I recently returned from a working trip to Italy, which included a stay of 8 days in Rome, my first visit to the city. While there, I went to a number of well-known historical sites, including the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus, the latter of which was used in ancient times for races, notably the very popular quadriga (four horse) chariot races. The Colosseum, as is well-known, was a giant arena for the purpose of entertaining the various classes of the people of Rome, who were ‘treated’ to the spectacle of watching victims (gladiators, criminals, prisoners of war, and countless numbers of animals of various kinds) being killed, or else religious ‘criminals’ such as Christians being put to death or torn to pieces by wild animals. Eventually, the ‘games’ (ludi) came to occupy some 135 days of the Roman year.

Returning to Britain, I found that once again, as before my trip, the news was full of images and reports of Gazans, often women, children and the elderly, day after day, being blown up, burned alive, shot, starved or buried under rubble by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). This has been going on now since October 2023. Such news would often be followed by cheery reports of sports events at home and abroad. Millions of us around the world have been watching this genocide in Gaza on TV, online or listening on the radio, many no doubt feeling as helpless to do anything about it as some of the ancient Romans watching the constant killings in the Colosseum, or else feeling as indifferent as they may have done. And day after day, mainstream news media distract our attention from the horrors in Gaza – that uniquely bloody small ‘arena’, where so many innocents have been slaughtered – by the endless sports events and other such ‘entertainment’ such as the Eurovision Song Contest, and, in the UK, the Oxford vs Cambridge boat race, the Glastonbury pop music festival, the Wimbledon tennis tournament and so on.

Gaza, Jan. 2025

This time of year is an appropriate time to reflect on such things, as, in keeping with Christian esoteric tradition, midsummer is the time of the Archangel Uriel, also known as Auriel or Ouriel, one of the four archangelic ‘regents’ of the four seasons, the others being Michael (autumn), Gabriel (winter) and Raphael (spring). Uriel is traditionally associated with light, enlightenment, wisdom, knowledge.

In Hebrew, ‘Oriel’ means ‘God is my Light’. Rudolf Steiner, in his lectures on the Four Seasons and the Archangels¹ in October 1923, associated Uriel also with “the historical conscience”. Steiner’s profound contemplation of what he called the “St. John Imagination” describes how at this time of year Uriel’s admonishing, warning gaze penetrates down into the subterranean regions of the earth and sees, rising up from there, the moral errors and failings of humanity, which can overcome us at this hot and drowsy time of year when we are less awake and less conscious, more easily overwhelmed by the heat outside us and by the heat of desire or anger within us.

Uriel, stained glass window,

Chester Cathedral, England

In the brilliant blue skies and magnificent clouds of midsummer, Uriel becomes, in ‘the St. John Imagination’², the representative of the Spirit-Father hovering above the Earth-Mother of the depths and between them is the Son, the Christ, and the human being seeking to raise itself, over time, to the Christ Spirit, indeed to realise itself as a child of Christ between the Spirit-Father and the Earth-Mother, although often failing and falling back. Uriel’s admonishing gaze urges us to stay awake at this time and reflect on our failings in the past so that we may learn from them for the sake of our present and future. In addition to wanting to understand the past for its own sake, this is the real value of the study of history and biography, whose real inspirer could be said to be Uriel: we can learn from the past, and especially from our past mistakes, so that we may create a better future. This requires us to become more ‘enlightened’ as to the unfolding of the human story, its meaning and development.

The spectres

The first Communist political party, the Communist League, was founded in London in June 1847 by mostly German political exiles  in England from the former radical group, the League of the Just, and from the Communist League came the first publication of the Communist Manifesto, in German, at 46 Liverpool St, Bishopsgate, in the City of London on 21 February 1848. The preamble to the manifesto stated: “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot³, French Radicals and German police-spies.” Today, two different ‘spectres’ are haunting the western world, but only one of them is doing so in the Marxist sense of a spectre haunting the imaginations of the established power elites; today, those power elites are the ‘old powers’ of the modern world: the US government, transatlantic financial capitalists, the EU bureaucracy, and the pro-Zionist lobby throughout the West. These two spectres are what Steiner calls “the ghost of Rome”, which today we can call ‘elite globalisation’, and the “spectre of the Old Testament”, by which Steiner meant nationalism, and today that also includes Jewish nationalism, or Zionism.

The ‘spectre’ haunting today’s power elites, which they loathe and fear, is that of so-called “populism”, often branded by the elites and their media instruments as “rightwing nationalism” or “the Far Right”. However, this is mostly a false branding because modern populism is a very broad movement of anti-Establishment dissidence that goes beyond the old Left-Right political party paradigm with which political establishments have sought to corral the populace for nearly two centuries. Modern populism is not wholly of the Right, let alone the ultranationalist Far Right. It includes many people who are thoroughly fed up with the Left-Right party paradigm and who consider that the globalist Establishment – forces such as the World Economic Forum and the billionaires who run the mostly American ‘technoligarchy’ (such as Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Tesla/Space X and others) and the financial oligarchy (BlackRock, Blackstone, Vanguard, State Street et al.⁴) – is not interested in democracy or in countries or nations but rather, in an abstract fashion, seeks to operate on a continental or global level. This globalist Establishment, which emerged from British, American, and Jewish elites, promotes an elite-driven form of globalisation, a standardised cosmopolitanism with aims to impose upon the peoples of the world a single world system through the agency of global organisations such as the UN, the WHO, the WEF, GAVI.⁵  The globalist Establishment  is supported and underpinned by a myriad of lesser organisations and groups, as well as political establishments and mainstream media organs in most of the so-called democratic countries of the West which do the bidding of the globalist corporate and financial elites. This support and underpinning was so evidently clear to see during the years of the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ and also after the 9/11 event in 2001, when mainstream media narrations of those events were almost entirely synchronised and alternative views were either downplayed or excluded.

Populists, nationalists and elitists

Modern ‘populists’ are, for the most part, not the nationalists of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, although there are some such people amongst the modern populist or dissident movement. Those nationalists are concerned, as in those earlier times, to assert the rights and values of their own countries against those of other countries. Modern populists, however, recognise that democracy cannot and does not function at a global (e.g. UN) or continental level (e.g. EU). It can only function closer to the people, at the national, regional or local levels.

Canadian truckers’ protest, (2022)

They see that the globalist Establishment of the billionaires and technocrats is in the process of abandoning democracy and wants to move to a technologically mediated form of standardised mass social control at the global level. This is evident from the writings and oral statements of the likes of Klaus Schwab (former head of the WEF), Larry Fink (CEO of BlackRock), Peter Thiel (CEO of Palantir⁶), Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Carney (former Governor of the Bank of England and now Prime Minister of Canada) and others.

This new technocratic elite, together with many members of the old elites who have allied themselves with them – such as Charles Windsor (aka King Charles III), who publicly introduced the WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ programme in 2020 – recognise the danger to themselves of the growing consciousness of the anti-Establishment populist movement, and so through the mainstream media which they largely control (whether the old print and TV media or the new online media), they try to label the increasingly non-compliant, non-conformist populist movements across the West as “conspiracy theorists” and “Far Right”, seeking to link them in the public mind with old forms of authoritarianism such as Fascism and Nazism or newer ones such as radical terrorist groups. To adapt the words of Karl Marx in the preamble to the Communist Manifesto: ‘All the powers of the West have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise what they regard as the spectre of populism: Pope and King, Macron and von der Leyen, American Technocrats and German Greens.” These ‘aristocrats’ of today fear the rising tide of dissidence from below – they were warned about it by one of their ‘intellectual champions’, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as long ago as 2009:

“For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. There are only a few pockets of humanity left in the remotest corners of the world that are not politically alert and engaged with the political turmoil and stirrings that are so widespread today around the world. The resulting global political activism is generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination…. The worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening.”⁷ (emphasis – TB) In 2005, Brzezinski had written for the bi-monthly magazine, The American Interest, an essay titled, ‘The Dilemma of the Last Sovereign’. In it, he had written: “For most states, sovereignty now verges on being a legal fiction” and “America needs to face squarely a centrally important new global reality: that the world’s population is experiencing a political awakening unprecedented in scope and intensity, with the result that the politics of populism are transforming the politics of power. The need to respond to that massive phenomenon poses to the uniquely sovereign America an historic dilemma: What should be the central definition of America’s global role?”⁸ (emphasis – TB)

He had in fact already given his answer in a book he had written 35 years earlier: Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. In that book, Brzezinski, one of the founders in 1973 of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission of global elite thinkers and planners, had called for a “Community of the Developed Nations.” It would consist “of Western Europe, North America and Japan [or rather, of their elites - TB], to coordinate and integrate in order to shape a ‘new world order’ built upon ideas of global governance under the direction of …transnational elites.” America, Brzezinski argued, would have to lead this process in the 21^st century, a view he repeated in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, but America, he said, would eventually have to surrender its sovereignty to the new system of ‘global governance’, a phrase of disguise for ‘world government’. However, he pointed in 2004 to a new force of opposition appearing against America: “I see the beginnings, in writings and stirrings, of the making of a doctrine which combines anti-Americanism with anti-globalization, and the two could become a powerful force in a world that is very unequal and turbulent.”⁹

Some people later felt that this manifested in the left-leaning Occupy movement, an international campaign against corporate greed and social and economic inequality, which emerged in  2010-2012 as part of the fall-out from the 2008 economic crisis and subsequent austerity policies adopted by numerous governments. However, that movement soon faded, and from America then came a more fragmented but more widespread, longer-lasting dissident movement from a more Right-leaning direction, arguably beginning with grass roots support for US Presidential candidate Ron Paul in 2010. As this new populist movement began to manifest around the world, facilitated not least by the Internet, it eventually transcended the Left-Right divide in its opposition to the globalist Establishment. It was not anti-capitalist as such, in the old Marxist sense, but was pro-democratic, libertarian, and anti-elitist. It recognised that global elites were acting in an increasingly rash and synchronised way that ignored the views of the majority of the peoples of their own countries. While claiming to support biological ‘diversity’, the elites sought to impose a uniform mode of life upon populations through ‘political correctness’ (originally a term used by Marxists), ‘woke-ism’ and ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI) requirements in companies and in numerous institutions.

The elite’s view of populism

Brzezinski was right, however, about one important thing when he said that “the worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening.” What “human dignity” means here in the anthroposophical sense is the awakening of the human individual consciousness and its refusal to be suppressed by traditional hierarchical authorities which see the human being only in collective terms – religious confession, class affiliation, racial or national belonging etc.

Nevertheless, Brzezinski had spent his life in the service of the global elite and in 2005 and 2009 he was speaking to those same people, warning them they would need to confront the populist challenge ‘from below’, much as Chancellor Metternich of Austria, who dominated the European political scene from 1815-1848, had also recognised the challenge ‘from below’ to the aristocracy of that time from liberal nationalists, republicans and democrats and had sought to suppress it. Much earlier, In the 1510s and 20s, the Vatican authorities had faced similar opposition ‘from below’ in the Protestant Reformation and launched the Counter-Reformation movement at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) to try to meet that challenge.

So how have the global Establishment sought to meet this new challenge to their power and authority from the ‘spectre’ of populism? They have done it by using their control of the old and new media to censor and filter alternative views as far as possible, scrubbing and removing from the Internet countless sites and articles¹⁰ by using their media instruments in the old and new media to label and smear, to accuse those who challenged them of being ‘conspiracy theorists’ ‘disinformation agents’ and ‘Far Right extremists’ and by ensuring that genuinely alternative views never got a hearing in mainstream media. They have sought to frighten the majority of the population by a new version of the old anti-Communist “Reds under the bed” scare of the 1950s i.e. the notion that there is a dangerous new delusional terrorist group at large with crazy ideas divorced from reality who will either seduce young people into believing in ‘crackpot conspiracies’ and confuse their minds or else will lure them into terrorist groups that commit violence. The BBC in Britain, for example, now regularly puts out programmes and documentaries warning in one way or another against ‘disinformation’, ‘misinformation, ‘conspiracy theories’ etc because, as a century-old servant of the British Establishment, the BBC is only too aware of the importance of ‘politically correct’ propaganda in the effort to control the population and of the significance of the ‘information war’ in the age of the Internet. In the modern age, what we think is vitally important for it determines our actions and thus the future direction of society.

The representatives of the Establishment and their supporters in the media and in the general population believe firmly that this new populist movement represents an effort to turn back the clock to the pre-1939 world of ‘autonomous’ nation states, which are something that globalist elites have been trying to undermine and do away with for about 100 years now. The very influential British historian Arnold Toynbee, who was a member of elite circles¹¹ between the world wars, revealed in 1931, In a speech to the Institute for the Study of International Affairs at Copenhagen that: “We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world. All the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands….”¹² Former Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and influential Kennedy administration State Department Official, Walt Whitman Rostow, in his 1960 work, The United States in the World Arena, wrote: “It is a legitimate American national objective to see removed from all nations—including the United States—the right to use substantial military force to pursue their own interests. Since this residual right is the root of national sovereignty, and the basis for existence of an international arena of power, it is, therefore, an American interest to see an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined.”¹³ (emphasis TB) In his book The New World Order, published in 1940, the well-known and very well-connected British author H.G. Wells called for the end of the age of the nation state and for a world socialist government, “a collectivist world order”, a global air police force patrolling the world (cf. the US Airforce and Space Force today), world order ideas spread via educational propaganda of all kinds, a fundamental law for mankind throughout the world, consisting of 11 ‘Commandments’ which “must become the common fundamental law of all communities and collectivities assembled under the World Pax” (emphasis Wells). Wells was not just an author favoured by the elite; together with the UK Lord Chancellor Sir John Sankey, he was behind a document known as the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man (1940) which prepared the way for, but was later superseded, by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN in 1948.

In April 1974, former U. S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Trilateral Commission and Council On Foreign Relations (CFR) member Richard Gardner’s article The Hard Road to World Order was published in the CFR’s journal Foreign Affairs, in which he stated that: “… an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault”¹⁴ – in other words, the Fabian Socialist strategy of ‘gradualist revolution’ (as distinct from sudden Bolshevik violent revolution) so that the people do not notice what is happening until it’s too late.

“In 1992, Strobe Talbott wrote an article for Time Magazine entitled, ‘The Birth of the Global Nation.’ Talbott worked as a journalist for Time Magazine for 21 years, and has been a fellow of the Yale Corporation, a trustee of the Hotchkiss School and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a director of the CFR, the North American Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission, the American Association of Rhodes Scholars, and a member of the participating faculty of the World Economic Forum. Talbott served as Deputy Secretary of State from 1994 to 2001 in the Clinton administration and currently sits as President of the Brookings Institution, one of the premier American think tanks. In his 1992 article, Talbot wrote ‘within the next hundred years, nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority.’”¹⁵ (emphasis TB)

All of this is evidence – and there is much more available – of a planned, steadily-pursued, insidious and essentially coercive design by widely-networked elites acting behind the scenes in countless conferences, seminars and thinktanks, their goals and actions largely veiled, as far as the world’s masses are concerned, by the constant distractions offered up by the worlds of the media, celebrity and sport and by the constant propaganda of fearmongering claims with regard to pandemics, vaccination, so-called ‘climate change’ and wars.

The ghost of Rome

We could say then that one of the two spectres ‘haunting’ the western world today is that of populism. It does exercise the global elite and they seek to exorcise it. However, there is another spectre to which Steiner referred– one which is fostered by those in the Establishment and which fosters them. It is the spectre, or ghost, of imperial Rome that our English-speaking globalist elite does not wish to exorcise, for they have modelled themselves upon it since the mid-19^th century, when British and, a few decades later, American elite boarding schools began consciously to educate the children of the elite in the service of ‘empire’, to train them in how to control the lower orders at home and abroad, often with the very methods of the ancient Romans drawn from studies of the classics, e.g. the Roman practice of having ‘client states’, such as Herod’s Judaea, in order to reduce the costs of imperial rule and then the Roman habit to “divide and rule” (divide et impera) to keep Rome’s subordinate states in jealous competition with each other for Rome’s favour. We see this in the ways in which the US government deals with its numerous client states in Europe and elsewhere. The client states anguish over which foreign leader is going to be invited to Washington DC first to visit a new President? How much time on the phone are those leaders going to be allowed to speak with the US President? Which country has the most special relationship with the USA? – and so on. Then there were the pseudo-governmental powers granted by Rome to private contractors’ organisations to collect taxes. These private, tax-collecting groups “collected taxes, lent money, fielded troops, and controlled the economies of Roman possessions outside of Italy. All of these pseudo-governmental powers were replicated by the great, modern colonial corporations—the French, Dutch, and British East India companies. ¹⁶

    On 16 September 1916 Steiner gave a very insightful lecture¹⁷ on the differences between ancient Greece and Rome and their influences on European culture and civilisation. He said: “In the first era of its conquests Rome took over Greece [a conquest completed in 146 BC]. Then we see how Christianity pervaded Roman civilisation, allowing itself to be overspread with the formal element that belonged to Rome…With the expansion of Christianity, this Latin-Roman element spread over all of Europe…Public institutions developed right out of Roman thought and custom, and Rome infected everything, grafting its own nature onto European culture.” Steiner describes how, after [Emperor] Justinian [6^th cent. AD] had established the code of Roman legal and political thought, had closed the ancient schools of Greek philosophy and had condemned [the philosophy] of Origen¹⁸, the Roman spirit “continued to live on in the institutions of Europe without the Greek content.” After that Roman spirit had “driven the very sap of its life, its spiritual content, out of itself, only the external remained, petrified in the word and grown strong and stubborn in external institutions. Occultists with insight have always had a certain feeling which still remains today…This is expressed in the statement: ‘The ghost of ancient Rome still lives in the institutions of Europe.’” (emphasis – TB) This external Roman spirit of politics, law, articles and clauses, contracts and treaties entered into the very marrow of the litigious Middle Ages.

