Preface to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
EVOLA
14 April 2016Non classé	

‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ purports to be the detailed report of twenty-four secret Judaeo-Masonic meetings, during which an ‘Elder of Zion’, the leader of a Jewish international political organisation driven on by an eternal and unquenchable hatred of Christianity, addresses the leaders of the Jewish people to present to them a Machiavellian plan for world domination. The first nine ‘conferences’ consist in an analysis of the means to be used to carry out the plan, which amount to the destruction of the monarchic and other national states through wars, revolutions, and disintegrative ideologies such as liberalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, and democratism – all of which the Jews, who regard politics as a subtle and sublime art, despise. The last fifteen ‘conferences’ describe the super-state which is to be created on the ruins of the traditional order.

Originally written in French, in a ‘poor French’, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ were first published in 1903 under the title ‘Jewish Program of World Conquest’, in the Saint Petersburg newspaper Znamja, which was edited by a man portrayed as an anti-Semite. In 1905, the Russian mystic Sergei Alexandrovitch Nilus published an enlarged version of the document, and it is this version which has become ‘classical’. Its fame began after the Bolshevik revolution, but not in Bolshevik circles : all copies which were known to exist in Russia were destroyed under the Kerensky regime, and, under his successors, possession of a copy by anyone within the Soviet territory was a crime sufficient to ensure the owner’s being shot on sight. From 1918 to 1920, many new editions circulated among the White armies which were fighting the Communist régime in power in Russia. They spread via Russian emigration and were translated into other European languages. In 1920, the ‘Protocols’ were published in French in Paris, in Hungarian in Vienna, and in English in Boston and London : in May 1920, in an article called ‘The Jewish Peril. A disturbing pamphlet: A call for Inquiry’, the London Times vouched for their authenticity, although this had already been questioned by various sources, as this influential newspaper itself acknowledged a few months later. The Italian translation was translated and published the following year by Giovanni Preziosi.

It was re-published by Preziosi 17 years later, in 1938, with a preface by Julius Evola, who had been writing articles about the Jewish problem for Presiozi’s paper Vita Italiana for several years by this time. Among these articles, there was an account of the proceedings instituted in 1933 in Berne by the Jewish community organisations there, against a man who had circulated copies of the German edition of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ during a meeting of the Swiss National Front.(‘Il processo di Berna e l’autenticità dei “Protocoli”‘, October 1937). In this article, Julius Evola also examined the question of the authenticity of the document ; in ‘La Volontà di potenza ebraica e l’autenticità dei “Protocolli”‘ (December 1937), he showed that the “spirit of the most orthodox Jewish tradition with respect to the will of world domination inherent in the messianic Israelite idea” is reflected in the ‘Protocols’. In the first part of his preface to ‘I Protocolli dei Savi Anziani di Sion’, he summarised the view he had expressed in the former and developed the ideas he had put forward in the latter ; they are supplemented, in its second part, by an analysis, from both practical and theoretical points of view, of the influence of the Jewish spirit in the economic and, especially, cultural fields, which echoes passages from ‘Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem’ and from ‘Presentation of the Jewish Problem’, while the parts dealing with the questions of the genesis of destructive Judaism, of the ‘Law’ and revolution, of Jewish hatred, and of the modern form of manifestation of Judaism, can be considered as anticipations of the ninth chapter of ‘Il mito del sangue’. The question of the ‘Protocols’ was also examined in ‘Men among the Ruins’.

The importance of this document, which Vita Italiana has just reprinted, cannot be sufficiently emphasised. It presents a spiritual ‘motivation’ like few others, it reveals unsuspected horizons, and it draws attention to fundamental problems related to action and to knowledge, which must not be neglected or postponed, especially in these decisive hours of Western history, on pain of seriously prejudicing the offensive of those who fight in the name of spirit, of tradition, and of true civilisation.

Two aspects particularly demand attention in the ‘Protocols’. The first concerns the Jewish question directly. The second has a more general importance, and leads us to tackle the problem of the true forces at work in history. For the reader to understand perfectly what we mean here, we think that it is suitable to bring forward certain considerations essential to a good orientation on this matter.

For this purpose, it is first necessary to examine the famous problem of the ‘authenticity’ of the document, on which certain parties have attempted tendentiously to focus all of the public’s attention, by means of which alone they endeavoured to determine the importance and the validity of the text. This is really a very childish approach (1). Obviously, one can simply deny the existence of any secret directive force behind historic events. But one cannot admit, even as a mere hypothesis, that there may be something of that sort, without acknowledging that it must then become necessary to do a kind of research very different from that which is based on ‘documentary evidence’ in the common sense. Here, as rightly pointed out by Guénon, lies the decisive point, which puts the question of ‘authenticity’ into perspective : the fact is that no truly and seriously secret organisation, whatever its nature, leaves behind written ‘documents’. It is only by inductive processes that the importance of texts such as the ‘Protocols’ can be determined. This means that the problem of their ‘authenticity’ is secondary to the far more serious and essential problem of their ‘veracity’, as was already emphasised by Giovani Preziosi when he published them for the first time seventeen years ago. The serious and positive conclusion of the whole controversy which has developed since is that, even if we assume that the ‘Protocols’ are not ‘authentic’ in the narrow sense, it comes to the same thing as if they were, for two capital and decisive reasons :

1) because the facts show that they describe the real state of affairs truthfully ;

2) because their correspondence with the governing ideas of both traditional and modern Judaism is indisputable.

