The Protocols of the Learned Anons of Zion

Some seek to designate a particular class of people as a scapegoat to be eradicated...anonymous posters in social media.

First published in 1903 in Russia, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a text that’s surprisingly hard to get ahold of, despite living in the Information Age. One of the few places the document can still be found is, ironically, on the website for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Like Hitler’s speeches that appear in History Channel documentaries that aren’t allowed to be subtitled, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is often deemed too dangerous to allow reprint, except in isolated excerpts and screen grabs, and always including factchecks on its authenticity.

THE PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION

The long and the short of it is, Protocols (for short) detailed a Jewish plot for global domination, with modern historians blaming it almost entirely for the common anti-Jewish conspiracy theory of global control.

By the 1930s, attempts were made in Europe to dismiss Protocols as a fabrication, largely because it quite apparently borrows from Maurice Joly's "Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,” which was a satirical criticism of Napoleon Bonaparte. It seems that the allegation that Protocols was plagiarized from Joly’s Dialogue is true, but misses an important detail. Joly was a known plagiarist, and known so widely for plagiarism that he sued more than ten newspapers for refusing to publish his work, before k!lling himself as a way to cope with the shame of it.

As the conspiracy theory goes, Joly had plagiarized the material he accessed as a part of his membership in the Lodge of Mizraim. You see, as all good conspiracy theories go, Free Masonry is involved. The Lodge of Mizraim was a French Lodge of Free Masonry founded in Paris in 1814. The Mizraim Rite, which had ties to the Scottish Rite and was a derivative of it, was banned by the French government in 1822 because it was the epicenter of (classical) liberal and Republican political resistance. Four of its ten affiliate lodges were allowed to reopen in 1831.

Supposedly accessing source material he would later use in Dialogue, directly from his Masonic Order, he published what would eventually become Protocols. When Protocols was snuck across the border into Russia it was discovered and censored by the Tsarist government until it was covertly published by a Russian professor, Sergius Nilusin, in 1903. When Nilusin was later arrested in Kieve two decades later, the judge told him that he had done “incalculable harm” by publishing the document. By the time of Nilusin’s arrest, the Bolshevik’s (whose leaders were almost entirely all Jewish) had already taken over (1917) Russia in the Communist Revolution. They had a score to settle with Nilusin.

From Russia, the document spread west to most of Europe as Russian began to flee the Bolshevik’s tyranny, and was widely read in Germany between the first and second world wars. The Germans, in particular, found the contents fascinating because of their fight against the Bolsheviks and having suffered under the reign of the Weimar Republic (which was also led primarily by Jews).

PLEASE NOTE: If you attempt to research any of this yourself, I would advise you to use an alternative web browser, such as Yandex, that doesn’t heavily censor search results. If you ask an AI tool or Google, for example, “Was the Weimar Republic Jewish?” or “Was the Bolshevik Revolution Jewish?” you’ll receive predictable responses like, “This is an antisemitic conspiracy theory; they were not Jewish…they were just mostly Jewish” (see below). You can read between the lines to distinguish between the truth, and the truth you’re allowed to say.

By 1933, when Hitler had vanquished the Weimar Republic, sources in Europe began to “debunk” the Protocols as a mere fabrication, largely leaning upon their plagiarism of Joly. Little discussion of Joly’s plagiarism of older material is allowed to happen, or the historic circumstances surrounding the historical details around Joly or his work, Dialogue.

Today, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of the most heavily-censored documents in the world, with bans against its publication in many countries, and Internet blocks on related materially internationally. If you don’t believe me, try to research it on Google or another mainstream web-crawler, and compare it to an alternative anti-censorship search engine. For example, in 2003 at the 100-year anniversary of the Protocol’s first printing, Rep. Tom Lantos (CA) used his time to denounce the document and blame it for antisemitism around the world a century later. It’s still very much a ghost that haunts the world’s memory, and the censorship regime has been trying to exorcise that ghost for a very long time.

