Thursday 10 May 2012

The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, where did they come from? Who wrote them?

(Continued from Part I)

6. Was it a Forgery …

In 1921, forgery claims appeared in papers of New York, Paris and London. The trouble was, the incoherence and implausibility of these stories, itself apeared as evidence against the ‘forgery’ claim.  The first of these appeared in the New York American Hebrew of 25 February, featuring testimony by the rather notorious Catherine Radziwill (1), a Russian princess. She claimed to have been living on the Champs-Elysees in Paris in 1904 (but, she never did (2)), when a member of the Russian secret police came by and showed her the French original of the Protocols he was just forging. Did he show it to a society gossip like Ms Radziwill, who had just been jailed for two years on charges of fraud and theft? That reminded her of an earlier draft of the same document she had been given in 1885! (3)

The next forgery claim appeared in a Paris newspaper, a testimony by Count Alexander du Chayla, entitled Nilus and the Zionist Protocols on May 12th. (NB, in no way can the Protocols be described as ‘Zionist’) Du Chayla, who had been paid to write this text, impugned the character of Sergius Nilus, claiming Nilus had obtained them via the Russian Okhrana secret police, (4) and had known the Protocols were a forgery when he published them. But, we may wonder, would the Russian police really want to entrust this prized document to a Russian monk, who would do nothing with it for several years? (5) Would they really want to rely upon him, to translate it back into Russian? Such claims contradict the preface with which Nilus accompanied the work. Lord Sydenham in a letter to the Spectator of 1921, wrote of Nilus: ‘He was I have been told by a Russian lady, absolutely incapable either of writing any portion of the Protocols, or of being a party to a fraud;’ Lord Sydenham expressed puzzlement that no-one had translated Nilus’ 1805 book from the Russian, which contained the Protocols as one chapter, as would ‘give some idea of the man.’(6)  

Next, The Times (16-18 August 1921) revealed the important fact that the Maurice Joly text of 1864 had overlaps with the Protocols - but it hugely exaggerated the claim, averring that there was little in the Protocols not found in the Joly text. It had its Constantinople correspondent discover the Joly text. As Makow points out, this was deception, which only worked because at that time the Joly text was generally unavailable: ‘Napoleon III’s police had seized it.’(7) 

On the 100th anniversary of the Protocols’ publication, there would appear to have been no better story available, for the Protocols’ origin, than that of Ms Radziwill: her account in The American Hebrew provided the main story, many years later, for The Lie that Wouldn’t Die by Israeli lawyer Hadassa Ben-Itto (2005). This book forgets to mention that Ms Radziwill was convicted several times of fraud and forgery (8), or that French author André Marois called her a “mythomaniac,” concluding: ‘in her life, everything was only deception and lies’ (9). It described how Radziwill’s story fell into two parts, twenty years apart: first 1885, then 1905. Firstly, in 1885 the Okhrana sent unnamed agents to Paris to draft the document, i.e. it was composed by nameless police bureaucrats, Russians writing in French; then, an attempt to convey it to the Emperor fails (would it really be the role of the police to concoct a false document then try to delude the Emperor with it?). It then gets shelved for twenty years. The point of composing it in the first place remains unclear, though at one point Ms Ben-Itto explains, ‘the objective being the wholesale expulsion of the Jews from Russia’ echoing Ms Radziwill’s New York claim. Why would Russian police want to do that, and if they did, why compose it in French? The authoress here even concedes: ‘Who would believe that Russians in Paris had forged a document in French to be published in Russia in the Russian language? It all seemed illogical and unrealistic.’ (p.80) Indeed it does, and had she pondered this a bit longer she might have refrained from writing her book. Why go to all the bother of concocting such an inflammatory manuscript, then leave it on a shelf for twenty years?

In 1905, a need was experienced ‘to develop and enlarge the original into a better and more modern form’ and so, despite the old text being stored in a Russian archive, Russian agents again get sent to Paris to update the text - during which the Russian police agent gets to show the document to Princess Radziwill, showing her the top-secret forgery.

