The Romance of QAnon and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

I don’t know if you’ve read it, but The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a fascinating book.

• Our triumph has been rendered easier by the fact that in our relations with the men whom we wanted we have always worked upon the most sensitive chords of the human mind, upon the cash account, upon the cupidity, upon the insatiability for material needs of man; and each one of these human weaknesses, taken alone, is sufficient to paralyze initiative, for it hands over the will of men to the disposition of him who has bought their activities.

Serge Nilus

, an anti-Jewish radical/philsopher of the early 20th century, was tasked with the submission of a conspiratorial text for Czar Nicholos II

attempting to explain away the rise of a revolutionary philosophy (Communism) among the slaves of his empire. The last Czar believed it was the Jews who invented it, targeting born-Jewish Karl Marx

as the prophet of apocalypse, of the end of Monarchy in a world gone crazy.

• The abstraction of freedom

Nilus wrote

• has enabled us to persuade the mob in all countries that their government is nothing but the steward of the people who are the owners of the country, and that the steward may be replaced like a worn-out glove.

The book is the primary source of modern conspiratorial thinking, whether anti-semetic or more specifically subtle. An ideological condemnation, the idea that different forms of thinking are a part of the scheme to crush free will, this is the presumptive warning offered by people seeking to reclaim power.

Let’s make a chart:

Elders of Zion

1. The Jews are out to take over the world and enslave humanity.
2. The Jews kidnap, rape, sell, and eat babies.
3. The Jews are in league with Satan.
4. The Jewish plot has been active for more than 1,000 years.
5. The Jews must be stopped.
6. There is one brave leader — a messiah — who can lead us to salvation.

QAnon

1. The Democrat/Socialists are out to take over the world and enslave humanity.
2. The Democrat/Socialists kidnap, rape, sell, and eat babies.’
3. The Democrat/Socialists are in league with Satan.
4. The Democrat/Socialist plot has been active since the founding of the United States of America.
5. The Democrat/Socialists must be stopped.
6. There is one brave leader — a messiah — who can lead us to salvation.

Now it might be a mistake to equate the historical uses of such a dire belief into an aggressive similar target. Ideology may be entirely different — a new way of thinking (New World Order) — and yet the aims and the means of the secret world rulers is always the same. They take a thousand years to accomplish the same lingering horrors that humanity continues to inflict upon itself every handful of decades.

QAnon is a movement no different than the panicking aristocratic Russians, nor the desiccated post World War I Germans, seeking a finger of blame for everything that has made their lives so difficult and that has threatened their singularly selfish beliefs about the way the world should be. It is no different than the Nazis, if we must say it. Forget, again, the specific focus of Hitler’s cult (although Jews are a problem for plenty of Q followers too), and stick to the nuance of how they choose to confront the world.

It is no longer something to dismiss — those crazy people shouting craziness and annoying the less crazy, the bland rationalists. Such a movement, now discussed day after day after day, is a hovering new religion, the sort of thing that challenged the Egyptians and Romans and Turks, and the church of the church of the New God. QAnon is an attempted revolution, plotting to insert their way of thinking into the everyday mind.

How many of you watch or read or share or text the news any given day? Whichever version, whichever bias or corrupted narrative we choose to tell ourselves? If you’ve paid attention since the attack on the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, (hopefully not subsequently remembered as 1/6), or especially before then after, then you’ve heard repeated chirping or barking about the QAnon movement. It is no longer a joke.

Two kooky and not particularly bright (people are saying) women, Marjorie Taylor Greene

and Lauren Boebert

are, no matter how they blasphemously attempt to cover it up, followers, radically, of the QAnon organizing belief. They stomp and rant and demand that people take them seriously. They shout the most awful things about those who they perceive have treated them badly in their youth. They carry guns in a threatening manner, not so much 2nd Amendment believers as survivalist warriors assuming that life is everyone for themselves.

An additional blasphemy of these two sneeringly cynical Congresswomen is their adoration of the mere symbols of the nation they quite obviously misunderstand, and don’t come close to loving, merely a cross, a star of David. Merely some secret button or tattoo that designates them as a true believer

And yet

To them the US Constitution means the right to an anarchic form of liberty, other people’s rights be damned. It is all about them, about me. If anyone is against me they must be destroyed.

Somehow, perhaps from the very start, the idea that people believed in the basic principle that we are all in this together has been tarnished by the envious greed and moral disgust we have towards and for one another, seeing life as unfair, a cheat, seeing something standing in our way, entirely beyond our control.

And so there is always an excuse, a bad guy fang-faced at the gates, keeping us all in prison, only the few brave who somehow see the truth will knock everything over in pursuit of paradise. They may pretend to be fighting for man,

but the idea of a secret force controlling you becomes an obsession. There is created, in self-defense, a separate secret religion, one prepared to fight against all of our worst fears, all of the things we believe yet to be proven; there is a swaying, perverted world that wants to consume us. . . .

There is a romance to this latest extremist terror group, a romance with a past we have been warned we were destined to repeat if we didn’t learn history. We have not learned history, ignoring everything before in the pleasure of thinking only about ourselves. Even our work-to-death ideas regarding family, about all those we immediately love, is about us. What we want for them, how we will train them what to do, what to think, what in fact they will believe.

No more is it about freedom with such a mindset, and it isn’t only them, these cartoon monsters with guns and violence in their hearts, with the madness of a crowd looking to play at tearing the world apart. We have all slogged down into this pit, this slough of despond, the misery of only what we think is right, and that everyone else is our enemy. Even among friends, even those we’ve known forever, there is a deep contempt, resentment over different political or social or favorite sports teams. So many dialogues are arguments, ending in disillusion, rounding a corner to the dissolution of human unity. We go away thinking less and less of each other, post it on social media sites such as this, such as whichever venue you have chanced upon these words, and then we feel justified, radicalized, having wished away everything we find disgusting in the world.