Midjord: So let’s just dive right into it. Let’s just take this in a particular order. Let’s talk first about what the Protocols claim be internally from the point of view of the document, or the book. And then we can go through a bit of what we think they are and how they came about. And then we can talk a bit about the historical context and then the impact they have had in the hundred twenty years since they have been published.

But Andrew what can we say about the Protocols themselves? What do they claim to be?

Joyce: Okay. Well the Protocols emerged into the public consciousness in a clear sense for the first time in 1903, in Russia, although it is rumored that copies of the Protocols were in circulation in Paris as early as 1897. But in 1903 a Russian newspaper serializes the Protocols and claim that they are the leaked minutes of a meeting of the senior jewish figures globally. So it’s the most influential figures within judaism. Why have a secret meeting. And at this meeting they basically lay out their plans for world domination.

There are a number of different versions of the Protocols in circulation. So there’s the copy that appears first of all serialized in the newspaper. Very shortly thereafter, within weeks there are other copy is which emerge, some of which are heavily influenced by Christianity. And the main speaker in those editions is the devil himself.

So there’s always a tension in the Protocols between the sort of spiritual side, the religious side of the Christian-jewish battle. And there are other editions which are focused more on political things, on real world events. And certainly the edition that has been passed down to ourselves has been the latter, rather than the copy in which the devil is one of the foremost characters. And this is the copy which is taken up by Henry Ford and given massive publicity in 1920 when he basically reinterprets it and embellishes it, and redevelops into “The International Jew”.

Now to go back to the Protocols themselves. The Protocols themselves are split into 24 sections. Each of these sections covers a different methodology so to speak of how jews attempt to undermine, overwhelm, subvert, and ultimately conquer Europeans, Christendom, whoever you want that protagonist to be. Now each of these sections over the years have acted almost like a prophesy. Because we can see, certainly over the last 100 years that certain events within these Protocols have come to fruition.

So we have a Protocols outlining that materialism most replace religion. Well we’ve seen the overwhelming victory of materialism ovt religion. We’ve seen the emphasis on modern progress and encourage people to become enraptured with novelty. Always seeking huge distractions. Always seeking to push the envelop and distracted with these things. And there is a Protocols specifically titled “Distractions”.

Underneath the guise of all of this rushing for progress, the jews are able to subvert society and overwhelm it and co-opt it to their means. There’s a Protocols on the promote of world wide wars. Well, we’ve seen wars all over the the world. Accelerated wars, of course in 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1945. We had wars the like of which that the world has never seen.

There is a Protocols on “Re-education”, co-opting the education system, subverting it, retraining children in new values. We have witnessed that certainly on a mass scale since the 1960s.

We’ve seen the Protocols in dealing with the “Press” come to fruition. Bear in mind that in 1903 when this document first emerged jews didn’t really control the press. In Britain, I think maybe one major newspaper was under jewish control but certainly on a global scale, or certainly throughout the West you could not make the argument that at that time jews were in control of the press in terms of ownership.

Certainly they were already forming commercial conglomerates that were able to exert a high level of commercial blackmail to force newspapers to take certain stances, and of course, Henry Ford found this out, much to his dismay when he was confronted with a lawsuit in 1927. And pretty much forced to back down from publishing his version, I suppose, of the Protocols.

But the other Protocols concerned things like assault on religion, brainwashing, abuse of authority, the arrest of opponents. There was a financial program, an emphasis on loans and credit and the power of gold.

It’s more or less a blueprint however you want to interpret these documents. Whether you want to look at it purely as fiction, as something of a prophecy, or whether you believe they are genuine. There’s clearly a blueprint for how to subvert and overcome a society here. This has been one of the reasons why the Protocols has endured for over a century, and why remains foremost in the public mind.

I mean we are only a few weeks on from the FBI accidentally — they claimed it was a bot — accidentally tweeted out a link to the Protocols [chuckling] and their documents on it! And there was quite a vigorous response to that. The Protocols are under the skin, even if they are not directly at the forefront of our consciousness. They are under the skin of Western society. They are there! And there’s no denying the reality of some of what is contained in that. Whether the authorship is suspect or not.

