The Protocols of the Wise Elders of Zion: Protocol One

PROTOCOL NUMBER ONE

1. ....Putting aside fine phrases we shall speak of the
significance of each thought: by comparisons and deductions
we shall throw light upon surrounding facts.

2. What I am about to set forth, then, is our system from
the two points of view, that of ourselves and that of the
goyim [i.e., non- Jews].

3. It must be noted that men with bad instincts are more in
number than the good, and therefore the best results in
governing them are attained by violence and terrorisation,
and not by academic discussions. Every man aims at power,
everyone would like to become a dictator if only he could,
and rare indeed are the men who would not be willing to
sacrifice the welfare of all for the sake of securing their
own welfare.

4. What has restrained the beasts of prey who are called
men? What has served for their guidance hitherto?

5. In the beginnings of the structure of society, they were
subjected to brutal and blind force; after words - to Law,
which is the same force, only disguised. I draw the
conclusion that by the law of nature right lies in force.

6. Political freedom is an idea but not a fact. This idea
one must know how to apply whenever it appears necessary
with this bait of an idea to attract the masses of the
people to one's party for the purpose of crushing another
who is in authority. This task is rendered easier of the
opponent has himself been infected with the idea of freedom,
so-called liberalism, and, for the sake of an idea, is
willing to yield some of his power. It is precisely here
that the triumph of our theory appears; the slackened reins
of government are immediately, by the law of life, caught up
and gathered together by a new hand, because the blind might
of the nation cannot for one single day exist without
guidance, and the new authority merely fits into the place
of the old already weakened by liberalism.

GOLD:

7. In our day the power which has replaced that of the
rulers who were liberal is the power of Gold. Time was when
Faith ruled. The idea of freedom is impossible of
realization because no one knows how to use it with
moderation. It is enough to hand over a people to
self-government for a certain length of time for that people
to be turned into a disorganized mob. From that moment on we
get internecine strife which soon develops into battles
between classes, in the midst of which States burn down and
their importance is reduced to that of a heap of ashes.

8. Whether a State exhausts itself in its own convulsions,
whether its internal discord brings it under the power of
external foes - in any case it can be accounted
irretrievable lost: It is in our power. The despotism of
Capital, which is entirely in our hands, reaches out to it a
straw that the State, willy-nilly, must take hold of: if not
- it goes to the bottom.

9. Should anyone of a liberal mind say that such reflections
as the above are immoral, I would put the following
questions: If every State has two foes and if in regard to
the external foe it is allowed and not considered immoral to
use every manner and art of conflict, as for example to keep
the enemy in ignorance of plans of attack and defense, to
attack him by night or in superior numbers, then in what way
can the same means in regard to a worse foe, the destroyer
of the structure of society and the commonweal, be called
immoral and not permissible?

10. Is it possible for any sound logical mind to hope with
any success to guide crowds by the aid of reasonable
counsels and arguments, when any objection or contradiction,
senseless though it may be, can be made and when such
objection may find more favor with the people, whose powers
of reasoning are superficial? Men in masses and the men of
the masses, being guided solely by petty passions, paltry
beliefs, traditions and sentimental theorems, fall a prey to
party dissension, which hinders any kind of agreement even
on the basis of a perfectly reasonable argument. Every
resolution of a crowd depends upon a chance or packed
majority, which, in its ignorance of political secrets, puts
forth some ridiculous resolution that lays in the
administration a seed of anarchy.

11. The political has nothing in common with the moral. The
ruler who is governed by the moral is not a skilled
politician, and is therefore unstable on his throne. He who
wishes to rule must have recourse both to cunning and to
make-believe. Great national qualities, like frankness and
honesty, are vices in politics, for they bring down rulers
from their thrones more effectively and more certainly than
the most powerful enemy. Such qualities must be the
attributes of the kingdoms of the goyim, but we must in no
wise be guided by them.

RIGHT IS MIGHT:

12. Our right lies in force. The word "right" is an abstract
thought and proved by nothing. The word means no more than:
Give me what I want in order that thereby I may have a proof
that I am stronger than you.

13. Where does right begin? Where does it end?

14. In any State in which there is a bad organization of
authority, an impersonality of laws and of the rulers who
have lost their personality amid the flood of rights ever
multiplying out of liberalism, I find a new right - to
attack by the right of the strong, and to scatter to the
winds all existing forces of order and regulation, to
reconstruct all institutions and to become the sovereign
lord of those who have left to us the rights of their power
by laying them down voluntarily in their liberalism.

15. Our power in the present tottering condition of all
forms of power will be more invincible than any other,
because it will remain invisible until the moment when it
has gained such strength that no cunning can any longer
undermine it.

16. Out of the temporary evil we are now compelled to commit
will emerge the good of an unshakable rule, which will
restore the regular course of the machinery of the national
life, brought to naught by liberalism. The result justifies
the means. Let us, however, in our plans, direct our
attention not so much to what is good and moral as to what
is necessary and useful.

17. Before us is a plan in which is laid down strategically
the line from which we cannot deviate without running the
risk of seeing the labor of many centuries brought to
naught.

18. In order to elaborate satisfactory forms of action it is
necessary to have regard to the rascality, the slackness,
the instability of the mob, its lack of capacity to
understand and respect the conditions of its own life, or
its own welfare. It must be understood that the might of a
mob is blind, senseless and un- reasoning force ever at the
mercy of a suggestion from any side. The blind cannot lead
the blind without bringing them into the abyss;
consequently, members of the mob, upstarts from the people
even though they should be as a genius for wisdom, yet
having no understanding of the political, cannot come
forward as leaders of the mob without bringing the whole
nation to ruin.