As the Berne trial provoked by the ‘Protocols’ was widely talked about, we shall describe it here, so that the reader knows where he stands and does not let himself be influenced by tendentious reportage. The Berne trial was really just a manoeuvre on the part of international Judaism, which attempted to use Swiss justice, or, to put it better, Swiss marxist ‘justice’, to obtain a sort of official legal determination of the non-authenticity of the document which so troubles Israel. That it was really just a manoeuvre becomes clear from the very impossibility of raising the question of the authenticity of the ‘Protocols’ there. Basically, the Berne court admitted the complaint made by certain Israelite communities against a certain Silvio Schnell, who had distributed some copies of the German edition of the ‘Protocols’ in a nationalist meeting, on the basis of Article 14 of the law of the Canton of Berne regarding subversive and immoral literature. Starting from this basis, from a strictly legal point of view, the Berne court should not have taken any interest in the problem of the authenticity or otherwise of the ‘Protocols’, but should simply have decided whether the ‘Protocols’, irrespective of their truth or falsity, were or were not reprehensible according to the aforementioned law, as being likely to incite one part of the Swiss population against another. Judaism however distorted this requirement by focusing attention on the problem of authenticity, in order to reach the desired conclusion. In this respect, here is a significant declaration by the great Rabbi of Stockholm : “This is not a process against Schnell and his friends, but one of all the Israelites of the world against all their detractors. Seventy million Jews have their eyes fixed on Berne”.

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After a year of proceedings, the court of first instance ended up convicting Schnell, from which the Jews happily inferred that they had got rid of the ‘Protocols’. This was a short-lived triumph. In November 1937, the Berne court of appeal quashed the previous judgement, acquitted Schnell, ordered the plaintiff Jewish communities to pay costs, and declared itself incompetent to rule on the question of the authenticity of the ‘Protocols’.

But the question of authenticity had already been raised in the first hearing. For what results? Once again, negative ones. The Jewish front had tried to reach its objectives essentially by two means : by false testimonies and by the thesis of ‘plagiarism’. As we cannot go into detail here, we shall limit ourselves to the following remarks : a certain Madam Kolb, already sentenced for fraud and forgery as ‘Princess Radziwill’, declared, in a deposition skilfully devised in conjunction with one of her woman friends and a certain Comte du Chayla – a more than suspicious character, a paranoiac, adventurer and traitor, once sentenced to the death penalty, then pardoned – that the ‘Protocols’ were written in Paris about 1905 by three agents of the Russian secret police, with the intention of stirring up an anti-Semitic publicity campaign. However, the ‘Protocols’ were shown to have been in the possession of a certain Stepanoff in 1895, and of Nilus in 1902, and to have been published fully in the Russian newspaper ‘Znamja’ in 1903, i.e., two years before their purported compilation in Paris! Furthermore, it was proved that none of the three Russians named, to wit, Ratchkovsky, Manuellov and Golovinsky, were in Paris at the time when, according to Madam Kolb, they supposedly “invented” the ‘Protocols’.

The other means of attack was the charge of ‘plagiarism’. A serious misunderstanding arose here. Basically, the problem of the value of the ‘Protocols’ is quite different from that which might arise regarding a literary work, which could be settled by the examination of its originality and the right of someone to consider themselves its author. Here, the issue is totally dissimilar. The ‘Times’ had already raised the question of plagiarism in 1903, by pointing out that the text copies ideas and sentences from a pamphlet published in 1864 by a certain Joly (himself a half-Jew, a revolutionary and a Freemason) about the methods to be used in a Machiavellian policy of domination. This correspondence, or this ‘plagiarism’, is real, and not limited to the work of Joly, but applies to various other then existent works. However, what does this tell us? In deciding whether or not the ‘Protocols’ correspond to the program of world domination of an occult organisation, it makes no difference whether the author has composed and written them from start to finish, or whether, in the course of his composition, he has also used ideas and elements from other works, thus creating, from the literary standpoint, a ‘plagiarism’. The anti-Semitic controversy has already brought to light a whole series of ‘sources’ or antecedents to the ‘Protocols’, which generally draw their inspiration from a single current of ideas, and reflect, often in a ‘fictionalised’ form, the confused awareness of a truth. This truth is that the whole orientation of the modern world conforms to an established plan, as implemented by some mysterious organisation.

