Introduction to the Protocols

Since it was first published more than a century ago, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion has shocked and fascinated the world. It has appeared in countless editions in every major language, flourishing in spite of ceaseless efforts to dismiss, ridicule and suppress it.

What is this remarkable and enduring work?

Apparently a secret guide or handbook for achieving world domination, it explains how a small group of initiated Jews, the “Elders,” can gain power over the world’s non-Jewish peoples, the “goyim.”

Organized into 24 chapters or “protocols,” possibly based on notes from lectures, the work is in the form of instructions to a new member of the inner circle of conspirators. It lays out a plan by which the Elders can undermine and destroy stable societies, and impose their own monopolistic rule over humanity. To hasten the collapse of the societies not yet under their control, the conspirators will promote corruption, immorality and social strife in all countries, especially Christian ones, while working to obliterate the national, ethnic and religious character of all non-Jewish peoples.

The Jewish conspirators are instructed to work patiently toward their goal using deceit and guile, hiding their true intentions, and exploiting the naïve nature of the “goyim.” The Elders seek to replace the traditional social order with a “one world” government run by Jews that will cynically manipulate the public through control of finance and the media.

Freemasons figure in The Protocols as a secretive and well-organized group of non-Jews that is allied with the Jewish Elders, a sort of conspiracy within a conspiracy. While Freemasons and other liberals are considered helpful in destroying the traditional social order, eventually they will be shoved aside as the Jewish theocracy takes full control. The work describes a forthcoming “kingdom,” although even in this final stage of Jewish global rule, the Elders will avoid direct or open control, preferring instead to run things through devious manipulation of money, the media and cultural life. Even the “King of the Jews” will be a figurehead.

The Protocols was first published in an abridged edition, in Russian, in 1903 in the Saint Petersburg newspaper Znamya. In 1905 the full text was published in Russia by the orthodox priest Sergei Nilus, as an appendix to his work, “The Great in the Small.”

In an introduction to a 1911 edition, Nilus explained how he obtained the manuscript:

“In 1901 a now-deceased acquaintance, Court Marshal Alexei Sukhotin of Tchernigov, gave into my possession a hand-written manuscript that detailed completely and clearly the secret Jewish-Freemason conspiracy that will surely lead to the end of our vile world. The person who gave me this manuscript assured me that it was a faithful translation of the original document. It had been stolen by a lady from one of the highest  and most influential leaders of the Freemasons following a secret meeting somewhere in France, that hot-bed of Masonic conspiracy.”

In an edition issued in 1917 Nilus wrote:

“…Now for the first time I have learned from authoritative Jewish sources that the Protocols is nothing less than the strategic plan of world conquest whereby the world will be brought under Israel’s yoke, the enemy of God. The plan, worked out by the leaders of the Jewish people during the many centuries of the Diaspora, was finally disclosed to the Elders by the Prince in Exile, Theodor Herzl, at the time of the first Zionist congress in Basel (August 1897).”

Theodor Herzl is sometimes credited as the author of The Protocols, or as the person who gave the lectures upon which the work seems to be based. He was the founder of the modern Zionist movement, and the author of The Jewish State, a highly influential booklet that was the movement’s seminal work. Just half a century after the First Zionist Congress, the Jewish state of Israel was established in Palestine, a remarkable achievement that attests to Jewish determination, power and organizational skill.

Russia’s emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, read The Protocols with interest. In the margins of his personal copy, his handwritten notes express his first reaction: “What precise execution of their program!”; “Our [Russian] 1905 [uprising] was clearly orchestrated by the Zion Elders!”; “The Jews’ guiding and destroying had is visible everywhere.”

The November 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia seems to give shocking validation to the conspiracy laid out in The Protocols, and greatly boosted interest in the work. Bolshevism was indeed a secretive, conspiratorial movement whose ultimate goal was world domination. Along with other Communists, the Bolsheviks were fanatic followers of the German Jewish philosopher Karl Marx. They openly proclaimed that their goal was the imposition of a worldwide Communist “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Jews were prominent among the revolutionary activists who took control of Russia in 1917 and established the Soviet regime. The two most important Bolshevik leaders were Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), who was one-quarter Jewish by ancestry, and Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein), who was entirely of Jewish descent. Trotsky headed the Red Army and, for a time, was chief of Soviet foreign affairs. Other leading Jewish Bolsheviks included Yakov Sverdlov (Solomon), who was both Bolshevik party’s executive secretary and chairman of the Soviet state’s Centrao Executive Committee; Grigori Zinoviev (Radomyslsky), who headed the Communist International (Comintern), the central agency for spreading revolution in foreign countries; press commissar Karl Radek (Sobelsohn); foreign affairs commissar Maxim Litvinov (Wallach); Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld); and Moisei Uritsky.