Midjord: Exactly. Like I said, even people who are friends of this show, who are friends of us, many people still reacted emotionally:

“Don’t, you know, it’s a forgery?”

That we were going to talk about it. It makes people uneasy, I guess this is what I’m getting at here. Because it’s such a heated discussion that has been about these Protocols, or this or this book, for more than 100 years. And if you just look at the Wikipedia article for it, already in the introduction they are upset that it is still in circulation, although it’s been proven to be a forgery it’s still in circulation. [Chuckling] Well so what? I mean aren’t people allowed to to read it, if it’s quote, unquote, a “forgery”?

But let’s get into that. What are the Protocols actually? I mean when I first read them many years ago, just from the style itself, I didn’t feel the need to read a whole lot around the Protocols, a lot of historical comments on them. Just from the style itself, it seemed to me that this was a sort of fictional account of what someone thought it would sound like if they were, if a council of jews were being honest, honestly talking about their ambitions in the world. This is sort of what it would sound like. From an [word unclear] point of view of course, because they use language, saying things like:

“We are going to be filled with hate! We are filled with envy and greed!”

Things like that. People don’t talk like that about themselves.

But can you talk about what are the protocols and how did they come about?

Joyce: Well I always felt that the description “forgery”, it just doesn’t quite fit. Now, in terms of what I believe about the protocols, part of their identity is that they are basically a plagiarism. They are a plagiarisms first of the work of a Frenchman called Maurice Joly, who was actually something of a political genius. He was a lawyer and a writer. And he had a real perceptiveness about the weaknesses of liberalism, the vulnerabilities of it. And the way that some of the mechanics of liberalism could themselves be subverted and used to overcome society. And certainly he was no fan of the French revolution and it’s aftermath.

But in 1864 He publishes a book called “Dialogue in Hell Between Montesquieu and Machiavelli”. And in that book it’s basically a discussion between those two individuals in hell about liberalism. And about post revolutionary France, and about how society could be overcome with the subversion and control of the press. All of the things I listed earlier when I was discussing the individual Protocols. So we list all these things, but specifically within that French context.

Now that was published in 1864. Four years later a German by the name of Hermann Goedsche who absolutely hates the British, but writes under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe. He publishes a novel called “Biarritz”. Biarritz in one of its chapters is called “The Rabbi’s Speech in Prague”.

And he basically plagiarizes Joly. So he incorporates all the stuff about subverting society, but he puts it into the mouth of a rabbi speaking to a council of jews in a cemetery in Prague. A midnight meeting.

And that’s the earliest incarnation we have. As I say 1868. This is the earliest incarnation of the Protocols. Because very shortly there after in Russia in particular the “Rabbi’s speech”, this chapter from the Biarritz is re-printed as a separate document and disseminated as the actual minutes of a meeting of jewish elders at a cemetery in Prague.

[10:45]

And it’s really over the next 20, 30 years that the Rabbi’s Speech, as authored by Goedsche, and being itself a plagiarization of the work of Joly, it morphs and it’s refined, and it’s perfected, until eventually in 1903 we get that version that we are now all familiar with now in 1903 it’s serialized, but it doesn’t quite make a splash. It’s only in, I think it was 1909, I think. 1905, sorry. Sergei Nilus, a Russian mystic republishes the Protocols in its entirety as an appendix to his book, “The Great and the Small and the Coming of the Antichrist and the Rule of Satan on Earth”. Quite an obscure book, but the appendix itself attracts all of the attention because here we have the first time the Protocols in one document.

And it’s again taken and circulated as an independent piece of work. It makes a moderate splash until the coming of the Bolshevik Revolution, when it seems to explain the Bolshevik Revolution in its entirety, and it just catches fire!

It’s used by the Whites, the counter-revolutionaries, as revolutionary propaganda. And by 1918 it starts creeping into the West. It is translated into different languages. The Germans latch onto it basically as an explanation for their defeat. And it reaches the United States in 1920 where Henry Ford basically says:

“I know that there some doubt about it accuracy but it seems to explain and predict everything that is happening right now, so I think this is a document worth promoting.”

