Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [227]
But these were cheap booklets. An expanded version of the Protocols, the one that was to be translated all over the world, came out in 1905, in the third edition of Nilus’s book, The Great in the Small: The Antichrist Is an Imminent Political Possibility, Tsarskoye Selo, under the aegis of a local chapter of the Red Cross. The scope was broader, the framework that of mystical reflection, and the book ended up in the hands of the tsar. The metropolitan of Moscow ordered it read aloud in all the churches of the city.
“But what,” I asked, “is the connection between the Protocols and our Plan? We keep talking about these Protocols. Should we read them?”
“Nothing could be simpler,” Diotallevi said. “There’s always someone who reprints them. Publishers used to do it with a great show of indignation, purely out of a sense of duty to make available a historical document, then little by little they stopped apologizing and reprinted it with unrepentant pleasure.” “What genteel gentiles.”
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The only society known to us that is capable of rivaling us in these arts is that of the Jesuits. But we have succeeded in discrediting the Jesuits in the eyes of the stupid populace, because that society is an open organization, whereas we stay in the wings, maintaining secrecy.
—Protocols, V
The Protocols are a series of twenty-four declarations, a program of action, attributed to the Elders of Zion. To us, these Elders’ intentions seemed somewhat contradictory. At one point they wanted to abolish freedom of the press, at another they seemed to encourage libertinage. They criticized liberalism, but supported the sort of thing today’s leftist radicals attribute to the capitalist multinationals, including the use of sports and visual education to stultify the working class. They analyzed various methods of seizing world power; they praised the strength of gold; they advocated supporting revolution in every country, sowing discontent and confusion by proclaiming liberal ideas, but they also wanted to exacerbate inequality. They schemed to establish everywhere regimes of straw men they would control; they fomented war and urged the production of arms and (as Salon had said) the building of metros (the underground world!) in order to have a way of mining the big cities.
They said the end justified the means and were in favor of anti-Semitism both to control the population of Jewish poor and to soften the hearts of gentiles in the face of Jewish tragedy (an expensive ploy, Diotallevi said, but effective). They candidly declared, “We have unlimited ambition, an all-consuming greed, a merciless desire for revenge, and an intense hatred” (displaying an exquisite masochism by reinforcing, with gusto, the cliche of the evil Jew that was already in circulation in the anti-Semitic press, the stereotype that would adorn the cover of all the editions of their book). They called for abolishment of the study of the classics and of ancient history.
“In other words,” Belbo said, “the Elders of Zion were a bunch of blockheads.”
“Don’t joke,” Diotallevi said. “This book was taken very seriously. But there’s something that strikes me as odd. While the Jewish plot was meant to seem centuries old, all the references in the Protocols are to petty fin-de-siecle French questions. The business about visual education stulifying the masses is a clear allusion to the educational program of Leon Bourgeois, who had five Masons in his government. Another passage advises electing people compromised in the Panama Scandal, and one of these was Emile Loubet, who in 1899 became president of the French republic. The Metro is mentioned because in those days the right-wing papers were complaining that the Compag-nie du Metropolitain had too many Jewish shareholders. Hence the theory that the text was cobbled up in France in the last decade of the nineteenth century, at the