The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

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A Chinese Perspective on the Protocols

Last week I published a long article on the growing global confrontation between China and America, comparing their relative strengths with regard to economic, technological, and military factors. My assessment drew very heavily upon the writings of a retired Chinese business executive named Hua Bin, whose recent posts on his Substack I cited and excerpted.

Hua seemed a very knowledgeable and level-headed individual, and I found most of his analysis and his factual claims quite persuasive, with many of these strongly matching my own views from the last few years. Although some Westerners might strongly challenge his positions, I thought that almost none of his posts would be considered bizarre or irrational.

  • American Pravda: China vs. America
    A Comprehensive Review of the Economic, Technological, and Military Factors
    Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 13, 2025 • 14,200 Words

However, there was one major exception to this pattern. As I wrote:

All of these Substack posts were written by an obviously intelligent and very well-educated Chinese author, and although many of the specific details might be sharply disputed by some of his mainstream Western counterparts, I doubt that any of the material presented would be regarded as shocking or unacceptably extremist.

However, the ideological taboos of Chinese society differ considerably from those of our own, and as a result some of the other posts he published during the first half of December fell into an entirely different category. Despite our boastful claims that we live in a free society, any mainstream Western academic, government official, journalist, or business leader who publicly expressed such controversial ideas would immediately be purged from respectability and probably would have his career and reputation destroyed, while perhaps even be facing imprisonment in some countries or de-banking with confiscation of his financial assets. As I’ve sometimes mentioned in my writings, such harsh social sanctions are related to a shrewd observation widely misattributed to Voltaire:

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

The titles of Hua’s posts indicated their incendiary content:

He opened his first post by setting forth his position in very clear terms:

After a year of observing the utter criminality and inhumanity of Israel’s actions in the Middle East, I have decided to investigate the origins of its dark national/racial/religious ethos from historical documents.

There seems to be numerous sources to draw insights from and there are many interesting analytical perspectives one can take, including –

    • The relationship between the decline of the west and the rise of the jews in western political establishment, especially in the US
    • The complete convergence of Zionism and neoconservatism to the point they are now interchangeable concepts
    • The roles played by the jews in the increasing militarism and jingoism in the west
    • The surprising (maybe not so surprising) similarities and parallel of Zionist ideologies and actions with the Nazis

One interesting piece of historical records seems a good place to start to understand Judaism and Zionism – the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

As an outside observer completely free from generations of our own intense ideological conditioning, the author simply went through numerous elements of that notorious early twentieth century document and noted how many of these seemed eerily similar to exactly what had taken place in the West since that time, especially with regard to the successful political strategies employed by our very powerful Jewish and Zionist minorities.

Henry Ford, The International Jew, and the Protocols

I’ve read the Protocols a couple of times, most recently a half-dozen years ago for a 2018 article that extensively discussed that topic. That same article had also focused upon The International Jew, an early 1920s series published by billionaire industrialist Henry Ford that had introduced the Protocols to the American public. As I’d explained in my article:

Ford himself was a very interesting individual, and his world-historical role certainly received very scanty coverage in my basic history textbooks. Although the exact reasons for his decision to raise his minimum wage to $5 per day in 1914—double the existing average pay for industrial workers in America—can be disputed, it certainly seems to have played a huge role in the creation of our middle class. He also adopted a highly paternalistic policy of providing good company housing and other amenities to his workers, a total departure from the “Robber Baron” capitalism so widely practiced at that time, thereby establishing himself as a world-wide hero to industrial workers and their advocates. Indeed, Lenin himself had regarded Ford as a towering figure in the world’s revolutionary firmament, glossing over his conservative views and commitment to capitalism and instead focusing on his remarkable achievements in worker productivity and economic well-being. It is a forgotten detail of history that even after Ford’s considerable hostility to the Russian Revolution became widely known, the Bolsheviks still described their own industrial development policy as “Fordism.” Indeed, it was not unusual to see portraits of Lenin and Ford hanging side-by-side in Soviet factories, representing the two greatest secular saints of the Bolshevik pantheon.

As for The Dearborn Independent, Ford had apparently launched his newspaper on a national basis not long after the end of the war, intending to focus on controversial topics, especially those related to Jewish misbehavior, whose discussion he believed was being ignored or suppressed by nearly all mainstream media outlets. I had been aware that he had long been one of the wealthiest and most highly-regarded individuals in America, but I was still astonished to discover that his weekly newspaper, previously almost unknown to me, had reached a total national circulation of 900,000 by 1925, ranking it as the second largest in the country and by far the biggest with a national distribution. I found no easy means of examining the contents of a typical issue, but apparently the anti-Jewish articles of the first couple of years had been collected and published as short books, together constituting the four volumes of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a notoriously anti-Semitic work occasionally mentioned in my history textbooks. Eventually my curiosity got the best of me, so I clicked a few buttons on Amazon.com, bought the set, and wondered what I would discover.

Although subsequently purged from Amazon, that series is available on this website in convenient HTML format.

After discussing the general contents of the Ford series, I focused upon its most controversial articles, namely those presenting and analyzing the Protocols.

