Customer Reviews

The Protocols of Zion

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Let us get a few facts straight: This book was forged by the Czarist secret police Ochrana beginning this century and published by a crazy priest, Sergius Nilus, in 1905 (just in time for the pogroms). It is a crude, anti-semitic rehash of an excellent 1864 book by Maurice Joly's "Les Dialogues aux Enfers" - a dialogue in Hell between Montesquieu and Machiavelli, in which Machiavelli explains to a horrified Montesquieu how a liberal democracy with all the trappings (separations of power, a free press, etc) can be subverted step by step into a despotic regime.</p> This was a not-so-veiled critique of the autocratic reign of Napoleon III. There is, alas, no English translation of this book, although there are French and German versions (that I know of). If you are the sort of troglodyte who believes in world-wide conspiracies, then any advice I may have for you is useless.</p> If you are not, and you are just curious about a book which has had such a profound impact, I'd cautiously recommend reading it - bearing in mind that these lies contributed more than any other single book to the slaughter of millions of Jews in this century.

How can you deny a book that is so prophetic? So many things have come to pass. Any denial that this is untrue is laughable. Scary!

I read the book and watched the dvd by Marc Levin (called Protocols of Zion). I thought both were worth my time. The dvd provides clear evidence of what some in our world believe and shows the passions that are yoked to those convictions. There are people who will immediately discount and reject Levin's presentation, but, taken at face value, it clearly presents a collection of straight forward experiences and, honestly, saddens me. We are a deeply torn humanity.

As a researcher, Protocols was a book I needed to go through. While presenting itself as "Jewish," I'm amazed by the similarities I find, in outlook and method, with any number of anti-democratic totalitarian systems, with American Progressivism, Statist Secular Socialism, and even with Islamic political fundamentalism. One could replace many Jewish references with some other entity and recognize historic examples of what the Protocols convey, likely because the book presents the workings of evil. Evil finds its home in the human heart, in the human condition. Thus, no single people group escapes its touch and the Protocols can apply to many throughout history. Assume it was not of Jewish authorship and origination. The author would need to be intimate with the workings of evil him or her self to create the work. We meet ourselves.

I realize the book's fame is anchored to some Islamic promotion, yet the concept of "freedom" found on pages 51, 65, and 97 (in my copy), for example, is a similar concept, a similar view of freedom, as that found in Islam (freedom according to Shariah, harmony, and as outlined by Islamic thinkers like Seyyid Qutb). So, before one throws stones, one should examine his or her own system and see how Protocols speaks to it.

Not everyone needs to read the Protocols, and those who do should, perhaps, labor to see its wider implications.

I would agree right away without any problem with all those who say that this is just propaganda if what I see around would be different. Just take a look to http://www.natall.com/who-rules-america for example. This book may be surely just a invention, but the facts that you see around at least tell you that there are some weird coincidences, although, maybe, they are just this, coincidences. Who knows.

There is something to be said of this book. It is nowhere NEAR the complete edition (There are more versions of this than I can count, almost all are edited and shortened considerably).

"The evil Jew" being responsible or not, take the "jew" out of it, and you'll see this book of the supposed meeting is actually a book of predictions that has come true in every respect.

If nothing else, it is a 95% accurate representation of today's western society...a godless, obsessed with entertainment, mindless, thoughtless, dumbed-down people that have another class of people over them. They have no hope, but are so dumb that they pay for their own destruction - socially, economically, intellectually.

Even if the book is "fake" (it IS a book, isnt it? How can it be fake? Is it invisible?) everything in it has come true.

[...]

The Protocols were first published in 1903 by Pavel Krushevan, an instigator of the Kishinew pogrom, in his Russian newspaper called Znamia. The book is usually composed a certain number of protocols, from 24 to 27. This is definitively an interesting work, if we take into account the historic aspects. In my view, it is a shallow anacronism to judge a book today because of the mentality of some people who lived in Russia 100 years ago.

