survives wherever independent (from media barons) media still
exists. Hundred years ago, this force was much weaker than it is
now, and it is amazing the Anonym recognised its
potential.
Century before the rise of World Bank and
IMF, the Protocols noticed the foreign loans are the best tools to
rob countries of their wealth. “While the loans were internal, money
remained in the land, but with externalisation of loans, all nations
pay tribute of their subjects to the oligarchy”. Indeed, the bigger
loans poor countries get, the poorer they become.
Concentration of capital in the hands of
financiers, concentration of media in few hands, extra-judicial
killings of unyielding leaders, stock market with its derivatives
sucks out wealth and it accumulates in the hands of the priesthood
of Mammon, gain (or “market forces”) as the only measure of
successful strategy… Yes, the interest to the Protocols does not
disappear because the described plan of creating oligarchic (not
necessarily Jewish) rule is being implemented in real time and it is
called the New World Order.
Sometimes, the Protocols are described as
extreme-right-wing anti-utopian piece of writing. However, it spans
both left and right-wing discourse. A right-wing writer would bless
strengthening of Law and Order, but the following prediction of
Anonym could be written today by a leftist libertarian, say, Noam
Chomsky, witnessing the present transition to the New World Order:
“The race of armaments and the increase of police force will bring
forth society where are only the masses of the proletariat, a few
millionaires, police and soldiers”.
However, the deepest thought of Anonym
remains in the spiritual sphere:
“Freedom might be harmless and have its place
in the State economy without injury to the well-being of the people
if it rested upon the foundation of faith in God, upon the
Brotherhood of humanity. This is the reason why it is indispensable
for us to undermine all faith, to tear out of the people’s mind the
very principle of God and the Spirit, and to put in its place
arithmetical calculations and material needs”.
Anonym connects the Faith and the idea of
Brotherhood of humanity. Undermining of Faith ruins the Brotherhood.
Freedom, instead of desirable and beautiful state of mind, turns
into destructive drive when unhinged from the Faith. Instead of
Faith, the Enemy offers pursuit of Mammon.
While reading in today’s (16.11.02) IH
Tribune philippics against gay priests and nuns, one notes the
following lines in the Protocols: “We have taken care to discredit
the Christian priesthood and ruin their mission which might still
hinder our plans. Day by day, their influence on the people is
falling lower. Collapse of Christianity is nigh”.
We witness implementation of this plan:
religion is removed from consideration, neo-liberalism or Mammon
worship takes its place, while with disestablishment of socialism,
this brave attempt of a non-faith-based brotherhood collapsed,
leaving ideological vacuum.
This observation caused some reviewers to
exclaim, “The true designer of the Master-plan is our old foe, the
Prince of the World, whose ultimate aim is elimination of Divine
Presence and ruination of Man”. True, but the Prince of the World
can’t act directly. He needs free agents that choose to accept his
plan. These chief agents and possible allies, according to the
pamphlet, are financial capitalists and Masters of Discourse, ‘the
Mind’.
They promote to the highest positions
“politicians who, in case of disobedience to our instructions, must
face criminal charges or disappear. We shall arrange elections in
favour of candidates with some dark, undiscovered stain in their
past. They will be our trustworthy agents out of fear of
revelations” For us, contemporaries of Watergate and Lewinsky, it
sounds familiar.
The shift from Stage One (liberalism and
freedom) to Stage Two (tyranny) took place in our lifetime. If in
1968 the NY Times promoted the Freedom Riders, in 2002 it supports
Patriot Act. An important American lawyer, Alan Dershovitz of
Harvard made a U-turn from Human rights to Right to torture. This
U-turn was predicted by the Protocols, as the purpose beyond the
struggle against the old elites.
“The aristocracy enjoyed the labour of the
workers, and it was interested in seeing that the workers were well
fed, healthy, and strong. The people have annihilated the
aristocracy, and have fallen into the grips of merciless
money-grinding scoundrels”.