Well-informed observers, both inside and outside of Russia, took note of the crucial Jewish role in Bolshevism. David R. Francis, United States ambassador in Russia, warned in a January 1918 dispatch to Washington: “The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution.”

In England, Winston Churchill warned in an article published in the London Illustrated Sunday Herald (February 8, 1920) that Bolshevism is a “worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.”

                       Winston Churchill

The eminent British political leader and historian went on to write:

“There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power come from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate, Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek – all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution [the Cheka] has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.”

In 1920 editions of The Protocols began to appear in all the major European languages. The work was widely distributed throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with especially brisk sales in Britain, Germany and the United States.

The English-language text that appears in this edition was translated by Victor E. Marsden, a British journalist who was the correspondent in Russia for The Morning Post, an important London daily newspaper. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, he was arrested and held prisoner for a time. Upon his release and return to England, he translated Nilus’ version into English. Marsden’s translation, first published in 1920 or 1921, has since remained the “standard” English-language text.

In the United States, an unsigned article headed “The International Jew: The World’s Problem,” appeared in the May 1920 issue of a Michigan weekly newspaper owned and controlled by the great American automobile pioneer and manufacturer Henry Ford. This was the first of dozens of articles in The Dearborn Independent that examined “the Jewish question” in detail.

Several of the articles sympathetically discussed The Protocols. In the issue of July 10, 1920, for example, an item titled “The Jewish Political Program,” explained:

“Whosoever was the mind that conceived them [The Protocols] possessed a knowledge of human nature, of history and statecraft which is dazzling in its brilliant completeness, and terrible in the objects to which it turns its powers. Neither a madman nor an international criminal, but more likely a super-mind mastered by devotion to a people and a faith could be the author, if indeed one mind alone conceived them. It is too terribly real for fiction, too well-sustained for speculation, too deep in its knowledge of the secret springs of life for forgery…

“The internal evidence makes it clear that the Protocols were not written by a Russian, nor originally in the Russian language, nor under the influence of Russian conditions. But they found their way to Russia and were first published there…

“The progress of the Protocols in the United States can only be explained on the ground that they supply light and give meaning to certain previously observed facts, and that this light and meaning is so startling as to give a certain standing and importance to these otherwise unaccredited documents. Sheer lies do not live long, their power soon dies. These Protocols are more alive than ever.

Two weeks later The Dearborn Independent again dealt with The Protocols. In an article entitled “An Introduction to the ‘Jewish Protocols’,” readers were told:

“The Protocols as we have them are apparently the notes of lectures which were made by someone who heard them. Some of them are lengthy; some of them are brief. The assertion which has always been made in connection with the Protocols since they have become known is that they are notes of lectures delivered to Jewish students presumably somewhere in France or Switzerland. The attempt to make them appear to be of Russian origin is absolutely forestalled by the point of view, the reference to the times and certain grammatical indications.

“…Whether the Protocols are judged as proving anything concerning the Jews or not, they constitute an education in the way the masses are turned about like sheep by influences which they do not understand. It is almost certain that once the principles of the Protocols are known widely and understood by the people, the criticism which they now rightly make of the Gentile mind will no longer hold good.”

The many Dearborn Independent articles dealing with “the Jewish question” were reprinted in four book-length volumes, known collectively as The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. During the next five years, hundreds of thousands of copies of The International Jew were distributed in the United States, and abridged editions, often with Henry Ford’s name on the cover, appeared in a range of languages and countries. These publications greatly boosted the fame and notoriety of The Protocols.

“The only statement I care to make about The Protocols,” said Ford in a February 1921 interview, “is that they fit in with what is going on. They are 16 years old, and they have fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now.”