 Emperor Augustus (27 BC – 14 AD)

It is still alive and kicking today, particularly in the USA. Steiner reckoned with epochs of time, relating to successive civilisations since what he termed Atlantean times (the time since the flood for Noah in the Old Testament). In 1919, he pointed out that the “… middle point of our century coincides with the end of the period in which the forces from before the middle of the 15^th century – still atavistically with us to some extent – reach their ultimate decadence. By the middle of our present century [1950s] mankind must have taken the decision to turn towards the spirit… the middle of this century is a very important moment.”¹⁹ He was here pointing to the Greco-Roman, and especially the Roman element from, what he termed, the fourth Post-Atlantean Epoch (747 BC – AD 1413), which remained dominant in external life, for example, in politics and the law, in everything to do with contract and treaty, republics and empires, in the first 540 years of our current fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch, that began in 1413, that is exactly one quarter of an epoch: for, according to Steiner, an epoch lasts 2160 years,²⁰ which, when divided by 4, is 540. Thus this first quarter of our current epoch ended in the 1950s.

This external Roman element functions like a ghost, a spectre, in our epoch because it is, anachronistic, out of its time, so to speak, existing beyond its proper time in ancient Rome. American politics in particular, in its forms, its symbolism (the Roman fasces²¹ on the walls beside the Speaker’s chair in the House of Representatives), and its architecture (the White House, and Capitol and various other government buildings) has been wrapped in the garments of ancient Rome since the founding of the American Republic in the 1770s. In correspondence between two of the ‘Founding Fathers’ of the American republic, James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson on 24 October 1787: “Divide et impera [Divide and Rule], the reprobated axiom of tyranny, is under certain (some) qualifications, the only policy by which a republic can be administered on just principles.”²² The imperial attempt to dominate the world these past 200 years, whether British or American – such as we read in the writings of the British Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes or in prominent and hugely influential modern American geopolitical thinkers such as Samuel P. Huntington (d. 2008), who wrote the controversial book Clash of Civilisations; Zbigniew Brzezinski (d. 2017), the scion of an old Polish Catholic aristocratic family and author of The Grand Chessboard, and Henry Kissinger (d. 2023)(author of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy) – stems largely from ancient Rome, from the fourth Epoch, and many British and American thinkers, politicians and military men instinctively hark back to the Roman Republic and Empire, either consciously or unconsciously. But ancient Rome is a ghost and it needs exorcising so that its influence, baleful because beyond-its-time, does not have a malign influence on the rest of the 5^th Epoch.

Zbigniew Brzezinski (d. 2017) and Henry Kissinger (d. 2023)

Recently, as we have seen during the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barak Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, that imperial will to dominate the world is still there, and it has not only been in those men, but in the confused, mixed-up system which they serve, in which the political, economic and cultural spheres are not separate and autonomous but confused, mutually interfering and mixed-up. The ghost of ancient Rome, a civilisation in which the three spheres were equally mixed up, sustains that imperial system today and is sustained by it.

A symptom of this ghost of Rome was the release in 2000, as the new millennium dawned, of the American Hollywood blockbuster movie Gladiator, directed by the Englishman Ridley Scott and starring the ageing Irish actor Richard Harris as the tired, old Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the young American actor Joaquin Phoenix as his son, the evil perverted young Emperor Commodus, and the Australian actor Russell Crowe as the film’s hero, general Maximus.

In that very period around the turn of the millennium, 1998-2003 – the years when Osama Bin Laden was being painted by the media as ‘the most evil man in the world’ – ‘imperialism’, previously a dirty word in ‘progressive’ circles, was suddenly rediscovered and lauded by sections of the Anglo-American media, especially when preceded by the adjective ‘liberal’. For example, a year before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Robert Cooper, British diplomat and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s close adviser on foreign policy issues, wrote an essay ‘The new liberal imperialism’ in The Observer newspaper (7 April 2002): “The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle. … All the conditions for imperialism are there, but both the supply and demand for imperialism have dried up. And yet the weak still need the strong and the strong still need an orderly world. A world in which the efficient and well governed export stability and liberty, and which is open for investment and growth – all of this seems eminently desirable. What is needed then is a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values. We can already discern its outline: an imperialism which, like all imperialism, aims to bring order and organisation but which rests today on the voluntary principle…the lightest of touches will be required from the centre; the ‘imperial bureaucracy’ must be under control, accountable, and the servant, not the master, of the commonwealth. Such an institution must be as dedicated to liberty and democracy as its constituent parts. Like Rome, this commonwealth would provide its citizens with some of its laws, some coins and the occasional road.” (emphasis – TB)

At the end of the film Gladiator, the hero Maximus and the villain Commodus both lie dead in the sand of the Colosseum. As he is dying, Maximus says: “There was a dream that was Rome. It shall be realised. These are the wishes of Marcus Aurelius”. The imperial princess, Marcus Aurelius’ daughter, says to those watching: “Is Rome worth one good man’s life? We believed it once. Make us believe it again”. As the 20^th century passed to the 21^st, there was much awareness that there had long been something rotten in the state of America, but in the era of American unipolar power in the 1990s the ‘imperial’ class still wished to revive the American ‘Rome’ and ‘make it great again’. Hence those last words of Maximus. Arguably, that dream was actually the dream of the Emperor Hadrian (117-138 AD), who passed it on to his successors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, both of whom he adopted. Hadrian called a halt to Roman expansion, withdrew from some previously conquered territories and sought to consolidate the Empire and make it more economically efficient, cultured, and peaceful. He was a profuse builder, and one of his greatest buildings in the Roman Forum was the Temple of Venus Felix and Roma Aeterna, which became the largest Roman temple. Hadrian was well aware of the relation between AMOR and ROMA. Venus (corresponding to the Greek goddess, Aphrodite) was the goddess of love, and Hadrian wanted to balance Rome’s focus on the martial by Hellenising the Empire as far as he could on his many travels, fostering Greek models of beauty in the arts, promoting scholarship, design and engineering as well as a more tolerant understanding for the cultures of the East and its ancient Mysteries. Roma was herself the tutelary goddess of Rome, the Roman State, and she was usually shown with a helmet, a spear and holding a small image of Victory on her hand. Her statues were modelled on those of Pallas Athena, and eventually, a sitting figure of Roma morphed into the image of Britannia.

Nationalism and the spectre of the Old Testament

The spectre which the global imperial class does wish to exorcise, is populism, as already mentioned, and which the globalists associate with nationalism, which, as has been argued in this article is false, because while there are nationalists in the broad populist movement, the two things are not coterminous: populism is much broader than nationalism or patriotism. There are elements in the populist movement that are nationalist and retrogressive; they have not yet really ‘arrived’, as it were, in the fifth epoch, which is one of individualism. They oppose globalism because from their clannish, tribal or national perspective, they reject ‘empire’ and imperialism, which seeks to standardise and make uniform. Ancient Rome in the fourth epoch (747 BC – AD 1413) was primarily a political empire. It was preceded by the third epoch, the age of theocratic empires, when religion ruled societies, not politics and abstract law. But our imperialism today, Steiner pointed out in February 1920 to a group of British visitors to Dornach²³, is economic, hence the power of global trade and finance and of the great American technological corporations that span the globe. These forces are not democratic; they are oligarchic and operate behind closed doors. They clearly threaten the older national and tribal communities of earlier ages, which are still with us.

    What Steiner called “the spectre of the Old Testament in the nationalism of the present” was the title of a lecture he gave on 7 October 1918²⁴. In this deep and complex lecture, which is far too complex to paraphrase here, he explains the relation between the Old Testament thinking of the ancient Israelites’ Jehovah religion and modern nationalism, and he shows how the nature of Jewish spirituality led them to their strong sense of cohesion as a culture and also separation from other cultures due to their unique sense of descent from the blood of their common ancestor, Abraham, and through their collective cultural practices. It is the sense of separation from other cultures that leads to modern nationalism and especially, its Jewish variant, Zionism. Although Zionism itself is not mentioned in the Steiner lecture cited above, Steiner considered that Zionism was not in the interest of Jewish people, because he saw it as a form of nationalism, and nationalism separates peoples from each other and pushes them into separate self-contained boxes on the basis of the physical nature of their genetics and/or language, whereas what we need in this modern 5^th Epoch, he maintained, is relations between individuals on the basis of spiritual understanding and mutual recognition. In the case of the Jews, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Hebrew as a spoken language was artificially revived in the 1880s to become the language of the Zionist movement and the Zionist settlers in Palestine. This paralleled the Zionists’ claim to settle in Palestine after 1800 years.

    Steiner regarded political nationalism, which is associated with a political state – as distinct from a cultural patriotism, an appreciation of homeland – as something that separates human beings from others. In unitary political nation states, in which the cultural, political and economic spheres are all mixed up and interfere with each other, majority communities tend to dominate minority communities, as we have seen in many countries, such as Myanmar for example, where the Muslim Rohingya minority were brutally oppressed in 2017 by the Buddhist majority. Steiner sharply criticised US President Woodrow Wilson’s proposals in 1918 for a League of Nations, which would consist of many unitary self-contained nation states. The UN today is essentially similar to the League of Nations in this regard. Wilson and his advisers drew lines across the map of Europe after the First World War, largely on the basis of abstract studies of language and culture, which led to all kinds of serious problems in the decades between the two world wars. British and French imperialists drew similar border lines across the Middle East. After 100 years, this problem has still not been solved in the Middle East. Steiner felt that Zionism would only add to this problem of the separation and antipathy caused by nationalism. One of the consequences of this is what we see occurring in Gaza today.

    Nationalism then, which champions the rights of the majority community over minorities, is a modern phenomenon, but it is rooted in the ancient concept of ethnic separation, such as we see in the Old Testament where Jehovah, or Yahwe, gives the Israelites 613 commandments (mitzvot), through the observance of which they were to maintain their identity and to separate themselves from other peoples. There were profound reasons for that separation at that time, which I cannot go into here, but since the time of Christ, when individuals, rather than blood communities, begin to come into their own, that kind of separation is no longer appropriate for human development. Jews and Arabs will have to learn to live together in the land of Palestine. The so-called ‘two state solution’ is no solution; it would only be another form of separation. The Jewish nationalists reject that solution anyway and are trying to take over the West Bank region by extending Zionist settlements there and by oppressing the Arabs. Their aim is to drive the Arabs out in time.

The Arabs, of course, will not accept this, nor do they accept the Israelis’ takeover, from 1948 until today, of more land than was recognised by the UN in the 1947 Plan which partitioned Palestine. The bitterly painful struggle will go on until both sides recognise the only truly human solution, which would correspond to the developmental needs of our fifth epoch; this would be a state of Palestine, in which the equal rights of both Jews and Arabs were recognised and in which the cultural and economic spheres of Palestine would communicate and collaborate with those of the surrounding Middle Eastern region and indeed, the wider world.

Nationalism then, is the other spectre confronting the world today. Unlike elite globalisation, the universalist but coercive ideological roots of which are to be found in ‘the ghost of Rome’, in the fourth epoch, the deep roots of nationalism are to be found in the less conscious blood and heredity traits of blood and clan that were the norm in the third epoch, before the 8th century BC. I have argued in this article that the imperial globalist business and technocratic class and their supporters and media instruments claim that populists are the same as nationalists, and smear them all as ‘Far Right extremists’, but this is not the case. Populism spans a very broad spectrum. Some old-fashioned nationalists do associate themselves with ‘populism’, but whereas nationalism is a collective phenomenon in the modern age, populism is essentially a democratic response, rooted in the individual consciousness of people of the fifth epoch, to the accelerationist drive of the ‘imperial globalists’ who are trying to force the pace of historical development faster than it is healthy to go. The French revolutionaries tried the same thing 230 years ago, and the Bolsheviks 100 years ago. They both eventually failed, and the consequences for the world were dire. The same will likely be the case for today’s imperial globalists.

Endnotes

1. Rudolf Steiner, Collected Works GA 229.

2. St John the Baptist. His day is traditionally celebrated on 24^th June.

3. Prince Clemens von Metternich (1773-1859), Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, 1821-1848 and François Guizot (1787-1874), French Prime Minister 1847-1848 under King Louis Philippe.

4. Three asset management firms – BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street – together constitute the largest shareholder in 88 percent of the world’s top 500 firms https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-politics/article/hidden-power-of-the-big-three-passive-index-funds-reconcentration-of-corporate-ownership-and-new-financial-risk/30AD689509AAD62F5B677E916C28C4B6

5. Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, founded in 2000 by Bill and Melinda Gates.

6. American software corporation that, amongst other things, services the US intelligence community and the Departments of Defence

7. http://www.nspm.rs/pdf/nspm-in-english/the-global-political-awakening.pdf

8. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2005/09/01/the-dilemma-of-the-last-sovereign/

9. http://www.nspm.rs/pdf/nspm-in-english/the-global-political-awakening.pdf

10. https://tuzarapost.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-being-scrubbed-like

https://therealistjuggernaut.com/2025/02/25/deleted-scrubbed-erased-the-untold-story-of-how-they-tried-to-make-us-disappear/

11. E.g. Chatham House and the Round Table Group.

12. https://christianobserver.net/globalist-agenda-quotes/

13.http://www.nspm.rs/pdf/nspm-in-english/the-global-political-awakening.pdf

14.http://www.nspm.rs/pdf/nspm-in-english/the-global-political-awakening.pdf#_ftnref33

15.https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-global-political-awakening-and-the-new-world-order/19873?pdf=19873

16.https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/divide-and-rule-legacy-roman-imperialism

17. Rudolf Steiner, Collected Works GA 171.

18. Prolific and brilliant early Christian philosopher, Alexandria c.185-c.253 AD.

19. Rudolf Steiner, 14.12.1919 Dornach, Collected Works GA 194.

20. In accordance with the precession of the equinoxes, which take 2160 years to complete a cycle.

21. Fasces – a bundle of wooden rods, sometimes containing an axe, that symbolised the Roman magistrate’s jurisdiction and power to punish. This is the origin of the word ‘fascism’.

22.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313006747_

Divide_et_Impera_Federalist_10_in_a_Wider_Sphere

23. See Rudolf Steiner, Lectures 5, 6, and 7 in Ideas for a New Europe – Crisis and Opportunity for the West (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1992)

24. Rudolf Steiner, Collected works GA 186.

To the majestic heights of summer

The Sun’s brilliant being arises

It draws my human feeling out

And into its vast expanse of space.

Intuitively, within my soul

A sense is stirring that dimly tells me:

In future time you will understand

That you now were perceived by a being divine.

from Rudolf Steiner, The Calendar of the Soul, 10th week 9-15 June

There are two moods in “Summer” from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” suite which most aptly portray in music the two sides of midsummer when the sun rises to the solstice. First there are the slow, heavy, languid moods that express the noonday heat when little moves and we have to struggle to stay awake and active. We feel the sensual oppressive heat and moisture. It is a time when we can easily fall into error or else into temptation. But the second, dynamic part brings the summer thunderstorm and the lightning strikes; then we can feel as if the weight of heaven comes down like a judgment telling us to “wake up!” and we run for cover. We are all well aware of the two sides of the sun: the giver and sustainer of life, but also the sun that can deal death, especially in the desert. Rudolf Steiner speaks of the sun not as one ‘positive’ thing such as a giant nuclear power plant but as an ‘empty’ or negative space which is the ‘dwelling’ place of numerous spiritual beings – to give them their traditional names in order of ascending spiritual rank: Angels, Archangels (notably Michael), Archai, Exusiai (Elohim), Dynamis, and Kyriotetes. Western esoteric knowledge (e.g. as in the Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa 1486-1535) has also been aware that two other particular beings indwell the sun – the beneficent Nachiel, or ‘Intelligence of the sun’, whose number, Agrippa notes, was 111, and the evil Sorath, or ‘Spirit of the sun’, whose number was 666.

