24.THE COMING OF ZIONISM...192

25.THE WORLD ZIONIST ORGANIZATION...198

26.THE HERESY OF DR. HERZL...202

27.THE "PROTOCOLS"...209

28.THE ABERRATION OF MR. BALFOUR...224

29.THE AMBITION OF MR. HOUSE...231

30.THE DECISIVE BATTLE...244

31.THE WEB OF INTRIGUE...261

32.THE WORLD REVOLUTION AGAIN...272

33.THE LEAGUE TO ENFORCE PEACE...283

34.THE END OF LORD NORTHCLIFFE...291

             Page 192

             Chapter 24


          THE COMING OF ZIONISM

In the second half of the last century when Communism and Zionism began their simultaneous assault on the West, Europe was a place of strong and confident states well able to withstand the effects of inner troubles and foreign wars. The revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 had been overcome without great exertion. Austria-Hungary and France were not much weakened by their Prussian defeats in 1866 and 1871; they resumed their national existences, as defeated countries for centuries had done, side by side with yesterday's victor, and soon were tranquil again. The Balkan people, emerging from five centuries of Turkish rule also were moving towards prosperity, in the kindlier air of national freedom. On the eastern borders of Europe Russia, under the flag of Christendom, appeared to be joining in this process of national and individual improvement.

The appearance was deceptive, for the two maggots were in the apple, and today's scene shows the result. The eighteen Christian centuries which, despite ups and downs showed a total sum of human betterment greater than that of any earlier time known to man, were coming either to an end or an interregnum; which, we still do not know, though believers have no doubt about the good resumption, somewhen. However, one eminent man of that period, from whom confidence in the outcome might have been expected, foresaw what was to come in our century and thought it would be the end, not a transient Dark Age.

This was Henry Edward Manning, the English clergyman who was converted to Rome, became Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and, had he accepted nomination by his fellow cardinals, might have become Pope. Edmund Burke, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton had all perceived the worldwide aims of the revolution and foretold its spreading eruptions. Disraeli, Bakunin and others, a half-century later, had testified to, and warned against, the Jewish usurpation of the revolutionary leadership. Manning joined in these warnings but also foresaw the coming of Zionism and the part it would play in the dual process.

Of the revolution he said, "The secret societies of the world, the existence of which men laugh at and deny in the plenitude of their self-confidence; the secret societies are forcing their existence and their reality upon the consciousness of those who, until the other day, would not believe that they existed" (1861). He expected the full success of Weishaupt's original plan and thought the time in which he lived was "the prelude of the anti-Christian period of the final dethronement of Christendom, and of the restoration of society without God in the world". Today the anti-Christian revolution holds temporal power in half of Europe, the Christian cross has been expunged from the flags of all great European nations save the British and from those of many small ones, and a "society without God" has been set up as a potential world-government, so that these words of ninety years ago are seen as an impressive forecast part-fulfilled.

Then (and in this he rose above the other seers) he depicted the part which Zionism would play in this process: "Those who have lost faith in the Incarnation, such as humanitarians, rationalists and pantheists, may well be deceived by any person of great political power and success, who should restore the Jews to their own land. . . and there is nothing in the political aspect of the world which renders such a combination impossible".

Finally, he said that he expected the personal coming of Antichrist in the form of a Jew. (In these words he moved from the ground of political calculation, where as events have shown he was expert, to that of interpreting prophecy; he related Saint Paul's message to the Thessalonians, 2.1.iii-xi, to the coming time, saying, "It is a law of Holy Scripture that when persons are prophesied of, persons appear".)

Thus, while Europe outwardly appeared to be slowly moving towards an improving future on the path which for eighteen centuries had served it well, in the Talmudic areas of Russia Zionism joined Communism as the second of the two forces which were to intercept that process. Communism was designed to subvert the masses; it was the "great popular movement" foreseen by Disraeli, by means of which "the secret societies" were to work in unison for the disruption of Europe. Zionism set out to subvert rulers at the top. Neither force could have moved forward without the other, for rulers of unimpaired authority would have checked the revolution as it had been checked in 1848.

Zionism was essentially the rejoinder of the Talmudic centre in Russia to the emancipation of Jews in the West. It was the intimation that they must not involve themselves in mankind but must remain apart.

Never since Babylon had the ruling sect ventured to play this card. It can never be played again, if the present attempt ultimately ends in fiasco. For that reason the Talmudists ever refrained from playing it, and only did this when emancipation confronted them with a vital emergency, the loss of their power over Jewry. Indeed, they had always denounced as "false Messiahs" those who clamoured that the day of fulfilment was come. 'Had Sabbatai Zevi, or for that matter Cromwell or Napoleon, been able to deliver Palestine to them, they might have proclaimed one of these to be the Messiah. On this occasion they proclaimed themselves to be the Messiah, and that bold enterprise can hardly be repeated. Historically therefore, we are probably moving towards the end of the destructive plan, because it obviously cannot be fulfilled, but the present generation, and possibly some generations to come, by all the signs have yet a heavy price to pay for having encouraged the attempt.

Dr. Chaim Weizmann's book is the best single fount of information about the twin roots of Communism and Zionism and their convergent purpose. He was present at the birth of Zionism, he became its roving plenipotentiary, he was for forty years the darling of Western courts, presidential offices and cabinet rooms, he became the first president of the Zionist state, and he told the entire tale with astonishing candour. He shows how, in those remote Talmudic communities nearly a hundred years ago, the strategy took shape which in its consequences was to catch up, as in a vortex, all peoples of the West. Americans and Britons, Germans and Frenchmen, Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Balts, the Balkanic peoples and all others were to be implicated. The lifeblood and treasure of the West were to be spent on the promotion of these two complementary purposes like water from a running tap.

Millions, living and dead, were during two wars involved in their furtherance. Men now being born inherit a share in the final upheavals to which they must inexorably lead. The Jews shared in all that tribulation, in their small proportion to the masses affected. Dr. Weizmann's account enables today's student to see the beginnings of all this; and now this narrative reaches our own time, which receives daily shape from what then occurred.

He explains that the Jews in Russia were divided into three groups. The first group was that of the Jews who, seeking "the peace of the city", simply wanted to become peaceable Russian citizens, as the Jews of the West, in the majority, at that time were loyal German, French or other citizens. Emancipation was for this group the final aim, and it chiefly contained those Jews who, by talent, diligence and fear of Talmudic rule, had escaped from the ghettoes.

Dr. Weizmann dismisses it as small, unrepresentative and "renegade", and as it was swept away it must also disappear from this narrative, which belongs to the two other groups. By the edict of the Talmudists it has "disappeared from the face of the earth", or been excommunicated.

The remaining mass of Jews in Russia, (that is, those that lived in the ghettoes under Talmudic rule) were divided into two groups by a vertical line which split households and families, including Dr. Weizmann's own house and family. Both groups were revolutionary; that is to say, they agreed in working for the destruction of Russia. The dissension was solely on the point of Zionism. The "Communist-revolutionary" group held that full "emancipation" would be achieved when the world-revolution supplanted the nation-states everywhere. The "Zionist-revolutionary" group, while agreeing that the world-revolution was indispensable to the process, held that full "emancipation" would only be achieved when a Jewish nation was established in a Jewish state.

Of these two groups, the Zionist one was clearly the superior in Talmudic orthodoxy, as destruction, under the Law is but a means to the end of domination, and the dominant nation is that ordained to be set up in Jerusalem. In the households, dispute was fierce. The Communists maintained that Zionism would weaken the revolution, which professed to deny "race and creed"; the Zionists contended that revolution must lead to the restoration of the chosen people, of whom race was the creed. Individual members of these households probably believed that the point in dispute was valid, but in fact it was not.

Neither of these groups could have taken shape, in those sternly ruled communities, against the will of the rabbinate. If the rabbis had given out the word that Communism was "transgression" and Zionism "observance" of "the statutes and judgments", there would have been no Communists in the ghettoes, only Zionists.

The ruling sect, looking into the future above the heads of the regimented mass, evidently saw that both groups were essential to the end in view; and Disraeli, in one of the passages earlier quoted, named the motive. From the middle of the last century the story of the revolution is that of Communism and Zionism, directed from one source and working to a convergent aim.

Dr. Weizmann gives an illuminating glimpse of this apparent dissension among the members of a conspiratorial, but divided, Jewish household where the ultimate shape of the high strategy was not seen and the issue between "revolutionary-Communism" and "revolutionary-Zionism" was fiercely argued. He quotes his mother, the Jewish matriarch, as saying contentedly that if the Communist-revolutionary son were proved right she would be happy in Russia, and if the Zionist-revolutionary one were correct, then she would be happy in Palestine. In the outcome both were by their lights proved right; after spending some years in Bolshevized Moscow she went to end her days in Zionized Palestine. That was after the two conspiracies, having grown in secrecy side by side, triumphed in the same week of 1917.

Communism was already an organized, though still a secret and conspiratorial party in the ghettoes when Zionism first took organized (though equally secret) form in the Chibath Zion (Love of Zion) movement. This was founded at Pinsk, where Dr. Weizmann went to school, so that as a boy his path led him into the Zionist-revolutionary wing of the anti-Russian conspiracy. In his childhood (1881) something happened which threatened to destroy the entire legend of "persecution in Russia" on which Talmudic propaganda in the outer world was based.

In 1861 Czar Alexander II, the famous Liberator, had liberated 23,000,000 Russian serfs. From that moment the prospect of liberty and improvement on the Western model opened out for Russian citizens of all nationalities (Russia contained about 160 nationalities and the Jews formed about 4 percent of the total population). Then, during the twenty years following the liberation of the serfs, the Jews began, under Talmudic direction, to offer "bitter passive resistance to all 'attempts at improvements' " (Dr. Kastein). In March 1881, Alexander II moved to complete his life's work by proclaiming a parliamentary constitution. Dr. Kastein's comment speaks for itself: "It is not surprising to find a Jewess taking part in the conspiracy which led to the assassination of Alexander II" .

This event, the first of a simi1ar series, was the first major success of the revolutionaries in preventing emancipation. It restored the ideal condition depicted by Moses Hess (one of the earliest Zionist propagandists) in the year following the liberation of the serfs: "We Jews shall always remain strangers among the nations; these, it is true, will grant us rights from feelings of humanity and justice, but they will never respect us so long as we place our great memories in the second rank and accept as our first principle, 'Where I flourish, there is my country' ".

During this period Leon Pinsker, another herald of Zionism, published his book Auto-Emancipation. The title was a threat (to the initiated); it meant, "We will not accept any kind of emancipation bestowed on us by others; we will emancipate ourselves and will give 'emancipation' our own interpretation". He said, "There is an inexorable and inescapable conflict between humans known as Jews and other humans", and he described the master-method to be used to bring about this "self-emancipation" and to "restore the Jewish nation": the struggle to achieve "these ends, he said, "must be entered upon in such a spirit as to exert an irresistible pressure upon the international politics of the present ".