19. Only one trained from childhood for independent rule can
have understanding of the words that can be made up of the
political alphabet.

20. A people left to itself, i.e., to upstarts from its
midst, brings itself to ruin by party dissensions excited by
the pursuit of power and honors and the disorders arising
therefrom. Is it possible for the masses of the people
calmly and without petty jealousies to form judgment, to
deal with the affairs of the country, which cannot be mixed
up with personal interest? Can they defend themselves from
an external foe? It is unthinkable; for a plan broken up
into as many parts as there are heads in the mob, loses all
homogeneity, and thereby becomes unintelligible and
impossible of execution.

WE ARE DESPOTS:

21. It is only with a despotic ruler that plans can be
elaborated extensively and clearly in such a way as to
distribute the whole properly among the several parts of the
machinery of the State: from this the conclusion is
inevitable that a satisfactory form of government for any
country is one that concentrates in the hands of one
responsible person. Without an absolute despotism there can
be no existence for civilization which is carried on not by
the masses but by their guide, whosoever that person may be.
The mob is savage, and displays its savagery at every
opportunity. The moment the mob seizes freedom in its hands
it quickly turns to anarchy, which in itself is the highest
degree of savagery.

22. Behold the alcoholic animals, bemused with drink, the
right to an immoderate use of which comes along with
freedom. It is not for us and ours to walk that road. The
peoples of the goyim are bemused with alcoholic liquors;
their youth has grown stupid on classicism and from early
immorality, into which it has been inducted by our special
agents - by tutors, lackeys, governesses in the houses of
the wealthy, by clerks and others, by our women in the
places of dissipation frequented by the goyim. In the number
of these last I count also the so-called "society ladies,"
voluntary followers of the others in corruption and luxury.

23. Our countersign is - Force and Make-believe. Only force
conquers in political affairs, especially if it be concealed
in the talents essential to statesmen. Violence must be the
principle, and cunning and make-believe the rule for
governments which do not want to lay down their crowns at
the feet of agents of some new power. This evil is the one
and only means to attain the end, the good. Therefore we
must not stop at bribery, deceit and treachery when they
should serve towards the attainment of our end. In politics
one must know how to seize the property of others without
hesitation if by it we secure submission and sovereignty.

24. Our State, marching along the path of peaceful conquest,
has the right to replace the horrors of war by less
noticeable and more satisfactory sentences of death,
necessary to maintain the terror which tends to produce
blind submission. Just but merciless severity is the
greatest factor of strength in the State: not only for the
sake of gain but also in the name of duty, for the sake of
victory, we must keep to the programme of violence and
make-believe. The doctrine of squaring accounts is precisely
as strong as the means of which it makes use. Therefore it
is not so much by the means themselves as by the doctrine of
severity that we shall triumph and bring all governments
into subjection to our super-government. It is enough for
them to know that we are too merciless for all disobedience
to cease.

WE SHALL END LIBERTY:

25. Far back in ancient times we were the first to cry among
the masses of the people the words "Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity," words many times repeated since these days by
stupid poll- parrots who, from all sides around, flew down
upon these baits and with them carried away the well-being
of the world, true freedom of the individual, formerly so
well guarded against the pressure of the mob. The would-be
wise men of the goyim, the intellectuals, could not make
anything out of the uttered words in their abstractedness;
did not see that in nature there is no equality, cannot be
freedom: that Nature herself has established inequality of
minds, of characters, and capacities, just as immutably as
she has established subordination to her laws: never stopped
to think that the mob is a blind thing, that upstarts
elected from among it to bear rule are, in regard to the
political, the same blind men as the mob itself, that the
adept, though he be a fool, can yet rule, whereas the
non-adept, even if he were a genius, understands nothing in
the political - to all those things the goyim paid no
regard; yet all the time it was based upon these things that
dynastic rule rested: the father passed on to the son a
knowledge of the course of political affairs in such wise
that none should know it but members of the dynasty and none
could betray it to the governed. As time went on, the
meaning of the dynastic transference of the true position of
affairs in the political was lost, and this aided the
success of our cause.

26. In all corners of the earth the words "Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity," brought to our ranks, thanks to our
blind agents, whole legions who bore our banners with
enthusiasm. And all the time these words were canker-worms
at work boring into the well-being of the goyim, putting an
end everywhere to peace, quiet, solidarity and destroying
all the foundations of the goyA States. As you will see
later, this helped us to our triumph: it gave us the
possibility, among other things, of getting into our hands
the master card - the destruction of the privileges, or in
other words of the very existence of the aristocracy of the
goyim, that class which was the only defense peoples and
countries had against us. On the ruins of the eternal and
genealogical aristocracy of the goyim we have set up the
aristocracy of our educated class headed by the aristocracy
of money. The qualifications for this aristocracy we have
established in wealth, which is dependent upon us, and in
knowledge, for which our learned elders provide the motive
force.

27. Our triumph has been rendered easier by the fact that in
our relations with the men, whom we wanted, we have always
worked upon the most sensitive chords of the human mind,
upon the cash account, upon the cupidity, upon the
insatiability for material needs of man; and each one of
these human weaknesses, taken alone, is sufficient to
paralyze initiative, for it hands over the will of men to
the disposition of him who has bought their activities.

28. The abstraction of freedom has enabled us to persuade
the mob in all countries that their government is nothing
but the steward of the people who are the owners of the
country, and that the steward may be replaced like a
worn-out glove.

29. It is this possibility of replacing the representatives
of the people which has placed at our disposal, and, as it
were, given us the power of appointment.

Go To Protocol Number Two . . .