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The document is so censored, in fact, that despite the Nazi Party buying the rights to its publication in 1929 and Hitler citing it repeatedly in Mein Kamph and Goebels using it extensively in German pre-war propaganda, Nazi historians - as a general rule - do not cite it or mention it often, for fear that some may seek it out and read its contents.

The claims of Protocols included assertions that Jews were attempting international domination by (1) controlling banking (2) subverting culture with pornography and loose sexuality (3) flooding nations with migrants to loosen the bonds of fraternal order (4) commandeering important positions of power and (5) controlling the academy.

For Germans reading Protocols for the first time, the contents therein resonated with their experience in the Weimar Republic and what they believed was true under the Bolsheviks in Russia. For historic revisionists who seek to blame Protocols for these conspiracy theories, the fact that these theories existed long before Protocols does little to deter their revisionism that it is the source of the conspiracy theories and not the result of them.

THE SIN OF THE PROTOCOLS

So far as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is concerned, the sin is not in the “noticing,” even if the noticing is inaccurate. Paying attention to the world around you, noticing trends and patterns, or paying attention to facts and correlations (for example, that a population consisting of far less than 1% of the world has been at the epicenter of almost every world conflict in the last 100 years) is hardly sinful.

No, the sin is in how such noticing is used. If, for example, the noticing of things leads one to believe (1) all individuals within an identity group are imputed with the sins of others within the identity group (2) sins or crimes committed by individuals or identity groups corporately justifies their mistreatment (3) casting off anyone as incapable of forgiveness, salvation, and sanctification, then sin has been committed.

Presuming that the “received accounts” (to quote Doug Wilson) are correct - that Jews have been the unfortunate target of blame for all sorts of societal ills merely because the world needs a scape goat - then no matter how strangely coincidental certain things happen to be, it’s wrong to mistreat anyone because of their ethnic or religious heritage.

But get this; presuming that the “received accounts” are wrong, and that Jews indeed have been disproportionately represented in a lot of evil movements, it’s still wrong to mistreat anyone because of their ethnic and religious heritage.

In neither case is it sinful to believe a certain “conspiracy theory” or to believe in “coincidences.” It is sinful if that belief leads you mistreat others, which is the sin in and of itself.

Both the “it’s all a conspiracy theory” folks and the “it’s all coincidences” folks seem to realize that Jews are indeed disproportionately represented in positions of power. For the Dispensationalist, they might argue that this is the blessing of Abraham. This doesn’t explain why “God’s blessing” is being used in those positions of power largely to commit great evil around the world, instead of good. But for Covenant Theologians who believe otherwise, different ideas are commonly postulated to explain it.

Over the weekend, I saw quite a few anti-anti-semitic folks argue that the reason for Jews’ disproportionate positions of power is due to their commitment to marriage and child-rearing. Of course, this doesn’t explain why other cultures that also share that commitment (including TradCaths, Mormons, and Hindus) have less representation in power positions than >1% of the world population, despite having an accumulative population in the billions.

My personal belief is that God has indeed blessed the Jews, despite believers in Jesus (whether born Jew or Gentile) being the only recipients of his salvific blessings obtained through Christ. I believe Jews are blessed in their physical lineage the same as Ishmael in Exodus 21, from whom God promised would come a mighty and prosperous nation. And that blessing, as the Ishmaelites showed us, could be used for either good or for great evil. I believe this overcomes the absurdity of believing in an endless string of coincidences, without accusing anyone of a global conspiracy.

Thomas Sowell perhaps has the best explanation for the disproportionate representation of Jews in positions of world power, that being without a homeland allowed them to commit their energies to obtaining wealth and influence, instead of dying for physical real estate. Perhaps there’s something to it.

Or perhaps, the reason for Jewish dominance in power positions is a combination of all the above. Or perhaps, there’s no ascertainable reason at all. But this many people who have “noticed” it surely aren’t all imagining it, no matter how anti-semitic we’re told our noticing might be.