These words of 1882 are some of the most significant in this entire story. They show foreknowledge of the highest order, as the reader may discern if he try to picture, say, some Polish or Ukrainian patriot-in-exile talking, then or now, of "exerting irresistible pressure upon international politics". The political emitter is a sad man of hope deferred, an habitué of the Café des Exiles who is usually thankful if the second secretary of an Under Secretary of State deigns to spare him half an hour. Pinsker was an obscure Jewish emigré in Berlin, little known outside revolutionary circles, when he wrote these words, which would seem to be of the most foolish pretension if the events of the next seventy years had not proved that he knew exactly what he meant. He knew how Zionism would prevail. Clearly the conspiracy, long before its nature was even suspected in the outer world, had powerful support far outside Russia and this unknown Pinsker was aware of the methods by which the affairs of the world were to be rearranged.

Such was the state of the two-headed conspiracy in Russia when Dr. Weizmann grew to manhood and began to play his part. The word "conspiracy", frequently used here, is not the author's; Dr. Weizmann candidly employs it. Loathing Russia, he went (without hindrance) to Germany. The sight of "emancipated" Jews there so repelled him that he longed for the ghettoes of Russia and returned to them during his holidays, then resuming his part in "the conspiracy", as he says. Then, at various universities in the emancipated West he continued his "open fight" to de-emancipate the Jews of Europe. They recognized the danger and turned faces of fear and enmity to these Ostjuden.

Thus in Germany Gabriel Rieser told the Zionist-revolutionaries from Russia "We did not immigrate here, we were born here, and because we were born here, we lay no claim to a home anywhere else; we are either Germans or else we are homeless". Similarly, the rabbis of Reform Judaism resolved that "the idea of the Messiah deserves every consideration in our prayers, but all requests that we may be led back to the land of our fathers and the Jewish State be restored must be dropped out of them".

These Jews struggled to keep faith with the Sanhedrin's pledges. They had made peace with mankind, and it appeared impossible that the Talmudists could ever lead them back into a new Nehemiahan captivity. Dr. Kastein records with horror that towards the end of the 19th century "one Jew in five married a Gentile" and, with greater horror, that in war "on all fronts Jew stood opposed to Jew; this was a tragedy . . . which will be repeated . . . as long as Jews are compelled to fulfil their duties as citizens of the lands of their adoption".

The shadow of the new Talmudic captivity was much nearer to the Jews of the West than even they could suspect. The elders in Russia had been organizing during all these decades and as the end of the century approached were ready to "exert irresistible pressure upon the international politics of the present". The most successful specialist in this exertion of pressure; a roving Zionist prime minister, was young Chaim Weizmann, who during the last years of Monk's life moved about the European cities and universities, from Darmstadt to Berlin, and later from Berlin to Geneva, planting therein the time-bombs of the future and preparing for his 20th Century task.

As the century closed came a sudden acceleration in this process, as if a machine long in construction were completed and began to run at high power, and its throbbing pulsations were at once felt throughout all Jewry, though the Gentile masses, less sensitive to such vibrations, remarked them not at all. In the succession to Moses Hess another Jew from Russia, Asher Ginsburg (Ahad Ha'am) proclaimed that the Jews not only formed a nation but must have a Jewish state in Palestine. However, this was but one more voice from remote Russia, and the weakness of the Jews in the West was that they did not realize the power and strength of the compact, organized mass in the Eastern ghettoes, or at any rate, they could not see how it could make itself felt in Europe.

The warning to them came in 1896, the year of Prophet Monk's death, when Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State. With that, the cat was in their dovecot, and not very long afterwards the doves were in the cat. Their ranks were split, for this Theodor Herzl was not one of the Eastern Jews, not a Jew from Russia. He was one of themselves, or at all events they held him to be one. He appeared to be the very model of an emancipated Western Jew, yet he was on the side of the Zionists. A premonitory tremor ran through Jewry. Christendom, which had as much cause to be perturbed, remained blissfully unaware for another sixty years.
 

Page 198

Chapter 25


THE WORLD ZIONIST ORGANIZATION

If mere chance, ever and again, produces men like Karl Marx and Dr. Theodor Herzl at moments when their acts can 1ead to destructive consequences out of proportion to their own importance, then chance in the past century has been enlisted in the conspiracy against the West. The likelier explanation is that a higher command was already in charge of these events and that it chose, or at all events used Herzl for the part he played. The brevity of his course across the firmament (like that of a shooting star), the disdainful way in which when his task was done he was cast aside, and his unhappy end would all support that explanation.

Those who have known Vienna and its atmosphere in our century will understand Herzl and his effect. A declining monarchy and a tottering nobility: a class of Jews rising suddenly and swiftly to the highest places; these things made great impression among the Jewish masses. Dr. Herzl, rather than the Neue Freie Presse, now told them how went the world and instructed politicians what to do. Obsequious Obers in the chattering cafés hastened to serve "Herr Doktor!" It was all new, exciting. Self-importance filled the Herzl's and de Blowitz's of that time and when Dr. Herzl emerged as the self-proclaimed herald of Zion the Western Jews were left awed and uncertain. If Dr. Herzl could talk like this to the Great Powers, perhaps he was right and the Napoleonic Sanhedrin had been wrong!

Could it be true that policy was made in Dr. Herzl's office, not in the Ballhausplatz? Had a Jew from Russia written The Jewish State, or attempted to set up a World Zionist Organization, the Western Jews would have ignored him, for they feared the conspiracy from the East and at least suspected its implications. But if Dr. Herzl, a fully emancipated Western Jew, thought that Jews must re-segregate themselves, the matter was becoming serious.

Herzl asserted that the Dreyfus case had convinced him of the reality of "anti-semitism". The term was then of fairly recent coinage, though Dr. Kastein seeks to show that the state of mind denoted by it is immemorial by saying "it has existed from the time that Judaism came into contact with other peoples in something more than neighbourly hostility". (By this definition resistance in war is "anti-semitism", and the "neighbours" in the tribal warfare of antique times, to which he refers, were themselves Semites. However, the words "contact exceeding neighbourly hostility" offer a good example of Zionist populism.)

Anyway, Dr. Herzl stated that "the Dreyfus process made me a Zionist", and the words are as empty as Mr. Lloyd George's later ones, "Acetone converted me to Zionism" (which were demonstrably untrue). The Dreyfus case gave the Jews complete proof of the validity of emancipation and of the impartiality of justice under it. Never was one man defended so publicly by so many or so fully vindicated. Today whole nations, east of Berlin, have no right to any process of law and the West, which signed the deed of their outlawry, is indifferent to their plight; they may be imprisoned or killed without charge or trial. Yet in the West today the Dreyfus case, the classic example of justice, continues to be cited by the propagandists as the horrid example of injustice. If the case for or against Zionism stood or fell by the Dreyfus case, the word should have disappeared from history at that point.

Nevertheless Dr. Herzl demanded that "the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation" (he specified no particular territory and did not especially lean towards Palestine). For the first time the idea of resurrecting a Jewish state came under lively discussion among Western Jews.* The London Jewish Chronicle described the book as "one of the most astounding pronouncements which have ever been put forward". Herzl, thus encouraged, went to London, then the focus of power, to canvass his idea. After successful meetings in London's East End he decided to call a Congress of Jews in support of it.

Consequently, in March 1897, Jews "all over the world" were invited to send delegates to a "Zionist congress", a counter-Sanhedrin, at Munich in August. The Western Jews were adamantly opposed. The rabbis of Germany, and then the Jews of Munich, protested, and the place of meeting was changed to Basel, in Switzerland. The Reform Jews of America two years earlier had announced that they expected "neither a return to Palestine. . . nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish State". (Most curious to relate today, when Rabbi Stephen Wise in 1899 suggested a book about Zionism to the Jewish Publication Society of America its secretary replied, "The Society cannot risk a book on Zionism").

When Herzl's congress met most of the 197 delegates came from Eastern Europe. This group of men then set up a "World Zionist Organization", which proclaimed Jewish nationhood and "a publicly secured, legally assured home" to be its aims, and Herzl declared "The Jewish State exists". In fact, a few Jews, claiming to speak for all Jews but vehemently repudiated by many representative bodies of Western Jewry, had held a meeting in Basel, and that was all.

Nevertheless, the proposal, for what it was worth in those circumstances, was at last on the table of international affairs. The congress was in fact a Sanhedrin summoned to cancel the avowals made by the Napoleonic Sanhedrin eighty years before. That Sanhedrin repudiated separate nationhood and any ambition to form a Jewish state; this one proclaimed separate nationhood and the ambition of statehood. Looking back fifty years later, Rabbi Elmer Berger observed, "Here was the wedge of Jewish nationalism, to be driven between Jews and other human beings. Here was the permanent mould of ghettoism into which Jewish life in the unemancipated nations was to remain compressed so that the self-generating processes of emancipation and integration could not come into play".

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* At that time it hardly reached the mind of the Gentile multitude. In 1841 a Colonel Churchill, English Consul at Smyrna, at the conference of Central European States called to determine the future of Syria had put forward a proposal to set up a Jewish state in Palestine, but apparently it was dismissed with little or no consideration.
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The Napoleonic Sanhedrin had a basic flaw, now revealed, of which Napoleon may well have been unaware. It represented the Western Jews, and Napoleon cannot reasonably be expected to have known of the strength of the compact, Talmudic-ruled mass of Jews in Russia, for Dr. Herzl, who surely should have known of this, was ignorant of it! He made the discovery at that first World Zionist Congress, called by him in such confident expectation of mass-support: "and then. . . there rose before our eyes a Russian Jewry, the strength of which we had not even suspected. Seventy of our delegates came from Russia, and it was patent to all of us that they represented the views and sentiments of the five million Jews of that country. What a humiliation for us, who had taken our superiority for granted! "

Dr. Herzl found himself face to face with his masters and with the conspiracy, which through him was about to enter the West. He had declared war on emancipation and, like many successors, was unaware of the nature of the force he had released. He was soon left behind, a bugler whose task was done, while the real "managers" took over.

He had forged the instrument which they were to use in their onslaught on the West. Dr. Weizmann, who became the real leader, clearly sees that: "It was Dr. Herzl's enduring contribution to Zionism to have created one central parliamentary authority for Zionism . . . This was the first time in the exilic history of Jewry that a great government had officially negotiated with the elected representatives of the Jewish people. The identity, the legal personality of the Jewish people, had been re-established".

Dr. Weizmann presumably smiled to himself when he included the words "parliamentary" and "elected". The middle sentence contains the great fact. The Jews who met at Basel, shunned by the majority of Western Jews, and its declarations, could only be lent authority by one event, which at that time seemed unimaginable; namely, their recognition by a Great Power. This inconceivable thing happened a few years later when the British Government offered Dr. Herzl Uganda, and that is the event to which Dr. Weizmann refers. From that moment all the Great Powers of the West in effect accepted the Talmudists from Russia as representing all Jews, and from that moment the Zionist-revolution also entered the West.

Thus ended the century of emancipation, which began with such bright prospect of common involvement, and the prescient words of Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (written just before Dr. Herzl's congress met at Basel) at once became truth and living reality. Looking back on Gottfried von Herder's words of a hundred years before, "The ruder nations of Europe are willing slaves of Jewish usury", Chamberlain wrote that during the 19th Century "a great change has taken place. . . today Herder could say the same of by far the greatest part of our civilized world . . . The direct influence of Judaism on the 19th Century thus becomes one of the burning subjects of the day. We have to deal here with a question affecting not only the present, but also the future of the world".