On the fifth day of the fifth month this year, 2023, the BBC reported¹ that the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared that Covid-19 no longer represents “a global health emergency”. Although these two organisations, WHO and BBC, which had played major roles in promoting the damaging lockdowns and the injection programmes from 2020 to 2022 that proved fatal or harmful for so many people, were loath to admit that this meant “the danger was over”, preferring to say that “the emergency status could be reinstated if the situation changed”, the news did in effect signal that the pandemic catastrophe of the past three years was indeed over.  Back in 2020, when the mainstream media informed us that pharmaceutical companies were racing “at unprecedented speed” to develop a “vaccine” against SARS-Covid-19, we were told that it may not be ready for the global population until 2023.² In Britain, the public was assured, for example, that “all three… vaccines [from Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna] have had analysis of safety and efficacy data from phase three trials (involving tens of thousands of participants) published in peer-reviewed articles in medical journals such as The Lancet [UK] and The New England Journal of Medicine [US]. The collection of long-term protection and safety data will continue over the next couple of years, and so the completion dates for the trials are in 2022 and 2023.”³ (emphasis – TMB).  2023 was thus the end date determined for the completion of the trials for the Covid-19 “vaccines”. We now see that it has become the end date for this whole global three-year experiment that was conducted on such a colossal scale, arguably the greatest coercive propaganda experiment in history.

Agenda 2030

We are rapidly approaching another very significant three-year period which begins in seven years’ time, in 2030 – the anniversary (2030-2033) of the three years when, according to Steiner’s spiritual science, 2000 years ago, the Christ was incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth, from His baptism in the River Jordan to His Ascension forty days after His Resurrection. We can also note that various prominent individuals and global organisations such as the UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF) have, for several years now, been focusing the attention of the world’s publics specifically on the year 2030 and the decade of the 2030s. For example, on 13 June 2019, the WEF, a private, non-democratic organisation, and the UN, another non-democratic organisation, signed the portentously named “Memorandum of Understanding between the UN and the WEF on the Strategic Partnership Framework for the 2030 Agenda”. This outlined areas of cooperation to “deepen institutional engagement and jointly accelerate the implementation” of the UN’s “2030 Agenda for ‘Sustainable Development’”, which was itself a further development of the UN’s Agenda 21⁴ that had first been laid out in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the city above which stands the colossal statue of Christ the Redeemer (built 1922-1931) on the 2,300 ft. (700 m.) high Corcovado peak.  On 25 September 2015, the 193 countries of the UN General Assembly – without any permission from their member countries’ citizens – adopted the 2030 Development Agenda titled “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”.⁵ In October 2019, the same month in which the “Event 201” “table-top exercise” began at Johns Hopkins University in New York, an event which, three months ahead of time, simulated a coronavirus pandemic and how the world should respond to it, not least by “flooding the zone” of public information (such was the phrase repeatedly used at the event) with a single narrative  –  the WEF published a paper laying out 30 goals to be achieved by the year 2030; it was titled: “What if we get things right? Visions for 2030”.⁶ A further “Strategic Partnership Framework” was signed between the WEF and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on 23 January 2020.

Soon after the alleged Covid pandemic began, in June 2020, Charles Windsor, then Prince Charles (above), and Klaus Schwab jointly launched the much-trumpeted “Great Reset” project, which aimed at nothing less than a proposed total transformation of our entire civilisation as well as human nature itself, all in the name of the “Fourth Post-Industrial Revolution”, the “A.I. Revolution”, the “Zero Carbon” targets of the Climate Change agenda, and the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (i.e. Agenda 2030/Agenda 21). Again, the focus was on the decade beginning in 2030. Clearly, the unelected global elite are very focused on this particular period of time 2000 years after what Steiner called the Mystery of Golgotha – the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But does Jesus Christ figure anywhere in their grandiose and ambitious projects? He does not.

The Sun Demon

What could be the connection between the three-year “Covid-19 pandemic” and these plans and projects for the 2030s? There are those who may see all these developments since 1992 – in my view, mistakenly – as further examples of the “globalisation” that they believe is an inevitable, cosmopolitan – and therefore positive – concomitant of the Age of Michael, the Archangel of the Sun, in whose era we have been living since the year 18797, according to esoteric knowledge that goes back at least to the late 15th century.  I am of the view that the answer can be found in two words known to those familiar with Anthroposophy: Ahriman and Sorath.

Just as, in most cases, the human physical body has a spiritual being associated with it, which we call our ‘self’ or our ‘I’, so also do the planetary bodies, including the Earth and the Sun, have spiritual beings associated with them. Just as the Earth currently has some 8 billion human spiritual selves associated with it, so are whole communities of spiritual beings associated with the Sun. And just as human beings can have dark spiritual forces that can influence or even possess them for part or most of their lives, so do the heavenly bodies also have dark forces, which can dwell within their spiritual spheres. The Sun is no exception: the dark being that indwells it is called Sorath.⁸

Steiner calls Sorath the “Sun Demon”, a powerful inspirer of materialism⁹ and black magic. Sorath does not incarnate in history as a human being but has made three major interventions into human history in the Christian era thus far – the first around the year 666, the second around the year 1332 (2 x 666) and the third around the year 1998.¹⁰ The first, according to Steiner, came through Sorath’s influence over an important teacher at the Academy of Gondishapur in Sassanid Persia in the mid-7th century AD, approximately the time of the Arab conquest of the Sassanid Persian Empire (see picture of the ruins of the academy below). The centre of that academy was its School of Medicine. Sorath’s goal here was to advance human scientific and technical knowledge prematurely to the point where mankind at that stage of its development, and especially the population of Europe at that time, would not have had the morality to cope with such knowledge (we are dangerously near another such a point today in relation to biotech and A.I., for example). This effort was swamped and largely prevented by the religious enthusiasm of the Islamic conquest in the 7th century AD. However, this premature knowledge was not suppressed totally by Islam; part of it ‘escaped’, as it were, from Gondishapur and, via Baghdad and then Islamic North Africa and Spain, made its way to western Europe, where it eventually laid the basis of modern natural science in the 17th century. One could thus say that a thousand years earlier, around the year 666, a ‘dark Sun’ ‘scientific’ influence was blunted by the crescent Moon ‘religious’ influence of Islam.

The second intervention came 666 years later, around 1332. Steiner associated this with the destruction of the Order of the Knights Templar by the French king Philip IV (the ‘Fair’) (picture below). The Templars ran an international banking operation on a moral basis, i.e. the money they handled belonged to the Order and not to the Knights personally. Philip was greedy for gold and wanted to seize that of the Templars. He also created the beginnings of the first European centralised modern state, in which civil servants were mostly secular and loyal to him; they were not clerics, whose loyalty might first be to the Church. This efficient centralised system is why he was able to arrest all the Templars across France within 24 hours on 13 October 1307. A hallmark of this second Sorathic intervention then, was a powerful centralised political State system.

1332 fell in the middle of what I would call the second ‘Sorathic window’ in the Christian era: 1307-1332-1357. Sorath’s intervention was not only in one year, 1332, but occurred during this window from 1307 (when the Templars in France were arrested) and 1357, by which time the Order of Templars throughout Europe was over: 1307 and 1357 are 25 years on either side of the axis point of 1332. My own research has convinced me that the first window of time in which Sorath intervened was from 641 to 691; 666 fell in the middle of that period. The second Sorathic window of time was 1307-1357, with 1332 in the middle.  The third Sorathic window was from 1973 to 2023, with the central axis year of 1998 (3 x 666). One can see this “window” of time like a lemniscate with the axis point at the centre of the lemniscate:

  641  –   666   –   691

1307  – 1332  –  1357

1973  – 1998  –  2023

Key events in this third period were the end of the Soviet Union and the emergence of China in the global capitalist economy, the development of the Internet, terrorism and the struggle between the West and Islamic states, 9/11, the beginning of the incarnation of Ahriman c.2000¹¹, the beginning of the second Cold War (2014), and the Covid-19 “pandemic” of 2020-2023 with its relation to the UN/WEF plans for a Great Reset to bring about a “new world order” in the 2030s. At root, most of these issues were economic ones, but the period has closed by combining in 2020-2023 aspects of all three Sorathic windows since the 7th century. The Covid years were the years of an engineered ‘health crisis’¹² in which drastic medical and political measures were forced onto populations throughout the world after being voted through in many countries by compliant parliamentarians; this was a coordinated and centralised global action carried out by so-called ‘democratic’ state governments that were driven by the WHO and its main financial funder, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Governments spent billions of their taxpayers’ money to compensate their taxpayers from the effects of the ruthless and completely unnecessary lockdown measures that the governments had imposed upon their populations, and this has had terrible economic (and social) consequences, which are likely to be with us for many years to come. This third ‘Sorath window’, then, which opened around 1973, closes this year in 2023, 7 years before the 2030 anniversary of the three years of the Mystery of Golgotha, which occurred 2000 years ago.

End Times?

Many people have for some decades now been convinced we are living through the biblical “End Times” prophesied by the books of Ezekiel, Daniel and the Revelation of St John (the so-called Apocalypse) and many Green, secular atheists are equally convinced we face extinction due to “climate change” unless we take drastic remedial action, which would require the end of democracy and a new ‘Green’ global authoritarianism – world government, in fact – or “global governance”, as it is euphemistically called. Indeed, what happened in 2020-2023 can be seen as having been a kind of ‘test-run’ for that authoritarianism. I am not convinced by either of these views. Certainly, our times can seem ‘apocalyptic’ in various respects, but they are not the biblical End Times, which, according to spiritual science, are not due for another four millennia at least, when the physical earth as we know it will enter the next phase of its development.¹³

What seems like the End Times today is actually more likely the atmosphere created by the incarnation (in the West – N. America) of Ahriman, one of the two main forces of spiritual evil who, according to Steiner is embodied as a human being only once in human evolution, as was the case with Christ, in Jesus 2000 years ago, and also the case with the other spiritual force of cosmic evil, Lucifer, in China 5000 years ago. In human evolution, Christ holds the balance between the two polar forces, Lucifer and Ahriman. In 1919 Steiner said in a lecture in Switzerland that Ahriman would appear in a physical (fleischliche) human being (his words: “Ahriman in the flesh”) before even a part of the third millennium would elapse.¹⁴ It is very likely that Ahriman’s approaching manifestation as an adult human being in the 2030s¹⁵ has been behind the sense of accelerating oppression and darkness that so many people have been experiencing.  There are sometimes very dark periods in history; the 1930s was one such and we can perhaps imagine how we might have felt to have lived through that era and to have been aware of the darkening shadow that many more sensitive or awake souls perceived at that time.

Philip IV (the Fair)

Ahriman will likely present himself not as a dark tyrant like the Big Brother figure in Orwell’s 1984, but rather as a benevolent positive saviour of humanity from all its woes, a figure of tremendous knowledge, as indeed the great teacher inspired by Sorath would have seemed no doubt to his pupils in the Academy of Gondishapur, and as the French king Philip the Fair (see below), tall, handsome and seemingly religiously moral and orthodox, presented himself to his court and his officials. Philip was autocratic and inflexible, known as the Iron King (le roi de fer); Bishop Saisset of Pamiers said of him: “He is neither man nor beast. He is a statue.” This royal ‘statue’ was the monarch who even dared, after his conflicts with the Papacy, to arrest the Pope and move the Papal institution to France, where Philip could better control it. The “Babylonian Captivity” of the Popes, as it became known, lasted from 1309 to 1376 and resulted in a considerable loss of respect for the Papacy throughout Europe. Julien Théry argues that by his persecution and cruel destruction of the Christian Order of the Knights Templar in order to take their money and set up a new military Order with himself as its head, Philip IV sought to erect a kind of ‘religion of royalty’ in France: “Being the ultimate defender of the Catholic faith, the …king was invested with a Christ-like function that put him above the pope. What was at stake in the Templars’ trial, then, was the establishment of a ‘royal theocracy’.”¹⁶

Here then, in the ‘second Sorath window’ – almost 200 years before Henry VIII of England  – was an attempt to merge and centralise the political and religious spheres in the person of the king.¹⁷ Many of Philip’s troubles came from his economic woes, a lack of money caused by his numerous wars and his attempts to manipulate and devalue the French currency. Within a year of the burning at the stake in Paris near Notre Dame of the Grand Master of the Templars and the Master of the Templar Order in Normandy, both Philip and the Pope, who had unwillingly assisted him in destroying the Templar Order, died. Then, within 14 years of Philip’s death, his three healthy adult sons each succeeded to the throne one after the other but all died without issue. Edward III of England, whose mother was Philip’s daughter Isabella, then insisted that he was the rightful ruler of France; the French nobility objected that the succession to the throne of France did not pass through a woman – and so began the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Philip’s actions in life would result in disaster for France.

Emperor Go-Daigo

In that same Sorath window, in the 1330s on the other side of the world, there was a parallel situation when another ruler attempted to combine the religious and the political in his own person in order to turn back the tide of history. In the early 14th century, the emperors of Japan had no real power; they had lost it two centuries earlier to the rising samurai (warrior) class whose leading families dominated. The Emperors had become impotent, mere symbolic figures.

However, the Emperor Go-Daigo (1318-1339, above) who, like all the emperors of Japan, regarded himself as the direct descendent of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami, wanted to regain for the Imperial House the powers Japanese emperors had possessed in the 8th-10th centuries, when the emperors had ruled on the highly centralised and absolutist Chinese model. He organised uprisings in 1331 and 1333 that eventually overthrew the samurai military government of the shoguns in Kamakura, (near modern Tokyo) and returned power to the ancient capital in Kyoto, far to the southwest. But his short-lived Kenmu Restoration (1333-1336), as it was known, failed because Go-Daigo could not recognise how the times had changed¹⁸ nor understand the real power and ambitions of the great samurai families or the realities of the lives of the minor samurai, the townspeople and peasants. His former samurai ally, Ashikaga Takauji, rose against him, and shattered Go-Daigo’s loyalist forces. Takauji set up a new emperor under his own control in Kyoto, while Go-Daigo escaped to the mountainous region south of Kyoto and set up a rival court there. So began the era of the civil wars between the Northern and Southern Courts, which split Japan for most of the 14th century, until 1392, when the Southern Court founded by Go-Daigo surrendered to the Northern Court. Thus Go-Daigo’s attempt around 1332 to return Japan to the ancient days of its solar “royal theocracy” failed disastrously. Japan’s Imperial Family today is descended from the emperors of the Northern Court, not the line of Go-Daigo.

Akhenaten

Some 2600 years before Go-Daigo and Philip IV, another ruler, more famous than both of them, sought to establish himself and his values and desires for his kingdom in a position of absolute power that was a challenge to the existing order. This was the pharaoh Amenhotep IV (see illustration below), who changed his name to Akhenaten (c. 1351 – c.1334 B.C.)¹⁹, and who some have argued was the father of Tutankhamen (whose original formal name was Tutankhaten), though this is disputed. Many people believe that Akhenaten was a “progressive reformer” who sought to change Egypt’s religion and culture for the better, a forerunner of Jewish and Christian monotheism, a pioneer of enlightened marital relationships, and so on. Beginning with Sigmund Freud, some have even seen him as identical with Moses and the biblical Exodus as having occurred during or just after his reign. But these views often look at Akhenaten through modern lenses,²⁰ focusing on Akhenaten himself, and often do not see him in the context of the pharaohs before him. If they did, they would realise that there was not a great difference between the way Akhenaten regarded his god, the Sun-Globe Aten²¹, and the way other Egyptians regarded their gods e.g., Atum, Amen, Ra/Re, Osiris, Horus. Each great city in ancient Egypt, for example, Memphis, Thebes, Edfu, Heliopolis (Iunu/On), Hermopolis (Khemnu) and Akhetaten (Amarna) had its own cult and chief god, which it regarded as the god, superior to all others. There is no great difference, for example, between Akhenaten’s well-known “Hymn to the Aten”, and the “Hymn to Amen-Re” preserved in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.²² What was different about Akhenaten was his fanaticism and lack of tolerance in his exclusion of the traditional gods in favour of his own, first removing funds for their temples and then actually defacing their images and cartouches (their formal names on buildings) so as to banish them from Egyptian memory (which was what later happened to his name too, after his death: he was condemned as a heretic).

