"When we deprived the masses of their belief in God, ruling authority was thrown into the gutter, where it became public property, and we seized it."—Protocol 5.
"We have taken good care long ago to discredit the Gentile clergy."—Protocol 17.
"When we become rulers we shall regard as undesirable the existence of any religion except our own, proclaiming One God with Whom our fate is tied as The Chosen People, and by Whom our fate has been made one with the fate of the world. For this reason we must destroy all other religions. If thereby should emerge contemporary atheists, then, as a transition step, this will not interfere with our aims."—Protocol 14.
This will probably offer matter for reflection by the "broad-minded."
It is curious to note how this religious program has worked out in Russia where Trotsky (as loudly heralded in the American Jewish Press) is said to have no religion, and where Jewish commissars tell dying Russians who ask for priests, "We have abolished the Almighty." Miss Katherine Dokoochief is reported, under a Philadelphia date, to have told the Near East Relief that Russian Christian churches have been subjected to the vilest indignities by the Bolsheviki, details of which she gives; but "the synagogues remain untouched, meeting with no damage."
All these lines of attack, whose object is the destruction of the natural rallying points of Gentile thought, and the substitution of other rallying points of an unwholesome and destructive nature, are assisted, as we saw in the last article, by the propaganda for luxury. Luxury is recognizedly one of the most enervating influences. Its course runs from ease, through softness, to flabbiness, to degeneracy, mental, physical and moral. Its beginnings are attractive, its end is lasciviousness in some form, testifying to the complete breakdown of all the strong fiber of the life. It may make a theme for a more complete study some day, this lure to lasciviousness through luxury, and the identity of the forces that set the lure.
But now, to conclude this general view of the method, rather this part of the method, the confusion itself, which all these influences converge to produce, is expected to produce another more deeply helpless state. And that state is, Exhaustion.
It needs no imagination to see what this means. Exhaustion is today one of the conditions that menace the people. The recent political conventions and their effect upon the public fully illustrate it. Nobody seemed to care. Parties might make their declarations and candidates their promises—nobody cared. The war and its strain began the exhaustion; the "peace" and its confusion have about completed it. The people believe little and expect less. Confidence is gone. Initiative is nearly gone. The failure of movements falsely heralded as "people's movements" has gone far to make the people think that no people's movement is possible.
So say the Protocols:
"To wear everyone out by dissensions, animosities, feuds, famine, inoculation of diseases, want, until the Gentiles see no other way of escape except an appeal to our money and power."—Protocol 10.