In less emotional terms, the new bourgeoisie
removed the old elites with support of people, while promising
freedom and objecting to their privilege. After its victory, it took
the privilege to itself, and turned out to be as bad (or worse) as
the feudal lord. Marx referred to this complaint of aristocracy in
one of the numerous additions to the Communist Manifesto, and
considered it futile if partly justified. However, he did not live
to witness a similar process which took place in the last days of
the Soviet Union. The rising new bourgeoisie took control over the
discourse, convinced people to fight the privilege of Nomenclature
for the sake of equality and freedom, and after their victory, it
assumed and multiplied the privilege, and rejected equality and
freedom.
The Protocols predict rise of New
Bourgeoisie, globalist Mammon-worshippers, who are inherently
hostile to Old Elites, to spirit, to religion, to the ordinary
people. For a long while, they were the engine of the left,
democracy-seeking movements, until their purpose was completed, and
then they made the U-turn towards oligarchy.
This U-turn can be quantified by the
inheritance and land tax rate in England: while the financial
bourgeoisie and Masters of Discourse fought against the old ruling
classes, the rates were high and eventually dismantled their power
base; after their victory, the rate decreased allowing consolidation
of the new ruling classes. It is possible that the Old Order had had
some advantages. It is almost certain that a transition from the Old
Order could be different if the people would understand the
intentions of the enemy. But history can’t be reversed, and it is
quite futile to dream of return of the good lords and benevolent
Party bosses.
Thus, the Protocols (purified of references
to the Jews and conspiracies) are useful as they describe a
blueprint of the New World Order, and help its adversaries to form a
defensive strategy against the designs of Enemy. But the references
to the Jews constitute large and important part of the
text.
The Jews and the Protocols
The Protocols identify the moving force of
the New World Order with a powerful group of extremely chauvinist,
manipulative and domination-obsessed Jewish leaders. The leaders,
according to the Protocols, despise ordinary community members; they
utilise and support anti-Semitism as the means to keep their “lesser
brethren”, innocent ordinary folk of Jewish origin, in thrall to
their rule. The leaders are described as pathological goy haters,
bent on destroying culture and traditions of other nations while
preserving their own. Their goal is to create world government and
rule the homogenised and globalised world.
Their aims and intentions are stated in
extremely contrarian and obnoxious way. Solzhenitsyn concluded that
no sane person would deliver his favourite ideas in such
self-demeaning and self-defeating way. "We extract gold from their
blood and tears”, “our power is based on workers’ hunger”,
“revolutionaries are our human tools”, “brutish minds of Goyim” are,
in his opinion, words ascribed to the Jews by their enemies. A Jew
would rather put such ideas in an oblique way, he felt.
It is not a water-tight argument. Some people
speak in oblique way, others prefer a direct one. An Armenian from
the Azeri capital, Baku told me in long gone 1988, “The Azeris are
our cattle, without our Armenian mind their country would collapse
in course of days, as they are silly donkeys”. (A few months later,
an explosion of native violence expelled the clever Armenians from
Azerbaijan, and since then the Azeris manage their own land quite
all right.) David Ben Gurion, the first ruler of the Jewish state,
coined an equally arrogant maxim: “Who cares what Goyim say? What
matters is what the Jews do!” This sentence is an almost direct
quote from the Protocols.
The Protocols ascribe to the Elders a saying,
“Each Jewish victim is worth in the sight of God a thousand goyim”.
This line, a pinnacle of arrogance, is not a vain invention of an
anti-Semite. Two ministers of Sharon’s government, Uri Landau and
Ivet Lieberman demanded to kill one thousand Palestinian goyim for
each Jewish victim. A Jewish extremist at a demo for the Jewish
Temple Mount (18.11.02) called each Jew to kill one thousand
Palestinian goyim. Apparently, some ideas of the Protocols are not
foreign to some Jews.
The late Israeli scholar Israel Shahak and an
American Jewish writer Norton Mezvinsky present in their Jewish
Fundamentalism in Israel[6] a plethora of sayings by Jewish
Rabbis that wouldn’t be out of place in the Protocols. “The
difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews is greater
and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of
cattle” (p. ix). Shahak and Mezvinsky proved the rage of the Jewish
chauvinists does not differentiate between Palestinians, Arabs and
Goyim in general. In other words, whatever happened to Palestinians
could happen to any Gentile community standing on the way of the
Jews.
Indeed, if the Protocols would have no
relation to reality, they probably wouldn’t be as popular as they
are. The Jews are sufficiently powerful to dream of domination, and
some do. Apparently some Jewish ideas found their way into the text.