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Thus, the problem of ‘authenticity’ brings us back again to that of ‘veracity’. As far as ‘authenticity’ is concerned, the outcome of the trial of Berne is, as we have explained, negative : the prosecution did not succeed in proving that the ‘Protocols’ were false. But, legally, the defence is not required to prove the authenticity of an impugned document ; it is up to the prosecution to prove its falsity. But since, despite all the efforts of Judaism – the concerted testimonies, the thesis of ‘plagiarism’, the tendentious documents provided by the Soviets, the manoeuvres which succeeded in rendering all the documents of the defence inadmissible (at least, in the court of first instance), an extremely one-sided assessor’s report by Loosli, a notorious philo-Semite, and so on – they did not succeed in proving this falsity, the field is clear, and the question of ‘authenticity’ is liquidated, that is to say, it is once again subordinate to a double test of superior character, which is, let us repeat again : 1) the proof by the facts ; 2) the proof by the nature of the Jewish spirit.

Having given these clarifications, it is now possible to move on to the content of the ‘Protocols’.

They contain the plan for an occult war, whose objective is the utter destruction, in the non-Jewish peoples, of all tradition, class, aristocracy, and hierarchy, and of all moral, religious, or supra-material values. With this aim in view, an occult international organisation, directed by real leaders clearly conscious of their goals and of the methods to be followed to achieve them, would appear for a long time to have been exercising, and continuing to exercise, a unitary invisible action, which constitutes the source of the main forms of corruption of Western civilisation and society : liberalism, individualism, egalitarianism, free thought, anti-religious Enlightenment, and various additions which, following on from these, bring about the revolt of the masses and communism itself.

It is important to note that the absolute falsity of all these ideologies is expressly recognised : they are stated to have been created and propagated only as instruments of destruction and, in relation to Communism, the ‘Protocols’ go so far as to declare : “If we have been able to bring them to such a pitch of stupid blindness is it not a proof, and an amazingly clear proof, of the degree to which the mind of the GOYIM is undeveloped in comparison with our mind? This it is, mainly, which guarantees our success.” (Protocol XV).

Not only they talk about political ideologies which will have to be instilled without anyone being allowed to grasp their true meaning and their goal, but they talk also of a “science” created with the purpose of general demoralisation, and significant references are made to the scientistic superstition of ‘Progress’, to Darwinism, to Marxist and historicist sociology, and so on. “Goyim are no longer able to think, in the field of science, without our help”, while, once again, the falseness of all those theories is acknowledged (I, II, III, XIII).

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In the third place, we find discussion of a specifically cultural action : to dominate the principal centres of official teaching ; to control, through the monopoly of the popular press, public opinion ; to spread in the so-called leading countries an unhinged and equivocal literature (XIV) ; to provoke, therefore, as a counterpart of social defeatism, a moral defeatism, to be increased by an attack upon religious values and their representatives, to be carried out, not head-on and openly, but by stirring up criticism, mistrust, and discreditable rumours regarding the clergy (XVI, IV).

The ‘mercantilisation’ of life is indicated as being one of the principal means of destruction ; hence, also, the necessity of having a crowd of ‘economists’ as conscious or unconscious instruments of the secret chiefs. Once the spiritual values which were at the root of the former authority have been destroyed and replaced by mathematical calculations and material needs, all the peoples of the world must be brought to a universal war, in which it is assumed each will follow its own interests, and all will remain unaware of the common enemy (IV) ; finally, it is proposed to encourage the ideas of the various competing groups, and, instead of attacking them, to use them to realise the overall plan, so that a capacity for providing support for the most diverse conceptions, from the aristocratic and the totalitarian to the anarchist or socialist ones, is recognised, provided that the effects contribute to the common goal (V, XII). The necessity of destroying family life and its influence on spiritual education is also recognised (X), as is that of rendering the masses stupid by means of sport and distractions of all kinds, and stirring up their passionate and irrational tendencies to the point at which they lose any faculty of discrimination (XIII).

This is the first phase of the occult war : its goal is to create an enormous proletariat, to reduce the peoples to a mush of beings without tradition or inner strength. Then there is proposed a further action, on the basis of the power of gold. The secret chiefs will control gold globally, and, by means of it, all the peoples already deracinated, along with their apparent, more or less demagogic, leaders. While, on one hand, the destruction will proceed through ideological poisons, revolts, revolutions and conflicts of all sorts, the masters of gold will stir up crises of domestic economy everywhere, with the purpose of driving humanity to such a state of prostration, despair, and utter mistrust towards any ideal or system that it becomes a passive object in the hands of the invisible dominators, who will then manifest themselves, and impose themselves as absolute world-wide rulers. The King of Israel will be at their head, and the ancient promise of the Regnum of the ‘Chosen People’ will be achieved.

This is the essence of the ‘Protocols’. The more general problem which is connected to it has various aspects.