So he incorporates it and works with it in an American context to explore judaism in American life, with the “International jew”. It sells 500,000 copies. The jewish bodies in America lose their minds. They start initiating lawsuits, boycotts, and everything else. Henry Ford finally backs down in 1927, and the Protocols goes into a little bit of a slumber in the United States, but it remains absolutely rampant in Europe. To the extent that between 1918 and 1939 the Protocols is second only to the Bible in terms of the number of languages it had been translated into, and the number of copies in circulation.

Midjord: That is quite fascinating. And many prominent people in right wing circles also mentioned it, talked about it. I know that Alfred Rosenberg who was from a Russian family, but was born in what is today Tallin in Estonia, and he spoke Russian. He translated a version into German in 1923, I believe. And he was the one who introduced to Hitler when they got to know each other in early 1919, 1920 thereabouts. Because it was a huge deal in Russia, but it hadn’t really reached Europe until around that time, 1920.

So, I mean, it was enormously influential. And just like you said I don’t think that the word “forgery” is a meaningful criticism against it. Because that sort of like saying that 1984, Orwell’s book, 1984, doesn’t have any value because you can’t find Winston Smith in the phone book, or something like that.

I mean the whole point is that it’s a sort of fictional account, but it’s relevant enough for people to actually talk about it in very serious ways. And it’s obviously something that hit a nerve among jews. So it wasn’t outlandish enough for people to just dismiss it. So it was close enough to reality for there actually to be a serious discussion about it, right?

[15:12]

Midjord: Of course. And the other point worth noting here is that it was part of a tradition. I mean the Protocols is not some document that comes out of nowhere. It emerges actually from a very intense literary scene. Now I remember reading that there were around 3,000 different anti-semitic texts in circulation in Russia between 1900 and 1918. And of these 3,000 separate texts amounted to around 14 million copies. So can you imagine today, for example, in the United States or the UK, or Norway, or Sweden, something like 14 million anti-semitic texts in circulation, like full-length books!

And the other thing is that it continues to evolve as well. We don’t really remember the kind of the aftershocks of the Protocols. But there were some early books which emerged sort of 1919, 1920, which took things further, or which were a different, … They were just as fictional so to speak, if I want to use the word “fictional”. They were just as fictional, but they were in the exact same style.

For example in 1920 in France we see the publication of a document called the “Report of Comrade Rappaport”. And this was purportedly the leaked minutes of a meeting of Russian jewish Bolshevik in which he kind of picks up from where the Protocols leave off. And he’s sort of:

“Okay! Now that we have accomplished Protocols 3, 5, 7, 8. Now we are going to do this to accomplish Protocols xyz.”

And there’s in Russia there’s a publication of “The German Bolshevik Conspiracy” in 1918. Sort of the last gasp by the Whites. So these things are ongoing for a while. They are continuing to evolve. And as you say “forgery” just doesn’t fit what this is. It fits into a historical trajectory, that if you really want to go into the deep intellectual origins of the Protocols, I would almost go as far back as Emmanuel Kant and his critique of judaism.

In 1793 he published, “Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone” in which he critiques judaism basically by saying:

“Its not spiritual. It’s not a religion. It is basically a political entity. And judaism is itself a kind of political organization.”

And that at the time that Kant was writing that right at the end of 18th century was a bombshell! Because it actually flipped on its head all previous interpretations of who jews were, and what they were doing in Christian society. I’m talking of course about Christian super secessionism.

So anytime jews did something bad it was viewed as more or less as simply proof that the Christian New Covenant had replaced to Old Covenant that God had with the jews. And more or less everything is refracted within that. Sometimes it tends toward is a dabblization and association of jews with the devil.

Sometimes there’s a kind of hint there in the Middle Ages, up to the early modern period of the idea of a pact jews may have had with the devil for the subversion of Christendom. But it’s made explicit that this is a kind of real world political entity that we are seeing here where there is practical interest and where jews are kind of a club that work to get here and have political interest within government and should be viewed almost as a entity within it’s own terms, if I can put it like that.