His father Amenhotep III had been a more ‘inclusive’ pharaoh, who accepted all the traditional gods even while welcoming and affirming the cult of Aten. The Egyptologist Wallis Budge points out that “To Aten, Amenhotep [IV i.e., Akhenaten] ascribed the attributes of the old gods, Tem [Atum], Ra, Horus, Ptah, and even of Amen, and he proclaimed that Aten was “One” and “Alone”. But this had been proclaimed by all the priesthoods of the old gods… the worshippers of every great god in Egypt from time immemorial declared that their god was “One”. “Oneness” was an attribute… of everything that was worshipped in Egypt… .” Budge also indicates that Akhenaten “possessed a determined will and very definite religious convictions and a fearless nature” but that he “did not lightly brook opposition… with all [his] gifts he lacked a practical knowledge of men and things. He never realised the true nature of the duties which as king he owed to his country and people, and he never understood the realities of life. He never learnt the kingcraft of the Pharaohs, and he failed to see that only a warrior could hold what warriors had won for him… .None but a man half-insane would have been so blind to facts as to attempt to overthrow Amen and his worship, round which the whole of the social [and economic] life of the country centred.”²³ The above characteristics were shared also by Go-Daigo and Philip IV: great willpower and firm religious convictions but a certain fanaticism and an ignorance of the realities of the lands and people they ruled.

Egyptologists are still arguing over whether Tutankhamen, the most famous yet one of the most insignificant pharaohs of ancient Egypt, was the son of Akhenaten, his younger brother, his stepson or no relation at all. But what is clear is that it was this pharaoh Tutankhamen (only 19 when he died c. 1323 BC), whose tomb has remained the greatest Egyptological sensation ever since it was discovered on 4 November 1922 by the British archaeologist Howard Carter (1874-1939, on the left in the photo above). Carter was funded by the archaeological enthusiast, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, (1866 – 1923, on the right in the photo above). The earl was property rich and cash poor, so he married Almina Wombwell, a young lady whose mother, Marie Wombwell, was able to blackmail millionaire banker Alfred de Rothschild, who however, cared much for Almina.²⁴ It was Carnarvon’s wife’s money i.e., Rothschild money, that enabled the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb by Howard Carter, who worked persistently for Carnarvon for 16 years.  Besides the Rothschild connection, the other point of interest about Carnarvon is that he was a descendant of Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648). Steiner speaks about Lord Cherbury in lecture 9 of his Historical Symptomatology course.²⁵ Cherbury was the founder of English Deism, which would become the de facto ‘religion’ of Freemasonry in England. Deism was the rationalistic belief in a supreme being, for which Cherbury put forward five propositions, but in them there is no mention of Christ. Freemasons, whose symbolism and rituals are largely based on the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and the cultic forms of ancient Egypt, have to affirm, in order to be accepted into the Freemasonry of England (United Grand Lodge, based in London), that they believe in a supreme being; it does not matter which one.  ‘Speculative’ (i.e., symbolic) Freemasonry itself is an example of what Steiner called the resurrection of aspects of the culture of the 3rd Post-Atlantean (Egyptian-Babylonian-Chaldean) epoch (2907-747 BC) within our current 5th Post-Atlantean epoch (1413-3573). It is not unreasonable to sense a certain connection between the abstract transcendent ‘spirit’ of the ‘modern’ god of Deism and Akhenaten’s sun god Aten, which was abstract compared to the very concrete, even sensual nature of the many other Egyptian gods. It may indeed have been no accident that connected Carnarvon with Tutankhamen.  Carnarvon was one of those involved in the excavation who died not long after the tomb was opened (the tomb was discovered in November 1922; he died in Cairo in April 1923).

Many may have wondered: why of all the pharaohs of Egypt, it should have been the insignificant Tutankhamen whose tomb has proved to be the most sensational discovery in Egyptology so far. And why was it discovered just at the time it was? Definitive answers to these questions may never be found, but besides speculation about reincarnation e.g. possible former lives of Carnarvon and Carter at the time of Tutankhamen²⁶, as well as the fact that the discovery came exactly 100 years after the vital decipherment of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script by Jean-Francois Champollion in 1822, there is also the fact that the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen (reigned c.1332-1323 B.C.) whose original reign name was Tutankhaten) directed attention back to Akhenaten’s era (c.1353-1323 B.C.) and the momentous but short-lived religious change that Akhenaten tried to impose upon his kingdom. Scholars have determined that Tutankhamen reigned for 9 years; he became pharaoh in c.1332 B.C., that is 2 x 666. It is also possible that Akhenaten himself died in 1332 B.C., as the dates of Egyptian chronology are not completely secure. The pharaoh Smenkhkare is supposed to have reigned in the one or two years (1334-1332 B.C.) between Akhenaten and Tutankhamen, but that too is debatable. (Egyptologists are still unsure whether he even existed, was merely Akhenaten’s co-regent in his last years or whether he was Akhenaten’s widow or daughter in disguise.)

The axis of history

The key point in all this, I feel, is that the period of the Atenist religion came to an end in the time (1330s BC) that was as far before Jesus Christ as the 1330s AD were after Jesus Christ, the years of the Christ Event being regarded by Steiner as the focal axis of human evolution. The years on either side of that axis seem mysteriously related to each other. Steiner discussed  this mirroring in history that occurs on either side of the Christ Event in Palestine from another perspective when, in 1910, he spoke of how the 3000 years from the beginning of the Age of Darkness (known in India as Kali Yuga) in 3101 BC, down to the time of Jesus Christ, can be divided in three periods of approximately 1000 years each, the ages of Abraham (c.3000 – c.2000 BC), of Moses (c.2000 – c.1000 BC) and of Solomon (c. 1000 BC to the Christ Event) and that something of the character of these three ages recurs, mirrored as it were, in reverse order in the 3000 years after Christ: the first Christian millennium – the Age of Solomon; the second Christian millennium – the Age of Moses; and the third Christian millennium – the Age of Abraham. In the Age of Abraham before Christ (i.e., 3000-2000 BC) natural clairvoyance faded, humanity became dependent on the physical brain and the concept of One God began to appear; in the Age of Moses BC (2000 – 1000 BC), humanity descended still lower into the material world, and the One God revealed Himself externally through the physical forms of nature (wind, storm, burning bush etc) and through external commands such as the Ten Commandments); in the Age of Solomon BC (1000-1 BC), human beings began to think for themselves; philosophy and politics emerged. However, the Age of Solomon AD (1 AD – 1000 AD) was one of the development both of Christian esoteric wisdom and also of barren and rigid intellectual theology and dogmatism; the Age of Moses AD (1000 AD – 2000 AD) was one of the development of Christian mysticism and inwardness within the soul; the Age of Abraham AD (2000-3000 AD) will be one in which humanity will gradually free itself from the physical brain, and natural clairvoyance will develop, including vision of the Christ, not as a physical presence but in the spiritual biosphere that surrounds the earth. The respective gestures of the three ages are thus related but mirrored in time. Another example of this mirroring around the Christ Event was that Buddhism emerged in the late 6th century BC and Islam in the late 6th century AD. A further example was that in the 6th century BC, between 597 and 538, many Jews were exiled in Babylonia following King Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the Kingdom of Judah, while in the 6th cent. AD, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian passed many anti-Jewish laws and restrictions, and the Babylonian Talmud (a central text of Rabbinic Judaism) was completed in the early 6th century. It is of great importance for our understanding of history that we learn to look at and compare historical events before the Christ Event with those that occurred in the same periodicity after it. In the context of this article, for example, this means the 1330s BC and the 1330s AD.

From the 1330s to today

In 1328 AD, King Charles IV of France died after a reign of only six years. He was the last of the three unfortunate sons of Philip IV (“the Fair”) and thus the last of the main branch of the Capetian dynasty, which had ruled France since the 10th century. Like his father, Charles was also known as “the Fair”. In 1328, Philip IV’s daughter Isabella was reigning in England with her lover Roger Mortimer, the couple having overthrown her husband, Edward II, two years earlier. After the death of Charles IV in 1328, the French nobles declined to accept Isabella or her son Edward (Edward III) as ruler of France and instead crowned Philip of Valois king of France. He was the brother of Philip IV (d. 1314) and the head of a cadet branch of the Capetian dynasty, henceforth known as the Valois dynasty. So, from the 1330s there was a new dynasty in France after the deaths of the three sons of Philip IV, the king who had tried to create a “royal theocracy” centred on himself as ‘Vicar of God’, rather as Akhenaten, who saw himself as “the Son of Aten”, had tried to do in Egypt, some 2660 years earlier, and, as mentioned above, Emperor Go-Daigo had also tried to do something similar in mediaeval Japan, also in the early 1330s. The ‘gesture’ that all three men had in common was that they saw themselves as ‘sunlike’ in their respective countries, which they wished to make revolve around themselves. Akhenaten, like Sorath in Gondishapur c. 666 AD, tried to push his people too far forward too fast, while Go-Daigo wanted to take his country backwards in time to the 9th or the 7th centuries. Philip IV was not as anachronistic as the other two; he understood his country or at least his nobles and clergy somewhat better, but he nevertheless caused his country and its people great suffering through his headstrong, ill-judged and stubborn decisions.

The discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb came in the 1920s. It was a decade when monolithic, absolutist totalitarianism, which one could call a modern ‘resurrection’ of ancient Egyptian behaviour in our time, was rapidly growing in Europe: the Bolsheviks had come to power in Russia in 1917, and the USSR was formally established in 1922; Stalin took over after Lenin’s death in 1924; Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, and the Nazi Party was founded in Germany in early 1920; Hitler became its leader a year later. The common point of all these forms of totalitarianism, besides their materialist underpinnings, was that they combined the cultural, political and economic spheres of society under State control – a theme of “Oneness”. All three of them had Egyptian overtones in their use of dictatorship by all-powerful leaders and those leaders’ control of the masses in an almost religious way, often through huge, ritualistic spectacles. In this second Age, the Age of Moses (second millennium AD), these regimes were very much ‘command societies’, absolutist theocracies as the earlier ‘Age of Moses’ (BC) had been. In Germany in particular, the cultic symbolism and style of the new regime was that of an inversion of the motif of the Sun, for example, in the omnipresent swastika.²⁷ Imperial Japan’s symbol was also that of the rising sun disk.

On 26 November 1922, after the arrival of Lord Carnarvon and his daughter Evelyn Herbert in Egypt, Howard Carter, together with Carnarvon and Evelyn, became the first people in millennia briefly to enter the tomb’s burial chamber, 33 centuries after the lives and deaths of Akhenaten and Tutankhamen. Evelyn, being smaller, was actually the first person to enter Tutankhamen’s burial chamber. Work inside the tomb proceeded slowly and carefully in 1923. Lord Carnarvon, who had already been suffering from a serious illness in 1922, died in April 1923, and Carter resumed work at the tomb in autumn that year. But on 12 February 1924 he stopped work in protest against interference by the Egyptian authorities and did not recommence work at the tomb until 25 January 1925. It is worth noting that Steiner had fallen seriously ill at the end of September 1924 and in January 1925 was still ill in his sickbed. It was only in October 1925, almost three years after the initial discovery of the tomb, that Carter and his team removed the now fabled and world-famous golden funerary mask of Tutankhamen from the mummy and finally gazed upon the pharaoh’s face. By that time, Steiner had died six months earlier (30.3.1925) and Adolf Hitler had been out of prison almost a year and had refounded the Nazi Party in February 1925 under his firm command, calling himself “der Führer”.  So much about Hitler (except for his normal speaking voice) and about the National Socialists is an image of rigid hardness. The stern “Man of Destiny” facial image he presented to the world resembled that of an Egyptian pharaoh – apart from the moustache of course! Nazi architecture resembled ancient Egyptian architecture in certain respects. The black swastika (itself an ancient Hindu symbol of the Sun) was set within a white disk in the centre of a blood red ground. Ancient Egypt was known as the Two Lands, black and red. Hitler, who idolised the figure of Parsifal, was represented as though he were the Sun’s representative on earth, and Nazi ideologues spoke of him as such. Akhenaten regarded himself as the Son of the Aten, the son of the Sun. Replacing all the priests of the old gods, he claimed in effect to be the Sun on earth, something which not even Louis XIV would have claimed for himself. Hitler came to power in 1933, (exactly 100 years after the death of Kaspar Hauser in 1833) and 66 years before 1999, which is close to 3 x 666 =1998.

The Beast

Steiner said in 1910 that some human beings would begin to perceive the Christ in the Earth’s etheric field (its spiritual biosphere) beginning in 1933²⁸ and in 1924 he remarked that “before the Etheric Christ can be comprehended in the right way, humanity must first cope with encountering the Beast who will rise up from the abyss. This is what the apocalyptic language tells us…”²⁹ Beasts of another kind did indeed arise, not in the heavens but on Earth, in human souls in 1933, inspired by a spiritual being, the Sun Demon, that made its own major intervention during the third ‘window’ of its activity in the Christian era³⁰, when it struck all three spheres of that period – in economic, political and cultural events – most recently in the area of health and medicine in the Covid crisis.

The German businessman, Klaus Schwab, who founded the WEF, and the WEF’s ‘court philosopher’, the Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari, (left) author of ‘modestly’ titled books such as Homo Deus and Unstoppable Us − How Humans Took Over the World, believed that Covid-19 was intimately related to the coming Great Reset; Schwab’s 2020 book was even titled Covid-19: the Great Reset, which almost suggests that Covid 19 was the Great Reset. But for Schwab, the Great Reset means the total transformation of our civilisation to an AI-driven, Transhumanist form of what he calls “stakeholder capitalism”, by which he means a form of global capitalism run in the interests of a few elites. This is what they have scheduled for the 2030s, when Ahriman will likely make his main move in the human realm. But before that momentous event, which will no doubt deeply affect the rest of this century as the two world wars did the last century, ‘the ground’ for the Great Reset by Ahriman was prepared during the last 50 years (1973-2023, the third Sorath ‘window’) by Sorath, the Sun Demon. Those years culminated in the three years of a catastrophe based on deception by the UN/WHO, WEF, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the British Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) as well as numerous national governments and media organisations which unquestioningly followed the ‘advice’ and the strictures of these institutions and individuals. It was a scientific (‘medical’), political, and economic catastrophe³¹ in the early years of this crucial 21st century, this new third millennium, and in the last 3 years of the third intervention of Sorath the Sun Demon, (the “two horned beast” of Revelation chapter 13), a pseudo-pandemic was conjured up in order to ‘save us all’ from an allegedly dreadful global disease. Hundreds of millions, from nonagenarians to infants, were injected with a deceptive “vaccination” that was no vaccination at all but a technological bioweapon³² that is steadily killing off considerable numbers of healthy, fit human beings, notably young sportspeople – some drop dead suddenly or fall seriously ill – and is implicit in women’s pregnancies that fail and the increasing excess mortality rates³³ – all of which the mainstream media largely ignore. Those in government, the media and the entertainment industry, who fell under Sorath’s spell and followed the official narrative on Covid and the “vaccinations”, spoke at first with comforting words and all kinds of encouragements and inducements but then finally with threats, insults and vicious propaganda that “spake as a dragon” against those who refused to have the injections, demanding they be locked up, interned, denied their civil rights etc.

Meanwhile, Schwab, the WEF, the media and national governments used the ‘crisis’ to push the new technology of surveillance and control with “Covid passes”, “health passes”, “Green passes”, “vaccine passports”, which were all dependent on smartphone apps and QR codes. We were told we would have to work from home, travel less and get used to a lifestyle within 15 minutes of our homes, where everything would be “within reach”, as it were – all so that we wouldn’t “spread the virus” and would also “reduce our carbon footprint” on the way to the “Zero Carbon” economy and society. Carbon has been turned into a hate object… People seem to forget that our bodies consist mostly of water and carbon. During the window of Sorath’s third intervention (1973-2023) not only have the technologies of microchipping both animals and human beings emerged along with those of smartphones, QR codes, automated payment and social credit surveillance systems, but we have also been pushed from fear of “global cooling” in the late 1970s to fear of “global warming” in the 1990s and fear of “climate change” since the 2010s. All of these fearmongering developments since the early 1970s, culminating in fear of Covid-19, bear the signatures of Ahriman (the “first beast” mentioned in the Book of Revelation Chapter 13) and Sorath the Sun Demon (the second, two-horned beast) who

“….deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the [first] beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the [first] beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

And he [the second beast, Sorath] had power to give life unto the image of the [first] beast, that the image of the [first] beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the [first] beast should be killed.