The Jew Disraeli once wrote these significant words : “The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by persons who are not behind the scenes.” The importance of the ‘Protocols’ consists, first and foremost, in arousing the suspicion, the presentiment, that history has a ‘third dimension’, that an ‘intelligence’ can be hidden behind apparent leaders and events, and that many presumed causes are only the effects of a subterranean influence. What the ‘Protocols’ say about a pseudo-scientific mentality, created solely with a pre-established plan in view, is particularly important ; the so-called ‘scientific’ or ‘historical’ way of looking at history falls exactly within this description, and aims to divert attention systematically from the plane where true causes come into play. Nothing is more significant than this passage from Protocol XV : “The purely brute mind of the GOYIM is incapable of use for analysis and observation, and still more for the foreseeing whither a certain manner of setting a question may tend. In this difference in capacity for thought between the GOYIM and ourselves may be clearly discerned the seal of our position as the Chosen People and of our higher quality of humanness, in contradistinction to the brute mind of the GOYIM. Their eyes are open, but see nothing before them and do not invent (unless perhaps, material things). From this it is plain that nature herself has destined us to guide and rule the world.” The same Protocol emphasises : “For the peoples of the world in regard to the secrets of our polity are ever through the ages only children under age, precisely as are also their governments.”

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It is not by chance that recent history shows us the phases of a systematic and progressive work of spiritual, political and cultural destruction, and, in this respect, the ‘Protocols’ offer us, to say the least, what a scientist would call a “working hypothesis”, that is, a basic idea whose truth is confirmed by its capacity to organise, via inductive research, a body of facts otherwise apparently unrelated and spontaneous, by bringing out their logic and their unique direction. This is the second aspect which must be borne in mind.

The fact is that the content of the ‘Protocols’, in its first part, which concerns the stages and the means of the destruction, corresponds in an impressive way to what has already unfolded, and continues to unfold, in recent history, as if the chiefs of the various governments, the apparent leaders of the various movements, and all those who made ‘history’ in the previous century, had only been the unconscious executors of a pre-established plan, announced a long time in advance, whether by that text or by others, as we have already mentioned. This is why Hugo Wast (Oro, Buenos Aires, 1935, p. 20) wrote : “The ‘Protocols’ may be false, but they are carried out wonderfully,” and Henry Ford, in the newspaper World, February 17, 1921 (2), wrote : “The only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on. They are sixteen years old and they have fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now”. Henry Ford refers here to the first edition, that of Nilus, but the anti-Semitic controversy has established that they date back to about twenty years earlier, and that the original document was known to Bismarck. History itself thus proves the veracity of the ‘Protocols’ in a manner that the accusations of their opponents cannot refute, and all the difficulties which ‘positive spirits’ claim to find, and which they assert change the terms of the problem, result not merely from superficiality but from outright irresponsibility – not from ‘objectivity’, but from prejudice.

Via capitalism, the mentality of the Ghetto spreads to the Aryan civilisations, which at the same time lays the foundation for the revolt of the working masses. In accordance with this, the Jews, Marx, Lassalle, Kautsky, and Trotsky, give the masses the most powerful ideological weapons, in the form of materialistic falsifications of the messianic myth, always subordinating the movement to a precise goal : the destruction of every last remnant of true order and of differentiated civilisation. Parallel occult tactics, to the same end, engender the most profound international conflicts, and Jewish financiers arm each militaristic front extensively, while, on the other hand, the Judaeo-Masonic ideology of liberalism and democracy prepares opportune coalitions. The world-wide conflict of 1914-18 breaks out, whose true signification, according to the official declarations of an international Masonic Congress which was held in Paris during the summer of 1917, was the holy war of democracy, “the crowning of the work of the French Revolution” (sic), which had in view not this or that territorial claim, but the destruction of the great European empires and the formation of the League of Nations as an omnipotent demo-masonic super-state. Judaeo-American capitalism finances the Russian Revolution (with which the English aristocracy was also involved) and, as, with the collapse of Russia, a first goal is reached, America intervenes directly, without any manifest reason, and the Central Empires meet the same fate as Russia.

After the war, revolutionary flames flare up everywhere, both in the vanquished nations and in the victorious ones, and the power of Judaism takes a phenomenal leap forward, through world-wide debt, through a secret tyranny in the Soviet state, and through the control of public opinion world-wide and general cultural influence. However, since the objectives of the revolt in Europe are not reached, they pass to a new phase.

The Third International abruptly changes tactics and allies itself, via the Popular Fronts, with the Second International and the great capitalist democracies, unveiling thus the framework of the secret war. After the failure of sanctions, all these things happen at once : the Soviets provoke the revolution in Spain, they ally themselves resolutely with Judaeo-Masonic France, and they assume, in co-operation with the secret anti-fascist politics of England, a guiding role in the League of Nations. Decisive alliances are prepared in this way. The reader will find an excellent reconstruction of the ‘occult war’ in a book by Malinski and de Poncins which is called, precisely, ‘La guerre occulte’, and in Vita Italiana’s article : ‘Is Israel provoking a war?’. This is indeed the prelude to the final stages of the plan of the ‘Protocols’. In reality, to adopt as working hypotheses the essential ideas of this ‘apocryphal’ manuscript is to find a reliable guide to the deeper unitary meaning of all the most important disruptions of recent times. This is why Adolf Hitler considered it to be undoubtedly the most powerful means of awakening the German people (3).

We can now move on to further considerations which demonstrate the veracity of the ‘Protocols’, not only as sigillum veri, but also as testimony to a specifically Jewish influence. Basically, even assuming that the subversion of the West has as its background some superior causality, we still have to prove strictly that the Jews are truly responsible for it. In other words, even assuming that the ‘Elders’ exist, we must ascertain whether they are really ‘Elders of Zion’, if we wish not to be suspected of making a tendentious interpretation, derived merely from a determination to hold the Jew responsible for any and all subversion and thus justify an extremist anti-Semitic campaign.