With the formation of the World Zionist Organization, which the great governments of the West were to treat, in effect, as an authority superior to themselves, the burning subject began to mould the entire shape of events. That it affected "the future of the world" is plainly seen in 1956, when this book is conc1uded; from the start of that year the political leaders of the remaining great powers of the West, Britain and America, observed in tones of sad surprise that the next world war might at any time break out in the place where they had set up "the Jewish State", and they hastened to and fro across the ocean in the effort to concert some way of preventing that consummation.
 

Page 202

Chapter 26


THE HERESY OF DR. HERZL

For the six years from 1897 to 1903 Dr. Theodor Herzl of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse was a world figure of an entirely new kind. He had created Zionism as an organized political force (and it was to be the death of him, as of some others who followed him on that path). He had launched it among the affairs of the West like a Chinese cracker. Yet he was an insubstantial shadow, the product of the cafés, of Sacher Torte and Kaffee mit Schlagsahne. He was like a man used for his "connections" by an astute company promoter and discarded when the flotation was well launched. He was never truly the leader and began to realize that, with a shock of alarm, at his first congress of 1897, when "there rose before our eyes a Russian Jewry, the strength of which we had not even suspected"; by 1904 the full realization of his captivity had killed him.

He once wrote that at Basel in 1897 "I founded the Jewish state . . . I hounded the people into the state sentiment and conveyed to them the emotion that they were the national assembly". The next six years showed, in actual events, what Leon Pinsker had meant in 1882 by "exerting irresistible pressure upon the international politics of the present".

Herzl, the Budapest-born Viennese journalist, began a triumphal tour of the great capitals; he was launched on a glittering flight, as from trapeze to trapeze, through the haut monde. Emperors, potentates and statesmen received him as the spokesman of all the Jews and the contrast between what they thought and what he must have known is impressive for, as his first lieutenant, Max Nordau, said after his death,: "Our people had a Herzl but Herzl never had a people"; the Ta1mudic rabbinate in the East, which scorned this false Messiah, stood between him and any mass following.

The world in which he moved seemed firm and well founded. The Widow at Windsor and the Old Gentleman at Schoenbrunn were beloved by their peoples; the Young Man in Berlin was growing older and mellowing; the Czar was still the father of his people; men's right to process of law was everywhere being asserted; gradually industrial serfdom was giving way to better conditions. But everywhere the rulers and politicians knew and feared the danger that this process, calculably good if given time, would be arrested and destroyed by the world-revolution, for by this time Weishaupt's secret society had grown, through Disraeli's "network of secret societies", into the Communist party organized in all countries.

Herzl's method was to exploit this general fear for his particular end, the Jewish State. He offered domestic peace if it were supported and revolution if it were not and he claimed to speak in the name of all the Jews. It is, of course, implicit in this that he knew the revolutionary leadership to be Jewish, and he thus confirmed, several decades later, what Disraeli and Bakunin had said. His belief in the method he used is expressed in his famous phrase, "When we sink we become a revolutionary proletariat; when we rise there rises the terrible power of our purse".

Thus he told a Grand Duke of Baden that he would diminish revolutionary propaganda in Europe in proportion to the support that his territorial ambition received from high authority. Then he was received by the behelmeted Kaiser, mounted on a charger, at the very gates of Jerusalem, and the emperor agreed to present to the Sultan Herzl's proposal for a Zionist chartered company in Palestine under German protection. When nothing came of this Herzl threatened the Kaiser, too, with revolution: "If our work miscarries, hundreds of thousands of our supporters will at a single bound join the revolutionary parties".

Then in Russia he was received by the Czar himself, to whom he spoke in similar terms. About this time the third Word Zionist Congress was held and the decision was taken that every Jew who became a member acknowledged the sovereignty of the still mythical Jewish State. Rabbi Elmer Berger says despondently that therewith "ghettoized, corporate Jewish existence became a reality again and now existed upon a greater scale that it had ever before achieved" .

Next Herzl saw another potentate, the Sultan of Turkey. Nothing tangible came of all these journeys, but the great coup was at hand, for Herzl then transferred his activities to England. There, too, he evidently had access to the highest places, for one of the decisive actions of world history was prepared, British folk who were then in their cradles, and their children and grandchildren were to be caught up in the consequences of those unrecorded interviews.

Who enabled Dr. Herzl from Vienna to command reception by the great in all countries, and who ensured that they should listen to demands that were imperious, and intimidatory as well? Obviously "kingly portals" (his own phrase) would not have opened to him merely because he had called a meeting of 197 men at Basel and this had passed a resolution. Others, more powerful than he, must have interceded to set aside porters, doormen, footmen, secretaries, chamberlains and all those whose task it is to keep importuners from their masters.

At this point the present narrative enters the most secret and jealously guarded field of all. The origins of the world-revolution, its aims and the Jewish assumption of its leadership may now be shown from the mass of documentary evidence which has accumulated; the existence of Disraeli's "network", spreading over the superficies of the earth, is known to all; the nature of the "revolutionary proletarist" is clear. But there is also that second network, of influential men at the higher level where "the power of the purse" may be used to exert "irresistible pressure on the international politics of the present" through rulers and politicians. This network of men, working in all countries to a common end, is the one which must have enabled Herzl to penetrate, with his demands, to the highest places.

All experienced observers know of the existence of this force at the highest level of international affairs. The Zionist propagandists pretend that Jewish opposition to Zionism came only from "Jewish notables", "Jewish magnates" and "rich Jews" (these phrases repeatedly recur, for instance in Dr. Weizmann's book). In fact the division in Judaism was vertical, among rich and poor alike, and though the majority of Western Jews were at that time violently opposed to Zionism the minority contained rich and notable Jews. Only these can have enabled the spectre of Zionism, in the person of Dr. Herzl, to make its sudden, Nijinski-like leap into courts and cabinet-rooms, where he began to go in and out as if he were born to privilege. Those who helped him were plainly in alliance with the one compact, organized body of Zionists: the Talmudic communities in Russia.

Dr. Kastein says that the "executive" set up by the 197 men at Basel "was the first embodiment of a real Jewish international". In other words, something that already existed received a visible expression. A "Jewish international" was already in being and this was powerful enough to command royal, princely and ministerial audiences for Dr. Herzl everywhere.

Of this international "network" of like-thinking men at the highest level, in Dr. Herzl's day, the student may only make a picture by carefully piecing together significant glimpses and fragments (its existence and concerted actions in our time are plainly demonstrable, as this book in its later chapters will show, from the growing mass of literature). For instance, Dr. Weizmann says he told Dr. Herzl that Sir Francis Montefiore (a leading Jew in England) was "a fool", whereon Herzl answered, "He opens kingly portals to me". Again, one Baron de Hirsch was Herzl's chief financial backer and supporter. Of this Baron de Hirsch Count Carl Lonyay (quoting from documents in the secret archives of the Imperial Court at Vienna) says that Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, wishing to make provision for a woman friend before his suicide at Mayerling, obtained 100,000 gulden "from the banker, Baron Hirsch, in return for an act of friendliness he had performed in December, when he invited the banker to meet the Prince of Wales" (the future Kind Edward VII).

Baron de Hirsch, in the sequence to this introduction, became an intimate of the Prince of Wales, and private banker and financial adviser to the future King of England. He was also brother-in-law of a Mr. Bischoffsheim of the Jewish financial house of Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt in London, of which a very rich German-born Jew, Sir Ernest Cassel, was a member. Sir Ernest, as Mr. Brian Connell says in a biographical study, fell heir to Baron de Hirsch's friendship with the future king: "where Hirsch had been an intimate, Cassel was to become Edward VII's closest personal friend". He was indeed the last of the king's intimates to see him alive, the king, on the day of his death, insisting on keeping an appointment with Sir Edward and rising to dress himself for the purpose.

In the sequence to this account Mr. Connell says: "The small international fraternity of which he" (Sir Ernest Cassel) "became perhaps the leading member were all men with backgrounds similar to his own, people whom he approached in the course of his extensive travels. There was Max Warburg, head of the great private banking house in Hamburg; Edouard Noetzlin, honorary president of the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, in Paris; Franz Philippson in Brussels; Wertheim and Gompertz in Amsterdam and, above all, Jacob Schiff of the firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company in New York. Ties of race and interest bound these men together. The web of their communications quivered at the slightest touch. They maintained between them an incredibly accurate network of economic, political and financial intelligence at the highest level. They could withdraw support here, provide additional funds there, move immense sums of money with lightning rapidity and secrecy from one corner to another of their financial empires, and influence the political decisions of a score of countries".

"Ties of race and interest . . . web . . . network . . . intelligence at the highest level. . . move immense sums of money . . . influence political decisions . . .": there can be no reasonable doubt that this was the "Jewish international" of which Dr. Kastein wrote and the mechanism which operated, across all national boundaries, to support Dr. Herzl. Nothing less could explain the action which the British Government took and if there was doubt earlier, about the concerted action of this force, above and distinct from nations, the events of our mid-century have removed it. With such a power behind him Dr. Herzl was in a position to make demands and utter menaces. The powerful men who formed this international directorate (the term is not too large) at that time may not, as individuals, have believed in Zionism, and may even have been privately opposed to it. In the present writer's belief even they were not powerful enough to oppose, or to deny support to, a policy laid down by the elders of Jewry.

While the consequences of Dr. Herzl's journeys were secretly taking shape, he continued his travels. He took an innocent pride in his sudden elevation and liked the elegance of society, the tailcoats and white gloves, the chandeliers and receptions. The Talmudic elders in Russia, who had grown up to the kaftan and earlocks and were preparing to overthrow him, disdained but made use of this typical figure of "Western emancipation".

In 1903 he had astonishing experiences, resembling those of Sabbatai Zevi in 1666. He went to Russia and on his progress through Jewish cities was the object of Messianic ovations from the unenlightened masses. On this occasion he sought to persuade de Russia to bring pressure on the Sultan, in the matter of his proposal for a chartered company in Palestine. He made some impression on the Russian Minister of the Interior, von Plehve, to whom he said that he spoke for "all the Jews of Russia".

If he believed that he was soon undeceived. He did something that shows him either to have been recklessly brave or else quite unaware of what truly went on around him (this happens sometimes with such men). Presumably in order to strengthen his case with von Plehve, with whom he must have used the "Zionism or revolution" argument, he urged the Jews in Russia to abstain from revolutionary activities and discussed their "emancipation" with the Russian authorities!

Thus he wrote his own political death warrant, and indeed he soon died. To the Talmudic elders this was heresy; he had entered the forbidden room. They had been working to prevent Jewish emancipation in Russia, because they saw in it the loss of their power over Jewry. If his negotiations with the Russian Government succeeded, pacification in Russia would follow, and that would mean the end of the propagandist legend of "Jewish persecution" in Russia.

When he returned to address the Sixth Congress of his World Zionist Organization his fate rose to meet him in the form of a compact mass of Russian Jews no longer merely "humiliating" to him, but menacing. At this moment of his fiasco he thought he had the ace of trumps in his pocket and he produced it. As a result of those interviews in London and of the "irresistible pressure" which supported him, the British Government had offered Dr. Herzl of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse a territory in Africa, Uganda!