And he [Sorath] causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast [Sorath], or the number of his name.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast [Sorath]: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”³⁴ (The Book of Revelation)

These are dark times indeed, times when, as a civilisation, we have achieved so much materially but fallen so far ethically and spiritually. Nicanor Perlas wrote about our time strikingly and helpfully in his 2018 book Humanity’s Last Stand – The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence, A Spiritual Scientific Response.  I personally feel that “Last Stand” is exaggerated, but nevertheless, it is true that ours is a time when only through the encounter with great darkness are many people waking up to the spiritual reality of what is happening and realising that darkness is followed by dawning light, as is said in the 4th verse of Steiner’s Foundation Stone Meditation, referring to the Mystery of Golgotha 2000 years ago: “Darkness of night had run its course. Day-radiant light now streamed into human hearts…” Christians should never forget that the spiritual forces of darkness were already comprehensively defeated 2000 years ago and that those forces have only conducted a huge and complex rearguard action since then, an action that has also included major offensives on their part, but ultimately all in vain. This 21st century is a momentous time for the future of humanity.  In a mood of equanimity, watching and praying, observing, understanding and acting, we should keep in mind that we have chosen to live in this time and to play our part for the sake of humanity’s future.

Endnotes

1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-65499929

2. https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/experts-warn-global-covid-vaccine-could-take-until-late-2023/

3. https://fullfact.org/health/covid-vaccines/

4. “Agenda 2030, also known as the Sustainable Development Goals, was a set of goals decided upon at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in 2015. It takes all of the goals set by Agenda 21 and re-asserts them as the basis for sustainable development, saying, ‘We reaffirm all the principles of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development…’ Adding onto those goals from the original Rio document, a total of 17 goals have been agreed on, revolving around the same concepts of Agenda 21; people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21

5. See a Romanian whistleblower and expert on sustainable development expose the UN, WEF and Agenda 2030: https://www.brighteon.com/a6d160b9-8794-438c-bc09-775534add11e  Interview with Reiner Fuellmich.

6. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/10/future-predictions-what-if-get-things-right-visions-for-2030/

7. Following Steiner’s indications, it will end approximately in the period 2250-2300. Following that of the mediaeval esotericist, Abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim, it will end in exactly the year 2233.

8. See Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) chapter XXII. Agrippa’s esoteric teacher at the time he wrote the book was Trithemius of Sponheim.

9. See lecture of 12 Sept. 1924 in Steiner’s Collected Works GA 346, and also lecture of 29 June 1908, in Collected Works GA 104.

10. See n. 9 above. See also lectures of 11th and 12th October 1918, in Collected Works GA 184 (published in Rudolf Steiner, Three Streams in Human Evolution, Rudolf Steiner Press 1965, rep. 1985)

11. See my article ‘The Incarnation of Ahriman: When and Where?’ at http://threeman.org/?p=2905

12. See the speech by Dr David Martin to the EU Parliament 28 May 2023 https://rumble.com/v2ncp8w-dr-david-e.-martin-phd-covid-summit-european-union-parliament-may-2023.html

13. See R. Steiner, The Apocalypse of St. John, Collected Works GA 104 (1908), lectures 8,9,10,11,12 and the chart at the back of the book.

14. Steiner lecture of 1 November 1919, Collected Works GA 191.

15. ‘He’ may not appear on the public stage, as it were, but may conceal ‘himself’ and act behind or through a number of human ‘frontmen’. Either way, humanity will notice a tremendous acceleration towards total control of the planet and the human race.

16. Julien Théry, ‘A Heresy of State. Philip the Fair, the Trial of the “Perfidious Templars”, and the Pontificalization of the French Monarchy’, in Journal of Mediaeval Religious Cultures, 2013.

17. In 1534 Henry VIII broke with Rome decisively and set himself up as the Head of the Established  Church in England.

18. This was, after all, the martial Age of the Archangel Samael (late 12th to the early 16th century). The characteristics of this age were war, conflict, fragmentation, but also individuation.

19. His dates, like those of most Egyptian pharaohs, are not exactly certain. Scholarly opinion includes 1353–1336 or 1351–1334 BC.

20. “Before much of the archaeological evidence from Thebes and from Tell el-Amarna became available, wishful thinking sometimes turned Akhenaten into a humane teacher of the true God, a mentor of Moses, a Christlike figure, a philosopher before his time. But these imaginary creatures are now fading away one by one as the historical reality gradually emerges. There is little or no evidence to support the notion that Akhenaten was a progenitor of the full-blown monotheism that we find in the Bible. The monotheism of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament had its own separate development – one that began more than half a millennium after the pharaoh’s death.” – From ‘Aspects of Monotheism’ by Donald B. Redford, Biblical Archaeology Review, 1996.

21. The Aten is often translated as Sun disk, but this is a mistranslation. ‘Globe’ is more accurate.

22. See E.A. Wallis Budge, Tutankhamen – Amenism, Atenism and Egyptian Monotheism (1923, repub. 1991) chaps. 2 and 3.

23.  Wallis Budge, pp. 77-78. Akhenaten’s closure of the temples of the other gods meant great hardship for the common people of Egypt as well as for the priests and scribes.

24. https://lord-carnarvon.blogspot.com/

25. From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, Collected Works GA 185, lecture 9 3 November 1918.

26. Carnarvon and Carter were close for 16 years, from 1907 until Carnarvon’s death in 1923: Lady Burghclere, Carnarvon’s sister, wrote that for 16 years “….the two men worked together with varying fortune, yet ever united not more by their common aim than by their mutual regard and affection” (my emphasis). See n. 24 above.

27. Looking at some other background events to the discovery and opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, we find that in 1919 serious rebellions broke out in two parts of the British Empire – Egypt and Ireland, and in 1922, the two peoples gained their independence from Britain – Egypt in February and Ireland in December. Then on 31 December 1922, the Goetheanum Building (1913-1922) designed by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach, Switzerland, was destroyed by arson.

28. Steiner lecture of 6.3.1910 Stuttgart, in Collected Works GA 118.

29. Steiner lecture of 20.9.1924 in Collected Works GA 346.

30. During the 49/50 year ‘window’ of 2023-1998-1973 BC (in the 21st/20th centuries BC) that corresponds to the period 1973-1998-2033 AD, the 11th Dynasty (c.2150 BC – c.1991 BC) ended in Egypt and was followed by the 12th Dynasty (1991-1802 BC). In 2023 BC Pharaoh Mentuhotep II (2060–2009 BC) was ruling; he reunited Egypt after the turbulence of the ‘First Intermediate Period’ (2181–2055 BC) and became the first pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom. He was succeeded during that third 666 window BC by Mentuhotep III (c. 2009–1997 BC), Mentuhotep IV (1997–1991 BC), and Amenemhat I (1991-c.1961 BC)

31. Medical, because of the injections which are gradually killing off countless numbers of people across the world and ruining the lives of many others; political, because of the huge extension during Covid-19 crisis and since, of the coercive powers of the national states which obey the will of the UN, WHO and WEF; and economic, because of the terrible economic effects around the world of the unnecessary lockdowns and injections.

32. See Dr. David Martin’s presentation to the “Covid Summit” at the EU Parliament May 2023 https://rumble.com/v2ncp8w-dr-david-e.-martin-phd-covid-summit-european-union-parliament-may-2023.html and also, biotech and patent lawyer Karen Kingston’s analysis of the Covid injections in the documentary Final Days: https://stewpeters.com/final-days-video/

33. Even the British MD, Dr John Campbell on Youtube, one of the most widely watched ‘experts’ who supported the official narrative 2020-2022, changed his tune last year out of his concern over the excess mortality figures.

34. See: The Book of Revelation, ch. 13: verses 14-18.

©Terry Boardman

In the three articles I have written in New View magazine this year about the conflict in Ukraine, a conflict which has broken out 33 years after the momentous events of the year 1989, and 233 years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, I have tried to show something of the deeper background to the Ukraine conflict which, I have argued, is actually a proxy war, an episode in a much longer-lasting war that the West, or more specifically, the Anglosphere, has been waging against Russia for about 200 years for both exoteric and esoteric reasons. This fourth contribution will round off this series of articles and bring them to a conclusion.

Three long-term goals

In this long struggle, the latest episode, from 2014 until today, has occurred 100 (3 x 33⅓) years after the events of the First World War, which was in so many respects the awful crucible of the modern world. In previous articles I have sought to describe how the elites ruling the British Empire brought about that war to achieve, essentially, three goals: firstly, to consolidate the forces of the English-speaking world (including those of the USA) in order to defeat rising challenges from Germany, Russia and Japan in the 20th century and ensure the continued domination of the world by the elites of the English-speaking peoples for centuries into the future, indeed until at least the 4th millennium, the end of our present age of history, which Rudolf Steiner termed the Age of the Consciousness Soul (1413-3573), and which is known astrologically as the Age of Pisces. This continued domination would require military, economic, technological, and cultural preponderance by the English-speaking world. It would also require political changes to minimise the impact of democratic forces within the English-speaking world and to centralise authority, not least through the operation of some form of world government, through technological means in the hands of an ever smaller, and English-speaking, global elite. These intentions can be seen in the writings, for example, of Anglophone elite members such as the brothers Brooks and Henry Adams in the USA (in accordance with their motto: “civilization = centralization = economy”) and of elite propagandists in the UK such as Lionel Curtis, Philp Kerr, and historian Arnold Toynbee, all of Lord Alfred Milner’s Round Table group (aka the Milner Group), H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley. Real power would be effectively removed from parliaments, where a mere ‘show’ of it for the sake of the media and the masses would continue, but behind the scenes it would be exercised in global or transatlanticist gatherings of the elite, either semi-public, such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), or entirely private, such as Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Council of Thirty etc. These private or semi-private bodies would then have national governments and global institutions (UN, WHO, UNESCO, EU, NATO) carry out their will. These intentions have been made manifest, and a prime example of this in our time was the implementation and enforcement across the entire world of governments’ measures ostensibly to combat the COVID-19 global pandemic from 2020 following the “Event 201” meeting at Johns Hopkins University in October 2019, a meeting organised by the WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with the collaboration of the WHO and the government of the People’s Republic of China (Gao Fu, a Chinese virologist and immunologist played a key part in “Event 201”; he served as Director of the Chinese government’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention from August 2017 to July 2022). The pandemic supposedly then began in China a month after “Event 201” and quickly spread to Europe, N. America and elsewhere. The absolutely unprecedented scale of the totalitarian controls imposed by most governments in the developed countries from 2020 and followed in 2021 by those government’s allegedly anti-COVID injection campaigns, which in countries that have employed the mRNA injections have been genocidal, served as an effective means of advancing the drive towards world government under the control of the Anglophone elites, as has been made only too clear in the public statements and writings of such figures as Klaus Schwab of the WEF and the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari.

The second of the three goals for the First World War that are directly related to the Anglo-Russian antagonism was the emasculation of Russia, and of the Slavic peoples as a whole: their reduction to servitude under the Anglo-American hegemony. This goal had both exoteric and esoteric aspects. The exoteric aspect was that   two  fears had possessed the British elite since the defeat of Napoleon: they had feared first that Russia might be the next contender to take India from British control. India was the key to Britain’s global economic supremacy, as Napoleon had recognised. This fear drove the so-called ‘Great Game’ between Britain and Russia over control of Central Asia in the 19th century and until Indian independence in 1947. The second fear, enunciated by the geographer and geopolitical thinker Halford Mackinder between 1904 and 1919,  was that Russia might combine her huge potential material and human resources with a smaller, more intelligent, more disciplined and efficient people such as the French, the Germans, the Japanese or the Chinese and in such a case, transport networks would be created across Eurasia that would be invulnerable to British attack and eventually a navy would be constructed that could mount an effective challenge to Britain’s Royal Navy and thus to the hegemony of the British Empire. This fear also came to possess the minds of American geostrategists after the USA had assumed Britain’s mantle of global hegemony in 1945. It has been evident, either implicitly or explicitly, in the writings and statements of very influential American geostrategists such as the late Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Friedman. The actions of the US military in Central Asia after 9/11, from 2001-2021, were evidence of this ongoing concern.

Esoteric goal

However, the second of the three goals also has an esoteric aspect, which I briefly alluded to in my previous article in the Autumn 2022 issue of New View (‘The Anglo-Russian Antagonism Part 2’). This esoteric aspect has to do with ensuring that the Slavic peoples, and especially the Russians, will not fulfil their potential to become the world’s ‘vanguard culture’ from the mid-4th millennium onwards but instead, will come under the domination of the English-speaking peoples, whose current ‘vanguard’ status –  which has become overwhelmingly driven by materialistic concerns and ambitions – would under normal conditions come to an end in the mid-4th millennium (the end of the Age of Pisces).

What does it mean that the Slavic peoples have the potential to become the world’s ‘vanguard culture’ from the mid-4th millennium onwards? It means that in the Age of the Spirit-Self (the Age of Aquarius), which, according to Steiner, will follow the Age of the Consciousness Soul (the Age of Pisces), the human ‘I’ (the essential self, the spiritual kernel of the human being), in large numbers of individuals, will have learned to see itself and other I’s as spiritual beings. These spiritualised I’s will then seek to form new communities on the basis not of the old blood ties or traditional religions but out of their own insight. It will be a new age of community based on empathy for others, an age of brother-and sisterhood that we in the West today can hardly even conceive of, just as people in ancient Greece and Rome would hardly have been able to conceive of our modern western individualism. But we can see foreshadowings of this future today in the remaining traditional communal behaviours of non-western cultures, although there such behaviour is instinctive and collective, based on blood ties, whereas in the future (Slavic) epoch of the Spirit-Self it will be based on the moral individualism that will have been won as a result of our current (Germanic) Age of the Consciousness Soul. The seed of this new impulse to new community, new fraternity, Steiner described,1 is already there in the Slavic peoples, who not only have the impulse to community, which all eastern peoples too have to a greater or lesser degree in comparison with the more individualistic westerners, but the Slavs also have a Christian culture. The native Slavic sense of community has been infused with over 1000 years of an empathic Christian sensibility, which one can see especially in the unfolding, for example, of village life in Russia, the nature of the mir, a word which translates variously as community, peace, village, world, cosmos. Russian and Slavic literature is permeated with this empathic sensibility.

The English-speaking peoples are a branch of the larger Germanic group of peoples that originated in northern Europe (Scandinavia). From the late 15th century onwards, these Germanic peoples gradually replaced the peoples of southern Europe as the arbiters of the destiny of the West. The southern Europeans of the Greco-Roman or Mediterranean region had been those arbiters since the 8th century BC (the Age of Aries), but from the 15th century AD onwards, the military, cultural and economic power of the Italian states, Iberia and France (France straddles both south and north) gave way to that of Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden and eventually England. Steiner described in numerous lectures how in the period of just over 2000 years until the 15th century, Europeans – a sizeable minority of them, at any rate – had learned to think for themselves; this was the key achievement of what he called the Age of the Intellectual-Mind Soul. No longer did they feel the gods or God thinking through them; now they felt that they themselves were thinking. In the following Age of Pisces, from the 15th century, the Germanic or northern European epoch, the focus of development is on the individual human will – how human thinking applies the human will and, essentially, how the individual will becomes morally informed and directed by the human I. This is a very dangerous phase of development, in some ways rather akin to adolescence, because its early stage is usually one of considerable egocentricity and selfishness as well as materialism, a view of life that results from feeling alienated, to a greater or lesser degree, as an individual from the rest of life and the cosmos. We are only 600 years into this Germanic or northern European epoch, the Age of the Consciousness Soul, as Steiner called it, with its American offshoot, and though there have been positive signs of growing human maturity over the past 50 years or so, there is still plenty of evidence of a thoroughly egocentric and competitive, materialistic culture in the West, especially in economic life.

Steiner described that the spiritual counterforces which exist to provide humanity with the resistance it needs to develop inner capacities for love and freedom desire that these egocentric and competitive, materialistic  attitudes and behaviours, (which have become extreme in the age of American hegemony since 1945), should continue on into the next epoch of human development, the Age of the Spirit-Self (aka the Age of Aquarius), indeed that in effect, human development will effectively stop at our present stage.2 Life on earth would then become so miserable and oppressive that most people would no longer wish to incarnate on this planet, or if incarnated, would soon seek to exit this life. This is the goal of those spiritual counterforces who oppose humanity’s growth and development. If it were achieved, the mission or task of humanity and the Earth would be a failure.