She narrated this story in 1921 in New York, unaware that the Protocols had actually been published in 1903, a fact which kills her tale. Should not The Lie that Wouldn’t Die have just mentioned this? Later on, it narrated the account of Du Chayla, as he gave it at a trial in 1933-5 in Berne, which has the Protocols ‘forged abroad sometime between 1896 and 1900’ (p.293). Should not this contradiction of the earlier story have bothered her? One reviewer observed of this book, ‘The result is a peculiar mix of fact and fiction, a kind of historical novel with invented episodes, dialogues, and inner monologues. The book was enormously successful among critics.’(10) We’re here in a realm of comic-book storyland, and synchronously enough a bestselling comic did appear in 2005 to spread the message.(11)

Comic: Can you spot the fallacy? Copies of Joly’s book had all been confiscated, The Times had to go to Constantinople in 1921 to find a copy.


… or a Prophecy?

1920: Henry Ford commented: ‘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.’ (Dearborn Independent July 10.
1921: ‘Are they a forgery? But how can one explain then this terrible prophetic gift that foretold all this before hand?   The Times, 8 May.(12)
1991 Milton Cooper, in his conspiracy classic Behold a Pale Horse reprinted the Protocols, and added: ‘Every aspect of the plan to subjugate the world has since become reality, validating the authority of conspiracy.’ p.267.
2009: Henry Makow, Illuminati:The authenticity of the Protocols is self-evident to any informed individual with an open mind. They describe the world we live in’.
2012: Web-philosopher Kevin Boyle has described the Protocols as ‘a work of genius written (obviously from experience) by a banking oligarch that describes our modern condition with an accuracy and clarity that no mainstream public commentator comes close to matching.’
That’s over a century after they appeared!  


