Individualism: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as Presented in Behold a Pale Horse pp. 312-314

Depression saved me. I had a roommate one that was very into Ayn Rand, and he kept telling me that I needed, NEEDED, to read the Fountain Head. I took one look at the size of the book, and in my depression spiral, said 'no.' It was too big, too long, and my depression wasn't going to let me read it. I should also explain that at this time I was reading the History of Florence by Niccolo Machiavelli; and a history of Rome that argued that the fall of Rome was due to the change in the Legions from different forces to one large mobile army (I'm not exactly convinced of that argument). Still my brain took a hard pass on Ayn Rand. 

For a class I had to read her "Anthem," which is significantly shorter, but, somehow just as preachy. I found her prose to be trite and terrible. The idea, that some force prevented people from saying the word "I" (this is the revelation at the end of the book) was absurd. If the word "we" is used in the singular enough it adopts the same meaning. The metaphor is bad. 

Conspiracy theorists on the right of politics laud individuality as a virtue. They claim that groups like the World Economic Forum, the UN, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Illuminati are working to subvert the very concept of individuality. Our Elder is, oddly, doing the opposite. He wants to destroy collectivism, "In order to effect the destruction of all collective forces except ours we shall emasculate the first stage of collectivism--the universities, by re-educating them in a new direction." 

I, was not prepared for this. So much of this book is a blueprint for conspiracy tracts that follow it--that  I was entirely expecting the collectivism to be the goal. The Elder wants to demonize Universities because they teach working together, so we, as the reader, are supposed to want this. Mind = blown.

Then again...this protocol seems to be all over the place. He wants to destroy collective education in order to drive a wedge between the established order (the monarchy of the Russian Empire) and the people. Ok, fine, I get what the goal is there, but then he argues that "when we are in power we shall remove every kind of disturbing subject from the course of education and shall make out of the youth obedient children of authority, loving him who rules as the support and hope of peace and quiet." 

Golovenski is having a difficult time "writing" this section. On the one hand the Elder is going to demonize the established order, but on the other hand he's not going to teach anything which goes against the authorities in charge. Previously, the Elder has argued that he would make puppets of the established rulers, so how does driving the wedge between them and population serve that plan? Again, I don't think that the audience of this book has really read the content of the book. They've skimmed it, and I would certainly doubt that very few of them have made it this far. 

The Elder then makes a curiously ironic declaration, "Each state of life must be trained within strict limits corresponding to its destination and work in life."

His edict is that people will be educated in hyper-specific categories. People will only be educated in the spheres that will serve them in their lives. This is interesting because the current conspiracy crowd is in favor of this kind of thinking. Ever since William F. Buckley's "God and Man at Yale" it has been a mantra amongst the conspiracy crowd to demonize higher education, especially of the generalize liberal arts variety. If you've ever encountered someone arguing that people ought to be in trade schools, this is the fruit of that tree. Yet, here the Elder is arguing pro-specialized education so that we are supposed to hate it. 

Then, of course, the elder entirely contradicts himself, "daring these assemblies, on holidays, teachers will read what will pass as free lectures on questions of human relations, of the laws of examples, of the limitations which are born of unconscious relations, and finally, of the philosophy of new theories not yet declared to the world."

He wants the people to read speculative philosophy--which I am interpreting as the socialist literature of the day given the context of the protocols. So, at first the elder wants to ban collective education but then he wants us to embrace the most theoretical of it. This game is getting tired at this point because it's hard to really pinpoint what it is that the conspiracy wants. Normally, I would say that this is the point of the contradictions and obfuscations--so that the reader can fill in whatever they want as being the tool of the conspiracy and the solution to it. I won't do it here because our author does not appear to be clever enough to accomplish that. 

The entire Protocol is really concerned with "thought control." This is what Orwell was trying to warn us about in 1984--not the mis-characterized version that pundits bring up but in the actual reading of 1984. The point was to control the thought process of the population, so that the word "knife" would mean six different things thus restricting the ability of the people to express themselves. The Elder is short on details because those don't really matter in this fiction, what matters is that anytime someone criticizes the authority of the people in charge, they can be demonized as being brainwashed by "them," which in this case is the "Jews." 

The Elder closes with an ellipses that is complete nonsense; then he writes, "In France, one of our best agents, Bourgeois, has already made public a new programme of teaching by object lessons." 

What? "Bourgeois" is a person? I have to guess that the point of this comment is to get people to analyze the French educational system, but to make comparisons against a stereotype of the French from all of the problems they've encountered since their Revolution. Even if that's the case, we should be given longer than a single oddly constructed sentence about it. As I said in the Gary Allen book, the Robison book, and even in the larger Cooper book: these conspiracy theorists could use an editor.