That in itself weakens the sort of historical Christian defense of jews on biblical and eschatological grounds. For example this idea that jews were the original vine, or jews have a role in the End Times, and so on and so forth. But the time you get to the end of the 19th century Christian biblical scholarship is kind of reinforcing this trend, scrutinizing authorship of the Bible as a whole, contrasting the Old Testament with the New. Rediscovering the Greek nature of Christianity. For example the influence, I suppose, of Platonic thought.

All of these things kind of weaken the position of the jews. I’m going on a long overview here. Sorry about this.

Midjord: No. Go ahead!

Joyce: In the century between Kant critiquing judaism, in that kind of real world political sense and basically the emergence of the Protocols we see an almost total decline or undermining of, …

Don’t get me wrong jews are increasing in power but they are declining in, how should I put this? Kind of subconscious approval in Western Christian societies. Because this idea that jews have a religious function, either as witnesses to God’s curse, or that they will one day play a role in the End Times, that is weakened by the rise of rationalism, by the Enlightenment.

I know in our movement we are quite critical of the Enlightenment, sometimes. But certainly I see Kant as firing a shot across the bow when he published that in 1793.

[20:29]

So by the time you get to the Dreyfus Affair, by the time you get to Herzl and zionism we basically see for the first time, it takes a century but we see that jews are a political entity. Zionism is kind of the most obvious manifestation of that, and it takes a lot of people by surprise in Europe. Zionism shocked a lot of non-jews across Europe.

Midjord: It shocked a lot of jews as well! [chuckling]

Joyce: Yeah! Yeah! I would say. So but zionism brings us full circle to this realization of the fact that Jews are a political entity as much as or more than a religion. And there’s something in that sort of end of 19th, start of the 20th century, where a switch gets flicked, where the Protocols is right there at the knife edge of it. And what we see is a rapid acceleration from that point on through the Second World War. And basically what I have always regarded as the third great European reaction against the Jews that occurs between the years roughly 1918 to 1950.

Midjord: Right. And I think it is also important to point out that this is not a uncommon way to write fiction, or to write fictional accounts like this. It has a long history. We talked about actually one of the best episodes in my own opinion we’ve had on Guide to Kulchur was the discussion we had about Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe’s book Robinson Crusoe that we did with Ricardo Duchesne. We did that in September, if anyone wants to watch that episode. And that is also a sort of a fictional account of:

“Well, I found these documents, or I found this diary somewhere.”

And that is a way of writing that is not uncommon.

Joyce: It was quite common in Gothic fiction in particular. Even Dracula and Frankenstein are kind of this “rediscovered letters” format. It’s got a narrative pull to it. It’s attractive. The way the Protocols are written is one of the reasons why it has remained more attractive than say some of the other texts of that period.

[22:47]

You look at Jacob Brofman’s, “The Book of the Kahal” for example which is actually a fantastic expose published in the 1860s by a Jew from Minsk. Who basically was frustrated by his interactions with other Jews. He converts to Lutherism. He then converts to the Russian orthodox church and he publishes The Book of the Kahal, where he basically explains how entire villages are bought and sold by Jewish communities.

And he explains how their economic practices works in terms of trying to gain political influence and forming economic monopolies. And this is a bit of a bombshell! But you ask anyone today about The Book of the Kahal and they won’t remember it.

Midjord: Right.

Joyce: And part of this, you know, there is a vigor and an attractive quality in which the way the Protocols were written. And I can’t help but believe that when someone was cobbling together the Protocols for the first time, the 1903 version, I find it very difficult to imagine that those particular individuals was thinking themselves:

“Oh I’m going to create the perfect forgery here!”

I think it was more a matter of this person had read the work of Goedsche, possibly also of Joly, and realized there’s something really perceptive and actually quite ingenious about this presentation. And I think it actually tells it in the Right way, it explains what’s happening perfectly!:

“So I’m just going to take these raw materials and refashion them a little bit. And what I’ll have is an absolutely compelling and very useful propaganda device!”

And that is I think is the best way to look at the Protocols.

And this unease about talking about them, using them as a propaganda device, that goes right back to the actual first exposes of the Protocols. Because obviously in 1920 at The Times, the London Jewish journalist Lucien Wolfe, he rushes with a kind of hurried article basically saying that this is [word unclear] focused. Basically saying what you said Frodi, which is that the style and tone are clearly fictional in origin.