7. If ....

If such a sinister plot did exist, then it would have affected the process of disclosure, whereby the Protocols emerged into the light of day. Let’s take a closer look.
1878  The first person to write about what is considered to be the Protocols content, was Maurice Joly, who shoots himself 14 years after writing his text. What did he see? Had he seen its very Source?
1884    Mr Joseph Schorst like Joly was a member of the Mizraim ‘Grand Orient’ Masonic Lodge in Paris. He steals a copy of the great secret. He is the Betrayer of the Protocols, and tries to save himself by fleeing to Egypt, but is there murdered. We’d like some more details about this life and death – but alas, it’s all gone.
1897    In Russia a Mr Philip Stepanov, friend of Alexis Sukhotin, prints off some copies of these Protocols, translated into Russian by Justine Glinka. No copies remain (13).- but copies must have reached Sergiei Nilus, and Pavel Krushevan, Editor of the St Petersburg newspaper Znamya.
1903  The editor Mr Krushevan published the Protocols in ten successive issues. No copies remain. His paper folded right after publication and he himself experienced an attempt upon his life, and thereafter takes care to have his own cook with him.
1905  Sergiei Nilus publishes ‘The Great within the small’, one chapter comprising the Protocols of Zion. This has never been translated into English, and only one copy remains, (14) that deposited in1906 with the British library. It’s still there! That was later used by Victor Marsden for his classic English translation, published in 1923. Marsden himself died in 1920 immediately after doing the translation. A Morning Star journalist seems to have done an earlier translation which appeared in 1919.
1906  A separate Russian translation appears, published by Georgi Butmi*.
1917  In Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, ownership of the Protocols carried a death penalty, which remained in force in the 1950s.
1920 The New York publisher Putnam & Son was about to publish an English language copy of the Protocols, when pressure was exerted upon the publisher threatening him with bankruptcy, and he instead gave notice of its cancellation.
1920 The Peer Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail and owner of The Times, wrote an article for the latter (anonymously, 8th May, see above), wondering about the text and marveling at their prophetic tone; saying, “An impartial investigation of these would-be documents and of their history is most desirable.” Over the next couple of years he was declared insane, lost his paper, believed someone was trying to poison him, then died. This was the last British newspaper account of the Protocols, not to call them fraudulent.
1920 Matvei Golovinski Okhrana agent dies aged 55, so the next year he could be given credit as Author of the Protocols.
1921 Mutually-contradictory newspaper accounts describing how the Protocols were ‘forged’ appear in Paris, New York and London. The Times owner Lord Northcliffe appears as no longer in control of his own newspaper, and an account radically different from the previous year’s is published.
1924 Sergiei Nilus was arrested by the secret police (‘Cheka’) in Kiev, imprisoned and tortured. The president of the court told him that this was in return for him "having done them incalculable harm in publishing the Protocols.” After being released for a few months he was then again led before the secret police, the GPU or Cheka in Moscow, and confined. Freed in 1926, he died two years later.
1927  Henry Ford, America’s richest man, had to apologise in public for having allowed a series of articles in his paper The Dearborne Independent to discuss the Protocols as if they were genuine.
1933: a criminal charge was brought against some members of the Swiss National Front, seeking to prohibit publication of the Protocols. Many witnesses were called by the Plaintiff but those called by the Defendants were not allowed to speak, or only one was allowed. After a two-year trial, the Court prohibited publication and the judge declared them to be a ‘forgery’. That decision (May 14, 1935) was announced in the Jewish Press before being delivered by the Court. (15)
*  Two Russian translations: A US philosophy professor expressed the matter as follows: “There were two independent Russian translations of the Protocols, the one published by Nilus and another, differing in some particulars, published by a man named Boutmi in 1905. It is the latter from which was made the French translation published by Revision in 1989. It is obviously of importance to collate the two versions.’(16) That may be so, but no-one has done it. A brief glimpse of insight appeared in a testimony given at the 1935 Berne trial:
Butmi was the publisher of another version of the Protocols, and you will notice that there appear in his version remarks by the translator [i.e., of the French into Russian] who maintained and underlined that these Elders of Zion have nothing to do with Zionist organization. The translator wished to correct Butmi, who had argued in his foreword that there was much in common between the Protocols and the Zionist organization.(17)
The unnamed translator here appears as having been present with Georgy Butmi, and added some argumentative comments after Butmi had written his foreword. We concur with this translator, that the document had no connection with Zionism. This is the second time we hear about a translator, the first translation being made by Justine Glinka in Paris. This story appears as another nail in the coffin of ‘forgery’ claims: if Russian police agents had composed the text in Paris, would they really have allowed two different translations to emerge in Russian? (18)
Conclusions
I.
If, then, the Protocols are genuine, they are the revised programme of illuminised Freemasonry formed by a Jewish lodge of the Order’ – Nesta Webster, World Revolution, 1921, p.307.
That may be the best answer we are ever going to get as to where this document came from. Nesta Webster wisely concluded that ‘So striking, indeed, are certain analogies not only between the code of Weishaupt and the Protocols, but between the Protocols and later secret societies, continuations of the Illuminati, that a continuation of idea throughout the movement becomes event.’(19)
The problem is, that the ‘we’ of the Protocols has some sort of deep identity which seems timeless, and is not like anything else. It has a fourfold character, being in turn banker, Jew, Mason and ‘Illuminati’’.
II. Concerning the various forgery-narratives, we may concur with Henry Makow: “In my opinion, the outlawing of Protocols on pain of death in Bolshevik Russia (20) and its execration in the West today proves its authenticity. If your plan for world domination leaked out, what would you do? Would you admit it? No, you’d employ an army of ciphers to stigmatise the document as a hoax motivated by ‘prejudice’ and ‘anti-Semitism.’ They have executed this damage control perfectly, a measure of their power to deceive even in the presence of the truth. This is the only conspiracy that has prevailed in spite of the blueprint being freely available” - Illuminati, p.112