Those claiming that “noticing things” makes one a conspiracy theorist, are perhaps the greatest conspiracy theorists of all. As Orwell spoke of Big Brother…

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Consider, for example, the angry caterwauling of Dr. James White over the weekend, left on an X thread to Eric Conn:

Of course, Jews do not have a “supernatural capacity to mentally communicate” in a hive mind, and neither does anyone seriously suggest they do. And Jews certainly can’t be blamed for “everything,” as James asserts, or for being “in control of everything bad in the world.” Neither, to my knowledge, does anyone claim this.

It’s beneath the elder apologist - or perhaps these days, it is not - to create a straw man of your opponent’s position before summarily setting fire to it, and walking away as though you had won an argument.

As absurd as it would be to suggest that Jews are the devil’s conduit for every social ill, it’s equally absurd to pretend as though every observation of >1% of the world’s population dominating half the world’s global headlines is mere coincidence.

And yet, evangelicals who are afraid of being locked up and executed like those who disseminated Protocols in 1910-1930 Russia are accusing almost anyone of antisemitism for even opining on the reason for Jewish dominance in evil industries.

Categorically denying Jewish prevalence in evil movements, as James White and others are doing, overlooks things like the Bolshevik Revolution and the Weimar Republic as just mere coincidence. And frankly, that’s beneath serious intellectual consideration.

THE LEARNED ANONS OF ZION

As stated above, the “sin” of Protocols is not found in the document itself, but in how the document is used. From above…

The attacks that I have seen from James White, Neil Shenvi, and others of similar disposition against the “anons” (those who post on social media anonymously or pseudonymously) is eerily similar to the type of hatred and generalizations committed by antisemites who have used Protocols sinfully.

They regularly speak of anons as White alleges the “noticers” speak of Jews, as though anons have a hive mind and are capable of the “supernatural capacity to mentally communicate” and that they are “guilty of everything bad in the world.” They speak not of anons in the plural, but in the singular with a definite article, as though being many, they are one.

White and the others impute to each anon the guilt perpetrated by the collective group, and impugns them all with the same “cowardice” or whatever other epithet they feel entitled to insult them with. Never looking at the anons individually, they attack the whole.

Of course, it’s fair to say that anons are disproportionately represented in the ugliness of social media. I don’t think any reasonable person would disagree. But that does not mean that all of them are somehow guilty of an Internet-wide conspiracy to drive evangelicals nuts.

In fact, I would argue that the anons are taking the heat and hatred of the Evangelical Elite at the moment precisely because they are are looking for a scape goat, much like they allege Hitler was looking for a scape goat in the Jews. The gross incompetence with which many of our evangelical leaders have led us poorly through cultural and social crises since Covid, or mismanaged crises (like White mismanaged the crisis from Tobias Reimsteinberger being caught in dishonesty regarding his criticism of Joel Webbon) make a common boogeyman enemy that much more appealing.

“I’m not to blame for this fracture in evangelicalism; the anons are.”

The problem with anonymity is amplified by this unreasonable, pseudo-conspiratorial hatred of the anons on the part of White and others. When someone with a webcast known for eviscerating critics, and launching volleys of angry diatribes against opponents even when they’re wrong (as White was with Tobias Rhemslingdonger), demanding that critics “identify themselves” is hardly a serious request.

Consider, for a moment, the actual international conspiracy that took place to paint Webbon as an abetter of antimsemitism. And now consider these same people are demanding that anons post their real identities and also list their pastor’s contact info in their bio?

If Jews have nothing to hide, why are they hiding in the attic?

We also recognize that’s a dumb question for the Gestapo to ask, but evangelicals are using the same logic to shame those with politically incorrect thoughts to show their papers.

What’s lacking in our current “IDENTIFY YOURSELF” controversy is a lack of self-awareness on the part of the inquisitors. While they rail against conspiracy, they are becoming the progenitors and propagandizers of it.

While they hate the Nazis, the Stasi, and the Gestapo (as they should), they’re becoming thinly veiled carbon copies of them.