But it isn’t until a year later when a Russian nationalist approaches a British journalist for the Times, called Phillip Graves, and says:

“You might want to look at this book by Hermann Goedsche, and you might want to look at this book by Maurice Joly and do a comparison of the texts.”

And the reason why this Russian nationalist, this was a Russian anti-semitic nationalist who actually tipped off that they were a forgery. Because this particular nationalist got cold feet thinking this was going to be a disaster for our movement if it is exposed that this thing is a fraud.

So the ambivalence about using the Protocols is there right from the beginning. I suppose if we wanted to use some kind of modern terminology, there is a difference in perceptions of the Protocols between, I guess you could call it, the sort of high IQ, the low IQ, and the midwit. And I would argue that it’s kind of the midwits just kind of don’t get it! The low IQ are sort like [chuckling]:

“Yeah! The Protocols! 100% genuine! Use them!”

Midjord: Yeah.

Joyce: And the high IQ people kind of get what’s going on. But the midwits are like:

“This is a forgery! We shouldn’t be using this!”

Midjord: Exactly! [loud laughter] Yeah, that is my reaction as well! It’s my reaction as well. That is not the point. When we are on the topic, … Let me just see here. I wrote so many notes, just to remember to bring everything up here, because it’s an important and interesting topic.

About the claims in the documents, this is the funny thing that at least the claims are not so outlandish that they are automatically dismissed, right? But what you always hear from critics is that the documents are false. That the documents themselves are forged or false or whatever. But they very rarely, very seldomly try to prove that the claims in the documents are false.

Joyce: Hmm.

Midjord: I mean they are very seldomly say that what is actually outlined here is completely untrue. The whole discussion about the authenticity of the documents themselves is sort of a red herring. It’s sort of a distraction. Because the important question must be:

“Are some of the claims, do they describe a realistic image of what’s going on?”

I mean it’s now been 120 years since they were published. So I mean, is there some truth to what’s claimed in here? And I think it can be discussed as a political theory! This is a book, although it’s written in this fictional form, literary form, it is a work of political philosophy, of how the author thinks that the world works.

And I would say that the worth of a political theory, for a large extent can be reflected in how well they are able to describe events in the real world, and how events will unfold in the real world. And of course in that sense both the theories like Liberalism and Marxism have been complete failures. And racial egalitarism, and so on, have been complete failures in describing that. That is why I think it can be interesting to discuss:

“Well, how good were the Protocols at describing what was going to unfold in more than a century after they were published?”

[28:35]

Joyce: Well, this is the basic argument made by Henry Ford who supported them purely on the grounds that they were accurate and useful in describing and predicting events that were happening in the United States. He said:

“Look, (more or less) the discussion of the authenticity is a red herring.”

Hitler on the other hand, he defended the Protocols simply in Mein Kampf, simply on the grounds that the jewish press in Germany was going crazy about it. And he writes in Mein Kampf [chuckling]:

“That’s proof enough that they’re genuine!”

And I think Hitler actually was probably trolling a bit in that respect. That strikes me as an obvious troll. I think Hitler probably knew that they were fictional, or contrived in some sense. But he didn’t care, and also he would have seen the usefulness of them in describing what’s gone [on]. They are an excellent piece of political theory.

They are because Joly himself, the man going right back to the “Dialogues in Hell Between Montesquieu and Machiavelli”. He was a genius, he was a bit of a tragic figure. He ended up taking his own life with a revolver.

Who knows, if he had dedicated himself to satire and to political theory, he may have been more widely regarded in that sense. But his book, if it had been written straight, so to speak, rather than as a satire, would have resembled something like Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”.

Now we will say that Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” is a fake book or a forgery, or anything else. Because it’s straightforward in saying this is how you take over and subvert movements, political parties or societies. The Protocols is a kind of version of, or a predecessor of “Rules for Radicals”. It outlines methodologies for subversion.

And whether or not jews created the Protocols, or whether they learned from them or whether they pay no attention to them what so ever, the fact of the matter is that we can clearly provide historical examples of jews following certain of the Protocols! Consciously or not.

