The gift of liberty according to the Machiavelli of the Geneva Dialogues, of self-government according to the Protocols (page 2), leads speedily to civil and social strife, and the State is soon ruined by internal convulsions or by foreign intervention following on the heels of civil war. Then follows a singular parallel between the two books which deserves quotation:—
| Geneva Dialogues, p. 9. | Protocols, p. 2. |
| What arms will they (States) employ in war against foreign enemies? Will the opposing generals communicate their plans of campaign to one another and thus be mutually in a position to defend themselves? Will they mutually ban night attacks, traps, ambushes, battles with inequality of force? Of course not; such combatants would court derision. Are you against the employment of these traps and tricks, of all the strategy indispensable to war against the enemy within, the revolutionary? | . . . I would ask the question why is it not immoral for a State which has two enemies, one external and one internal, to use different means of defence against the former to that which it would use against the latter, to make secret plans of defence, to attack him by night or with superior forces ? . . . |
Both "Machiavelli" and the author of the
Protocols agree (Prot. p. 3, Genova Dialogues,
p. 11) almost in the same words that politics
have nothing in common with morality. Right is described in the Protocols as "an abstract
idea established by nothing," in the Dialogues
as an "infinitely vague" expression. The end,
say both, justifies the means. "I pay less
attention," says Machiavelli, "to what is
good and moral than to what is useful and
necessary." The Protocols (p. 4) use the same
formula, substituting "profitable" for "useful."
According to the Protocols he who would
rule "must have recourse to cunningness (sic)
and hypocrisy." In the second Dialogue (p.
15) Montesquieu reproaches Machiavelli for
having "only two words to repeat—'Force'
and 'guile.'" Both Machiavelli and the "Elders"
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