This is certainly a legitimate question, but only to the extent that we can ask it regarding an organisation which is ex hypothesi occult. In Freemasonry, even the highest dignitaries are unaware of exactly who their so-called ‘Unknown Superiors’, to whom they owe their obedience, actually are, and they could even stand right next to them without being able to identify them. We cannot therefore be expected to produce the duly authenticated identity cards of the ‘Elders’ in order to place the problems following on from the ‘Protocols’ into the context of the Jewish question. This however does not prevent us from arriving at a fairly precise ‘evidentiary process’.

Let us start by saying that we cannot support the sort of fanatical anti-Semitism which sees the Jew everywhere, as a deus ex machina, and finally falls into a sort of trap. In fact, as Guénon pointed out, one of the means of defence of the real concealed forces consists in drawing the whole of the attention of their adversaries tendentiously upon persons who are only partially responsible for certain upheavals, thus making them into scapegoats of a sort, on which all the reactions are discharged, and leaving themselves free to pursue their game. This is true, to some extent, in respect of the Jewish question. Merely noting the pernicious rôle that the Jew has played in the history of civilisation must not prejudice a deeper investigation, which can make us become aware of forces for which Judaism itself may have been, to some extent, only the instrument.

Besides, the ‘Protocols’ often speak imprecisely about Judaism and Freemasonry, so that one reads “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy”, “our divided Free-Masonry”, and at the bottom of the first edition : “signed by the representatives of Sion of the 33rd degree”. Since the theory that Freemasonry is exclusively a creation and instrument of Judaism is, for various reasons, untenable – see our ‘The relations between Freemasonry and Judaism’, in Vita Italiana, June 1937, where we show that the judaisation of Freemasonry occurred essentially in the eighteenth century – it follows that it is necessary to refer to a much larger network of corrupting occult forces, which we are even inclined to believe is not purely human. Besides, the principal ideologies indicated by the ‘Protocols’ as being instruments of destruction, which have indeed have this historical effect, viz., liberalism, individualism, scientism, and rationalism, are only the last links in a chain of causes which are unthinkable without antecedents such as, for instance, humanism, the Reformation, and Cartesianism, all of which are phenomena which no one would seriously think of ascribing to a Jewish conspiracy – except Nilus, insofar as, in an appendix to his edition of the ‘Protocols’, he makes the Jewish conspiracy date back to 929 B.C. (4).

Perhaps, though, Nilus perceived a certain truth, in a confused fashion. The various stages in the progress of the destructive Symbolic Snake, of which he informs us, are mostly perfectly real, but it is advisable to examine them in a far wider and more objective framework : the fall of ancient, sacral, Dorian Greece, and the coming of the ‘humanist’ Greece ; the degeneration of the Roman empire ; the degeneration into absolutism of the Sacred Empire of the German people with Charles V, and the Reformation ; the preparation of the French Revolution (Enlightenment, rationalism, absolutism) ; the anti-traditional manoeuvres of mercantile England ; the attacks upon Austria and the plots within Germany ; and the anticipation of Bolshevism, the point of arrival of the “serpent”. However, by contrast, we should remember that the positively destructive action of the international Jewish organisation developed in a more recent period, and that the Jews found a ground already undermined by processes of decomposition and involution, whose origins date back to very distant times, which are linked to a chain of very complex causes (cf. ‘The Crisis of the Modern World’, René Guénon ; ‘Revolt against the Modern World’, Julius Evola). They have used that ground, and, so to speak, grafted their own action onto it, accelerating the rhythm of these processes. Thus they cannot be solely responsible for the entire world-wide subversion. The ‘Elders of Zion’ are really a much more profound mystery than most of the anti-Semites, or those who, contrarily and for different reasons, reduce everything to Masonic internationalism or something of that sort, can imagine.

We feel that this caveat is eminently justified. However, having established this, the ‘presumption’ which we have indicated, and which constitutes the second basis of the veracity of the ‘Protocols’, is completely justified, and leads to very precise results.

Here, we must distinguish two aspects, the one practical, the other ideological. In practical terms, are we to imagine that so many events which ended as victories for Judaism, along with the infallible presence of Jews, half-Jews, or agents of Judaism in connivance with judaised Freemasonry, in all the principal seats of modern social, political and cultural subversion, are fortuitous? Are we to ignore the fact that Israel not only remained united, despite the dispersion, but that agents of Judaism, quoting almost literally the words of the ‘Protocols’, have recognised that such a dispersion has a providential character, since it facilitates the universal domination promised to Israel? And, let us not be mistaken, in this respect, there is also a unity which is quite different from the abstract and ideal unity. Israel, the unassimilable cell in every nation, the people within every people, and, in some cases, such as Czechoslovakia, even the state in the state, has its own supra-national parliament, with legitimate delegates elected by the Jews of each country, which regularly meets and takes decisions, without, obviously, being obliged to provide a complete and public report of these to any Goy who wishes for it. On the other hand, there is a domain within which suppositions and inductions give way to overwhelming statistics : the fact is that, wherever the Jews obtained emancipation and equality, they did not use it to establish normal relations with the Goyim, but to rise immediately to all the principal positions of responsibility and social privilege, and thus to develop, more or less visibly, real hegemony. Whether the principles of democracy and liberalism were created by the ‘Elders’, or not, the fact is that, in all countries and epochs in which those principles have prevailed, the Jew has pervaded, parasitically or tyrannically, the highest rungs of culture and society, where he has undeniably exercised a destructive and corrosive influence and has woven a cord of international racial solidarity which, leaving aside the plane of a true secret war, does have the character of a conspiracy. Is all this mere ‘chance’?