These forces, Steiner pointed out, influence the thoughts and actions of those at the helm of the English-speaking countries in the modern age. What is the aim, Steiner asks, of the secretive and semi-visible elite groups operative in the English-speaking world? “They do not work out of any particular British patriotism, but out of the desire to bring the whole world under the yoke of pure materialism. And because…certain elements of the British people as the bearer of the Consciousness Soul are most suitable for this, they want, by means of grey magic [he means the mass media], to use these elements as promoters of this materialism. This is the important point. Those who know what impulses are at work in world events can also steer them. No other national element, no other people, has ever before been so usable as material for transforming the whole world into a materialistic realm. Therefore, those who know, want to set their foot on the neck of this national element and strip it of all spiritual endeavour – which of course lives equally in all human beings. Just because karma has ordained that the Consciousness Soul should work here [in Britain] particularly strongly, the secret brotherhoods have sought out elements in the British national character. Their aim is to send a wave of materialism over the earth and make the physical plane the only valid one. A spiritual world is to be recognised only in terms of what the physical world has to offer.”3 This last point can be understood in the ways in which, in the West, spiritual practice has been taken over by, or put in the service of physical aims e.g. the commercialisation of Christmas and Easter, the turning of eastern spiritual practices in martial arts and meditation from ways of living into ‘techniques’ of supporting ‘health’ – sport and ‘mindfulness’, and more recently, the creation of alternative worlds in virtual reality, Second Life, and the Metaverse in which individuals can supposedly live out their fantasies.

The ruination of Russia

Theodore Roosevelt, US President 1901-1909 and an ardent Freemason, was particularly focused on Russia as the representative of the Slavic race and as the Power of the future which would one day take the place of the English-speaking peoples.  He was concerned about Russia’s advance into southern and eastern Asia, which he felt had to be stopped. At the same time, he was well-acquainted with Russia’s internal problems: its weak government, the poverty and sufferings of its people, the revolutionary forces under the surface. He was therefore confident, as he told his British friend, the diplomat Cecil Spring Rice in 1901, that “the Russian growth – the growth of the Slav – is slow. […] Russia’s day is yet afar off. I think the twentieth century will still be the century of the men who speak English.”4

During the First World War, for example, in his Karma of Untruthfulness lectures of 1916-1917, Steiner repeatedly referred to the pre-war plans and intentions of western occult groups, emphasising the need for the peoples of Central Europe to think about history in long-range perspectives; otherwise, he said, the peoples of Central Europe would always be at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the western elites if they were unaware of the bases of such long-range western elite thinking.

Steiner’s response to the intentions of those western elites was given publicly, for example, on 1 Dec. 19185: “What has developed there in Russia [i.e. the Bolshevik Revolution - TB] is basically only a realisation of what is wanted in the West. […] Whatever people [in the West] may say they want consciously, what they are striving for is to found a caste of masters in the West and a caste of economic slaves in the East, beginning at the Rhine and extending eastwards into Asia. […] A caste of slaves, which is to be organised socialistically and which is to take up all the impossibilities of a social structure which are then not to be applied to the English-speaking population.” By ‘impossibilities’ here he meant that a socialist order was regarded by western elites as ‘impossible’, i.e., intrinsically harmful to society and not to be implemented in the West. The history of Russia since 1917, eastern Europe since 1945 and especially China since 1990 bears this out clearly.

Steiner knew that modern history since the 15th century showed that democratic impulses in the West would inevitably lead to the self-assertion of the individual at all levels of society but that due to growing materialism, this would actually result in totalitarian and atheistic communism, as was already evident with the French Revolution after 1789. He knew too that this was known also by the western occult brotherhoods, who had resolved that this inevitable socialism and communism would not be allowed to take over the West. Instead, they would direct such forces from the West towards the East, where they would be more easily adopted because of the traditional eastern proclivity for collectivism and brotherhood. This ‘socialist experiment’ would contribute to undermining the cultural fibre of the Slavic peoples, especially the Russians and thus contribute to preventing them from being able to do what they would otherwise seek to do in the 4th millennium. This was one of the other, more esoteric purposes behind the First World War – the ruination of Russia, which since 1907 had been Britain’s ally but until that date, for nearly 100 years, had been regarded by the British elite as Britain’s premier imperial rival.

“On 23 December 1917 Lord Milner… and Lord Robert Cecil wrote a memorandum, that proposed to the French a division of southern regions of Russia into spheres of influence: France would get Ukraine and the Crimea, while the British reserved for themselves the Caucasus region and the Cossack lands on the Don.”  Milner felt that all means possible had to be employed to prevent the Germans from gaining control of Russian resources; he wrote that in Russia ‘Civil war, or even the mere continuance of chaos and disorder, would be an advantage to us from this point of view.’ ” 6 In 1918 British, French, American and Japanese armies landed in Russia. The British arrived in March at Murmansk and in August at Archangelsk “Over the next three years Russia sank into the chaos of the civil war that Milner had seen as ‘opportune’ for western interests. The interventionist armies did not have the numbers, however, to be able to strike a decisive blow against the Red Army. Indeed, it seemed that they did not even want to strike such a blow. Even Winston Churchill, one of the fiercest opponents of the revolutionaries, was forced to acknowledge on 27 February 1919 that “there is no ‘will to win’ behind any of these ventures”. The whole enterprise resulted not in the victory of the anti-Communist forces but the consolidation of Bolshevik rule.” 7

Scholars such as Markus Osterrieder, Guido Giacomo Preparata, and Antony C. Sutton have detailed how Britain and America deliberately failed to support the White armies in their struggle against the Bolsheviks and instead financed the Bolshevik regime during the Russian Civil War 1917-1922 and afterwards.8 A Russia, whether capitalist or communist, with a strong economy that could rival the capitalist West was not wanted in the City of London and on Wall St. Members of the British and American elites did much to facilitate the arrival – via New York and Canada – of Trotsky in Russia in the spring of 1917; he went on to organise victory for the Bolsheviks in the Civil War. The British “appeared to back” Admiral Kolchak’s White Russian army that sought a democratic federation in Siberia but the British refused to give Kolchak the support he needed to make his Siberian Federation the kernel of a democratic all-Russian State. The British apparently wanted to separate Siberia off from European Russia, no doubt to be able to open it up to exploitation by western interests.9 This motive would reappear in the 1990s.

On 17 October 1918 the deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Lawrence Saunders, wrote to US President Woodrow Wilson: “Dear Mr. President, I am in sympathy with the Soviet government as that best suited for the Russian people.”10 US capitalist interests wanted at all costs to keep German business out of Russia and Russian resources open to themselves. We can be reminded here of the struggle over Russian oil and gas pipelines today and the American determination, reiterated earlier this year by both President Biden and Victoria Nuland of the State Department, to see the Nordstream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany cancelled; ultimately it was blown up!11 A hundred years ago, the State Department pressed for recognition of the (genocidal) Bolshevik government. In a memorandum for President Wilson’s closest adviser Col. House in February 1918, the State Department wrote that “had the Bolsheviks been recognised by the United States, ‘we would now have control over all of Russia’s raw material reserves and control officials at all border crossings.’ ” 12 The new US mantra now became “Change the Bolsheviks through trade”, rather than through armed intervention. In Britain, Arthur Balfour, Foreign Secretary since a political ‘regime change’ coup in London effected by his ally Lord Milner in Dec. 1916, was concerned only to keep Russia within certain geographical limits and not to intervene in her internal affairs. As the Russian Civil War progressed, the situation became worse for the Whites, and the genocidal Bolsheviks became ever more radical; the Cheka secret police murdered tens of thousands of Russians simply because of their profession or class affiliation, motives similar to those of French revolutionaries at the height of the Terror in the 1790s or of Pol Pot in Cambodia in the 1970s. The Allied tone changed from military intervention to one of the need for containment, of a cordon sanitaire, but above all, of the need to keep Germany and Russia apart – their possible combination identified by Churchill, echoing Mackinder, as “the greatest danger for the future” (16.9.1919). Mackinder himself advocated “a belt of independent, pro-western states of the western and southern Slavs …as a buffer between the Germans and the Russians.” To this end, he proposed the forced ‘transfer’ of Germans east of the river Vistula and out of a ‘cleansed’ Poland.” [This would come in 1945 - TB] The Russians themselves, he said, were at least for one or two generations “hopelessly incapable” of resisting German penetration; “autocratic rule of some sort – i.e., by the Bolsheviks – was therefore ‘unavoidable’, he felt, so that Russia would be able to resist the German temptation out of its own forces.”13

The West thus condemned the Russian  people to decades of imprisonment under Communist rule, which the West itself had facilitated; it was a period which included the murder of countless priests and nuns and the destruction of numerous churches and monasteries, between 100,000 and 200,000 executed in the Cheka’s ‘Red Terror’ of 1917-1922, the state-enforced Holodomor famine of 1932-33 which killed about 4 million Russians and Ukrainians, the inhuman gulag system which killed about 116,000, Stalin’s purges (about a million dead), and worst of all, the approx. 34 million Russians (military and civilian) killed in the colossal invasion by National Socialist Germany (1941-1944), a regime whose rise the West too had facilitated and had appeased in order to create two authoritarian socialist behemoths, the one national, the other international, that could be lured into going to war against each other to ensure that the German and Russian peoples would never in the future combine against the US and the UK.14 For three long years (1941-44) Churchill refused to countenance opening a second front in the West against Nazi Germany until the German armies had wasted themselves in the bloodletting on the Eastern Front, and even then, after Hitler’s defeat, Churchill soon wanted to go to war again, against Soviet Russia, Britain’s ally from 1941-45.

The Russian people were held – ‘contained’, to use the expression of the principal US strategic ‘expert’ on Russia at the time, George F. Kennan – in the Communist gulag for 70 years, and all that time, certain forms of business went on between the US and the USSR, and certain American elitists, such as Averell Harriman and Armand Hammer, of Occidental Petroleum, continued to visit Soviet Russia and cultivate clandestine relations with Soviet leaders. In 1989-91 the West terminated the “socialist experiment” that it had initiated 70 years earlier, and “the Harvard boys” (business ‘consultants’ and ‘advisers’) immediately descended on Russia during the Yeltsin years to loot what could be looted. Meanwhile, as Russia went down, China came up; the next phase of the “socialist experiment” in China had been initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. David Rockefeller had taken care to visit Deng’s political mentor, Zhou Enlai, in China in 1973, the same year in which Rockefeller and his own acolyte, Brzezinski, founded the Trilateral Commission to integrate East Asian elites into their world government plans, and the same period in which “the 1980s Project” got underway under the joint auspices of the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations – both private organisations. The termination of the USSR was a key element in the project, along with economic shock treatment (which was called “controlled disintegration”) and plans for radical global depopulation.

The intended break-up of Russia

In the 1990s the Russians saw how, along with the rapid decline in their economy and in the health of their citizens, their state lost three huge regions of territory – Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the four smaller ‘-stans’15 of Central Asia – as well as the security of the Warsaw Pact military alliance. They noted that NATO, which had ostensibly been founded in 1949 specifically to ‘protect’ against the Warsaw Pact armies, was not dissolved by the West along with or after the end of the Warsaw Pact; on the contrary, NATO continued to be strengthened and eventually, from the late 90s, to expand towards the East, ever closer to Russia itself. NATO’s first head, Lord Hastings Ismay, Winston Churchill’s chief military assistant during the Second World War, had famously said that NATO was created “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” This would still seem to be the intention of NATO today, the Soviet Union now being seen as Russia.  The Russians noted that certain elite organs of the western media began to imagine the further dissolution of Russia, even the loss of all Russian territory east of the Ural mountains, a vast area, such as was prognosticated by the highly influential Rothschild and Fiat-controlled Economist magazine in December 1992, only a year after the end of the USSR. In the same year, Brzezinski wrote in the CFR journal Foreign Affairs (Vol. 71, No.4, 1992) that “Russia’s own unity may soon be at stake, with perhaps the Far Eastern provinces tempted before too long to set up a separate Siberian-Far Eastern republic of their own.” He imagined a threefold division of Russia. From 1991-1994, the pro-Russian majority in Crimea, which had been part of Russia until the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (a Ukrainian) had arbitrarily handed Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, sought to become a republic independent of Ukraine, but after the pro-Western Boris Yeltsin had consolidated his power in Russia in 1994, he did not back the efforts of the Crimeans for more autonomy or independence from Kyiv, which was able to reassert its authority over Crimea. However, it would lose that authority in 2014.

This year (2022), an article in the prestigious US journal The Atlantic called for the dismantlement of Russia under the cover of the word “decolonisation”. The article noted that in 1991 the then US Defence Secretary Dick Cheney had “wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.” The article went on to state: “The West must complete the project that began in 1991. It must seek to fully decolonize Russia…. Russian imperialism…presents the most urgent threat to international security. Now the bill of allowing Moscow to retain its empire, without any reckoning with its colonial history, is coming due…. Russia has launched the greatest war the world has seen in decades, all in the service of empire. To avoid the risk of further wars and more senseless bloodshed, the Kremlin must lose what empire it still retains. The project of Russian decolonization must finally be finished.”16

But Putin did not launch his “special military operation” in February 2022  in the service of empire or imperial reconstruction, as western commentators keep on falsely claiming. He launched it because he could see what was coming towards Russia from the West, because the West had effectively taken over Ukraine in an illegal coup in 2014 that had ousted the democratically elected government of President Yanukovych. The new regime in Kyiv had then immediately enforced discriminatory laws against Russian-speaking citizens, who protested against those laws, and when Kyiv showed itself unwilling to respond and instead sent in extreme nationalist militia groups to enforce its will with violence, the citizens of Russian-speaking Donbass and Crimea rose in revolt against the Kyiv regime; what began as a movement for greater autonomy within Ukraine turned into a separatist movement due to Kyiv’s intransigence and its use of violence in Donbass, Crimea and Odessa.17 The West, having achieved its goal through the violent Kyiv coup of February 2014, then became preoccupied with ISIS, the EU crisis and Brexit, but behind the scenes the US was funnelling very large amounts of money and military supplies to Kyiv from 2014 onwards, as well as providing military training. All this Putin had observed. He observed too how the Western media paid little attention for eight long years while Kyiv went on shelling and bombing those it continued to call its own citizens – the people of Donbass. Some 14,000 people had died on both sides by the end of 2021, but those in the West who have been so furious with Russia since February this year have apparently forgotten those eight years of conflict and killing, and Kyiv’s persistent refusal to implement the Minsk Agreement, witnessed and signed by France and Germany, which provided for greater autonomy within Ukraine for the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel recently gave an interview to the German newspaper Die Zeit (7.12.2022) in which she says that “the Minsk Agreement of 2014 was an attempt to give Ukraine time. Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today. The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. An illustrative example was the battle for Debaltseve [Jan. 2015]. At the beginning of 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them at that time. And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do today to help Ukraine.” (emphasis – TB) At the time, the German and the French governments said that the Minsk Agreement aimed to bring peace to Ukraine, but now Merkel says it was to make Ukraine (i.e. the Kyiv regime) stronger i.e., more capable of fighting the Donbass separatists and Russian forces aiding them (e.g. the Wagner private military company) and implies that this is what made Ukraine capable of resisting Russia as it has since 24 February 2022.

Vladimir Putin must then have observed how Volodymyr Zelensky, the comic actor and political creature of Ukrainian billionaire Ihor Kholomoisky,  was elected President of Ukraine by 73% of Ukrainians in 2019  precisely on a promise to bring peace in the Donbass, but then in office did no such thing. The Russians had seen the steady build-up of NATO forces ever closer to Russia’s borders, the constant demonisation of Vladimir Putin in western media after about 2004, the unwillingness of western media, after 2016 (the year of Brexit and Trump), to recognise the strong neo-Nazi element in Ukraine although, until then, western media had been paying quite a lot of attention to it. Suddenly that attention fell away, and in 2022 has disappeared completely. On the contrary, the western claim is now that “there are no Nazis in Ukraine! Ukraine has a Jewish president!” Yet those many videos about the various Nazi groups in Ukraine can still be seen online; it’s just that they are not talked about by the western media, for whom it is no longer convenient or expedient to talk about them. The Russians also saw how the West curtly dismissed Russia’s request in December 2021 for comprehensive discussions relating to security in eastern Europe.

Today, western media prefer to talk about the “decolonisation” (i.e. the dismantling) of Russia. Decolonisation has been a leftwing buzzword in recent years since the “Rhodes Must Fall!” statues issue in South Africa (2015) and the death of George Floyd in the USA (2020). Despite its minorities, the Russian Federation is overwhelmingly a white country and a Christian country. The anti-imperialist “decolonisation” narrative therefore easily lends itself to being applied, perversely, to Russia. Perversely, because the aim is to serve the imperial and globalist ambitions of the English-speaking elite.