III. The French Okhrana agents Golovinski and Rachovski were victims of posthumous identity-theft by those wishing to construct forgery-narratives. (21) Matvei Golovinski conveniently died in 1920, immediately prior to Radziwill naming him as Author of the Protocols. Hardly anything is available about his biography – although, there is a comic you can read about him. In the meantime I suggest he was not in Paris in e.g. 1998 or whenever the writing-the-Protocols story requires him to be there. His Father knew Dostoevsky, which has led to allegations of stylistic similarity to Dostoevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor (1894); but, this is really going too far! Suffice to say that if Golovinski had had any such Russian inspiration, the idea of his going to Paris and composing it in French would become even more absurd. 
IV. Few copies of Joly’s Dialogue remained in Europe in the 19th century, after Napoleon III’s police had confiscated them, and its unlikely that a copy existed in St Petersburg. Do you want to believe, that Okhrana agents in Russia sent agents to Paris, with instructions to use this hard-to-find text, which was entirely devoid of anti-Semitic remarks, for the sole purpose of whipping up anti-Semitism? That story is never going to make sense. It’s not clear whether Paris libraries had a copy, presumably why Wikipedia claims that the Okhrana obtained their copy of this text in Geneva. But in that case, how would they have known that they wanted to look for it? (Another account has the son of Joly, Charles, coming to St Petersburg in 1902 to meet Golowinski and give him a copy of the book, this unlikely story appeared in 2001) (22) 
V. More reliable versions of the story involve an early text being given to the head of the Okhrana in Russia, Mr Nikolai Tcherevine (or, ‘Cherevin’), who died in 1896. The Princess Radziwill had a long-term relationship with him, the most important in her life according to her biographer. (23) She is part of the Mystery of the Protocols, because he would have told her something about this. An investigation of Cherevin’s biography or correspondence in this regard would be valuable. Likewise there is no reason to doubt the signed-and-witnessed testimony of Philip Stepanov, to the effect that he possessed a copy of the Protocols in 1995 (see Note 22), also that he had received his copy from Alexay Sukhotin.
VI.  Nilus received the text in French, according to Testimony at the 1935 Berne trial: M. Du Chayla averred that Nilus had received it indirectly from Rachovskii the Okhrana agent in Paris, while Nilus claimed he had received it from Mr Sukhotin. But, if Russian police forged the document in Paris, would they really entrust it to a monk, in a vague hope that he would one day translate it into Russian? If they composed it to stir up anti-Semitism in Russia, then that could only ‘work’ with the document in Russian. Du Chayla averred at Berne that Nilus knew it had come from the Okhrana: would that not make him even less likely to bother to translate it into Russian? Such a harebrained tale would only work if Nilus were an agent of the Okhrana, which even Du Chayla did not suggest. This narrative is locked in self-contradictions! In fact Nilus totally believed that the Protocols were genuine, just as later on he totally believed that the 1917 Bolshevik revolution (with murder of the Russian royal family) was an expression, in practice, of the Protocols’ deeply-laid action-plan.     
VII. “There remains a small space to cross before all states of Europe will be locked in the coils of the symbolic snake by which we symbolize our people.” Protocol 2 (Greek citizens, please note) We live in a world today where only a very few nations still do not have Rothschild-controlled central banks – Iran, Syria, North Korea – and such nations are the ones which may get bombed into submission until they do. 
Nations therefore experience terrible problems from debt, nearly all are in debt – or, imagine that they are - a situation reminding us of the definition of Goy stupidity, kindly provided in the Protocols:
How clear is the undeveloped power of thought of the purely brute brains of the GOYIM, as expressed in the fact that they have been borrowing from us with payment of interest without ever thinking that all the same these very moneys plus an addition for payment of interest must be got by them from their own State pockets in order to settle up with us. What could have been simpler than to take the money they wanted from their own people?
    But it is a proof of the genius of our chosen mind that we have contrived to present the matter of loans to them in such a light that they have even seen in them an advantage for themselves. (Prot. 21)
The sole remedy against the remorselessly-unfolding plan would be, to terminate that which began in 1694, and instead have states able to create and control their own usury-free money - not anonymous foreigners - and without interest at source (24) whereby it would hardly be possible for anyone to grow rich by owning a bank. An Islamic type of banking has to be the answer. The Protocols gloat that the Goyim cannot ever find where the centre of despotic power is located (25) – true, but we don’t need to: all we would need is a real money system, that does not continually enrich the Hidden Ones. The chains of illusory debt have to be broken.


References
[1] She gave a talk in New York, synchronizing with the American Hebrew interviews.

[2]  ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Between History and Fiction’ by Michael Hagemeister, New German Critique 103, Vol. 35, 2008, pp. 83-95, 90.