An item like this doesn't really get graded entirely upon historical accuracy or literary significance, but on historical significance. For that reason it gets a higher grade than an equivalent piece of less historical notability would receive. The material here did influence some important people in the last century and is therefore worth looking up and studying.

Does it make astounding predictions? That's the really big question which always seems to come up in debates about this. Everyone understands that demagogues like Julius Streicher used to pump this stuff, but the real question is whether or not the predictions made in this piece are so truly astounding as to suggest that only someone connected to the Illuminati or some such thing could have made them. It's been pointed out several times by others that the text of the Protocols could be edited rather slightly to remove any references to Jews, while still leaving the broad conspiracy scenario intact. People have then argued from this point that the Protocols are actually so prescient in forecasting the world of today that they simply must be viewed as a mysterious revelation of some kind. Is that really true?

One place where I think we can be confident that the Protocols are not being fulfilled today is Protocol 20:

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The tax upon the poor man is a seed of revolution and works to the detriment of the State which in hunting after the trifling is missing the big...

A tax increasing in a percentage ratio to capital will give much larger revenue than the present individual or property tax...

The force upon which our king will rest consists in the equilibrium and the guarantee of peace, for the sake of which things it is indispensable that the capitalists should yield up a portion of their incomes for the sake of the secure working of the machinery of the State. State needs must be paid by those who will not feel the burden and have enough to take from...

In order that payers of the educated classes should not too much distress themselves over the new payments they will have full accounts given them of the destination of those payments, with the exception of such sums as will be appropriated for the needs of the throne and the administrative institutions...

Purchase, receipt of money or inheritance will be subject to the payment of a stamp progressive tax. Any transfer of property, whether money or other, without evidence of payment of this tax which will be strictly registered by names, will render the former holder liable to pay interest on the tax from the moment of transfer of these sums up to the discovery of his evasion of declaration of the transfer...
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-- Protocol 20

Notice how this stands diametrically opposite to 8 years of George W. Bush? It even calls for "A tax increasing in a percentage ratio to capital..." Isn't that the opposite of abolishing the capital gains tax?

Of course people can point to taxation programs pushed by much earlier administration from a century ago at a time when the Protocols were more recent. That's the point however. The Protocols were clearly written with the current events and trends of their original era in mind. They don't really show any stunning foresight of events which would have been hard to predict. But they group together a lot of predictions which had been made in that day by various informed observers.

Probably the most significant predictions carried in this manuscript are the following. The Protocols predict:

a) The decline of European power, and the rise of the United States and Japan to world power status.

b) A future war between Russia and Japan.

c) A general war among all of the great powers.

d) The overthrow of the Russian Czar by a revolution.

None of these predictions are very strange, and all of them were made at one time or another by somebody somewhere. In going over some reports which carry synopses of events from long ago I came across an interesting blurb:

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[...]

100 years ago: Germany's US ambassador says war "improbable"

In an address to the Academy of American Political and Social Sciences in Philadelphia on November 6, 1909, Germany's ambassador to the US attempts to reassure Washington that Germany's rise to world power will not necessarily lead to war.

Albrech von Bernstorff says that the increasing size of Germany's navy only serves to protect her commerce, and that there is sufficient world trade for all the major powers. The speech is in response to a book by Archibald Coolidge, The United States as a World Power, which envisioned the likelihood of a clash between the two powers over trade.

"The trade of the world is now only a fraction of what it will be in years to come," von Bernstorff says. "[T]here is room enough in the world for all manufacturing nations." The ambassador cites the close economic relations between Germany and Great Britain as evidence of trade's role in lessening tensions, and declares that Germany's interests are "purely commercial and without territorial ambitions."
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I found that interesting, to learn that Archibald Coolidge was talking about war between the United States and Germany as early as 1909. But does this prove that Coolidge was a member of the Learned Elders of Zion? Or does it simply show that the author of this document was paying attention to some real events, while giving it their spin in the text of the Protocols? If someone could predict a war between the USA and Germany as early as 1909, how difficult should it have been to predict a war between Japan and Russia several years before the Russo-Japanese War of 1904? Japan and Russia were geographic neighbors and it was clear to any informed observer that Japan's efforts to adopt western industry had outpaced Russia. Envisioning a war where Japan asserts itself as a new power at the expense of its Russian neighbor should not have very difficult.