If history records a stranger thing, I have not discovered it. Yet the trump card proved to be a deuce. 295 delegates voted to accept the offer, but 175 rejected it; clearly Dr. Herzl did not speak for "all Jews". The great majority of the 175 Noes came from the Jews of Russia. The huddled Jewish throngs there had hailed Herzl as the Messiah; these 175 emissaries of the Eastern rabbinate imprecated him, for Uganda meant the ruin of their plan. They cast themselves on the floor in the traditional attitude of mourning for the dead or for the destruction of the temple. One of them, a woman, called the world-famous Dr. Herzl "a traitor" and when he was gone tore down the map of Uganda from behind the speakers' dais.

If what he said and wrote was fully candid, Dr. Herzl never understood why the Jewish emissaries from Russia refused to consider any other place than Palestine, and if that is so he must have been most guileless. He had built up his entire movement on the c1aim that "a place of refuge" was directly needed for "persecuted Jews", and these were the Jews of Russia; Jews were fully emancipated elsewhere. If that was true, then any good place would do, and he had now procured one for them; moreover, if any of them preferred to stay in Russia, and his negotiations with the Russian Government succeeded, they could have all they wanted in Russia too!

From the point of view of the Talmudic rabbinate in Russia the matter was entirely different. They, too, had built up the legend of "persecution in Russia", while they worked against emancipation there, but this was for the purpose of fulfilling the ancient Law, which meant possession of Palestine and all subsequent things that the Law ordained. Acceptance of Uganda would have meant Doomsday for Talmudic Judaism.

Dr. Weizmann describes Dr. Herzl's final humiliation. After the vote Herzl went to see the Jews from Russia, who had turned their backs on him and walked out, in their committee room. "He came in, looking haggard and exhausted. He was received in dead silence. Nobody rose from his seat to greet him, nobody applauded him when he ended. . . It was probably the first time that Herzl was thus received at any Zionist gathering: he, the idol of all Zionists".

It was also the last time. Within the year Dr. Herzl was dead, at the age of forty-four. No conclusion can be offered about his death. Judaist writers refer to it in cryptic terms. The Jewish Encyclopaedia says it was the result of what he endured and other authorities make similarly obscure, though significant, allusions. Those who during the centuries have been the object of anathema or excommunication by the ruling sect often have died soon and wretchedly. The student comes to feel that in this matter he approaches mysterious things, closed to all ordinary research.

The curious thing is that Herzl's intimate, right-hand man and leading orator saw the shape of things, at that time and to come, with complete clarity. He displayed a foreknowledge as great as that of Leon Pinsker when he depicted the series of events to which Pinsker's "irresistible pressure on international politics" would lead. At the very congress where Herzl suffered his humiliation Max Nordau (an alias or pseudonym; his name was Suedfeld) gave this exact prognosis:

"Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl, the Zionist congress, the English Uganda proposition, the future world war, the peace conference where, with the help of England, a free and Jewish Palestine will be created" (1903). Here spoke the initiate, the illuminate, the man who knew the strength and purpose of "the international". (Max Nordau helped the process, the course of which he foretold, by writing such best-sellers of the 1890's as Degeneration, in which he told the West that it was irredeemably corrupt). Even Max Nordau did not spell out his conclusion to its logical end. Another delegate did that, Dr. Nahum Sokoloff, who said: "Jerusalem will one day become the capital of world peace". That the ambition is to make it the capital of the world is clear in 1956, when the Western governments stand in daily fear of its annexation to the Zionist state; whether mankind would find it to be the capital of peace remains to be seen.

After Dr. Herzl died Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the later Zionist leader, led the attack on the Uganda offer and at the Seventh Congress, of 1905, the acceptance, at his instigation, was revoked. From that moment Zionism was the instrument of the Talmudic rabbinate in the East.

The story of the Uganda offer and its scornful rejection shows the indifference of the ruling sect to the welfare and the wishes of the Jewish masses, for whom they pretended to speak; indeed, when the matter is carefully considered "hostility" suggests itself as a truer word than "indifference". This is seen by examining, in turn, the feeling expressed towards the offer by the three main groups of Jews: those of the West, those of Russia, and (a section of Jewry never even mentioned in all these loud exchanges) the Jews already in Palestine.

The Jews of the West at that time were strongly opposed to Zionism as such, whether it led to Uganda, Pa1estine or anywhere else; they just wanted to stay where they were. The Jews of Russia were depicted as needing simply "a place of refuge" from "persecution", and if that was true, Uganda might have appealed to them; anyway, the frenzied ovations with which they received Dr. Herzl suggest that they would have followed any lead he gave, had the rabbinate allowed them. That leaves the Jews who were already in Palestine.

This one community of original Jews was ardently in favour of removal to Uganda, as research discovers, and for this reason they were denounced as "traitors" by the Judaized Chazars from Russia who had taken over Zionism! This is what the Zionist Organization at Tel Aviv still was saying about them in 1945:

"It was a degrading and distressing sight to see all these people who . . . had been the first to build up the Jewish Palestine of that day, public1y denying and repudiating their own past. . . The passion for Uganda became associated with a deadly hatred for Palestine. . . In the community centres of the first Jewish colonies young men educated in the Alliance Israelite schools denounced Palestine as 'a land of corpses and graves', a land of malaria and eye-diseases, a land which destroys its inhabitants. Nor was this the expression of a few individuals. Indeed, it was only a few individuals here and there . . . who remained loyal. . . The whole of Palestine was in a state of ferment. . . All opposition to Uganda came from outside of Palestine. In Zion itself all were against Zion".

What the masses of people wanted, Jewish or Gentile, was from 1903 of no account. Acceptance or refusal made no difference; the offer had been made, and by it the West and its future were involved in an enterprise foreseeably disastrous. As Dr. Weizmann says, a British government by this act committed itself to recognize the Talmudists from Russia as the government of all Jews; thereby it also committed future generations of its people, and the similar commitment of the American people was to follow a decade later, when the path had been prepared.

Out of that act of 1903 came the beginning of this century's tribulations. The story of Zion thereafter became that of Western politicians who, under "irresistible pressure", did the bidding of a powerful sect. 1903 was the conspiracy's triumphant year, and for the West it was to prove as ominous as 1914 and 1939, which years both took their shape under its shadow.
 

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Chapter 27


THE "PROTOCOLS"

While Zionism thus took shape in the Eastern ghettoes during the last century and at the start of this one emerged as a new force in international affairs (when the British Government offered it Uganda), the world-revolution, in those same Talmudic areas, prepared its third "eruption". The two forces moved forward together in synchronization (for Zionism, as has been shown, used the threat of Communism in Europe to gain the ear of European rulers for its territorial demand outside Europe). It was as if twin turbines began to revolve, generating what was in effect one force, from which the new century was to receive galvanic shocks.

According to Disraeli and Bakunin the world-revolution had come under Jewish leadership around the middle of the century, and its aims then changed. Bakunin's followers, who sought to abolish the State as such because they foresaw that the revolutionary State might become more despotic than any earlier despotism, were ousted and forgotten. The world-revolution therewith took the shape of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, which aimed at the super-State founded in slave-labour and in "the confiscation of human liberty" (as de Tocqueville wrote in 1848).

This change in leadership and aims determined the course of the 20th Century. However, the methods by which the existing order was to be destroyed did not change; they continued to be those revealed by Weishaupt's papers published in 1787. Many publications of the 19th Century showed that the original Illuminist plan continued through the generations to be the textbook of the revolutionaries of all camps, as to method.

These works propagated or exposed the destructive plan in various ways, sometimes allegorical, but always recognizable if compared with the original, Weishaupt's documents. In 1859 Crétineau Joly assailed Jewish Leadership of "the secret societies". His book reproduced documents (communicated to him by Pope Gregory XVI) of the Italian secret society, the Haute Vente Romaine; their authenticity is beyond question. The Haute Vente Romaine was headed by an Italian prince who had been initiated by one of Weishaupt's own intimates (Knigge) and was a reincarnation of the Illuminati. The outer circle of initiates, the dupes, were persuaded that "the object of the association is something high and noble, that it is the Order of those who desire a purer morality and a stronger piety, the independence and unity of their country". Those who graduated into the inner degrees progressively learned the real aims and swore to destroy all religion and legitimate government; then they received the secrets of assassination, poison and perjury first disclosed by Weishaupt's documents.

In 1862 Karl Marx (whose Communist Manifesto is recognizably Illuminist) founded his First International, and Bakunin formed his Alliance Sociale Democratique (the programme of which, as Mrs. Nesta Webster has shown by quoting correlative passages, was Illuminism undiluted). In the same year Maurice Joly published an attack on Napoleon III, to whom he attributed the identical methods of corrupting and ruining the social system (this book was written in al1egorical form). In 1868 the German Goedsche reproduced the same ideas in the form of an attack on Jewish leadership of the revolution, and in 1869 the French Catholic and Royalist Gougenot Des Mousseaux took up the same theme. In that year Bakunin also published his Polemic Against The Jews..

In all these works, in one form or another, the continuity of the basic idea first revealed by Weishaupt's documents appears: namely, that of destroying all legitimate government, religion and nationhood and setting up a universal despotism to rule the enslaved masses by terror and violence. Some of them assailed the Jewish. usurpation of, or succession to the leadership of the revolution.

After that came a pause in the published literature of the conspiracy first disclosed in 1787, until in 1905 one Professor Sergyei Nilus, an official of the Department of Foreign Religions at Moscow, published a book, of which the British Museum in London has a copy bearing its date-stamp, August 10, 1906. Great interest would attach to anything that could be elicited about Nilus and his book, which has never been translated; the mystery with which he and it have been surrounded impedes research. One chapter was translated into English in 1920. This calls for mention here because the original publication occurred in 1905, although the violent uproar only began when it appeared in English in 1920.

This one chapter was published in England and America as "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion"; I cannot learn whether this was the original chapter heading or whether it was provided during translation. No proof is given that the document is what it purports to be, a minute of a secret meeting of Jewish "Elders". In that respect, therefore, it is valueless."

In every other respect it is of inestimable importance, for it is shown by the conclusive test (that of subsequent events) to be an authentic document of the world-conspiracy first disclosed by Weishaupt's papers. Many other documents in the same series had followed that first revelation, as I have shown, but this one transcends all of them. The others were fragmentary and gave glimpses; this one gives the entire picture of the conspiracy, motive, method and objective. It adds nothing new to what had been revealed in parts (save for the unproven, attribution to Jewish elders themselves), but it puts all the parts in place and exposes the whole. It accurately depicts all that has come about in the fifty years since it was published, and what clearly will follow in the next fifty years unless in that time the force which the conspiracy has generated produces the counter-force.

It is informed by a mass of knowledge (particularly of human weaknesses) which can only have sprung from the accumulated experience and continuing study of centuries, or of ages. It is written in a tone of lofty superiority, as by beings perched on some Olympian pinnacle of sardonic and ancient wisdom, and of mocking scorn for the writhing masses far below ("the mob" . . . "alcoholized animals" . . . "cattle" . . . "bloodthirsty beasts") who vainly struggle to elude the "nippers" which are closing on them; these nippers are "the power of gold" and the brute force of the mob, incited to destroy its only protectors and consequently itself.

The destructive idea is presented in the form of a scientific theory, almost of an exact science, argued with gusto and eloquence. In studying the Protocols I am constantly reminded of something that caught my eye in Disraeli's dictum, earlier quoted. Disraeli, who was careful in the choice of words, spoke of "the destructive principle" (not idea, scheme, notion, plan, plot or the like), and the Protocols elevate the theory of destruction to this status of "a fundamental truth, a primary or basic law, a governing law of conduct" (to quote various dictionary definitions of "principle"). In many passages the Protocols appear, at first sight, to recommend destruction as a thing virtuous in itself, and consequently justifying all the methods explicitly recommended to promote it (bribery, blackmail, corruption, subversion, sedition, mob-incitement, terror and violence), which thus become virtuous too.