Other thoughts are ascribed to the Jews on the basis of “qui
bono”.
The least acceptable idea of the Protocols is
the presumption of an extremely ancient conspiracy of the Jews
aiming to take over the world. The extreme philo-Semitic view denies
the Jews their ability to act together and presents them as separate
individuals united by prayer only. This view is not accepted by the
Jews, and it does not agree with the common sense.
Solzhenitsyn does not believe in existence of
the Elders of Zion, though “the togetherness and coordination of
Jewish activity for the sake of their advancement caused many
writers (beginning from Cicero) to imagine there is a single
commanding centre to direct their attacks”. “Without such a
world centre, without conspiring, the Jews understand each other and
are able to coordinate their actions”.
The Jews are perfectly able to coordinate
their actions, but I doubt human beings, Jews or English, Russians
or Chinese are able to form long-standing plans spanning centuries
and continents. Nobody was able to prove such a plot exists.
Usually, ‘anti-Semites’ (the people who doubt or deny inherent
benevolence of the Jews to Gentile society) argue for its
authenticity as Henry Ford did. The car king said[7]: "the only statement I care to make about
the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on.” Indeed
they do, exclaims Victor Marsden, the English translator of the
Protocols.
However, it is not a proof of Jewish plot. We
can reach similar results rejecting the conspiracy line altogether,
by applying the concept of self-interest to the real Jewish
community as it was aptly described by Shahak-Mezvinsky. We shall
prove that the troublesome concept of the Hidden Hand or the
Elders of Zion
is superfluous and unnecessary.
Traditional Jewish community had a structure
of “upturned pyramid”, in words of Zionist theoreticians: it
contained many persons of wealth, learning and management, and very
few workers. It appears an odd thing, until one understands that the
Zionists artificially view the Jews in divorce of the society they
live in. The Jewish ‘upturned pyramid’ couldn’t exist without a real
down-turned pyramid of Gentile low classes. The Jews compete with
the native elites of the Gentile society for the right to exploit
the Gentile worker and peasant. The modus operandi of the two
competitors differs. While native elites shared some values with
their lower classes and usually provided for some upward mobility,
the Jewish community had its own structure and values.
Economically it stood for capitalist or
quasi-capitalist exploitation of the natives, while ideologically
the community declared loyalty to its leaders, rejection of common
humanity with the natives, extreme ethnocentrism, feeling of racial
and religious superiority towards the natives. It was a marginal
community, forming no bonds of marriage and friendship with the
natives. As a marginal community, it was free of long-standing
considerations the native elites had had.
For instance, the Jewish community of
17th century Ukraine has been a collective tax-farmer and
leaseholder, extracting from the natives SIX times more taxes and
dues per person than a gentile landlord did, wrote a prominent
Jewish Ukrainian historian Saul Borovoy in a recently published in
Jerusalem book. The Jewish communities of Maghreb supported the
colonial power against their gentile neighbours, etc. Their
traditions forbade normal relations with the natives.
Let us presume that such a community acts in
its egoistic interests. Forget conspiracy; forget the Elders of
Zion, learned or otherwise. The community’s only aim is to promote
its own well-being. For a marginal group it means to make the social
gap between its members and the native population as broad as
possible, while minimising the backlash potential.
The group would naturally, for its
self-interest, support every movement against native elites, whether
initiated by the King (as the Jews did before the French Revolution)
or by the rebelling low classes. It would not be done for the Jewish
love of democracy or rebellious nature, but for improvement of their
own positions. Ideal situation would be created by massacre or
expulsion of the native elites, as the group members would be able
to appropriate their positions. Indeed, it happened in Soviet Russia
and Soviet Hungary in the aftermath of World War One. Massacre and
exile of the native elites made the positions of power and influence
available to the competing Jews.
Self-interest explains the Jewish involvement
with the dreaded Cheka, the Soviet security services. Until 1937,
the Jews occupied the top echelon of the KGB predecessor body, while
millions of Russians lost their life or liberty. Objectively, these
executioners made jobs and houses available for their fellow Jews.
After the massacre and exile of Russian elites, the Jews were ready
for equality, as a son of a Rabbi could easily compete with a son of
Russian worker or peasant, though he wouldn’t be able to compete
with a son of Russian noble.
