PROTOCOL NUMBER SEVENTEEN


1. In order to effect the destruction of all collective
forces except ours we shall emasculate the first stage of
collectivism - the universities, by re-educating them in a
new direction. Their officials and professors will be
prepared for their business by detailed secret programs of
action from which they will not with immunity diverge, not
by one iota. They will be appointed with especial
precaution, and will be so placed as to be wholly dependent
upon the government.

2. We shall exclude from the course of instruction State Law
as also all that concerns the political question. These
subjects will be taught to a few dozen of persons chosen for
their pre-eminent capacities from among the number of the
initiated. The universities must no longer send out from
their halls milk sops concocting plans for a constitution,
like a comedy or a tragedy, busying themselves with
questions of policy in which even their own fathers never
had any power of thought.

3. The ill-guided acquaintance of a large number of persons
with questions of polity creates utopian dreamers and bad
subjects, as you can see for yourselves from the example of
the universal education in this direction of the goyim. We
must introduce into their education all those principles
which have so brilliantly broken up their order. But when we
are in power we shall remove every kind of disturbing
subject from the course of education and shall make out of
the youth obedient children of authority, loving him who
rules as the support and hope of peace and quiet.

WE SHALL CHANGE HISTORY:

4. Classicism as also any form of study of ancient history,
in which there are more bad than good examples, we shall
replace with the study of the program of the future. We
shall erase from the memory of men all facts of previous
centuries which are undesirable to us, and leave only those
which depict all the errors of the government of the goyim.
The study of practical life, of the obligations of order, of
the relations of people one to another, of avoiding bad and
selfish examples, which spread the infection of evil, and
similar questions of an educative nature, will stand in the
forefront of the teaching program, which will be drawn up on
a separate plan for each calling or state of life, in no
wise generalizing the teaching. This treatment of the
question has special importance.

5. Each state of life must be trained within strict limits
corresponding to its destination and work in life. The
occasional genius has always managed and always will manage
to slip through into other states of life, but it is the
most perfect folly for the sake of this rare occasional
genius to let through into ranks foreign to them the
untalented who thus rob of their places who belong to those
ranks by birth or employment. You know yourselves in what
all this has ended for the "goyim" who allowed this crying
absurdity.

6. In order that he who rules may be seated firmly in the
hearts and minds of his subjects it is necessary for the
time of his activity to instruct the whole nation in the
schools and on the market places about this meaning and his
acts and all his beneficent initiatives.

7. We shall abolish every kind of freedom of instruction.
Learners of all ages have the right to assemble together
with their parents in the educational establishments as it
were in a club: during these assemblies, on holidays,
teachers will read what will pass as free lectures on
questions of human relations, of the laws of examples, of
the philosophy of new theories not yet declared to the
world. These theories will be raised by us to the stage of a
dogma of faith as a traditional stage towards our faith. On
the completion of this exposition of our program of action
in the present and the future I will read you the principles
of these theories.

8. In a word, knowing by the experience of many centuries
that people live and are guided by ideas, that these ideas
are imbibed by people only by the aid of education provided
with equal success for all ages of growth, but of course by
varying methods, we shall swallow up and confiscate to our
own use the last scintilla of independence of thought, which
we have for long past been directing towards subjects and
ideas useful for us. The system of bridling thought is
already at work in the so-called system of teaching by
object lessons, the purpose of which is to turn the goyim
into unthinking submissive brutes waiting for things to be
presented before their eyes in order to form an idea of them
.... In France, one of our best agents, Bourgeois, has
already made public a new program of teaching by object
lessons.1. The practice of advocacy produces men cold, cruel,
persistent, unprincipled, who in all cases take up an
impersonal, purely legal standpoint. They have the
inveterate habit to refer everything to its value for the
defense and not to the public welfare of its results. They
do not usually decline to undertake any defense whatever,
they strive for an acquittal at all costs, caviling over
every petty crux of jurisprudence and thereby they
demoralize justice. For this reason we shall set this
profession into narrow frames which will keep it inside this
sphere of executive public service. Advocates, equally with
judges, will be deprived of the right of communication with
litigant; they well receive business only from the court and
will study it by notes of report and documents, defending
their clients after they have been interrogated in court on
facts that have appeared. They will receive an honorarium
without regard to the quality of the defense. This will
render them mere reporters on law-business in the interests
of justice and as counterpoise to the proctor who will be
the reporter in the interests of prosecution; this will
shorten business before the courts. In this way will be
established a practice of honest unprejudiced defense
conducted not from personal interest but by conviction. This
will also, by the way, remove the present practice of
corrupt bargain between advocation to agree only to let that
side win which pays most .....