For example, when it comes to the assault on religion, we know, you look at the work of Kevin MacDonald, we know for example that jews have been at the forefront of de-Christianizing Christmas. They have been at the forefront of removing the link between church and state wherever that is possible, wherever that is beneficial to jews. We know that in terms of pushing progress, so-called progress, or modern ideas, that jews tend to always be at the cutting edge of the most destructive of those.

The promotion of LGBT insanity. The trans-sexuality and trans-genderism, pornography. And all of these things will be defended on some level as “progress”, or free speech, or of all of these liberal values. And all of this is pre-figured in the Protocols at a time when jews, I suppose, you could make the argument that they were certainly on some levels there were complaints in Poland right at the end of the 19th century that jews were selling pornography.

But can you imagine someone in 1903 even conceiving of the totally degraded state of modern Hollywood or the vast Californian pornography industry? Or internet pornography, or any of these things which have just reached a kind of satanic scale? They couldn’t have imagined it, but it’s right there in the Protocols! And we have to ask ourselves why? Is this a remarkable piece of prescient literature? Or are jews following some sort of blueprint, and is this it?

Sometimes things work in funny ways. I’m not strictly a materialist. I try to be as objective as possible in how I look at things, but I always leave a little 5% of my thinking to not necessarily spiritual things, but for the unknown. And the Protocols is one of those strange documents which seem so prescient, and which seem to conform so much to reality. And even though I know that it’s a contrived document.

And when you compare it side by side with the texts that it has been plagiarized from, you can see that clearly. But there is still something uncanny about the Protocols that you simply cannot escape. And yes, there is plenty that we can see in our modern day current contemporary situation which matches very, very closely and it’s accelerating.

For example arrest of opponents, loans and credit. Our Western economy at the minute is basically a credit economy from the man on the street, through to governments themselves, everything is funded and financed by debt. The only difference being today, the only difference between today and for example the middle of the 19th century, is that in the middle of the 19th century if you were a Russian peasant you knew who your money lender was and you knew what religion he was.

Today everything is so obscured with company titles and names and companies loaning to companies and banks selling debt to banks, that it’s so obscured that we live in a much more convoluted system. And it’s much more difficult to see who exactly who the final profiteers are at the top of the pyramid. I think we can all guess who these individuals are, and what group they represent. But this is the situation which we are in.

[34:21]

Midjord: Right. And I for got to mention as well, I read a recent piece that was written in the same style as the Protocols. It was actually 5 or 10 years ago. I read this long article, … It was actually a comment to a article. I think it was on Lasha Darkmoon’s site, or something like that. Someone wrote a long, long comment describing how they had taken part in a meeting in the Rothschild house in England, and these parties that they have, and who they had met there, etc. And I obviously thought immediately of the Protocols. That this is someone who wants to write in the same style, simply because it’s effective.

But at the same time it can describe something real and in the world as well, and can make substantial, interesting, points.

Joyce: Of course. And it’s dangerous as well. In the 1920s for example Sergius Nilus, the mystic who published the Protocols as an appendix to his book “The Coming of the Anti-Christ”. Once the Soviets came to power they didn’t know quite what to do with him. They wanted to punish him because obviously anti-semitism was basically made illegal and any kind of anti-semitic documents, … If you were discovered in the possession of Nilus’ book with the Protocols or any anti-semitic literature you could face up to 10 years imprisonment. That is the penalty.

Nilius actually gets arrested on three separate occasions. And he’s in his sixties when he is arrested. He was arrested in 1924. He’s arrested again in the following year in 1925. He arrested again in 1927. When they go to arrest him again in 1929 he has a heart attack and dies.

So there’s this constant fear and apprehension on the part of certain regimes about the Protocols. Something that should be hidden and brushed under the carpet. After the Second World War there’s quite a subtle move against it.

By 1934, I should mention, first in Switzerland there was a very famous trial, the Berne Trial where basically the Protocols were put on trial. There was a national group, I think it was the “Swiss National Front” were printing and disseminating the Protocols. And the Jewish groups in Switzerland basically took this national group to court. The national group lost because it was basically shown that there were plagiarisms of the authors that I’ve described earlier. And they were fined. That was kind of the first legal challenge or, I suppose, government interaction with the Protocols, outside of the Soviet Union.