As mentioned, the overwhelming majority of The International Jew seemed a rather bland recitation of complaints about Jewish misbehavior. But there was one major exception, which has a very different impact upon our modern mind, namely that the writer took quite seriously The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Probably no “conspiracy theory” in modern times has been subjected to such immense vilification and ridicule as the Protocols, but a voyage of discovery often acquires a momentum of its own, and I became curious about the nature of that infamous document.

Apparently, the Protocols first came to light during the last decade of the 19th century, and the British Museum stored a copy in 1906, but it attracted relatively little attention at the time. However, all this changed after the Bolshevik Revolution and toppling of many other long-standing governments at the end of the First World War led many people to seek a common cause behind so many enormous political upheavals. From my distance of many decades, the text of the Protocols strikes me as rather bland and even dull, describing in rather long-winded fashion a plan of secret subversion aimed at weakening the bonds of the social fabric, setting groups against each other, gaining control over political leaders by bribery and blackmail, and eventually restoring society along rigidly hierarchical lines with an entirely new group in control. Admittedly, there were many shrewd insights into politics or psychology, notably the enormous power of the media and the benefits of advancing political front-men who were deeply compromised or incompetent and hence easily controllable. But nothing else really jumped out at me.

Perhaps one reason I found the text of the Protocols so uninspiring is that over the century since its publication, these notions of diabolical plots by hidden groups have become such a common theme in our entertainment media, with countless thousands of spy novels and science fiction stories presenting something similar, though these usually involve far more exciting techniques, such as a super-weapon or a powerful drug. If some Bond villain proclaimed his intent to conquer the world merely through simple political subversion, I suspect that such a film would immediately die at the box office.

But back one hundred years ago, these were apparently exciting and novel notions, and I actually found the discussion of the Protocols in many of the chapters of The International Jew far more interesting and informative than reading the text itself. The author of the Ford books appropriately treated it as any other historical document, dissecting its content, speculating on its provenance, and wondering whether or not it was what it purported to be, namely an approximate record of the statements of a group of conspirators pursuing mastery over the world, with those conspirators seeming to be an elite fraternity of international Jews.

Other contemporaries took the Protocols very seriously as well. The august Times of London fully endorsed it, before later retracting that position under heavy pressure, and I’ve read that more copies were published and sold in the Europe of that era than any other book save the Bible. The Bolshevik government of Russia paid the volume its own sort of deep respect, with mere possession of the Protocols warranting immediate execution.

Although The International Jew concludes that the Protocols were probably genuine, I doubt that likelihood based upon the style and presentation. Browsing around on the Internet a dozen years ago, I discovered quite a variety of different opinions even within the precincts of the Far Right, where such matters were freely discussed. I remember some forum writer somewhere characterizing the Protocols as “based upon a true story,” suggesting that someone who was generally familiar with the secretive machinations of elite international Jews against the existing governments of Czarist Russia and other countries had drafted the document to outline his view of their strategic plans, and such an interpretation seems perfectly plausible to me.

Another reader somewhere claimed that the Protocols were pure fiction but quite significant nonetheless. He argued that the very keen insights into the methods by which a small conspiratorial group can quietly corrupt and overthrow powerful existing regimes arguably ranked the work alongside Plato’s The Republic and Machiavelli’s The Prince as one of the three great classics of Western political philosophy, earning it a place on the required reading list of every Political Science 101 course. Indeed, the author of Ford’s books emphasizes that there are very few mentions of Jews anywhere in the Protocols, and all the implied connections to Jewish conspirators could be completely struck from the text without affecting its content whatsoever.

Once again, the Protocols has been purged from Amazon but I’ve made the full text available on this website in convenient HTML format.

And ironically enough, the most lasting cultural legacy of the widespread anti-Jewish agitation of the 1920s may be the least recognized. As mentioned above, modern readers might find the text of the Protocols rather boring and bland, almost like they had been cribbed from the extremely long-winded monologue of one of the diabolical villains of a James Bond story. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there were actually an arrow of causality in the opposite direction. Ian Fleming created this genre in the early 1950s with his string of international best-sellers, and it is interesting to speculate about the source of his ideas.

Fleming had spent his youth during the 1920s and 1930s when the Protocols were among the most widely read books in much of Europe and leading British newspapers of the highest credibility were recounting the successful plots of Schiff and other international Jewish bankers to overthrow the government of Britain’s Czarist ally and replace it with Jewish Bolshevik rule. Moreover, his later service in an arm of British Intelligence would surely have made him privy to details of that history that went far beyond those public headlines. I think it is more than pure coincidence that two of his most memorable Bond villains, Goldfinger and Blofeld, had distinctly Jewish-sounding names, and that so many of the plots involve schemes of world-conquest by Spectre, a secretive and mysterious international organization hostile to all existing governments. The Protocols themselves may be half-forgotten today, but their cultural influence probably survives in the Bond films, whose $7 billion of aggregate box-office gross ranks them as the most successful movie series in history when adjusted for inflation.

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