But careful scrutiny shows that this is not the case. In fact the argument presented begins at the end, world power, and goes backward through the means, which are advocated simply as the best ones to that end. The end is that first revealed in Weishaupt's documents, and it is apparent that both spring from a much earlier source, although the Protocols, in time, stand to the Weishaupt papers as grandson to grandsire. The final aim is the destruction of all religion and nationhood and the establishment of the super State, ruling the world by ruthless terror.

When the Protocols appeared in English the minor point, who was the author of this particular document, was given a false semblance of major importance by the enraged Jewish attack on the document itself. The asseveration of Jewish leadership of the revolutionary conspiracy was not new at all; the reader has seen that Disraeli, Bakunin and many others earlier affirmed it. In this case the allegation about a specific meeting of Jewish leaders of the conspiracy was unsupported and could have been ignored (in 1913 a somewhat similar publication accused the Jesuits of instigating a world-conspiracy resembling that depicted alike in the Protocols and in Weishaupt's papers; the Jesuits quietly remarked that this was false and the matter was forgotten).

The response of official Jewry in 1920 and afterwards was different. It was aimed, with fury, at the entire substance of the Protocols; it did not stop at denying a Jewish plot, but denied that there was any plot, which was demonstrably untrue. The existence of the conspiracy had been recognized and affirmed by a long chain of high authorities, from Edmund Burke, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton to Disraeli, Bakunin and the many others mentioned in an earlier chapter. Moreover, when the Protocols appeared in English conclusive proof had been given by the event in Russia. Thus the nature of the Jewish attack could only strengthen public doubts; it protested much too much.

This attack was the repetition of the one which silenced those earlier leaders of the public demand for investigation and remedy, Robison, Barruel and Morse, but on this occasion it was a Jewish attack. Those three men made no imputation of Jewish leadership, and they were defamed solely because they drew public attention to the continuing nature of the conspiracy and to the fact that the French revolution was clearly but its first "eruption". The attack on the Protocols in the 1920's proved above all else the truth of their contention; it showed that the standing organization for suppressing public discussion of the conspiracy had been perfected in the intervening 120 years. Probably so much money and energy were never before in history expended on the effort to suppress a single document.

It was brought to England by one of the two leading British correspondents of that day in Moscow, Victor Marsden of the Morning Post (the significant story of the other correspondent belongs to a later chapter). Marsden was an authority on Russia and was much under the enduring effect of the Terror. He was in effect its victim, for he died soon after completing what he evidently felt to be a duty, the translation of the Protocols at the British Museum.

Publication in English aroused worldwide interest. That period (1920 and onward) marks the end of the time when Jewish questions could be impartially discussed in public. The initial debate was free and vigorous, but in following years the attack succeeded in imposing the law of lese majesty in this matter and today hardly any public man or print ventures to mention the Protocols unless to declare them "forged" or "infamous" (an act of submission also foretold in them).

The first reaction was the natural one. The Protocols were received as formidable evidence of an international conspiracy against religion, nationhood, legitimate government and property. All agreed that the attribution to Jewish authorship was unsupported, but that the subject matter was so grave, and so strongly supported by events subsequent to the original publication, that full enquiry was needed. This remedy, "investigation", was the one advocated by many leading men 120 years earlier. In this instance the attack was in effect again on the demand for investigation, not simply on the allegation against "the Elders of Zion".

The Times (of London) on May 8, 1920 in a long article said, "An impartial investigation of these would-be documents and of their history is most desirable . . . Are we to dismiss the whole matter without inquiry and to let the influence of such a book as this work unchecked?" The Morning Post (then the oldest and soberest British newspaper) published twenty-three articles, also calling for investigation.

In The Spectator on August 27, 1921, Lord Sydenham, a foremost authority of that day, also urged investigation: "The main point is, of course, the source from which Nilus obtained the Protocols. The Russians who knew Nilus and his writings cannot all have been exterminated by the Bolsheviks. His book . . . has not been translated, though it would give some idea of the man. . . What is the most striking characteristic of the Protocols? The answer is knowledge of a rare kind, embracing the widest field. The solution of this 'mystery', if it is one, is to be found where this uncanny knowledge, on which prophecies now literally fulfilled are based, can be shown to reside". In America Mr. Henry Ford, declaring that "the Protocols have fitted the world situation up to this time; they fit it now", caused his Dearborn Independent to publish a series of articles of which a million and a half reprints were sold.

Within two years the proprietor of The Times was certified insane (by an unnamed doctor in a foreign land; a later chapter will describe this episode) and forcibly removed from control of his publications, and The Times published an article dismissing the Protocols as a plagiarism of Maurice Joly's book. The proprietor of the Morning Post became the object of sustained vituperation until he sold the newspaper, which then ceased publication. In 1927 Mr. Henry Ford published an apology addressed to a well-known Jew of America; when I was in the United States in later years I was told by credible informants that he was persuaded to do this, at a moment when a new-model Ford automobile was about to be marketed, by hostile threats from dealers on whom the fortunes of his concern depended.

The campaign against the Protocols has never ceased since then. In communized Russia all copies discoverable had been destroyed at the revolution and possession of the book became a capital crime under the law against "anti-semitism". In the direct sequence to that, though twenty-five years later, the American and British authorities in occupied Germany after the Second World War constrained the Western German government to enact laws against "anti-semitism" on the Bolshevik model; and in 1955 a Munich printer who reproduced the Protocols had his business confiscated. In England at the time of publication the sale of the book was temporarily stopped by authority, under the pressure described, and in the course of the years the attack on it continued so violent that publishers feared it and only small local firms ever ventured to print it. In Switzerland, between the wars, a Jewish suit was brought against the book as "improper literature"; the case was won, but the verdict was set aside by a higher court.

The state of affairs thus brought about after 1920, and continuing today, was foretold by the Protocols in 1905: "Through the press we have gained the power to influence while remaining ourselves in the shade . . . The principal factor of success in the political" (field) " is the secrecy of its undertaking; the word should not agree with the deeds of the diplomat. . . We must compel the governments . . . to take action in the direction favoured by our widely-conceived plan, already approaching the desired consummation, by what we shall represent as public opinion, secretly prompted by us through the means of that so-called 'Great Power', the press, which, with a few exceptions that may be disregarded, is already entirely in our hands. . . We shall deal with the press in the following way: . . . we shall saddle and bridle it with a tight curb; we shall do the same also with all productions of the printing-press, for where would be the sense of getting rid of the attacks of the press if we remain targets for pamphlets and books? . . . No one shall with impunity lay a finger on the aureole of our government infallibility. The pretext for stopping any publication will be the alleged plea that it is agitating the public mind without occasion or justification . . . We shall have a sure triumph over our opponents since they will not have at their disposition organs of the press in which they can give full and final expression to their views owing to the aforesaid methods of dealing with the press . . ."

Such is the history of the Protocols thus far. Their attribution to Jewish "Elders" is unsupported and should be rejected, without prejudice to any other evidence about Jewish leadership of the world-revolution as such. The Jewish attack on them was bent, not on exculpating Jewry, but on stopping the publication on the plea that it was "agitating the public mind without occasion or justification". The arguments advanced were bogus; they were that the Protocols closely resembled several earlier publications and thus were "plagiaries" or "forgeries", whereas what this in truth showed was the obvious thing: that they were part of the continuing literature of the conspiracy. They might equally well be the product of non-Jewish or of anti-Jewish revolutionaries, and that is of secondary importance. What they proved is that the organization first revealed by Weishaupt's documents was in existence 120 years later, and was still using the methods and pursuing the aim then exposed; and when they were published in English the Bolshevik revolution had given the proof.

In my opinion the Protocols provide the essential handbook for students of the time and subject. If Lord Sydenham, in 1921, was arrested by the "uncanny knowledge" they displayed, "on which prophecies now literally fulfilled are based", how much more would he be impressed today, in 1956, when much more of them has been as literally fulfilled. Through this book any man can see how the upheavals of the past 150 years were, and how those of the next fifty years will be brought about; he will know in advance just how "the deeds" of his elected representatives will differ from their "word".

In one point I am able from my own experience to test Lord Sydenham's dictum about fulfilled prophecies. The Protocols, speaking of control of published information, say: "Not a single announcement will reach the public without our control. Even now this is already being attained by us inasmuch as all news items are received by a few agencies, in whose offices they are focused from all parts of the world. These agencies will then be entirely ours and will give publicity only to what we dictate to them". That was not the situation in 1905, or in Lord Sydenham's day, or in 1926, when I became a journalist, but it was developing and today is the situation. The stream of "news" which pours into the public mind through the newspapers comes from a few agencies, as if from half a dozen taps. Any hand that can control those valves can control "the news", and the reader may observe for himself the filtered form in which the news reaches him. As to the editorial views, based on this supply of news, the transformation that has been brought about may be comprehended by referring to the impartially critical articles published in The Times, Morning Post, Spectator, Dearborn Independent and thousands of other journals some twenty-five years ago. This could not happen today. The subjugation of the press has been accomplished as the Protocols foretold, and by the accident of my generation and calling I saw it come about.

Comparative study of the Protocols and of the Weishaupt papers leads to the strong deduction that both derive from a common and much older source. They cannot have been the product of any one man or one group of men in the period when they were published; the "uncanny knowledge" displayed in them obviously rests on the cumulative experience of eras. In particular, this applies (in Weishaupt's papers and the Protocols alike) to the knowledge of human weaknesses, which are singled out with analytical exactitude, the method of exploiting each of them being described with disdainful glee.

The instrument to be used for the destruction of the Christian nation-states and their religion is "the mob". The word is used throughout with searing contempt to denote the masses, (who in public are flattered by being called "the people"). "Men with bad instincts are more in number than the good, and therefore the best results in governing them are attained by violence and terrorization . . . The might of a mob is blind, senseless and unreasoning force ever at the mercy of a suggestion from any side". From this the argument is developed that "an absolute despotism" is necessary to govern "the mob", which is "a savage", and that "our State" will employ "the terror which tends to produce blind submission". The "literal fulfilment" of these precepts in communized Russia must be obvious to all today).

This "absolute despotism" is to be vested in the international super-State at the end of the road. In the meanwhile regional puppet-despots are depicted as essential to the process of breaking down the structure of states and the defences of peoples: "From the premier-dictators of the present day the peoples suffer patiently and bear such abuses as for the least of them they would have beheaded twenty kings. What is the explanation . . .? It is explained by the fact that these dictators whisper to the peoples through their agents that through these abuses the are inflicting injury on the States with the highest purpose - to secure the welfare of the peoples, the international brotherhood of them all, their solidarity and equality of rights. Naturally they do not tell the peoples that this unification must be accomplished only under our sovereign rule".