The first German-language edition of The Protocols was published in 1920, and numerous printings and editions appeared in the following years. Alfred Rosenberg, an associate of Adolf Hitler, prepared a German edition that appeared in 1923 under the title of Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion und die judische Weltpolitik. (After the end of World War II, Rosenberg was condemned to death by a tribunal in Nuremberg organized by the victorious Allied [Zionist-controlled] powers.)

Hitler himself remarked on The Protocols in his book Mein Kampf, which he wrote in 1924-25:

“…To what extent the whole existence of this [Jewish] people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung [an important Jewish-owned liberal daily] moans repeatedly to the world, which is the best evidence that they are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is revealed here consciously. It does not really matter from which Jewish brain these disclosures originate. What is significant is that they reveal with rather terrifying precision the character and the activities of the Jewish nation and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate goals. The best critique of it, though, is reality. Anyone who examines the historical development of the last one hundred years from the perspective of this book will immediately understand the cries of the Jewish press. For when this book becomes the common property of a nation, the Jewish danger may be regarded as broken.”

                                   Adolf Hitler

Similar comments were made by other public figures. In 1934 a widely-read Irish priest, the Rev. Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp., B.A., D.D., wrote:

“These Protocols are said to be the rough notes of a series of conferences delivered to a select body of Jewish leaders assembled in secret conclave about the end of the nineteenth century. They purport to give an outline of Jewish plans for the preparation of the Messias to come. On the one hand, the authenticity of this document cannot be proved; on the other, the efforts made by some writers, principally Jewish, to show it to be a forgery do not carry conviction to many serious minds…

“What must be kept in clearly in mind and emphasized, throughout any discussion concerning the Protocols, is the very grave fact that the program outlined in them is being fulfilled… Anyone who reads the Protocols carefully will be obliged to confess that a more skillful plan could hardly be devised for the destruction of belief in our Lord and the preparation of the advent of the new Messias. In addition, if the reader is acquainted with the world, he will see that the plan is being carried out, and that, as a result, Jewish power is increasing.”

In Canada, Member of Parliament Norman Jaques declared in the House of Commons on July 9, 1943: “Those who feel libeled by the Protocols have the most obvious remedy in the world; all they have to do is rise and denounce the policy of them, instead of denying the authorship… But when you come to read them how can any reasonable man deny the truth of what is contained in them?”

Over the years numerous efforts have been made to “expose” The Protocols as a malevolent fraud. The first was a series of articles published in August 1921 in The Times of London, which told readers that the work was a plagiarized forgery. A few weeks later these articles were reprinted in The New York Times. In the years since, countless books and articles meant to discredit The Protocols have appeared.

Many governments have banned the work outright. The first was the Soviet regime that seized power in Russia in 1917. The country’s new Bolshevik rulers severely punished anyone caught distributing or even possessing a copy. Following the victory of the Soviet Union and the United States in World War II, The Protocols was banned in most of Europe, including in all Soviet-controlled countries. More than 60 years after the end of the war, publication and distribution of the work is still prohibited in Germany, Austria, and a number of other European countries that forbid writings that might encourage anti-Jewish sentiment.

In countries where The Protocols has not been suppressed, such as in South America an Asia, the work has remained popular. In Japan, books that echo the theme of The Protocols have been bestsellers. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the end of Soviet hegemony over central Europe, new editions have appeared in Russia and other formerly Soviet-controlled countries. The work has remained especially popular in Arab and Muslim countries, where numerous editions have been issued.

In January 2006 voters in occupied Palestine elected a new government headed by Hamas, the militantly anti-Zionist “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Article 32 of the Hamas Covenant states: “…The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”

In addition to the many published editions, the internet makes The Protocols instantly available everywhere in a range of languages.

Much of the reason for the work’s enduring popularity and impact is that the conspiracy it outlines seems to be more dangerous than ever. Even many who might not accept The Protocols as an authentic document nonetheless regard it as a fascinating validation of Jewish methods and goals.

The awesome power and influence of organized Jewry is undeniable. Especially in the United States, Jews wield tremendous power, above all through their hold on television and motion pictures, and their prominent role in political life. The Jewish-run “Israel lobby” insures that U.S. Foreign policy steadfastly supports the Zionist state and its policies of brutal occupation  and aggressive war. It is this reality that moved Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed to boldly declare in October 2003 that “today the Jews rule this world by proxy.”
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