Super-Legal: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as Presented in Behold a Pale Horse pp. 288-291

Protocol 9

Internal consistency is one hurdle that conspiracy theories like the one we see in the Protocols, and then in Cooper's book cannot get over. The biggest problem with this theory is the one that Cooper has been unwittingly revealing in this book. It's said outright by the Elder:

                 "De facto we have already wiped out every kind of rule except our own, although de jure there still remain a good many of them. Nowadays, if any States raise a protest against us it is only pro forma at our discretion and by our direction, for their anti-Semitism is indefensible to use for the management of our lesser brethren."

And later in the next paragraph the Elder claims: "For us there are no checks to limit the range of our activity. Our Super-Government subsists in extra-legal conditions which are described in the accepted terminology by the energetic and forcible word--Dictatorship." 

[I also note that this is a departure from the Joly book the Protocols almost entirely plagiarizes.] 

The first flaw in my own conspiracism, occurred when listening to a 9/11 "truther." One of the big rallying cries of that movement was to have an investigation into the Building 7 in particular and the entire attack in general. The problem that I saw with this claim was that an investigation already existed, the 9/11 Commission report. The conspiracy theorists, of course, said the Commission was full of lies and bought off by the Bush administration (or whoever); and they demanded an independent investigation. What would that accomplish? Let's give the "truthers" their investigation. Since the conspirators control everything there would be no different result. 

When Cooper claims that all patriots need to stand up and demand their congressman do/prevent the thing--there's no weight to the claim. The Protocols are different in that there is no explicit call to action. This isn't Cooper claiming that we can force a Senator to reveal the truth of the aliens at Roswell or that weird order he keeps focusing on when Nixon resigned. The Protocols are only a call to action if we are ignoring the literal words and instead focusing on the implied command to blame the "Jews" for the lamentable state of Imperial Russia. 

You can't fistfight god, so the point is just to drum up general outrage and give readers a sense of how superior they, and their past, is to the current state of things. 

There's another story in Protocol 9. The other story is how "they" will get support and I find this suspiciously similar to something that Wormwood claims in C.S. Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters." If you're unfamiliar, the Screwtape Letters are a series of letters from Screwtape, a master demon; to his nephew Wormwood. They concern Wormwood's task of divorcing a human, "The Patient," from devout Christianity. 

Even though I am an atheist, I find the arguments Lewis presents in these letters to be quite interesting. One letter focuses on symbolism. Screwtape, responding to Wormwood's apparent attempt to blame someone else for his failure, explains what to do about prayer. He tells the apprentice demon that prayer is a serious problem when trying to get the humans to damn themselves, but it is not an insurmountable problem. Instead of getting the human to just stop praying, the demon advises that Wormwood should instead get the human to pray to the crucifix on the wall and not the meaning of it. Screwtape advises that the human should be made to pray to the composite object, to focus on the pedantic nature of the prayer, to the abstract notion of it; and never to the meaning underneath it. 

It's relevant here because the Elder claims that they will shift the liberal concept of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," from being a demand or watchword into an expression of idealism. There will no longer by a demand for liberty rather "The' right of liberty, the duty of equality, the ideal of brotherhood."

The interesting thing about the idea is that people like Cooper entirely represent the final outcome. They speak of "Patriotism" and "Freedom" entirely as idealistic concepts without meaning. There's an adage that the more a person references the Constitution/1984/the Bible the less likely it is that they have read it. Those three texts represent a concept to them, but it is a vapid concept because they have no idea what those names refer to. A person talking about fealty of the Constitution (like Cooper does) if largely unaware that most of the Constitution is a detailed construction of a how a government works. It's merely a sentiment and this works of the conspirators because instead of actually focusing on a concept they get tripped up on the pedantic details of an idea that they are entirely unfamiliar with.