Financial Obligation: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as Presented in Behold a Pale Horse pp. 319-322

Protocol 20

After the shortest of Protocols I think we come to the longest. This Protocol is six pages long and it is predictably unfocused. This week we'll focus on the tax plan set forth by the Elder. 

I think my favorite thing about when conspiracy theorists get into financial conspiracies is that they have no idea what they are talking about. We saw this when I covered None Dare Call it Conspiracy; as soon as Allen attempted to dive into financial ties it he was lost. Economics is never as simple as balancing a checkbook, but it is an easy way to enrage people who pretend to be concerned about deficit spending and that sometimes "the poors" get stuff for free. 

The conspirators here are going to redesign an entire economic system from the ground up. They are going to do this in order to hide the fact, that in the real world, the Russian Tsar is out of money but that we shouldn't worry about that because the Jews are behind it. 

The elder begins oddly, well oddly for this book, "...which I put off to the end of my report as being the most difficult, the crowning and decisive point of our plans."

Since when has this been a report? The entire thing has been framed as the directions and instruction of the Elder to the Cabal. The myth is that these are the minutes of a meeting taking place in a cemetery in Prague; it's never been a report. The only thing that almost makes the leap is that it's a copy of the minutes made by an agent of the Okhrana; but then we wouldn't be using the "I" if that were the case.

The other odd thing is that this isn't the end either.  There's still five Protocols left in this book. I wondered if this was one of those cases where the plagiarst copied directly from the Joly work without checking it--but no. Financial plans begin on page 113 and there's still 40 pages left there. 

Let's move past that...the Elder addresses a topic that I am always curious about--how is the conspiracy funded? The original Men In Black (1997), had a fun scene where Agent Kay explained that they held patents on things like velcro and CDs for funding. But nowhere else do we actually see this. How is the Flat Earth conspiracy funded? Who paid for the 9/11 inside job? What was the line item for faking the Moon Landing? 

Then again, why does it need to be funded in the first place? If the cabal controls everything there isn't a need they have to pay for things, they just take it. You could hide such purchases in the nebulous world of "credit" and just make it vanish. Of course, given that the larger scope of this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is that the Jews control the gold and diamonds--the funding of the conspiracy isn't that much of a problem. 

The point of this protocol isn't to explain how "they" are funding the operation but why the Russian government has no money. Remember how we read this: everything the Elder is going to recommend we are supposed to hate. This is going to be important to remember because the Elder's recommendations will actually make sense to a lot of us. 

The first rule is that "...the king will enjoy the legal fiction that everything in his State belongs to him (which may easily be translated into fact), will be enabled to resort to the lawful confiscation of all sums of every kind for the regulation of the their circulation in the State." 

First, the phrase "legal fiction" does not mean imaginary. Think of a corporation like Microsoft. Microsoft is real in the sense that it produces products, has employees, and can be located. The "corporation" though is a legal arrangement, it's fictional in that a person can't touch it. When the elder says that the king enjoys this legal fiction, it's within the power of the king, When it gets translated into fact, that power has been enabled. The Elder is merely describing a standard autocrat here--they own everything in the state, there is no private property. 

What this is actually about is an appeal against the Socialism that was sweeping Europe at the time. We know this because of the last part of the sentence, "regulation of their circulation in the state." This is very similar to the modern "you will own nothing and be happy;" mantra that conspiracy theorists repeat but take out of context and still fail to understand. Legally, the Tsar owned your house, but he had little need for peasant hovels and goats. The moral panic surrounding the Socialist movement was that your neighbor, or gasp, a poor person would also need your goat. 

The elder then makes the claim that the rich will be taxed at a higher rate than the poor. In this the elder is repeating something not from Karl Marx, but from Adam Smith who wrote that it is "not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue but something more than in that proportion."

It's very amusing to read the Adam Smith Institute try and weasel out of that direct quote from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. 

The reasoning is, again, straight from Smith. Because the rich enjoy more privileges from the state in the form of protection and maintenance they should pay more. Park illegally in one of the wealthier neighborhoods of my city and you'll find a traffic ticket very quickly, unlike parking illegally in my neighborhood (though not my street--I live on an ambulance route and that's a special case). The Elder first concentrates on property for this reason. Then he quickly moves over to taxing capital as well. 

We should be quite aware that what's happening is a response to the Socialism of the late 19th century, the word "capital" gets brought up quite frequently as a reference for people that know "Das Kapital" is a book but have never read it. 

One of the most interesting things that comes up in this Protocol is why progressive taxation makes sense. The Elder is concerned with the idea of revolution and he claims that burdening the poor with the highest of taxes is the seed of revolution. This is an odd turn for a cabal that seemed, throughout this book, to have no concern over the public other than dominating them. Now, he seems to care for the people in such a way that he will prevent revolution by throwing them a lifeline, "such a measure (progressive taxation) would destroy the hatred of the poor man for the rich in which he will see a necessary financial support of the state." 

The poor will not hate the rich, because their taxation (on both property and capital) will support the very things that they need. A plan like this could amend some of the wealth inequality in our current world. People like me might see that people like Musk actually contribute something to the general weal rather than not being just obscenely wealthy but also parasites on the system. 

As a book plagiarised for the general public I'm not quite certain what the point of this is supposed to be. Is an early 20th century beet farmer in Western Russia supposed to read this and then think, "Those dastardly Jewish overlords! Attempting to make the local Duke and I equal! I'll die before he is forced to share borscht with me!" 

We're supposed to hate this, but I can't see one reason that we should. Was the lie of unregulated capitalism rampant in Tsarist Russia? I cannot see that the fictional beet farmer would think to themselves that hard work was going to elevate them beyond the rank of peasant farmer. That's a lie sold to the poor in societies with representative governments not monarchies.