Recently, Anders Östlund, a fellow at the US State Department-funded Center for European Policy Analysis, and resident of Kyiv, wrote: “Russia’s war against Ukraine will end with the break-up of the Russian Federation. It will be replaced by small, demilitarized and powerless republics with neutrality written into their constitutions.”18

The goal of keeping Germany and Russia apart

Finally, we come to the third of the three goals of the English-speaking elites that they sought to achieve in the First World War and which still determine their policies today: besides the consolidation of the English-speaking countries and the emasculation of Russia, is the goal of the reduction of Germany to puppet status and the prevention of any combination or alliance between Germany and Russia. In esoteric terms, this means the blowing up of any enduring cultural bridge between the present Germanic epoch and the future Slavic epoch. Both these two goals have thus far been ‘impressively’ achieved: millions of Russians and Germans killed in colossal wars against each other, endless soul soil sowed with potential seeds of future resentment and hatred. And yet…. in wars and conflicts both good and bad future karma is created. Countless individuals who were incarnated in Slavic or German bodies 1914-1945 will seek in their next incarnations to understand and overcome what brought them against each other in the 20th century and made them inflict so much pain and suffering on each other.

In this Age of Pisces, the Age of the Consciousness Soul, the German-speaking peoples have the task of upholding the I, whereas the English-speaking peoples are the prime representatives of the Consciousness Soul itself. In European folklore and fairy tales one often sees a hero or heroine with three brothers, sisters or attendants of some kind or other. We also see these figures in Rudolf Steiner’s four Mystery Dramas (1910-1912). These three are the three human soul forces assisting the human I. They can be regarded as the three representatives, respectively, of thinking, feeling and willing, through which the I acts. The Consciousness Soul is that part of the soul through which the will acts, whereas thinking acts through the Intellectual-Mind Soul and feeling through the Sentient Soul.19  Insofar as the English are the people of the Consciousness Soul and the Germans those of the I, conflict between the English and German-speaking peoples therefore signifies conflict between the I as it acts through the will element of the soul, and the I itself: conflict between the I itself and its own will.  The will acts in the world, and so the English-speaking peoples have long been inclined to look outwards into the physical world, whereas Innigkeit (inwardness, intimacy) has always been a prime feature of German-speaking culture. Like other peoples in western Europe, the English took to the oceans in search of adventure and wealth, and eventually created a world-spanning empire, with its physical and scientific underpinnings; in doing so, they played a major role in creating a global consciousness. The Germans, by contrast – although there was considerable emigration to the American continent -  remained for the most part ‘at home’ among their forests, hills and mountains in Central Europe; they created no great extra-European empire but explored the inner world of the mind and soul, from Bach, Beethoven and Bruckner to Goethe, Hegel, and Jung, to name but a few great artists and thinkers. English culture has had a problem with how to deal with materialism and the temptations of external power, which can result when one goes too far out of oneself; action loses contact with the Self, with the I (“Just Do It” – the Nike advertising slogan). German culture, by contrast has had more of a problem with how to deal with delusion and the temptations of fanaticism, either intellectual or emotional, which can result when one goes too far inward; the I becomes fixated, trapped by subconscious entities (Blut und Boden – blood and soil) or else inflated by them. That the peoples of the I and of the Consciousness Soul in Europe should war with one another has been a disaster, for these two peoples of the inner focus and the outer focus respectively should of course work together for the good of humanity.

Beyond the three soul forces of the human I which humanity has been developing over the past several millennia (the Sentient, Intellectual-Mind and Consciousness soul) are the three yet-to-be-developed spiritual forces, which Steiner calls the Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, and Spirit-Man: these are the transformed spiritual counterparts of the three soul forces.  The first of them, the Spirit-Self, the transformed astral body (or Sentient Soul) will be found especially developed by the peoples of eastern Europe, the Slavic peoples, and those in close relation to them (e.g. Finns, Balts, Romanians). The I stands midway between impressions from the corporeal and the spiritual worlds, and the Consciousness Soul is the most developed aspect of the soul; Steiner even called it “the soul within the soul… the truth is true even if all personal feelings revolt against it. That part of the soul in which this truth lives will be called Consciousness Soul”.20 It is the part of the soul in which intuitions from the spiritual world begin to dawn for the individual, who begins to realise that he is not just a thinking, feeling personality (who is also capable of feeling alienated from the cosmos, his fellows and even from himself), but a spiritual individual (who feels and knows himself to be united with the cosmos, his fellows and with all life). The Age of the Consciousness Soul (1413-3573), in which the Germanic peoples (including, of course, the English-speaking peoples) are the “vanguard peoples” is therefore a vital bridging epoch between the soul phase of the development of humanity and the spiritual phase, in which true morality and ethics are integrated within the I through individualised spiritual intuitions. When individuals gather together on this basis, they will form new, morally grounded, communities.

It is therefore crucial that a bridge be built between the properly developed Consciousness Soul Piscean epoch (Germanic) and the subsequent Spirit-Self Aquarian epoch (Slavic). The counterforces seek to destroy this bridge, just as in 1914-1945, they sought – and still seek – to destroy the relationship between the two aspects of the Consciousness Soul epoch – outer and inner, which thus far, have been dominant in the English and German cultures respectively.

In the first lecture of the cycle given in Oslo in 1910 titled The Mission of Folk Souls, in Connection with Germanic/Nordic Mythology, Steiner said: “It is especially important, because the fate of humanity in the near future will bring men together much more than has hitherto been the case, to fulfil a common mission for humanity.” Here he is referring to the Age of the Archangel Michael, one of seven archangels who, one after the other, bring different impulses to humanity in successive periods of 350-400 years. The Age of Michael  began in 1879 and will continue until about 2250.  It is an increasingly cosmopolitan age, in which nationalist impulses will steadily decline under the impact of spiritual idealism, which reflects the all-embracing, all-relating spiritual influence of the sun. Spiritual science sees the sun not as a nuclear power plant but as a threefold community of spiritual beings (traditionally known as Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai) who serve the solar Logos (the Cosmic Christ) and are not only the source of all life and external light on earth and in our solar system, but also the origin of the light of our thinking, which illumines for us and embraces all our inner and outer experience. Michael is traditionally the Archangel of the Sun, as the other six Archangels are those of the other six traditional celestial bodies of our solar system. However, it is noteworthy that Steiner goes on to say that “the individuals belonging to the several peoples will only be able to bring their free, concrete contributions to this joint mission, if they have, first of all, an understanding of the people to which they belong, an understanding of what we might call ‘Ethnic Self-knowledge.’ In ancient Greece, in the Mysteries of Apollo the sentence ‘Know thyself’ played a great role; in a not far-distant future this sentence will be addressed to the folk-souls; ‘Know yourselves as folk-souls’. This saying will have a certain significance for the future work of mankind.” (emphasis – TB)  A people or nation or ethnic group lives between two factors spiritual and natural: the Folk Spirit, or Archangel ‘above’ in the spiritual world, who is responsible for guarding and guiding that people throughout its history, and the more earthbound elements of geography, geology,  climate, history, language and culture, within which the nation lives. This more earthbound natural element forms the ‘folk soul’ of a people. The Folk Spirit, or Archangel, is the spiritual being who oversees and accompanies the destiny of that people. One can think of this as analogous to the physical germ of the human being created by the DNA from its parents, as distinct from the individual spirit that, from the spiritual world, incarnates into and unites with that physical germ sometime after conception, with the difference that Archangels do not reincarnate, as human beings do. In order both to understand how as individuals we might best bring our “free, concrete contributions to this joint mission” and in order that we become able to guard against chauvinist impulses, however subtle, that may be at work within our souls, we need this ethnic self-knowledge of which he speaks in those lectures.

St George and the Dragon

For English people, this includes becoming aware of how deep-rooted the supposedly very English image of St George rescuing the Princess (or Maiden) from the Dragon has been in England since at least mediaeval times21 and how this image may influence the way we look, for example, at foreign affairs and make value judgments accordingly. An obvious case in point is how, under the influence also of the utterly one-sided mass media, so many Britons have taken to flying Ukrainian flags, wearing Ukraine flag badges, and saying “I stand with Ukraine” or the like. Most British people speak few or no foreign languages; indeed, before the 1960s, those who did were often regarded as ‘odd’ or even ‘suspicious’. Until the 1960s this island nation was known for centuries of being very wary of “foreigners”. It is no mere generalisation to say that consequently, the English people, apart from their elites, have had comparatively little interest and little education in foreign affairs for a long time; foreign affairs are complex matters, after all, and may seem far from the lives of ordinary people. Yet whenever the image of ‘the bully’ – not a foreign image at all for the British – is held before them, by the mass media for instance, the image of St. George rescuing the Maiden from the Dragon is never far behind and has often facilely been applied to complex foreign situations where elite interests would wish the English population to support UK government actions that are in the interests of the elite but not necessarily or not at all in the interests of the general population of the UK. One may think of how Belgium and Serbia in 1914, and Poland in 1939 were represented as ‘Maidens’ to be rescued by the English ‘St George’ from vicious, bullying ‘Dragons’.

                                                                                                    First World War recuiting poster

The current conflict in Ukraine is a prime example of this trope, especially when to the images of ‘the bully’ and of ‘St George’ are added the effects of 200 years of anti-Russian propaganda and fearmongering by the British Press, the government and the media. So when Russian troops and tanks crossed what most countries still regarded as the international border of Ukraine 22 on 24 February this year, for very many people in the UK, the issue must have seemed clear-cut: Russia had simply ‘invaded’ Ukraine – a large powerful bully (dragon) was bullying a small underdog (maiden) and must therefore be resisted as firmly as the UK was able. In these four articles in New View, I have tried to show that the issue is far from being so clear-cut, and that the seeming small ‘underdog’ in this case (Ukraine) is in fact a ‘bulldog’ that has been set up for years to bait, ensnare and ultimately enable the destruction of the bull (Russia) in order to serve the deep-rooted exoteric and esoteric interests of the bulldog’s handlers – the Anglophone elites who created and control NATO, the UN, the WHO and yes, also the EU.

If the peoples of the UK – especially the English, for whom the figure of St. George may particularly strike a subconscious chord – can exercise what Steiner called ‘ethnic self-knowledge’ and bring to the full light of consciousness any subconscious motives in their souls that may be affecting their judgments of the current conflict, they may be able to prevent their elites from poisoning relations between themselves and the people of Russia and from destroying the bridge between the Germans and the Russians, and also between the present Germanic and the future Slavic  epochs, that is so important for Europe and for humanity, both today and into the distant future.

Notes

1 See Andreas Bracher (ed.), Kampf um den russischen  Kulturkeim (2014), pp. 343-4.

2 See for example, Steiner’s lectures of 10-11 October, 1918 (Collected Works GA 184).

3 R. Steiner, Karma of Untruthfulness Vol. 2, 15.1.1917, GA 174. We can ask: what are these “certain elements” within the British national character? That is a subject in itself and one which deserves much contemplation about the history of the British people over the past 1000 years at least.

4 M. Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch (2014), p. 929.

5 GA 186.

6 Osterrieder, p. 1346.

7 Osterrieder, pp. 1346-7

8 Markus Osterrieder (Welt im Umbruch, 2014), Guido Giacomo Preparata (Conjuring Hitler, 2005), and Antony C. Sutton (Wall St. and the Bolshevik Revolution, 1974).

9 Osterrieder, p. 1348, n.3523.

10 Osterrieder, p. 1348.

11 27.9.2022. https://21stcenturywire.com/2022/09/28/did-nato-just-blow-up-the-nordstream-pipelines

12 Osterrieder, p. 1349.

13 Osterrieder, p.1351.

14 See G.G. Preparata, Conjuring Hitler (2005).

15 Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan.

16https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/russia-putin-colonization-ukraine-chechnya/639428

17 On 2 May 2014, 42 anti-Kyiv regime demonstrators were burned to death in the Trade Unions House in Odessa by pro-Kyiv regime supporters. This atrocity has been largely forgotten by western media.

18 https://twitter.com/andersostlund/status/1513407913611739136

19 See R. Steiner, Theosophy (Anthroposophic Press, 1971).

20 Steiner, Theosophy, pp. 24-25.

21 During the reign of King Edward III, 1327-1377.

22 On 21 February 2022, three days before the beginning of his  “special military operation”, Russian president Putin recognised the independence of the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. Most governments under the influence of Anglophone globalist interests (e.g. NATO and EU members) did not recognise these two new states.

Terry M. Boardman Dec. 2022

From Peter to Paul and Alexander

By the end of the 18th century, the two states that were England and Muscovy in 1600 had become the world-spanning imperial powers Great Britain and Imperial Russia – the ‘Whale’ (as Britain was referred to due to its sea power) and the ‘Bear’. From its island point, Britain had expanded over the oceans to almost the entire global periphery, while Russia had simply expanded overland: west to the Baltic, south to the Black Sea and massively east to Siberia and the Pacific Ocean. In the 18th century the British elite were preoccupied with dealing with France and replacing it as the global Power. The Russian Czars after Peter the Great (1682-1725) continued with a gradual westernisation of their country and sought to expand against Muslim powers in the south and southeast, the Ottoman Turks and the Persians. Relations between Britain and Russia had been good on the whole, except during the Seven Years War in mid-century when they were allied to Powers on opposite sides, but their own forces never actually clashed. Real tension only began in the time of Catherine II (the Great) in the 1790s, when William Pitt the Younger was Prime Minister in Britain. The British elite, always concerned about their hold on India, so important to the British economy, began to feel that Russia might pose an indirect or direct threat to British control of India because of Empress Catherine’s aggressive policy towards Turkey, which the British saw as a gatekeeper state that served their interests in keeping other European Powers away from British India. When Russia took the fortress of Ochakov (near Odessa) after the Treaty of Jassy (1792), William Pitt aggressively threatened war and equipped a fleet to sail to the region, but the very capable Russian ambassador in London organised a campaign that weakened Pitt’s position on the issue of Anglo-Russian relations and Pitt backed down.

Another problem emerged when the eccentric son of Catherine the Great, Czar Paul I (1796-1801), succeeded her and having first been anti-French – the revolutionary French had publicly executed their king and queen, which the traditionalist Paul did not appreciate –  he shifted to a pro-French, anti-British policy because he felt the British had put undue pressure on his Scandinavian friends in Denmark and Sweden and because in October 1800, the  British Admiral Nelson had taken the island of Malta, traditionally ruled by the Knights Hospitaller, a Roman Catholic Order of which Paul, who was very concerned about chivalric matters, had only recently become the Grand Master, despite his being Russian Orthodox. As Malta was a strategic naval asset in the middle of the Mediterranean, the British did not give the island back. Paul was furious and sought to hit Britain at its weak points – its commerce and its colonies. He allied himself with Napoleon and intended to stop British trade in the Baltic, a vital region for materials essential for the Royal Navy, and combine with the French in a great march to India, a project his new French ally Napoleon had already tried to realise in 1798 with his failed expedition to Egypt. Napoleon knew that India was the key to Britain’s grip on world trade. The British response to Paul’s move was not long in coming; on 23 March 1801, when 20,000 Russian Cossacks were already on their way to India and had reached the Aral Sea, Paul was assassinated by a conspiracy of aristocrats led by Counts Pahlen and Panin, the Hanoverian General Benningsen and the Georgian General Yashvil, together with the three brothers Zhubov, whose sister was the lover of the skilful British ambassador, Charles Whitworth, who provided funding for the plot. The conspirators even managed to get Paul’s son, Czarevitch Alexander, to keep silent about it; he went along, wrongly assuming his eccentric father would not actually be killed. Those men had their own, mostly venal, personal reasons for opposing Czar Paul, but Paul’s dramatic demise was certainly in the interests of British foreign policy.  Ambassador Whitworth’s Russian lover Olga Zherebtsova, in whose house the conspirators had made their plans, soon followed Whitworth to Britain, but there he dumped her and married the wealthy widow of the Duke of Dorset who was worth £13,000 a year and owned the borough of East Grinstead. Needless to say, the new Czar Alexander (1801-1825) immediately recalled his father’s military expedition to British India and returned Russia to an anti-French policy. He did not execute any of the conspirators involved in his father’s assassination.

It was during the reign of the new Czar Alexander I that relations between Britain and Russia headed into the poisonous direction which they have maintained ever since, except for two very brief interludes around World War I (1907-1917) and during World War II (1941-45). The period after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 was when, after a thousand years of gradually approaching one another, the two countries that had now become the Great Whale and the Great Bear entered into a seemingly permanent state of hostility. And it began, at first, because of the British elite’s paranoia about the possible loss of India, a paranoia which later in the 19th century was disguised under the very British term: “The Great Game”.