But this practical aspect of the Jewish influence is linked at its root to the theoretical problem. To present the Jewish problem properly, so as to understand the true danger of Judaism, it is necessary to work on the premise that what is fundamental to Judaism is not so much race (in the strictly biological sense) as the Law. ‘The Law’ means the Old Testament, the Torah, but also, and especially, its further developments, the Mishnah, and, finally, the Talmud. It was rightly said that, as Adam, the Jew was shaped by the Law, and the Law, by its age-old influence throughout the generations, has awakened special instincts, a special way of feeling, of reacting, of behaving, has passed into the blood, and has continued to act on the Jew without his even being directly conscious of it or wanting it. It is an essence, an incoercible way of being, which has allowed Israel to preserve its unity, and its principle, Jewish Law, the Talmudic spirit, persists and acts today, fatally, whether in an atavistic and unconscious manner, or in an occult manner, or in some other more or less tortuous manner.

Here another decisive proof of the veracity of the ‘Protocols’ as Jewish document becomes apparent, namely, that to draw from that Law all its logical consequences on the plane of action means, precisely, to arrive more or less at what is essential in the ‘Protocols’ : International Judaism has striven to prove that the ‘Protocols’ are ‘false’, while always taking great care to avoid the question of whether that document, true or false, corresponds to the Jewish spirit. And it is precisely that question which we would like to examine now. Jewish Law is based on the radical distinction between the Jew and the non-Jew, which is presented more or less in the same terms as that between human and animal, or that between élite and slaves ; from this is derived the promise that the universal Reign of Israel will come sooner or later, and that all peoples will have to submit to the sceptre of Judah ; it is the duty of the Jew to see only violence and injustice in any law which is not his Law, to manifest a torment, and a baseness, wherever his power is less than absolute ; from this is derived a double morality which limits solidarity to the Jewish race, while approving every form of lying, trickery, and treachery, in the relations between Jews and non-Jews, thus making the latter into outlaws ; finally we find the sanctification of gold and interest as instruments of the power of the Jew, to whom, by divine promise, all the wealth of the earth must peculiarly belong, and who must ‘devour’ any people that the Lord will give to him. The Talmud goes so far as to say : “Even the best of the non-Jews (goyim) deserve death.” In the Shemoneh Esreh, a Jewish daily prayer, one reads : “May the apostates lose all hope, the Nazareans and the Minim (The Christians) perish on the field, be erased from the book of life and have no contact with the righteous.”

“Limitless ambition, devouring thirst, blind desire of vengeance and excessive hate”, one can read in Protocol XI, and it is difficult to find a more fitting expression for what is revealed to the one who penetrates the Jewish essence. The hope of the Reign has never departed from the Jew, and within this hope lies the secret of the unheard-of force which has allowed Israel to persist and to remain true to its own nature throughout the centuries, tenacious, obstinate, proud and vile all at once. Even today, yearly, all the Jewish communities evoke the following promise during the celebration of Rosh Hashanah : “Raise your hands towards the sky and acclaim God while rejoicing, for Jehovah, the Most High, the terrible one, will bring all the nations to submission, and will prostrate them at your feet.” For these textual quotations, and for the declarations of the official representatives of Judaism, even today, we refer the reader to the May and June issues of ‘Vita Italiana’, and to ‘Fatti e Commenti’, as well as to the following works : E. Vries de Heekelingen : ‘Israël, son passé, son avenir’ (Paris, 1937) ; U. Fleischhauer : ‘Die Echten Protrokolle der Weisen von Zion’ (Erfurt, 1935) ; E. Jouin : ‘La judéo-maçonnerie et l’église catholique’ (Paris, 1921).

The reader will find in an appendix [not included here] specific documentation of textual quotations and declarations of representatives, including contemporary ones, of Judaism, of this Israelite ‘tradition’.

Thus, the theoretical convergence between the essence of the ‘Protocols’ and that of Judaism is indisputable, and we can infer that, even if the ‘Protocols’ are invented, the author has written what Jews faithful to their tradition and to the deep will of Israel would have thought and written.