As for the likelihood of an eventual war in Europe, anyone who followed European history from the Napoleonic Wars and on through the 19th century and into the early 20th, could see that the formation of the German Reich by Bismarck, and Bismarck's later dismissal by Kaiser Wilhelm II, carried the seeds of a major war. It was not necessarily that Germany was or was not more aggressive. But the 19th century showed that the most reliable way for Europe to establish a stable peace was to have Napoleon defeated by England and Russia, two major powers which existed on opposite ends of Europe. This was similar to the way that Hitler's defeat by the United States and the Soviet Union, two major powers on opposite sides of the globe, created a general peace for Europe. When Bismarck formed the Second Reich it was clear that this involved the risk that new rivalries would be sparked by having strong ambitious states right next to each other. Bismarck himself realized this and tried to minimize the chances of this happening. When the Kaiser dismissed him in 1890 it became clear that he had a more reckless attitude.

It's no surprise that the manuscript of the Protocols first became known in Russia and was widely peddled by Russian exiles in the 1920s. The problem is though that many of these Russian Whites in exile had an ideological stake in making it sound as if the outbreak of revolution in Russia was something unnatural and surprising. In fact, the writing had been on the wall for half a century before the Russian Revolution actually occurred. Nothing in the Protocols carries such a specific and accurate prediction of the revolution that would warrant seeing it as stunning advance knowledge. Another group which has sometimes picked up on the Protocols has been conservatives in the USA who have sometimes mourned the end of the Western Frontier and the particlar kind of economy which had been linked with expanding settlements. Some of these people have portrayed the prediction in the Protocols that the United States would become a world power since they maintain that this is inconsistent with the record of the USA during the 19th century. In fact, it was very consistent. As an expanding colonial power the USA devoted itself to consuming the Western Frontier throughout the 19th century. But after 1890 it was clear that the USA would have to expand beyond the hemisphere to be able carry on. It was clear at that time that the USA had developed the most tremendous industry, and yet was locked out many markets in the world by European colonialism. That pointed to future rivalries and wars.

So none of the predictions made in this text are really as astonishing as some people have tried to make them seem. It's a case of "argument by incredulity" that people have tried to insist that the Protocols really show a mystical foresight. They don't and they would be irrelevant if they didn't occupy an important place in history for the way they persuaded many people. But they did and they do, so there's something to be said for reading them.

I don't know how to evaluate such a book. I bought it because I had read so many references to it. Certainly an important book to read in that it helps the reader to understand anti semitism and other related issues, like the origin of conspiracy theories.

The following is provided as a public service to all who are concerned with the Protocols Affair. "As early as 1921, the English journalist Philip Graves exposed the similarity between the Protocols and a political satire by Maurice Joly, 'Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu' (1864). Subsequent investigation showed the original document to be a forgery written by members of the Russian secret police." -The New Columbia Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press, New York and London, 1975, p. 2229. Additionally, in 1994, after an exhaustive year-long investigation, a Russian District Court in Moscow, Judge Ludmilla Belikova presiding, ruled that the Czarist-era 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' was, in fact, a forgery and that its publication constituted an antisemitic act.

Read this book simply for the sake of gaining insight as to the degree of hatred that it represents. It is a forgery, banned in many countries. It is a magnificent tool of propaganda, the language is complex and comes across as well researched and to those who do not know any better it is a convincing piece of literature. It has been used as the tool of the anti-semite since its publication, including Adolf Hitler, and so those who disagree with me will no doubt be his loyal post-mortem supporters, thier biggotry undying and their ignorance causing irrepairable damage. To this day, web sites quote Henry Fords appraisal of the work, they fail to quote his retraction and apology to the world of Jewry. [...]