But in 1965 the United States government publishes a document called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion a Fabricated Historical Document” that declares the Protocols both unAmerican and the product of a warped mind. The true origins of the document went way over the head of whoever compiled that particular report.

In 1991 it’s declared fraudulent in a South African court. In 1992 a Russian District Court declares it a forgery and fines the Russian nationalist group Panyet for disseminating it.

But there’s always been a little bit of a push back. The rise of the internet for example give the Protocols a new lease of life. Although in 1996 the first day of passover* you get these unusual little instances. On the first day of passover in 1996 in Estonia the countries third largest newspaper publishes the Protocols! The first day of passover! [laughter]

[* Passover is a major jewish holiday that occurs in the spring (April) on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan. Passover is one of the most widely celebrated Jewish holidays. It commemorates the Biblical story of Exodus, when Hebrew slaves were released by God from bondage in Egypt. Called Pesach (pay-sak) in Hebrew, Passover is a celebration of freedom observed by jews everywhere. The name derives from the story of God’s angel of death “passing over” the homes of Hebrews when God sent the tenth plague. SOURCE: Misc.]

So there is always this kind of, there’s an undercurrent there. There’s always, as soon as the legal pressure is lifted the Protocols manage to seep their way back to the surface, almost as this kind of primordial [word unclear] text of the anti-semitic impulse, and the desire to confront the Jewish Question head on. So I have always found that interesting.

And of course even today the Protocols are very popular in the Middle East. And actually quite strangely popular in Japan.

[38:39]

Midjord: One of the things I hinted at is that the Protocols are realistic enough for anyone basically to imagine that something similar has taken place in reality. There’s something about both the claims, about the things that jews do and things that people do to jews that others quote, unquote, anti-semites do against jews, that sort of no matter how sort of outlandish it seems it has a sense of a sort of credibility around it.

And I think Alex Linder, he put it very [chuckling], put it in the funniest way. He said that about the “Holocaust”:

“That the genius of the “Holocaust” story was that anyone who knows jews finds it plausible.”

[laughing]

And the things that the Protocols as well. Like when you look at events and you look at many things in jewish history they still have a plausible feel to them. So this group, of course, the learned elders of zion that are in the book, in the Protocols, represented in the Protocols, can we say something about real world equivalence of groups like that? Of Sanhedrin, a Council of Elders that determine the direction of the jewish community? Have there been similar things in reality? The image we’ve used for this episode is from the World Zionist Congress in the 30s. Have there been similar things in reality?

Joyce: I think foremost in the mind of the writers of the Protocols were the recent and very new zionist Congresses at the time. But there had always been in the European consciousness this idea of a group of jewish elders, of a resurgent Sanhedrin.

Now in the 1830s, after the French revolution jews become basically de-facto citizens of France for the first time, because of the French Revolution. Political emancipation is what it is called and many, many Frenchmen are unhappy with it because of usury, particularly in areas like Alsace Lorraine, and the money lending going on there. The fact that many farmers have fallen to jewish debt, and there are lots of complaints. Why should jews be allowed to be Frenchmen? And this basically reaches the ear of Napoleon.

Napoleon appoints an advisor called Count Louis Molé, whose image you see right there. The avatar I use is Count Louis Molé. And Molé convenes what he calls “The Grand Sanhedrin”. So he basically goes around France and he gathers up the foremost jewish businessmen, the foremost jewish clergy, and other notables, associates of the French aristocracy, for example. And convenes them all at the Hotel DuVille in Paris, where he posits to them various questions, and he basically says:

“Look you’re holding on to political equal status in the French nation depends on your answers to these questions. I want to know, do you only marry among your own kind? What is your attitude toward is lending money at interest to non-jews? , etc., etc.”

So basically all of these questions cut to the heart of jewish particularism, and basically to the jewish evolutionary strategy. The language we would use now. All of it is attempting to understand jewish ethno-nationalism. The jews lie to every single one of the questions! But Molé naively kind of accepts them, and the question of jewish eligibility for citizenship is never raised again.