This passage is of especial interest. The term "premier-dictator" would not generally have been understood in 1905, when the peoples of the West believed their elected representatives to express and depend on their approval. However, it became applicable during the First and Second World Wars, when American presidents and British prime ministers made themselves, in fact, "premier-dictators" and used emergency powers in the name of "the welfare of peoples. . . international brotherhood . . . equality of rights". Moreover, these premier-dictators, in both wars, did tell the peoples that the ultimate end of all this would be "unification" under a world government of some kind. The question, who would govern this world government, was one which never received straightforward answer; so much else of the Protocols has been fulfilled that their assertion that it would be the instrument of the conspiracy for governing the world "by violence and terrorization" deserves much thought.

The especial characteristic of the two 20th Century wars is the disappointment which each brought to the peoples who appeared to be victorious. "Uncanny knowledge", therefore, again seems to have inspired the statement, made in 1905 or earlier, "Ever since that time" (the French Revolution) "we have been leading the peoples from one disenchantment to another", followed later by this: "By these acts all States are in torture; they exhort to tranquillity, are ready to sacrifice everything for peace; but. we will not give them peace until they openly acknowledge our international Super-Government, and with submissiveness". The words, written before 1905, seem accurately to depict the course of the 20th Century.

Again, the document says "it is indispensable for our purpose that wars, so far as possible, should not result in territorial gains". This very phrase, of 1905 or earlier, was made the chief slogan, or apparent moral principle, proclaimed by the political leaders of America and Britain in both world wars, and in this case the difference between "the word" and "the deed" of "the diplomat" has been shown by results. The chief result of the First War was to establish revolutionary-Zionism and revolutionary-Communism as new forces in international affairs, the first with a promised "homeland" and the second with a resident State. The chief result of the Second War was that further "territorial gains" accrued to, and only to, Zionism and Communism; Zionism received its resident State and Communism received half of Europe. The "deadly accuracy" (Lord Sydenham's words) of the Protocol's forecasts seems apparent in this case, where a specious phrase used in the Protocols of 1905 became the daily language of American presidents and British prime ministers in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945.

The reason why the authors of the Protocols held this slogan to be so important, in beguiling the peoples, is also explained. If the nations embroiled in wars are denied "territorial gains", the only victors will then be "our international agentur. . . our international rights will then wipe out national rights, in the proper sense of right, and will rule the nations precisely as the civil law of States rules the relations of their subjects among themselves". To bring about this state of affairs compliant politicians are needed, and of them the Protocols say: "The administrators whom we shall choose from among the public, with strict regard to their capacities for servile obedience, will not be persons trained in the arts of government, and will therefore easily become pawns in our game in the hands of men of learning and genius who will be their advisers, specialists bred and reared from early childhood to rule the affairs of the whole world".

The reader may judge for himself whether this description fits some of "the administrators" of the West in the last five decades; the test is their attitude towards Zionism, the world-revolution and world-government, and subsequent chapters will offer information in these three respects. But "deadly accuracy" appears to reside even more in the allusion to "advisers".

Here again is "uncanny knowledge", displayed more than fifty years ago. In 1905 the non-elected but powerful "adviser" was publicly unknown. True, the enlightened few, men like Disraeli, knew that "the world is governed by very different persons from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes", but to the general public the passage would have been meaningless.

In the First and Second World Wars, however, the non-elected, unofficial but imperious "adviser" became a familiar public figure. He emerged into the open (under "emergency powers") and became known to and was passively accepted by the public masses; possibly the contempt which the Protocols display for "the mob" was justified by this submission to behind-the-scenes rule even when it was openly exercized. In the United States, for instance, "advisers on Jewish affairs" became resident at the White House and at the headquarters of American armies of occupation. One financier (who publicly recommended drastic measures for "ruling the affairs of the world") was adviser to so many presidents that he was permanently dubbed "Elder Statesman" by the press, and visiting prime ministers from England also repaired to him as if to a supreme seat of authority.

The Protocols foretold this regime of the "advisers" when none understood what was meant and few would have credited that they would openly appear in the high places.

The Protocols repeatedly affirm that the first objective is the destruction of the existing ruling class ("the aristocracy", the term employed, was still applicable in 1905) and the seizure of property through the incitement of the insensate, brutish "mob". Once again, subsequent events give the "forecast" its "deadly accuracy":

"In politics one must know how to seize the property of others without hesitation if by it we secure submission and sovereignty. . . The words, 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity', brought to our ranks, thanks to our blind agents, whole legions who bore our banners with enthusiasm. And all the time these words were canker-worms boring into the wellbeing of the people, putting an end everywhere to peace, quiet, solidarity and destroying all the foundations of the States. . . This helped us to our greatest triumph; it gave us the possibility, among other things, of getting into our hands the master card, the destruction of privileges, or in other words the very existence of the aristocracy . . . that class which was the only defence peoples and countries had against us. On the ruins of the natural and genealogical aristocracy . . . we have set up the aristocracy of our educated class headed by the aristocracy of money. The qualifications of this aristocracy we have established in wealth, which is dependent upon us, and in knowledge. . . It is this possibility of replacing the representatives of the people which has placed them at our disposal, and, as it were, given us the power of appointment …. . We appear on the scene as alleged saviours of the worker from this oppression when we propose to him to enter the ranks of our fighting forces; Socialists, Anarchists, Communists . . . By want and the envy and hatred which it engenders we shall move the mobs and with their hands we shall wipe out all those who hinder us on our way . . . The people, blindly believing things in print, cherishes . . . a blind hatred towards all conditions which it considers above itself, for it has no understanding of the meaning of class and condition. . . These mobs will rush delightedly to shed the blood of those whom, in the simplicity of their ignorance, they have envied from their cradles, and whose property they will then be able to loot. 'Ours' they will not touch, because the moment of attack will be known to us and we shall take measures to protect our own. . . The word 'freedom' brings out the communities of men to fight against every kind of force, against every kind of authority, even against God and the laws of nature. For this reason we, when we come into our kingdom, shall have to erase this word from the lexicon of life as implying a principle of brute force which turns mobs into bloodthirsty beasts. . . But even freedom might be harmless and have its place in the State economy without injury to the wellbeing of the peoples if it rested upon the foundation of faith in God. . . This is the reason why it is indispensable for us to undermine all faith, to tear out of the minds of the masses the very principle of Godhead and the spirit, and to put in its place arithmetical calculations and material needs . . ."

". . . We have set one against another the personal and national reckonings of the peoples, religious and race hatreds, which we have fostered into a huge growth in the course of the past twenty centuries. This is the reason why there is not one State which would anywhere receive support if it were to raise its arm, for every one of them must bear in mind that any agreement against us would be unprofitable to itself. We are too strong, there is no evading our power. The nations cannot come to even an inconsiderable private agreement without our secretly having a hand in it . . . In order to put public opinion into our hands we must bring it into a state of bewilderment by giving expression from all sides to so many contradictory opinions and for such length of time as will suffice to make the peoples lose their heads in the labyrinth and come to see that the best thing is to have no opinion of any kind in matters political, which it is not given to the public to understand, because they are understood only by him who guides the public. This is the first secret. The second secret requisite for the success of our government is comprised in the following: to multiply to such an extent national failings, habits, passions, conditions of civil life, that it will be impossible for anyone to know where he is in the resulting chaos, so that the people in consequence will fail to understand one another . . . By all these means we shall so wear down the peoples that they will be compelled to offer us international power of a nature that by its possession will enable us without any violence gradually to absorb all the State forces of the world and to form a Super-Government. In place of the rulers of today we shall set up a bogey which will be called the Super-Government administration. Its hands will reach out in all directions like nippers and its organization will be of such colossal dimensions that it cannot fail to subdue all the nations of the world".

That the Protocols reveal the common source of inspiration of Zionism and Communism is shown by significant parallels that can be drawn between the two chief methods laid down in them and the chief methods pursued by Dr. Herzl and Karl Marx: The Protocols repeatedly lay emphasis on the incitement of "the mob" against the ruling class as the most effective means of destroying States and nations and achieving world dominion. Dr. Herzl, as was shown in the preceding chapter, used precisely this method to gain the ear of European rulers.

Next, Karl Marx. The Protocols say, "The aristocracy of the peoples, as a political force, is dead. . . but as landed proprietors they can still be harmful to us from the fact that they are self-sufficing in the resources upon which they live. It is essential therefore for us at whatever cost to deprive them of their land. . . At the same time we must intensively patronize trade and industry . . . what we want is that industry should drain off from the land both labour and capital and by means of speculation transfer into our hands all the money of the world.. ..."

Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto exactly followed this formula. True he declared that Communism might be summed up in one sentence, "abolition of private property", but subsequently he qualified this dictum by restricting actual confiscation to land and implying that other types of private property were to remain intact. (In the later Marxist event, of course, all private property was confiscated, but I speak here of the strict parallel between the strategy laid down before the event alike by the Protocols and Marx).

A passage of particular interest in the present, though it was written before 1905, says, "Nowadays if any States raise a protest against us, it is only proforma at our discretion and by our direction, for their anti-semitism is indispensable to us for the management of our lesser brethren". A distinctive feature of our era is the way the charge of "anti-semitism" is continually transferred from one country to another, the country so accused becoming automatically the specified enemy in the next war. This passage might cause the prudent to turn a sceptical eye on today's periodical reports of sudden "anti-semitic" turns in communized Russia, or elsewhere.

The resemblance to Weishaupt's documents is very strong in the passages which relate to the infiltration of public departments, professions and parties, for instance: "It is from us that the all-engulfing terror proceeds. We have in our service persons of all opinions, of all doctrines, restorating monarchists, demagogues, socialists, communists, and utopian dreamers of every kind. We have harnessed them all to the task: each one of them on his own account is boring away at the last remnants of authority, is striving to overthrow all established form of order. By these acts all States are in torture; they exhort to tranquillity, are ready to sacrifice everything for peace; but we will not give them peace until they openly acknowledge our international Super-Government, and with submissiveness".

The allusions to the permeation of universities in particular, and of education in general, also spring directly from Weishaupt, or from whatever earlier source he received them: ". . . We shall emasculate the universities . . . Their officials and professors will be prepared for their business by detailed secret programmes 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". This secret permeation of universities (which was successful in the German ones in Weishaupt's day, as his documents show) was very largely effective in our generation. The two British government officials who after their flight to Moscow were paraded before the international press in 1956 to state that they had been captured by Communism at their universities, were typical products of this method, described by the Protocols early in this century and by Weishaupt in 1787.

Weishaupt's documents speak of Freemasonry as the best "cover" to be used by the agents of the conspiracy. The Protocols allot the function of "cover" to "Liberalism": "When we introduced into the State organism the poison of Liberalism its whole political complexion underwent a change. States have been seized with a mortal illness, blood-poisoning. All that remains is to await the end of their death agony".

The term "utopian dreamers", used more than once, is applied to Liberals, and its original source probably resides in the Old Testamentary allusion to "dreamers of dreams" with "false prophets", are to be put to death. The end of Liberalism, therefore, would be apparent to the student even if the Protocols did not specify it: "We shall root out liberalism from the important strategic posts of our government on which depends the training of subordinates for our State structure".

The "Big Brother" regimes of our century, are accurately foretold in the passage, "Our government will have the appearance of a patriarchal paternal guardianship on the part of our ruler".

Republicanism, too, is to be a "cover" for the conspiracy. The Protocols are especially contemptuous of republicanism, in which (and in liberalism) they see the weapon of self-destruction forged out of "the mob": ". . . then it was that the era of republics became possible of realization; and then it was that we replaced the ruler by a caricature of a government, by a president, taken from the mob, from the midst of our puppet creatures, our slaves. This was the foundation of the mine which we have laid under the peoples".