One should not imagine, then, that this discussion is a matter of retrospective disinterment, and that the Law is merely a religious myth from a remote and ‘outdated’ past. Jews faithful to their tradition are far more numerous than is commonly believed, or than one is led to believe. But it is necessary to recognise that the influence of Judaism is not limited to these faithful : the influence of a law followed continuously for centuries does not vanish from one day to the next, but perpetually manifests itself, in one form or another, in any Jewish substance. According to what has been said above about the essence of the Law, which regards as unfair and violent any order which is not led by the ‘chosen people’, it follows necessarily that the Jew is prone, consciously or unconsciously, to all agitation or subversion, to a continuous project of corrosion. It is so today and so will it be forever. In the classical era, Jewry was already significantly assimilated to the ‘Typhonian’ stock, that is to say, to obscure disintegrative forces, enemies of the solar god, generators of the ‘sons of the powerless revolt’. Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism, recognised that the Jews, on one hand, always formed the body of non-commissioned officers, as it were, of revolutionary parties, and, on the other hand, always used the terrible power of gold in multifarious ways. The opposition between the two Internationals, the revolutionary one and the financial one, is only apparent,and merely expresses the nature of the two strategic objectives ; the Jewish millionaire, Schiff, who bragged publicly of having financed and brought about the Bolshevik revolution, is only one revealing case among many others, hidden behind the scenes of Western history. Again, the appendix [not included here] offers precious materials to the reader, to which can be added what ‘Vita Italiana’ has brought to light methodically since.

Attention should also be drawn to the destructive work which Judaism has accomplished, quite in accordance with the stipulations of the ‘Protocols’, in the specifically cultural field, where the destruction has become protected by the taboos of Science, Art, and Thought. Freud, whose theory aims to reduce internal life to instincts and unconscious forces, or to conventions and repressions, is a Jew ; Einstein, whose ‘relativism’ has become fashionable, is a Jew ; Lombroso, who has perversely equated genius, crime and madness, is a Jew, as are Stirner, the father of absolute anarchism, and Debussy (a half-Jew), Schönberg and Mahler, the main representatives of musical decadence. Tzara, creator of Dadaism, extreme limit of the disintegration of the so-called avant-garde, is a Jew, and so are Reinach and many representatives of the sociological school, which is characterised by a degrading interpretation of ancient religions. Nordau, who wants to reduce the essence of civilisation to conventions and lies, is also a Jew. The ‘primitive mentality’ is to a large extent a discovery of the Jew Levy-Brühl, and it is to the Jew Bergson that we owe one of the most striking forms of irrationalism, the exaltation of ‘life’ and ‘becoming’ at the expense of any higher intellectual principle. Ludwig, whose biography contains so many tendentious distortions, is a Jew. Wassermann and Döblin are Jews, as well as a whole series of novelists within whose works corrosive and mordant criticism of essential social values can always be found. And so on. Are we so naïve as to consider all this, once again, a matter of ‘chance’? The same influence emanates from all those personalities, whose destructive effect propagates itself in their respective domains, and one can hear cries of ‘barbarism’ and ‘fanatical racism’ as soon as they are impugned. To debase, to make all fixed points variable, to make all certainties problematic, to sensualise, to tendentiously exalt what is inferior in man, to spread a sort of terror, calculated to favour self-abandonment to obscure forces and to pave the way for occult influences of the sort described in the ‘Protocols’ ; this is the true meaning of cultural Judaism. We do not think that there is a genuine plan here, or even a precise intention on the part of every individual ; what comes into play is ‘race’, i.e., an instinct ; in the same way, it is in the nature of fire to burn. The fact remains that the whole, disorganised, unconscious influence is in perfect accord with the occult, integral, unitary influence of the hidden forces of world-wide subversion. In order to recognise the existence of international Judaism, it is not therefore necessary to assert that all Jews are led by a genuine organisation, and that their whole action consciously follows a plan. The link is established to a large extent automatically, by nature. Once this becomes clear, another aspect of the veracity of the ‘Protocols’ is confirmed immediately.

What is debatable, however, is the true nature of the main goals of that indisputable influence. The problematic part of the ‘Protocols’ is that which deals with reconstruction, not with destruction. When Nilus compares, in an apocalyptic tone, the principal ideal of the ‘Protocols’ to the coming of the anti-Christ (the obsession of the Slavic soul), he simply raves. The truth is that this ideal, basically, is the imperial ideal, no more and no less – and even in a higher form : an absolute and inviolable authority of divine right, a system of classes, a government of men who possess a transcendent knowledge and make light of all the rationalist, liberal and humanitarian myths ; defence of craft industry, and struggle against luxuriousness. Gold, once its mission is carried out, will be overcome, as will be demagoguery, all the ‘immortal principles’, and all the illusions and suggestions used and spread as means. There remains a promise of peace and liberty, respect of property and person, for whomsoever recognises the Law of the Elders of Zion. The sovereign, chosen by God, will dedicate himself to the destruction of all ideas dictated by instinct and animality ; a personification, in a way, of destiny, he will be inaccessible to passion, and master of himself and of the world around him ; his power will be so unshakeable that he will not need an armed guard about him (III, XXII, XXIII, XXIV).