One of the reasons that is given for this is that Molé was actually pushing to strip the jews of citizenship, but Napoleon had this kind of quasi-religious vision of himself as a new Messiah of the jews, and in a grand gesture in his own egomaniacal state he had nothing to fear from the jews and neither did the French people, because he was the all conquering semi-god. And he loved this idea of himself as a savior of the jews.

So, the question is never raised again. This Grand Sanhedrin, this collective of jewish leaders is brought to get here for the first time, of course it is derived from an understanding of the Bible, the Sanhedrin’s in it, this idea, this quasi-Gothic idea that jews have these semi-clandestine meeting of their elders, this kind of ancient cabal. And that is carried forth, so you get in the 1830s the Grand Sanhedrin of Paris.

But the end of the century you have the first zionist Congresses. You then have the World jewish Congresses. And then from the 1910s onwards you have the formation of bodies like the Anti-Defamation League. There’s the Council of German Citizens of the jewish Faith in Germany. The Board of Deputies of British jews in Britain. The Universal Alliance of jews in France, or whatever it is.

These bodies start springing up all over the place. And they in turn are viewed as forms of elders, or councils of senior jews. And of course that is what they are! Because the ADL is staffed primarily or certainly funded by a certain cohesive group of jewish businessmen. It’s linked to whole networks of rabbis, and so on and so forth.

So does the concept of an Elders of Zion exist in reality? Do we have groups of elders of zion? By which I mean senior jewish figures getting to get h in a kind of corporate body to make decisions that benefit jews and advance their interests nationally and globally? Yes! Absolutely!

We see these groups and we also know what they advocate for. Because we know that the World jewish Congress under people like Moishe Kamp [sp] are advocating for highly restrictive speech laws to be imposed across Europe We see this prefigured in the Protocols. We see their attitudes towards policing and the arrest of their opponents and the introduction of draconian laws which will result in long prison sentences for anyone espousing anti-semitic views.

And we also see how these people vote financially, so to speak. Whenever they pump their funding into the LGBT lobby or into the Israel lobby, into pushing for some wars, the push for war with Iran being the latest in a long list of Israeli and jewish war mongering.

Do Councils of Learned Elders of Zion exist? Yes they do! Under multiple names and in multiple jurisdictions.

[46:14]

Midjord: So let’s move on to talk a little bit about the historical context which the Protocols arose, or these attitudes arose. I guess one thing that I’ve observed in studying jewish history is that when massively anti-jewish attitudes have sort of flared up in a country, it hasn’t been because the host population has been originally hostile toward jews. It’s just built up over a long time. It’s rather been that jews have been very successful and very prominent in that society and sort of abused the hospitality of the host country, and then the attitudes have changed very quickly.

I think that that can be said to have happened in Germany before the First World War and the rise of National Socialism. That the jews in Germany had an existence that was similar to what they have in America today. Where they’re very prominent in society, very wealthy, very successful, and then all of a sudden people say:

“Enough is enough!”

And want to throw them out of the country.

How was the historical context in Russia? Can you say something about the historical context in which the Protocols came about?

Joyce: Of course, one of the biggest questions about the Protocols that should arise to any reader of this particular book, is why Russia? Why did Russia, … Because we don’t associate jews really with Russia. With view as the kind of the centre, I suppose, of jewish power as residing either in the United States, or in Israel. So why Russia?

Well first of all, around 1900 there was about four million jews not Russian empire, as opposed to only one and a half million jews not United States. So demographically speaking Russia, the Russian empire, I should say, Zionist world centre of judaism, of jewry. Jews of course had been in Russia, the Russian empire, and those lands, for about a 1,000 years. They were a kind of Turkish ashkenazi population, traceable for the most part to the expulsions from central Europe around the time of the crusades.

Now during those 1,000 years they were mostly a middleman minority. They attached themselves to nobles and they gained contracts to run mills, taverns, they engaged in tax farming over the serfs. And basically by the time you get to the 1860s the jews have basically just started to ride the crest of a wave, of a massive demographic boom. I mean their population is just exploding!