WE SHALL DESTROY THE CLERGY:

2. We have long past taken care to discredit the priesthood
of "goyim," and thereby to ruin their mission on earth which
in these days might still be a great hindrance to us. Day by
day its influence on the peoples of the world is falling
lower. Freedom of conscience has been declared everywhere,
so that now only years divide us from the moment of the
complete wrecking of that Christian religion: as to other
religions we shall have still less difficulty in dealing
with them, but it would be premature to speak of this now.
We shall act clericalism and clericals into such narrow
frames as to make their influence move in retrogressive
proportion to its former progress.

3. When the time comes finally to destroy the papal court
the finger of an invisible hand will point the nations
towards this court. When, however, the nations fling
themselves upon it, we shall come forward in the guise of
its defenders as if to save excessive bloodshed. By this
diversion we shall penetrate to its very bowels and be sure
we shall never come out again until we have gnawed through
the entire strength of this place.

4. The king of the Jews will be the real pope of the
universe, the patriarch of the international church.

5. But, in the meantime, while we are re-educating youth in
new traditional religions and afterwards in ours, we shall
not overtly lay a finger on existing churches, but we shall
fight against them by criticism calculated to produce schism
....

6. In general, then, our contemporary press will continue to
convict State affairs, religions, incapacities of the goyim,
always using the most unprincipled expressions in order by
every means to lower their prestige in the manner which can
only be practiced by the genius of our gifted tribe ....

7. Our kingdom will be an apologia of the divinity Vishnu,
in whom is found its personification - in our hundred hands
will be, one in each, the springs of the machinery of social
life. We shall see everything without the aid of official
police which, in that scope of its rights which we
elaborated for the use of the goyim, hinders governments
from seeing. In our programs one-third of our subjects will
keep the rest under observation from a sense of duty, on the
principle of volunteer service to the State. It will then be
no disgrace to be a spy and informer, but a merit: unfounded
denunciations, however, will be cruelly punished that there
may be development of abuses of this right.

8. Our agents will be taken from the higher as well as the
lower ranks of society, from among the administrative class
who spend their time in amusements, editors, printers and
publishers, booksellers, clerks, and salesmen, workmen,
coachmen, lackeys, et cetera. This body, having no rights
and not being empowered to take any action on their own
account, and consequently a police without any power, will
only witness and report: verification of their reports and
arrests will depend upon a responsible group of controllers
of police affairs, while the actual act of arrest will be
performed by the gendarmerie and the municipal police. Any
person not denouncing anything seen or heard concerning
questions of polity will also be charged with and made
responsible for concealment, if it be proved that he is
guilty of this crime.

9. Just as nowadays our brethren, are obliged at their own
risk to denounce to the Kabal apostates of their own family
or members who have been noticed doing anything in
opposition to the Kabal, so in our kingdom over all the
world it will be obligatory for all our subjects to observe
the duty of service to the state in this direction.

10. Such an organization will extirpate abuses of authority,
of force, of bribery, everything in fact which we by our
counsels, by out theories of the superhuman rights of man,
have introduced into the customs of the goyim .... But how
else were we to procure that increase of causes predisposing
to disorders in the midst of their administration? ....
Among the number of those methods one of the most important
is - agents for the restoration of order, so placed as to
have the opportunity in their disintegrating activity of
developing and displaying their evil inclinations -
obstinate self-conceit, irresponsible exercise of authority,
and, first and foremost, venality.

Go To Protocol Number Eighteen . . .