The ‘Protocols’ lose much of their significance if one does not separate that part from the rest, for, if that was their true goal, they could basically receive a justification. But, to us, all that is fantasy. We have tried, instead, to analyse the process which has led to the paradoxical association between these revivals of traditional ideas, linked to the ideal of the ‘Regnum’, and the motifs of anti-traditional subversion : here, we see rather a deviation, culminating in a true ‘inversion’, of certain elements from which the original spirit has withdrawn ; elements which, left to themselves, have come under the influence of forces of a quite different kind. We have tried elsewhere to determine the successive phases of this inversion and perversion (see our ‘Trasformazioni del Regnum’, in Vita Italiana, November 1937). The positive part, which we have traced in the ‘Protocols’, is that from which we have shown how, in all the destructive processes of the modern world, there is something which did not happen ‘by chance’, something which shows a ‘plan’ and the presence of hidden forces. We have already talked about the rôle which the Jew has played therein, and we think that it is wrong to conclude that everything he has done, he has done with the ideal of the spiritual empire, as described in the ‘Protocols’, in view. And even if this were not the case, for us who are not Jewish, the result would be the same, for we dispute Israel’s right to consider itself as the ‘chosen people’ and to claim an Empire which would imply the submission of all the other races. We are in no way willing to grant absolution for this crime. We know all the greatness of our former imperial, aristocratic and spiritual Europe, and we know that that greatness was destroyed. We fought against the forces which caused that destruction, and we know what rôle the Jews played then, and play now, within it, and we know that they can be found necessarily, today, in all the most virulent centres of international revolution. Our knowledge regarding this does not in itself require us to pose for ourselves any additional questions. We do however acknowledge that most anti-Semitic positions are not up to the true task, since, by the idea of race, of nation, of anti-revolution, of anti-Bolshevism, of anti-capitalism, this or that sector of the Jewish front and of the vaster front of subversion to which it is linked, can certainly be affected, but we will not reach its centre. The political myths of the majority do not count for much, their breath is short, their validity is often affected by the evils which they hope to cure. What is necessary is the full return to the spiritual idea of the empire, the precise, hard, absolute, will of a truly traditional reconstruction in every domain, and, therefore, first, in that of the spirit, on which all the rest depends. Protocol V contains a really significant remark, recognising that only a Sovereign drawing his authority from a ‘divine right’ can really aspire to universal empire, and the ‘Protocols’ add that only someone similar appearing in the opposite front would be in a position to fight the ‘Elders of Zion’ ; and then the conflict between him and them “would be of such a nature that the world had never known its like.”

The ‘Protocols’ conclude : “But it is too late for them” – i.e., for us. Our view is the opposite of this. At the present time, forces are leaping everywhere to the reconquest, because the destiny to which Europe seemed condemned may be averted. These forces must be completely conscious of the tasks and principles which inflexibly determine their action, and must have the courage to be radical, firstly on the spiritual plane, and to reject all compromise, to prepare the conditions of the formation of an international traditional front, and continue in this direction until the conflict “of such a nature that the world has never known its like” finds them united in a single robust, unshakeable, irresistible block.

Julius EVOLA

(1) Comte Alexandre du Chayla was a French aristocrat who converted to orthodoxy and subsequently fought in the White army against the Bolsheviks. In 1909 he met Nilus, who showed him the ‘original’ of the document and later said that the question of its authenticity did not matter much to him : “Let’s admit,” he told du Chayla, “that the ‘Protocols’ are false. However, can’t God use them to unveil the iniquity of what is brewing? Can’t God, because of our good faith, turn dog’s bones into miraculous relics? He can thus put into a lying mouth the heralding of truth!”

(2) The title of this newspaper is actually New York World.

(3) “… The extent to which the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week : this is the best proof that they are authentic. […] The important thing is that, with positively terrifying certainty, they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people, and expose their inner contexts, as well as their ultimate final aims.” (A. Hitler, ‘Mein Kampf’). Alfred Rosenberg, in his ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Jewish World Politics’, published in Munich in 1923, concludes that “Today’s politics is true in every detail to the quotations and to the plan exposed in the ‘Protocols’.”

(4) Yet, in ‘La scienza ebraica, la teoria della relatività e la “catarsi demoniaca”‘ (Vita Italiana, May 1940), Evola, under the pen-name ‘Arthos’, brought to light “the relations which have existed since the most ancient times between Judaism and the inclination to an abstract and lifeless mathematical speculation”, and noted that “that relation, in its turn, brings us back to an opposition between general world-outlooks, and originates in that denial of the world as cosmos, as organic and living unity, which characterised the Semite as opposed to the Aryan”. More concretely, he added that “it can be noted that algebra and arithmetics were brought to the West by the Semites and the Arabs ; the numbers which allow algebraic operations are precisely those called ‘Arabic’, and unknown, for instance, to the Romans, who had their own methods of calculation – since, obviously, with Roman numbers it is impossible to perform the most basic arithmetical operations known to everyone today”. Ourselves, we don’t find these considerations, which can be developed to enable us to conclude that modern so-called ‘Western science’ would not have been possible without a Semitic contribution, particularly ludicrous.