[3]  In New York in 1921 she is strapped for cash (getting prosecuted for not paying her hotel bills, see Note 37) and stories about the Protocols are spreading, having a Russian context and an origin in Paris. As a Russian princess, who had had a liason with Nicholas Tcherevine the former head of the Okhrana in Russia (he died in 1896), and had lived in Paris for one year, namely 1904, she was fairly qualified to tell a story. Matvei Golowinsky was trying to ‘update’ the evil manuscript, and he showed it to her to try to enlist her in Russian secret-police activities. All future stories implicating Golowinsky as forger of the Protocols originate from her tale. A real Paris encounter between her and Golowinsky did happen in 1899 (Leda Farrant, The Princess from St Petersburg, 2000, pp.204,288). There was a family connection, she knew Golowinsky’s mother, and he and her son Nicholas went to school together. Little is known about Golowinsky, alleged perpetrator of the Greatest Deception in History, until later when he became a prominent Bolshevik. He conveniently died prior to Radziwill telling her tall story to the American Hebrew in 1921.
[4] In contrast, what Nilus wrote (in the preface to his 1917 3rd edition) was that he had received a hand-written manuscript from Alexander Sukhotin (see section 3) who in turn had obtained it from an ‘expatriate’ lady who had been in Paris, i.e. he did not name Mme Glinka.


[5] Count Alexander du Chayla, a Frenchman who had lived in Russia for many years, testified at a 1934 trial in Bern in return for a substantial sum of money, 4000 Francs, regarding the "Protocols," i.e. he was bribed to testify. Earlier in 1921 he had given ‘the first authentic information concerning the mysterious Nilus’ (Metapedia, Ibid), after spending nine months at the monastery at Optina Poustina as a close neighbor and intimate friend of Nilus. In the winter of 1918-19, the latter allegedly ‘proceeded to show him a manuscript, which he claimed was the original draft of the sessions of the Wise Men of Zion. Du Chayla noticed on the front page a large ink spot. The text was French, and was in several handwritings and in different inks. Nilus explained this by asserting that different people had filled the post of secretary at the secret sessions of the Wise Men of Zion. He did not seem to be certain, however, about this detail, for at another time he told du Chayla that the manuscript was not the original but a copy.’ Nilus’ son was present at the Berne trial, and described Chayla as a ‘perfidious liar’ and a ‘calumniator’ (de Michelis, 2004, p.41, note 44)    


[6] The Spectator 27.8.21, letter to the Editor, reproduced in Marsden’s translation. The four hundred page book published by Nilus in 1905 concluded with the Protocols, that chapter being dated 1902. As Lord Sydenham remarked, no one has ever translated the text, apart from two pages in the Marsden edition of the Protocols (in which Nilus calls for an Eighth Oecumenical council of Christendom to deal with the threat). Let’s hope that what might be the sole copy remaining of this text does not vanish like all the others.


[7] But hang on, if The Times’ correspondent had to go to all the way to Turkey to find a copy of this confiscated book in 1921 (originally published in Geneva, as it was too risky for any French publisher) how come the Russian Okhrana found a copy in Paris in 1898? The Wiki section on Maurice Joly says ‘One of the few copies of the Dialogues to survive, found its way to Switzerland’ and that was where the Okhrana found it. ‘Forgery’ narratives normally have the Protocols being forged in the main Paris library, the Bibliotheque Nationale: do you really want to believe that a copy found in Switzerland was studied in Paris, by Russians from St Petersburg? That Wiki comment suggests that Paris’ main library had no copy of the Joly text in 1998. It’s one thing to aver that the Joly text was used as a source, but quite another to aver that the Okhrana had to scour Europe to find a copy. After all, how would they know that they wanted to look for it? 


[8] Princess Catherine Radzivill had been convicted of forgery in London on April 30,1902, the amount involved being £3,000, and was sentenced to two years in prison (London Times, April 16, 29, and May 1, 1902). On October 13, 1921, suit was filed against her by the Hotel Embassy, New York, for failure to pay her bill of $1,239, and on October 30 she was arrested on the instance of the Hotel Shelbourne, New York, on a charge of defrauding the hotel of $352. (New York World, Oct. 14 and 31, 1921).


[9] Hagemeister, ref 31, p.90.


[10] Hagemeister, Ibid., p.94.


