Page:The truth about The Protocols.djvu/14

 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:&mdash;

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&mdash;'Force' and 'guile.'" Both Machiavelli and the "Elders"