The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a document that purports to be the minutes of a series of meetings of Jewish leaders planning world domination. It was first published in Russia in 1903 by Pavel Krushevan, an antisemitic journalist, and widely distributed in Russia in 1905 in an edition compiled by Sergei Nilus. In 1921, Philip Graves of The Times of London published evidence that the Protocols were largely plagiarized from Maurice Joly's 1864 satirical work 'The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,' which had nothing to do with Jews. The consensus among historians today is that the Protocols was a fabrication, almost certainly produced by agents of the Russian secret police (the Okhrana) in Paris around 1898–1902 as part of an antisemitic propaganda campaign.
Ford devoted the sixth chapter of 'The International Jew' to the Protocols before the Graves exposé appeared. Ford's treatment of the Protocols was carefully hedged on the question of their literal authenticity. Ford did not argue that they were genuine minutes of actual meetings. Instead, Ford argued that the Protocols were extraordinary because, whether genuine or fabricated, they accurately described the mechanisms by which Jewish influence was operating in the real world. Ford's framing was: look at what the Protocols describe — press control, financial control, control of educational institutions, the fomentation of class conflict to destabilize Gentile societies — and compare it to what you can observe in the actual world. The question of whether the document is genuine is secondary to the question of whether the methods it describes are real.
Ford summarized what he characterized as the central strategy described in the Protocols: the deliberate fomentation of division within Gentile societies — between classes, between political parties, between racial groups, between religious denominations — as a method of weakening the coherence of those societies and making them more susceptible to control by an organized minority that maintained its own internal coherence. Ford cited what he presented as Protocol passages on this theme, arguing that the Jewish policy was to encourage liberalism and individual rights not from genuine commitment to those values but as a solvent for the social solidarities — family, church, nation — that might otherwise resist Jewish influence.
Ford cited Protocol 1, which he quoted as stating: 'The political has nothing in common with the moral. The ruler who is governed by the moral is not a skilled politician and is therefore unstable on his throne. He who wishes to rule must have recourse both to cunning and to dissimulation... Violence must be the principle, cunning and make-believe the rule for governments which do not want to lay down their crowns at the feet of agents of some new power.' Ford used this passage to argue that the Protocols described a fundamentally amoral political philosophy, one that was at odds with the Christian political tradition's grounding of governance in moral principle.
Ford cited Protocol 10 on the democratic system, quoting it as stating: 'When we introduced into the State organism the poison of liberalism its whole political complexion underwent a change. States have been seized with a mortal illness — blood poisoning. All that remains is to await the end of their death agony.' Ford argued that this passage described the strategy of promoting democratic liberalism — the doctrine that any group, no matter how recently arrived or how concentrated its interests, had equal political rights — as a method of dissolving the coherent Gentile national communities that might otherwise resist organized minority influence.