Apparently, according to the Protocols, Jews and Freemasons also frequently use war as a pretext to remove civil liberties that are never restored, even after the fighting has ended.In reality, the culprits for subversive tactics such as these are neither Jews nor Freemasons, but corrupt administrations working alongside military or intelligence agencies. Of course, many conspiracists will counter that the Jews and/or Freemasons are actually running these institutions from the shadows, but offer little proof to support their claims.
Despite attempts by both Freemasons and outsiders to convince the world otherwise, the origins of Freemasonry can be traced to the stonemasons’ guild of York in 926 CE. The stonemasons were artisans in medieval England, revered for constructing castles and cathedrals. The guild—like many others—trained apprentices, fixed prices, and offered quality assurance. Its members met at a wooden structure called a “lodge,” where they received education, dined together, initiated apprentices, and slept. The earliest record of masonic guilds, the Regius manuscript, dates back to 1390 CE.
In the 1640s, stonemasons began allowing “speculative” non-stonemasons—who did not actually practice the craft—into their lodges, thus establishing the basis of modern Freemasonry. By the latter half of the 1600s, such lodges could be found all over England and Scotland. Throughout the 18th century, an increasing number of non-laborers from the monied classes were admitted into Freemason lodges in London. In 1717, the members of four local lodges congregated at the Goose and Gridiron pub in Castle Baynard, central London, to officially found the Premiere Grand Lodge of England. Each of the First Grand Officers elected was a non-operative gentleman. At this point, Freemasonry became the entirely speculative philosophical fraternity it is today. Why these radical changes occurred is unknown, but henceforth, for the first time, the ruling classes began to view Freemasonry as a nefarious organization bent on world domination.
A significant contributor to this suspicion is a fabricated mythology linking the Freemasons to ancient Middle Eastern secret societies. This connection seems to have been drawn in 1730 with the writings of Scottish expatriate Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Jacobite in France. Ramsay declared that the first masons had actually existed before ancient Egypt, and unlocked esoteric secrets, only to later lose them. However, during the Crusades, European knights had recovered this knowledge and returned it to the masonic order.