In a similar way, the Jews in Israel granted
limited equality to the Palestinians in 1966, after confiscation of
90% of native lands and expulsion of 90% of natives. Now, the
settlers promise to extend equality to the rest of Palestinians,
after they will expel the majority of them elsewhere. In the light
of great Jewish support for Israel, there is no reason to presume
that the Jewish modus operandi in Palestine is intrinsically
different from the Jewish intentions abroad.
Solzhenitsyn writes: “Executed <during the
revolution> army officers were Russians, the noblemen, priests,
monks, deputies were Russians… In 1920s, the pre-revolutionary
engineers and scientists were exiled or killed. They were Russians,
while their place was taken by Jews. The best Russian Psychiatric
institute in Moscow, its Russian members were arrested or exiled,
while their place was taken by the Jews. Important Jewish doctors
blocked the advancement of Russian medical scientists… The best
intellectual and artistic elites of Russian people were killed,
while the Jews grew and flourished in these (deadly for Russians)
years”.
The new Jewish elite did not fully identify
with Russia but carried out separate policy. It had a fateful effect
in 1991, when over 50 p.c. of Jews (as opposed to 13 p.c. of
Russians) supported pro-Western coup of President Yeltsin. In 1995,
81% of Jews voted for pro-Western parties, and only 3% for the
Communists (as opposed to 46% of Russians), according to the
publication by the Jewish sociologist Dr Ryvkina in her book Jews in
Post-Soviet Russia (1996).
In ever-expanding America, the Jews did not
have to kill or remove the native elites; they became its important
part, controlling discourse and wielding considerable financial
clout. They still do not identify with the goyish America: every
year, they force the Congress and the Administration to send five
billion dollars to their Israeli offshoot and now try to let America
fight their war in Iraq. They do discriminate other Americans,
otherwise 60% of the leading positions in the media would not become
Jewish[8].
Jews of France do not identify with France,
either. “Their identification with Israel is so strong; it
overshadows their ties to the country they live in”. – writes Daniel
Ben Simon in Haaretz. - “This dual loyalty was made very clear to me
by a Jewish doctor in Nice.”If the choice is between Israel and
France, there's no question I feel closer to Israel," he said,
without a moment's hesitation. He was born and bred in France; he
went to medical school in France; his patients are French; he speaks
French with his wife and children. But in the depths of his heart,
he feels a greater affinity with the Jewish state”.
In Palestine, the Jews have no compassion for
the natives. They travel by segregated roads, study in segregated
schools, while a Jew consumes ten times more water resources than a
goy, and has seven times higher income. Thus, the Jewish
separateness remains a fact of life for many Jewish
communities.
For their own well-being the Jews have to
obscure their unique position, wealth and power by the following
means:
- Holocaust discourse helps to
fight envy.
-
In a mono-ethnic society, the
Jews as the only foreign body do stick out and attract attention,
while in multicultural society they are hardly seen. For this
purpose, the Jews support immigration from non-European countries,
as their presence would remove the stamp of Jewish exclusiveness.
-
The Political Correctness is
another device forbidding the discussion of Jewish
influence.
-
Fight against Christianity and
the Church makes sense for a non-Christian community: if the Church
would be strong, the Christians would prefer their own, Christian
elite.
-
Globalisation is a natural
development for the people spread all over the globe, if they attach
but little importance to the local ways.
-
Impoverishment of the natives is
but another side of growing wealth of the Jewish
community.
Summing it up, a big share (though not all)
of the ideas ascribed to the Jews by the Protocols are indeed the
ideas useful or necessary for the Jewish communal well-being,
without any need for great hatred towards Gentiles and/or the
guidance of mythic Elders of Zion. That is the reason of the
Protocols’ long life. Paradoxically, without Israeli apartheid these
facts would remain invisible for the host communities
[3] CIDE HAMETE BENENGELI, in
Cervantes’ spelling
[4] Nom de plume of François Rabelais.
[5] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Evrei v
SSSR i v budushei Rossii, 2001 (in Russian)
[7] in an interview published in the
New York World, February 17th, 1921
[8] The data provided by Kevin MacDonald of
California
University.
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