Then the unknown scribes of some time before 1905 describe the position to which American presidents have been reduced in our century. The passage begins, "In the near future we shall establish the responsibility of presidents". This, as the sequence shows, means personal responsibility, as distinct from responsibility curbed by constitutional controls; the president is to become one of the "premier-dictators" earlier foreseen, whose function is to be to break down the constitutional defences of states and thus prepare "unification under our sovereign rule".

During the First and Second World Wars the American presidents did in fact become "premier-dictators" in this sense, claiming that "the emergency" and the need for "victory" dictated this seizure of powers of personal responsibility; powers which would be restored to "the people" when "the emergency" was past. Readers of sufficient years will recall how inconceivable this appeared before it happened and how passively it was accepted in the event. The passage then continues:

"The chamber of deputies will provide cover for, will protect, will elect presidents, but we shall take from it the right to propose new, or make changes in existing laws, for this right will be given by us to the responsible president, a puppet in our hands. . . Independently of this we shall invest the president with the right of declaring a state of war. We shall justify this last right on the ground that the president as chief of the whole army of the country must have it at his disposal in case of need. . . It is easy to understand that in these conditions the key of the shrine will lie in our hands and that no one outside ourselves will any longer direct the force of legislation. . . The president will, at our discretion, interpret the sense of such of the existing laws as admit of various interpretation; he will further annul them when we indicate to him the necessity to do so, besides this, he will have the right to propose temporary laws, and even new departures in the government constitutional working, the pretext both for the one and the other being the requirements for the supreme welfare of the state. By such measures we shall obtain the power of destroying little by little, step by step, all that at the outset when we enter on our rights, we are compelled to introduce into the constitutions of states to prepare for the transition to an imperceptible abolition of every kind of constitution, and then the time is come to turn every government into our despotism".

This forecast of 1905 or earlier particu1arly deserves Lord Sydenham's tribute of "deadly accuracy". American presidents in the two wars of this century have acted as here shown. They did take the right of declaring and making war, and it has been used at least once (in Korea) since the Second World War ended; any attempt in Congress or outside to deprive them of this power, or curb them in the use of it meets with violently hostile attack.

So the Protoco1s continue. The peoples, on their progress "from one disenchantment to another", will not be allowed "a breathing-space". Any country "which dares to oppose us" must be met with war, and any collective opposition with "universal war". The peoples will not be allowed "to contend with sedition" (here is the key to the furious attacks of the 1790's, 1920 and today on all demands for "investigation", "Witch-hunting", "McCarthyism" and the like). In the Super-State to come the obligation will fall on members of one family to denounce dissidents within the family circle (the Old Testamentary dispensation earlier mentioned). The "complete wrecking of the Christian religion" will not be long delayed. The peoples will be kept distracted by trivial amusements ("people's palaces") from becoming troublesome and asking questions. History will be rewritten for their delusion (another precept since fulfilled in communized Russia), for "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 national governments". "All the wheels of the machinery of all States go by the force of the engine, which is in our hands, and that engine of the machinery of States is Gold".

And the end of it all: "What we have to get at is that there should be in all the States of the world, beside ourselves, only the masses of the proletariat, a few millionaires devoted to our interests, police and soldiers. . . The recognition of our despot. . . will come when the peoples, utterly wearied by the irregularities and incompetence. . . of their rulers, will clamour: 'Away with them and give us one king over all the earth who will unite us and annihilate the causes of discords, frontiers, nationalities, religions, State debts, who will give us peace and quiet, which we cannot find under our rulers and representatives' ".

In two or three of these passages I have substituted "people" or "masses" for "Goyim ", because the use of that word relates to the unproven assertion contained in the book's title, and I do not want to confuse the issues; evidence about the identity of the authors of the conspiracy must be sought elsewhere than in an unsupported allegation. The authors may have been Jewish, non-Jewish or anti-Jewish. That is immaterial. When it was published this work was the typescript of a drama which had not been performed; today it has been running for fifty years and its title is The Twentieth Century. The characters depicted in it move on our contemporary stage, play the parts foretold and produce the events foreseen.

Only the denouement remains, fiasco or fulfilment. It is a grandiose plan, and in my estimation cannot succeed. But it has existed for at least 180 years and probably for much longer, and the Protocols provided one more proof in a chain of proofs that has since been greatly lengthened. The conspiracy for world dominion through a world slave state exists and cannot at this stage be abruptly checked or broken off; of the momentum which it has acquired it now must go on to fulfilment or failure. Either will be destructive for a time, and hard for those of the time in which the dénouement comes.

Page 224

Chapter 28


THE ABERRATION OF MR. BALFOUR

As the first decade of the 20th Century grew older the signs of the coming storms multiplied. In 1903 the British Government had offered Uganda to Zionism and Max Nordau had publicly foretold "the future world war", in the sequence to which England would procure Palestine for Zionism. In 1905 the Protocols prophetically revealed the destructive orgy of Communism. Then in 1906 one Mr. Arthur James Balfour, Prime Minister of England, met Dr. Weizmann in a hotel room and was captivated by the notion of presenting Palestine, which was not his to give, to "the Jews".

The shape which "the future world war" would take was then determined. Mr. Balfour stood guard over the new century and yielded the pass. A different man, in his place, might have saved it; or another might have done the same, for by 1906 the hidden mechanism for exerting "irresistible pressure on the international affairs of the present" (Leon Pinsker, 1882) had evidently been perfected. Rabbi Elmer Berger says of that time, "that group of Jews which committed itself to Zionism . . . entered a peripatetic kind of diplomacy which took it into many chancelleries and parliaments, exploring the labyrinthine and devious ways of international politics in a part of the world where political intrigue and secret deals were a byword. Jews began to play the game of 'practical politics'." The era of the malleable "administrators" and compliant "premier-dictators", all furthering the great plan, was beginning. Therefore any other politician, put in Mr. Balfour's place at that time, might have acted similarly. However, his name attaches to the initial misdeed.

His actions are almost unaccountable in a man of such birth, training and type. Research cannot discover evidence of any other motive than an infatuation, of the "liberal" sort, for an enterprise which he did not even examine in the light of duty and wisdom. "Hard-boiled" considerations of "practical politics" (that is, a cold calculation that money or votes might be gained by supporting Zionism) can hardly be suspected in him. He and his colleagues belonged to the oldest families of England, which carried on a long tradition of public service. Statesmanship was in their blood; understanding of government and knowledge of foreign affairs were instinctive in them; they represented the most successful ruling class in recorded history; and they were wealthy.

Why, then, did instinct, tradition and wisdom suddenly desert them in this one question, at the moment when their Conservative Party, in its old form, for the last time governed England, and their families still guided the country's fortunes from great houses in Piccadilly and Mayfair and from country abbeys? Were they alarmed by the menace that "the mob" would be incited against them if they did not comply? They realized that birth and privilege alone would not continue to qualify for the function of governing. The world had changed much in the century before, and they knew that the process would go on. In the British tradition they worked to ensure continuity, unbroken by violence and eased by conciliation. They were too wise to resist change; they aimed at guiding change. Perhaps they were too eager on that account to shake hands with Progress, when it knocked, without examining the emissaries' credentials.

Mr. Balfour, their leader, was a tal1, aloof and scholarly bachelor, impassive and pessimistic; he was of chilly mien but his intimates contend that his heart was warm. His middle-aged love affair with Zionism might be a symptom of unwilling celibacy. In youth he delayed asking his ladylove until she became affianced to another; before they could marry her lover died; and as Mr. Balfour was about to make good his earlier tardiness she died. He then resolved to remain unmarried.

Women may not be good judges of a distinguished bachelor who wears a broken heart on his sleeve, but many of the contemporary comments about him come from women, and I quote the opinions of two of the most beautiful women of that day. Consuelo Vanderbilt (an American, later the Duchess of Marlborough) wrote, 'The opinions he expressed and the doctrines he held seemed to be the products of pure logic. . . he was gifted with a breadth of comprehension I have never seen equalled"; and Lady Cynthia Asquith said, "As for his being devoid of moral indignation, I often saw him white with anger; any personal injustice enraged him".

The italicised words could not more completely misportray Mr. Balfour, if the result of his actions is any test. The one thought-process which cannot have guided him, in pledging his country to Zionism, was logic, for no logical good could come of this for any of the parties concerned, his own country, the native inhabitants of Palestine, or (in my opinion) the mass of Jews, who had no intention of going there. As for injustice (unless Lady Cynthia intended to distinguish between "personal" and mass injustice), the million innocent beings who today have been driven into the Arabian wilderness (in the manner of the Levitical "scapegoat") offer the obvious answer.

Anyway, there he was, Prime Minister of England, having succeeded "dear Uncle Robert" (Lord Salisbury, of the great house of Cecil) in 1902. Clearly he cannot at that instant have conceived, from nowhere, the notion of giving Uganda to the Zionists, so that "irresistible pressure" must have been at work before he took office. What went on in that earlier period is all mystery or, in truth, conspiracy ("labyrinthine intrigue"). When he became prime minister the mine was already laid, and to the end of his days Mr. Balfour apparently never realized that it was the mine of which all are today aware.

Dr. Herzl, despairing of the Czar, the Kaiser and the Sultan (the three potentates had been amiable but prudent and non-committal; they knew, what Mr. Balfour never learned, that Zionism was dynamite*) had declared: "England, great England, free England, England commanding the seas wil1 understand our aims" (the reader will perceive for what purpose, in this view, England had become great, free, and commander of the seas). When the Uganda offer showed the Talmudic directorate in Russia that Dr. Herzl was wrong in thinking that England would "understand" their needs, Dr. Weizmann was sent to London. He was preparing to overthrow Dr. Herzl and now becomes our chief witness to the hidden events of that time.

A young Englishman, with some modest petition, would have great trouble even today in penetrating the janitorial and secretarial defences of a Cabinet minister's private room. Young Dr. Weizmann from Russia, who wanted Palestine, was quickly ushered into that of Lord Percy ("in charge of African affairs").

Lord Percy was another scion of a great ruling family with an ancient tradition of public service and wise administration. According to Dr. Weizmann, he "expressed boundless astonishment that the Jews should ever so much as have considered the Uganda proposal, which he regarded as impractical on the one hand, and, on the other, a denial of the Jewish religion. Himself deeply religious, he was bewildered by the thought that Jews could even entertain the idea of any other country than Palestine as the centre of their revival; and he was delighted to learn from me that there were so many Jews who had emphatically refused. He added, 'If I were a Jew, I would not give a halfpenny for the proposition'."

Presumably Dr. Weizmann did not inform Lord Percy of the unanimous longing of the Jews in Palestine to remove to Uganda. What he had heard, if his record is correct, was virtually an invitation to get rid of Dr. Herzl and a promise to support the claim to Palestine. He went away to prepare Dr. Herzl's discomfiture. He did not go empty-handed.

Possibly, in the fifty years that have elapsed, British ministers have learned that official notepaper should be kept where only those authorized may use it. On leaving Lord Percy's room Dr. Weizmann took some Foreign Office notepaper and on it wrote a report of the conversation, which he sent to Russia (where, under the Romanoffs and the Communist Czars alike, government stationery is not left lying around). In Russia, this document, written on offical Foreign Office paper, must have aroused feelings akin to those which a holy ikon would cause in a moujik. Clearly it meant that the British Government had no further use for Dr. Herzl and would procure Palestine for the Zionists in Russia. Lord Percy, in today's idiom, had started something.

