The Cycle: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as presented in Behold a Pale Horse; pp. 280-281 (Protocol 4)

I've decided that as we read through this book within a book, I need to make a change to the format. I've always had the intent to do a walkthrough of the Protocols. I was preparing to do it two books from now. With a book as infamous and as anti-Semitic as this I needed a book break and was planning on doing something light first. Yet, Cooper has thrown me into it anyway so, here we are. I've always known that the Protocols was in Behold a Pale Horse, but I assumed that it was an abridged version, or that there would be commentary to it. I never assumed it would be the whole bloody thing. 

So the format change is super minor but here it is: the Protocols are divided up by Protocol. I'm not going to do more than one protocol a week, but some of the longer ones may take more than one post. I mention this because where we are now, Protocol 4, is a short one. 

The original document that the Protocols is a plagiarism of, is a work by an opponent of Napoleon III named Maurice Joly. The original title is "A Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu."

I know, I've mentioned it several times, but I repeat it now because the first paragraph of Protocol 4 steals its idea from Machiavelli. The Elder writes of the fluid changing of governments, of a cycle of evolution of kinds of governments. The elder writes:

"Every Republic passes through several stages. The first of these is comprised in the early days of mad raging by the blind mob, tossed hither and thither, right and left: the second is demagogy, from which is born anarchy, and that leads inevitably to despotism--not any longer legal and overt, and therefore responsible despotism,..."

In Plato, there are three types of governments: Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy. Democracy, according to Plato was the worst form of government because that's the kind that killed Socrates. Plato had little trust in the people to make the right decision and therefore created his Republic which was a kind of Aristocracy. His student Aristotle, adjusted Plato's view--improving it between virtuous forms of government and vicious ones. According to Aristotle there was Monarchy and there was Tyranny, Aristocracy, and Oligarchy; finally ending with Democracy and Anarchy. Each of the latter is a corruption of the former. A good king was better than a bad group of oligarchs. Machiavelli took these six and created a historiagraphical cycle. 

A loose gathering of people elects a king from among their ranks to lead them and protect them from outside hostilities. This is a good king, but his children or his grandchildren do not remember the struggles and behave for themselves, becoming tyrants. The tyrant is eventually overthrown by a group of people who rule as aristocrats. These people keep checks on one another and make decisions based on the good of all. However, after a time they too begin ruling for themselves, until the populace overthrows them. Deciding instead that the common good would be better decided by the common people. This maintains until the population breaks apart returning to the original anarchic groups that crowned a king to begin with. 

The elder's position is at the end: that despotism is the best form of government. He continues on:

"...but to unseen and secretly hidden, yet nevertheless sensibly felt despotism in the hands of some secret organisation or other, whose acts are the more unscrupulous inasmuch as it works behind a screen, behind the backs of all sorts of agents, the changing of whom not only does not injuriously affect but actually aids the secret force by saving it, thanks to continual changes, from the necessity of expending its resources on the rewarding of long services." 

Here the elder is discussing the bureaucracy, the true deep state. Reagan believed the deep state existed, but not the deep state of Q-anon and Trump; but the administrators and secretaries who worked in government no matter who was in charge. Imagine if every secretary in the White House doesn't like your idea--it's not getting done. They can lose a form, things can be miss stamped, and one of those manila inter-office envelopes can be sent to the wrong department over and over again. Sure, they may not be able to stop an idea, but they can sure as hell slow it down. The elder believes that by infiltrating these people, they will effectively control the governments of the world. This can work, in real life, for a bit; but eventually, these schemes will be figured out and the people replaced. Reagan was speaking in the same vein as his anti-union sentiment; you can't just fire people who won't play along; here, this is a plan. 

This deep state will work because the people will be distracted by their need for gold. They will be pushed into industry and trades; they will be set against each other so that they never see what is going on. All of this will be pitched toward a boiling point that will result in the population working against the only people who can expose the secret--the intellectuals. 

There is an out-of-place section in this protocol about how the goyim could survive if they only had faith in god and walked hand in hand with each other as equal children of god. The Elder says that to deal with this threat they will undermine the people's faith and destroy the very idea of a Godhead. The paragraph is a non-sequitur, it doesn't relate to anything before or after it. The paragraph must be one of the additions that Serge Nilus added to the work, it's implicitly against how Christians portray their worldview, especially in late 19th century Europe. Religion will come back, so we'll deal with it in more detail as the elder does. 

This Protocol is now over. It's only of note because it's the first writing where we can identify a conspiracy that will become the "deep state," which is troubling. After all, I had no idea that the conspiracy theory had anti-Semitic origins.