[11] In the comic The Plot: The Secret Story of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion, created by comics legend Will Eisner - probably the most coherent exposition of the forgery claim we’re likely to get - Matvei Golovinskii forges it in 1898 under instructions from Piotr Rachkovskii, head of the foreign branch of the Russian secret police, the infamous Okhrana, in Paris - in accord with St Petersburg historian Mikhail Lepekhin’s story as published in 1999 in Le Figaro in Paris. However, the historian Boris Nikolaevskii, a coordinator of the Bern trial and an expert on the czarist secret police, admitted in a confidential letter that his own research had convinced him that Rachkovskii “under no circumstances could have had anything to do with the preparation of the Protocols.” He called du Chayla a “swindler” who had no idea about the origins of the Protocols. Owing to the rise of Hitler in Germany, Nikolaevskii did not wish to be seen at that trial to be undermining the ‘forgery’ arguments. (The 1999 story involved a file on Henri Bint allegedly surfacing in Moscow, he being the Okhrana agent who had paid Golowinski while he was in Paris composing the Protocols. One would like to learn from that file, if it exists, in what year that happened.  No article or book was published on this, just a newspaper article.) In reality, the archives of the Okhrana have revealed ‘nothing’ (stored at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute) as likewise the Rachkovsky archives in Paris failed to show anything (Cohn, p.117). 


[12] There is quite a bit more of interest in this quite honest article, almost the only one such in a British newspaper, on this topic: by Viscount Northcliffe, owner (main shareholder) of The Times. The sense of prophecy fulfilled was also expressed by Lord Sydenham: “The Protocols explain in almost laborious detail the objects of Bolshevism and the methods of carrying it into effect… the deadly accuracy of the forecasts of the Protocols, most of which have since been fulfilled to the letter. ..” letter to The Spectator 27.8.21

[13] A German translation may remain, ref .24.


[16] By Revilo P. Oliver, Professor of Philosophy at Illinois University. alluding to the French revisionist journal edited by Alain Guillonet.


[17] Statement to Berne trial by Carl Loosli (The Lie that Wouldn’t Die, p.295)


[18] Butmi’s 1906 text was ‘the same version but no longer truncated’ as that published in 1903: Cohn, p.72.


[19] Nesta Webster, World Revolutions: the Plot against Civilisation, 1922, p.296: five pages show similar sets of text. She here references John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy 1797, 2003.


[20] Such a comment was also made by Fry in her Waters Flowing Eastward, concerning people being shot on sight for possession: ‘This fact is in itself sufficient proof of the genuineness of the Protocols,’ p.87.


[21]  At the Wiki site for ‘Golovinski’, I entered ‘chat’ and found (March 2012) only one comment: “Michael Hagemeister the German scholar …  calls seriously into question the claim that Golovinski assembled the Protocols. The article should be edited to reflect that,” alluding to a 2008 article. The person who made that remark, had then been ‘blocked indefinitely’ from using Wikipedia. What a surprise! There is no more discerning scholar writing on this topic than Hagemeister, history professor at Munich University. We’ve earlier linked to his main English article ‘Between History and Fiction,’ published in 2008, presumably the one here alluded to.   


[22] Chapter 2 of Vadim Skuratovsky’s The Question of the Authorship of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", 2001, ponders the ordinary, forgettable journalese of Golowinski’s known writings, plus the absence of any evidence linking him to the Protocols beyond Ms Radziwill’s testimony. It finds evidence that Golowinski iwas residing in Paris somewhat later on, in 1910. Its chapter 6 laughably suggests Dostoyevsky as a major source of inspiration to Golowinski in forging the Protocols. The Wiki section on Golowinski knows of no evidence linking him as Author beyond the discredited testimony of Radziwill.


[23] Leda Farrant, The Princess from St Petersburg, 2000.


[24] For the titanic struggle over the heart and soul of America, attempting to resist the Rothschild-controlled central banks – a struggle tragically lost, as US presidents who issued debt-free money kept being assassinated – see the text of ‘The Money Masters’, which every politician needs to read. (Or, watch it on Youtube). 


[25] “The plan of action of our force, even its very abiding place, remains for the whole people an unknown mystery.... Who and what is in a position to overthrow an invisible force?" (Protocol 4). The most secret political plots will be known to us and will fall under our guiding hands...We know the final goal...whereas the goyim have knowledge of nothing..." (Protocol 15)



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