All else followed as if arranged by Greek gods: the triumph of the Zionists from Russia over Dr. Herzl, his collapse and death, the rejection of the Uganda offer. Then Dr. Weizmann moved to England, "the one country which seemed likely to show a genuine sympathy for a movement like ours", and where he could "live and work without let or hindrance, at least theoretically" (any compilation of classical understatements might include this passage in first place).
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* For that matter, the successors of the Czars were of just the same opinion. Lenin in 1903 wrote, "This Zionist idea is entirely false and reactionary in its essence. The idea of a separate Jewish nation, which is utterly untenable scientifically, is reactionary in its political implications . . . The Jewish question is: assimilation or separateness? And the idea of a Jewish people is manifestly reactionary". And in 1913 Stalin reaffirmed this dictum. The destiny of the Jews, he said, was assimilation (in a Communist world, of course, in this opinion).
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Dr. Weizmann chose Manchester for his residence. He says "by chance", but credulity balks. Manchester held Mr. Balfour's constituency; Manchester was the Zionist headquarters in England; the chairman of Mr. Balfour's party in Manchester was a Zionist (today the British Conservative Party is still enmeshed in these toils).

The Greek drama continued. Mr. Balfour's prime-ministership ended in a fiasco for his party when in the 1906 election eight out of nine Manchester seats were lost to it. He then faded temporarily from office. At that moment another personage entered the present narrative. Among the triumphant Liberal candidates was a rising young man with a keen nose for political winds, a Mr. Winston Churchill. He also sought election in Manchester and commended himself to the Zionist headquarters there, first by attacking the Balfour government's Aliens Bill (which set a brake on large-scale immigration from such places as Russia) and next by supporting Zionism. Thereon "the Manchester Jews promptly fell into line behind him as though he were a kind of latterday Moses; one of their leaders got up at an all-Jewish-meeting and announced that 'any Jew who votes against Churchill is a traitor to the common cause' " (Mr. R.C. Taylor). Mr. Churchill, elected, became Under Secretary for the Colonies. His public espousal of Zionism was simply a significant episode at that time; three decades later, when Mr. Balfour was dead, it was to have consequences as fateful as Mr. Balfour's own aberration.

To return to Mr. Balfour: his private thoughts were much with Zionism. At no time, as far as the annals disclose, did he give thought to the native inhabitants of Palestine, whose expulsion into the wilderness he was to cause. By coincidence, the election was being mainly fought around the question of the allegedly cruel treatment of some humble beings far away (this is an instance of the method of stirring up the passions of "the mob", recommended by Dr. Herzl and the Protocols). The electors knew nothing of Zionism and when they later became acquainted with it felt no concern for the menaced Arabs, because that side of the matter was not put before them by a press then "submissive". However, in 1906 their feelings were being inflamed about "Chinese slavery" and (Manchester being Manchester) they were highly indignant about it. At that time Chinese Coolies were being indentured for three years work in the South African gold mines. Those chosen counted themselves fortunate, but for electoral and "rabble-rousing" purposes in Manchester this was "slavery" and the battle was fought and won on that score. The victorious Liberals forgot "Chinese slavery" immediately after the counting of the votes, (and when their turn in office came outdid the Conservatives in their enthusiasm for Zionism).

Thus, while shouts of "Chinese slavery" resounded outside his windows, Mr. Balfour, closeted with a Zionist emissary from Russia, prepared something worse than slavery for the Arabs of Palestine. His captivation was complete before the interview began, as his niece and lifelong confidante (Mrs. Dugdale) shows: "His interest in the subject was whetted. . . by the refusal of the Zionist Jews to accept the Uganda offer. . . The opposition aroused in him a curiosity which he found no means to satisfy . . . He had asked his chairman in Manchester to fathom the reasons for the Zionist attitude. . . Balfour's interest in the Jews and their history. . . originated in the Old Testament training of his mother and in his Scottish upbringing. As he grew up his intellectual admiration and sympathy for certain aspects of the Jews in the modern world seemed to him of immense importance. I remember in childhood imbibing from him the idea that Christian religion and civilization owed to Judaism an immeasurable debt, ill repaid".

Such was Mr. Balfour's frame of mind when he received Dr. Weizmann in a room of the old Queen's Hotel in dank and foggy Manchester in 1906. The proposition before him, if accepted, meant adding Turkey, in 1906, to England's enemies in any "future world war" and, if Turkey were defeated in it, engaging in perpetual warfare thereafter with the Arab world.

But calculations of national interest, moral principle and statesmanship, if the above quotations are the test, had deserted Mr. Balfour's mind.

He was in the grip of a "whetted" interest and an unsatisfied "curiosity"; it sounds like a young girl's romantic feeling about love. He had not been elected to decide what "debt" Christianity owed to Judaism, or if he decided that one was owing, to effect its repayment, from a third party's funds, to some canvasser professing title to collect. If there were any identifiable debt and any rational cause to link his country with it, and he could convince the country of this, he might have had a case. Instead, he decided privately that there was a debt, and that he was entitled to choose between claimants in favour of a caller from Russia, when the mass of Jews in England repudiated any notion of such a debt. History does not tell of a stranger thing.

Dr. Weizmann, forty years later, recorded that the Mr. Balfour whom he met "had only the most naive and rudimentary notion of the movement"; he did not even know Dr. Herzl's name, the nearest he could get to it being "Dr. Herz". Mr. Balfour was already carried away by his enthusiasm for the unknown cause. He posed formal objections, but apparently only for the pleasure of hearing them overborne, as might a girl object to the elopement she secretly desires. He was much impressed (as Dr. Weizmann says) when his visitor said, "Mr. Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?" "But, Dr. Weizmann, we have London", he answered. Dr. Weizmann retorted, "But we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh".

Mr. Balfour apparently felt this to be a conclusive reason why the Ashkenazic Jews from Russia should be removed to Palestine. However, the only body of Jews whose interest he had any right to consider, those of England, had been working hard to dissuade him from getting entangled in Zionism, and he made a last feeble objection: "It is curious, Dr. Weizmann, the Jews I meet are quite different". Dr. Weizmann replied, "Mr. Balfour, you meet the wrong kind of Jew".

Mr. Balfour never again questioned the claim of the Zionists from Russia to be the right kind of Jew. "It was from that talk with Weizmann that I saw that the Jewish form of patriotism was unique. It was Weizmann's absolute refusal even to look at it" (the Uganda proposition) "which impressed me"; to these words Mrs. Dugdale adds the comment, "The more Balfour thought about Zionism, the more his respect for it and his belief in its importance grew. His convictions took shape before the defeat of Turkey in the Great War, transforming the whole future for the Zionists". He also transformed the whole future for the entire West and for two generations of its sons. In this hotel-room meeting of 1906 Max Nordau's prophecy of 1903 about the shape of "the future world war" was given fulfilment.

As that war approached, the number of leading public men who privily espoused Zionism grew apace. They made themselves in fact co-conspirators, for they did not inform the public masses of any intention about Palestine. None outside the inner circle of "labyrinthine intrigue" knew that one was in their minds and would be carried out in the confusion of a great war, when parliamentary and popular scrutiny of acts of State policy was in suspense. The secrecy observed stamps the process as a conspiratorial one, originating in Russia, and it bore fruit in 1917.

The next meeting between Dr. Weizmann and Mr. Balfour was on December 14, 1914*. Then the First World War had just begun. The standing British army had been almost wiped out in France, and France itself faced catastrophe, while only the British Navy stood between England and the gravest dangers. A war, costing Britain and France some three million lives, lay ahead, and the youth of Britain was rushing to join in the battle. The great cause was supposed to be that of overthrowing "Prussian militarism", liberating "small nations", and restoring "freedom and democracy".

Mr. Balfour was soon to be restored to office. His thoughts, when he met Dr. Weizmann again, were apparently far from the great battle in France. His mind was not with his country or his people. It was with Zionism and Palestine. He began his talk with Dr. Weizmann by saying, "I was thinking about that conversation of ours" (in 1906) "and I believe that when the guns stop firing you may get your Jerusalem".
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* An instance of the difficulty of eliciting facts in this matter: Mrs. Dugdale quoted Dr. Weizmann as saying, "did not see him again until 1916", but contradicts this statement by another of her own, "On December 14, 1914, Dr. Weizmann had an appointment to see Balfour". This implicit mention of a second meeting on that date appears to be confirmed by Dr. Weizmann's own statement, that after seeing Mr. Lloyd George on December 3, 1914, he "followed up at once Lloyd George's suggestion about seeing Mr. Balfour".
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People who lived at that time may recall the moment and see how far from anything which they supposed to be at stake were these thoughts of Mr. Balfour. In the person of Mr. Balfour the Prophet Monk reappeared, but this time armed with power to shape the destiny of nations. Obviously "irresistible pressure" behind the scenes had gained great power and was already most effective in 1914.

By that time the American people were equally enmeshed in this web of "labyrinthine intrigue", hidden from the general view, though they did not suspect it. They feared "foreign entanglements"; they wished to keep out of the war and had a president who promised he would keep them out of it. In fact, they were virtually in it, for "irresistible pressure" by that time was working as effectively in Washington as in London.

Page 231

Chapter 29


THE AMBITION OF MR. HOUSE

While Mr. Balfour and his associates in this still secret enterprise moved towards power in England during the First World War, a similar group of men secretly took shape in the American Republic. The political machine they built produced its full result nearly fifty years later, when President Truman in effect set up the Zionist state in Palestine.

In 1900 Americans still clung to their "American dream", and the essence of it was to avoid "foreign entanglements". In fact the attack on Spain in Cuba in 1898 had already separated them from this secure anchorage, and the mysterious origins of that little war are therefore of continuing interest. The American public was caused to explode in warlike frenzy, in the familiar way, when it was told that the Maine was blown up in Havana harbour by a Spanish mine. When she was raised, many years later, her plates were found to have been blown out by an inner explosion (but by then "the mob" had long lost interest in the matter).

The effect of the Spanish-American war (continuing American "entanglement" in the affairs of others) lent major importance to the question: who was to exercise the ruling power in America, for the nature of any "entanglements" clearly depended on that. The answer to this question, again, was governed by the effect of an earlier war, the American Civil War of 1861-1865. The chief consequences of it (little comprehended by the contending Northerners and Southerners) was sensibly to change the nature, first of the population, and next of the government of the Republic.

Before the Civil War the American population was predominantly Irish, Scots-Irish, Scottish, British, German and Scandinavian, and from this amalgam a distinctly "American" individual evolved. In the direct sequence to that war the era of unrestricted immigration began, which in a few decades brought to America many millions of new citizens from Eastern and Southern Europe. These included a great mass of Jews from the Talmudic areas of Russia and Russian Poland. In Russia the rabbinate had stood between them and "assimilation" and this continued when they reached America. Thus the 20th Century, at its start, threw up the question, what part would their leaders acquire in the political control of the Republic and of its foreign undertakings. The later events showed that the Eastern conspiracy, in both its forms, entered America through this mass-immigration. The process of acquiring an ever-increasing measu