Protocol No. XXIII
To teach the people obedience they must be taught modesty, and to accomplish this the production of luxuries must be limited. We will thus improve customs, demoralized by rivalry, resulting from luxury.
We will restore handicraft, which will undermine the private capital of manufacturers. This is necessary, because big manufacturers often influence, although not always consciously, the thoughts of the people against the government.
A people, practicing handicraft, does not know what unemployment means, and this makes them cling to existing conditions and consequently to the power of authority. Unemployment is most dangerous for a government. It will have finished its work for us as soon as authority falls into our hands.
Drunkenness will also be forbidden by law and will be punishable as a crime against human decency, for man becomes bestial under the influence of alcohol.
Once more I state, that people obey blindly only the hand that is strong and entirely independent of them, in which they see a sword of defense and a stronghold against the blows of social misfortune. Why should the sovereign have an angel’s heart? They want to see in him the personification of might and power.
The sovereign who will replace the present existing governments, dragging along their existence in the midst of a society demoralized by us, which denies even the power of God and from whose midst rises on all sides the flames of anarchy, must primarily undertake to extinguish this all-consuming fire. Therefore, he must destroy such a society, if necessary drown it in its own blood, in order to resurrect it as a well-organized army, which consciously struggles against the infection of any anarchy affecting the state organism.
He, God’s elect, is chosen from above for the purpose of crushing the insane forces that are moved by instinct and not by intellect, by bestiality and not by humanitarianism. These forces are now triumphant, and assume the form of robberies and all kinds of violence exercised in the name of liberty and of right. They have destroyed all social order, so as to establish the throne of the King of Israel; but their rôle will be ended with his coming into power. Then it will be necessary to sweep them from his path, on which not a twig or an impediment shall remain.
Then we will say to the peoples: Pray to God and bow before him who bears the mark of predestination, to whom God Himself showed His Star, so that none but He Himself should free you from all sinful forces and from evil.