Russophobia after 1815: The Great Game

It was a dispute over Poland which had prompted the first serious wave of British Russophobia after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Lord Castlereagh, the powerful British Foreign Secretary at the time, had strongly opposed Czar Alexander I’s wish to be crowned king of Poland. The anti-Russian, Polish forgery known as the Testament of Peter the Great, first circulated by Napoleon in 1812, accused the Russians of having designs on British India amongst other things. It was first translated into English at this time. Guy Mettan in Creating Russophobia (2017) writes: “The imperialist lobby, increasingly powerful in London, would never thereafter lose sight of Russia and became the most determined adversary of the Russian cause….” By the 1820s, letters, articles and polemics began to appear frequently in the British press about the Russians’ thirst for unlimited expansion and the threats they posed to British interests. The Whigs, who represented the tenets of British free trade and the middle-class liberal opposition to the Tory government, were also vehement in their criticism of Russia, which they regarded as backward, even barbaric and illiberal. Being often anti-monarchical themselves, they naturally opposed Czarist autocracy. This vehemence passed on to the Liberals in mid-century and is still the case today with such media as The Guardian newspaper and the BBC. The forged Testament of Peter the Great was repeatedly alluded to, often without being mentioned explicitly, in absurd charges that the Russians were planning “to take over the world”. Although the British government found itself allied with the Russians over the question of Greek independence from Turkey in the 1820s, the British Press kept up the drumbeat of Russophobia, always suspecting that Russia was intending to take Constantinople and penetrate the Mediterranean, thus posing a potential threat to sea and land routes to India. Then again came the Polish issue, when the Poles rose in revolt against the Czar Nicholas I in 1830, causing great emotion among the English middle classes when the revolt was crushed. Needless to say, then as now, the British middle classes knew hardly anything about actual life in Russia or Poland except what their Press told them. A well-known cartoon by the cartoonist Granville went the rounds featuring a Cossack smoking his pipe, standing amidst Polish corpses. As usual, memories were short: dragoons had  massacred civil rights protesters in Manchester  only 12 years before. In 1833, Russia and Turkey signed a peace deal but this only enraged the British Press, fearful as ever that Turkey might allow the Russian navy into the Mediterranean. In fact, the Russians were just as worried about the consequences of Turkish decline as were the British. The peace deal with Turkey allowed Russia fully to establish control over the region  of Circassia in the Northeast Black Sea region, but the Circassians objected. The British secretly sent weapons to the Circassians but were found out, and the two countries came close to war, but the British backed down, as they could secure no continental allies for a fight with Russia at that time.

The term ‘Great Game’ was coined by a British officer, Arthur Conolly, who tried to get Turkmen tribes to revolt against Russia but ended up beheaded in Bokhara in 1842. Throughout these decades there were numerous intrepid ‘adventures’ by British soldiers, agents and spies in the depths of Central Asia; their exploits, eagerly reported in the Press, fuelled the fires of Russophobia in Britain.

One of these ‘adventurers’ was the enigmatic English discoverer, translator, writer, orientalist, secret agent, diplomat and occultist Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890), widely-travelled and skilled in 29 Eurasian languages. He was a member, together with the novelist and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Lord Stanhope, of the occult group Orphic Circle and regularly accessed ‘the other world’ through his wife Isabel, a medium. Burton said: “I believe the Slav to be the future race of Europe, even as I hold the Chinese to be the future race of the East. In writing politics and history which may live after one is long forgotten, one must speak the truth, and bury repulsions and attractions.”(1) He repeated this at a dinner in the presence of   Lord Palmerston and added that Russia and China would one day fight over Central Asia.”

British paranoia about India and suspicions that the Russians were using the Persians to attack India resulted in the First Afghan War in 1839, which ended so disastrously for the British; they invaded the country but were slaughtered and after eventually recapturing Kabul, they withdrew and peace was restored with difficulty in 1842. The Afghan ruler Dost Mohammed said: “I have been struck by the magnitude of your resources, your ships, your arsenals, but what I cannot understand is why the rulers of so vast and flourishing an empire should have gone across the Indus to deprive me of my poor and barren country.” He was clearly not au fait with the imperatives of ‘the Great Game’…

The Egyptian crisis in the early 1840s further stoked British Russophobia. Mettan notes:  “In just 25 years, English public opinion had been completely turned around. From privileged ally, which had entered into war against Napoleon alongside Great Britain out of unwillingness to participate in the anti-English blockade wanted by the French emperor, Russia had become public enemy Number One of the United Kingdom. From great ally of liberal England, the czar had become a barbaric, furiously expansionist despot. From then on, solidly implanted in public opinion, British Russophobia was rapidly going to translate into open warfare. A mere spark might start it.”(2) The cheerleader for British Russophobia, Lord Palmerston, described the struggle against Russia as a “fight of democracy against tyranny” (like British politicians today). The spark came in 1853. An argument over the rights of Christian minorities in Palestine, which was governed by the Ottomans, led to Turkey declaring war on Russia in October of that year. The Russians destroyed a Turkish fleet at Sinope, and the British and French, fearing a Turkish collapse, joined the war and invaded the Crimean peninsula. This war, the only time when British and Russian forces have ever clashed directly, was a watershed in Anglo-Russian relations and poisoned them for over sixty years. The first war that was photographed and reported in detail in the Press, its names and events, its horrors and heroes, victories and disasters, were imprinted on the national consciousness. Countless British street names across the country stem from it.

Britain’s embarrassments in the Crimean War and its subsequent defeats in colonial struggles in Africa only worried British imperialists even more over those six decades. Despite being at a peak of power at the time of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and despite their ever increasing imperial pride and bombast, the British elite knew the empire was fragile, both at home and abroad and that after the 1870s, it was losing out economically to Germany and the USA. Only two years after of the costly victory in the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny or Rebellion had broken out which deeply shocked the outraged British, put them very much on the defensive, aware of the Indians’ potential for further uprisings, and greatly increased their sense of racial superiority and psychological distance from the Indians: ‘the Club’ mentality now took over as the British community in India restricted itself more to its own circles.

Meanwhile, the Russians, laying railway lines now, advanced slowly but steadily in these decades across Central Asia from the Caspian Sea towards Afghanistan. As ever, the abiding British fear was the possible loss of India, the source of their national and personal profit, of their civilisational, cultural, religious, professional and racial pride, and of their lust for adventure and self-assertion. The 30-year period 1877-1907 was the high point of the Great Game, as the Russians inched ever closer to India. Disraeli declared Victoria ‘Empress of India’ in 1876, his friend Colonial Secretary Edward Bulwer-Lytton having nationalised the East India Company in 1858. Disraeli also appointed his friend’s son, another Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Viceroy of India under Victoria as Empress of India. In the same year 1876, a major famine broke out in India during Bulwer-Lytton’s viceroyalty; at least 8 million died and Bulwer-Lytton was much criticised for his poor response to the disaster, a response informed by his Social Darwinist views. In 1878 he took British India into the 2nd Afghan War, which was fought for much the same reasons as the first, and in 1879 the empire suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Zulus in S. Africa, another Disraelian imperial ‘adventure’. These years were something of another watershed in British history; for the next 4 decades until 1914 British attitudes towards the Empire were marked by a peculiar hubris, as grandiose dreams of Imperial Federation (1884), a united globe-spanning imperial entity, arose in the imaginations of sections of the imperialist elite, led by the likes of Charles Dilke MP, the historian J.R. Seeley, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Milner and the journalist W.T. Stead.

But along with this growing hubris came a greater awareness of a gnawing weakness vis-a-vis Russia, Germany and America. This awareness led to the diplomatic revolution in British foreign policy that occurred between 1887 and 1907. A complex of factors crystallised in the years 1884-87 that there is not space here to go into, but perhaps the most significant of them was that in 1887 the British faced a looming Franco-Russian alliance in support of a potential Indian rebellion by the Sikh prince Duleep Singh (see pic below), who had been removed from India as a child by the British government and brought up in Britain. He had since rediscovered his Indian roots and wanted to return to India to lead his people in the Punjab. The British saw this as the most serious challenge to the British Raj: the prospect of an Indian rebellion aided by two major European Powers. They managed to weather the crisis, not least because the Czar Alexander III (1881-1894) refused to support Duleep Singh, but it led them to reassess their imperial strategy and foreign policy. They concluded that the joint threat from their long-term opponents France and Russia would have to be met by aligning with those two countries, and the price for this would have to be ditching Britain’s traditionally friendly relations with the enemies of France and Russia, namely, Germany and Austria.

Britain’s national myths

Before proceeding, a very important background motif to the Great Game and 19th century Anglo-Russian relations should be considered. By the end of the wars against Napoleon, Britain and Russia had already embraced their own very significant national myths, both of which, in their differing ways, harked back to ancient Rome. The British elite and many in the British population as a whole, since the country’s victory over Spain’s Armada in the 16th century – which was more of a lucky escape – and its humbling of royal and then imperial France in the 18th and early 19th centuries, its success in planting colonies in N. America and elsewhere, the growth of its overseas possessions, its commercial achievements safeguarded by the world’s greatest navy and supported by its scientific and technical progress and prowess in the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, had come to feel that Providence was now blowing in the sails of the British ship of state. Yet there was something of a split in English national consciousness in the late 18th century.  There were those more cynical and self-interested, less concerned with saving their souls and more concerned with maximising their profits, whose values were more influenced by rationalist and classical Roman models. They regarded themselves as realists and ‘down to earth’ and wanted to ‘get on in the world’, whether at home or abroad. These people believed that they accepted the world as it is and sought to profit from it – as it is. One such was Robert Clive, the victorious general of the East India Company’s wars in the mid-18th century. He started in India in 1744 as an office clerk for the East India Company and finally returned home to Shrewsbury in 1767 a very wealthy man indeed, with the equivalent of about £50 million in today’s money, which he himself regarded as a moderate sum, he said, given the opportunities available in India for greater profit. Arguably, no-one did more to cement the structure of British power in India than Clive. Yet when he left India in 1767 he said: “We are sensible that… the power formerly belonging to the soubah [ruler] of those provinces is totally, in fact, vested in the East India Company. Nothing remains to him but the name and shadow of authority. This name, however, this shadow, it is indispensably necessary we should seem to venerate.”(3) This had also been the attitude of the rulers of the City of London, of whom the globally operative leaders of the East India Company were the foremost, towards the British monarch: to venerate the throne, safe in the knowledge that since the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 or even since the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the throne reigns but does not rule; we, the wealthy men of the City of London, rule. Such was the cynical attitude of the men of power. However, seven years after his return from India, in 1774, aged 49, Robert, now Baron Clive, an opium addict suffering from depression and gallstones, died after slitting his throat with a penknife, a victim of his own success.

From the time of the Elizabethan sailors and adventurers of the 16th century – ‘latter-day Vikings’ like Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher and Raleigh – Britain’s expansion had been driven by lust for profit, by curiosity and love of adventure; such was the case in England’s  southernmost colonies in North America, from Virginia to the Carolinas, but there was also a particular religious motive – most evident in the more northern colonies, from Virginia to Massachusetts – namely, the desire of the Puritans to escape, like the Israelites on whom they modelled themselves, from the wickedness of sinful ‘Egypt’ (i.e. England) and seek their Promised Land in North America. Impressed by the Jews they had met in the Netherlands, the English Puritans in America increasingly came to see themselves as God’s new ‘Chosen People’. Though nominally Christians, they lived their lives especially according to the Old Testament, which meant that many of them, though not all, tended to regard the native peoples among whom they came as ‘Canaanites’, savages beyond God’s grace, who could and should be treated harshly, even genocidally if necessary, as Joshua did with the peoples of Canaan. However, from the 1770s onwards, a new religious movement – that of Evangelical Anglicanism – was abroad in Britain; it gave rise to a new form of the national ‘Chosen People’ myth, and its pietistic Methodist emphasis on the inner life and the new Birth in Christ and the Holy Spirit emphasised the New Testament rather than the Old, challenging the Established Anglican Church, in which many felt religiosity had become a matter of outer forms, ceremonies and compliance with social conventions.  Many people were longing for a religious life of experience that emphasised high moral standards for both clergy and laity. The shock of the loss of the American colonies, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was published in the year of the American Declaration of Independence, the trial of Warren Hastings for corruption in the East India Company, the extravagant decadence of many in the upper class, the growing awareness both of the harshness of the Industrial Revolution and of the evils of the slave trade – all these filled many people with the notion that God was testing and punishing England for its sins. However, despite the new focus on the New Testament, on Christ in the individual soul, and on compassion for oppressed people and slaves, a new sense of conviction emerged among the English that they were after all, God’s Chosen People, a people whose destiny it was to be a light unto the world. ‘He who challenged God, challenged England’ and ‘he who challenged England, challenged God’. The English, it was felt, had been given the mantle of world power by God and must use it ‘properly’. They thus determined to keep that mantle  as long as was ‘proper’ or as long as Providence decreed they should. The Evangelical Anglicans were very active in the anti-slavery movement, which eventually achieved success in the British Empire by 1833. As the Royal Navy patrolled the world arresting slave traders while keeping the oceans safe for British commerce, this gave liberal-minded people in Britain a smug sense of moral superiority, and gradually, the sense of divine entitlement with regard to the Empire, especially after the British State took over the running of India when the East India Company was nationalised in 1858. The mediaeval myth of St. George rescuing the maiden from the dragon came in very handy here to justify the actions of the Foreign Office. No longer was the empire merely a sordid source of profit and wealth, now it was felt, it also had to be a moral and providential crusade to ‘save benighted peoples from tyranny’ or to ‘elevate the natives’ in the Empire beckoned. Grand inflated perspectives of history and imperial destiny and mission loomed. It was now seen as Britain’s task to spread such things as freedom, parliamentary government, law, civilisation and Christianity throughout the world.

Something akin to the fate of ancient Rome occurred in 19th century Britain in its attitude to its empire: the conquests of the Roman Republic had been a no-nonsense, down-to-earth enterprise of straightforward military might, to destroy rivals in the name of survival or to punish recalcitrant client rulers, or else simply to acquire more territories for taxation and mining. The Roman Empire, however, became increasingly pompous and pretentious, less Roman and more Greek and Asiatic in its attitude and values as time went on. A similar transition also happened in 19th century Britain and was reflected in its frequent poor military showing in the second half of the century. The hardnosed harshness of British life in the Napoleonic period and the plain, classical lines of Georgian buildings gave way to a ‘softer’, more Romantic image presided over by that essentially middle-class couple Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert, while their people, or those who could afford it, indulged themselves in nostalgia for the chivalric Middle Ages and the Gothic style, which reflected the ‘new’ Romantic sensibility in the arts and architecture. Or else, as so-called ‘scientific’ racism began to take hold after the 1820s and 30s, other Britons fancied themselves the literal descendants of the ancient Israelites who, it was said by the new British Israelite movement, had wandered from the Holy Land in the form of the Ten Lost Tribes of the Old Testament over to Europe, to northern Germany and Denmark, from where they had settled in England and produced the British Royal Family! Much taken with this idea, Victoria and Albert even had their royal male children circumcised, and royal male heirs apparently continued to be circumcised until the late Princess Diana put her foot down.  While the symbol of Britain in the first half of the century was more the self-satisfied, materialistic, down-to-earth yeoman squire John Bull, in the second half it was more the refined image of the quintessential English gentleman, or else the allegorical figures of Britannia and the British lion.

Rudolf Steiner gave a humorous description of this process in a lecture in February 1920, at which a number of English people were present. He spoke, with considerable irony, of how the empire began with “adventurers, considered rather undesirable at the heart of the empire” who went out to make their fortune and then came home with their wealth. Society looked askance at them but their sons and grandsons ‘smelled’ a little better: “And then empty words take over the thing that is beginning to smell nice. The state takes everything under its wing, becomes the protector, and now everything is done in an honest way. It would be good if we could call things by their proper name, but the proper name very rarely denotes the actual reality.”(4) He was speaking in that lecture about the three periods of imperialism that had developed over the past 5000 years or so. First, there had been theocratic, priestly empires ruled by demigods, god-kings; then military empires ruled by the aristocratic warrior class in which the rulers were no longer god-kings but symbols ruling by divine right on behalf of the deity; this was  already a step down, so to speak; and then finally, since the 16th century, economic empires based at first on trade and stealing other people’s land, but which were then embellished, prettified, ‘tarted-up’ we might even say, with fine, empty words to make the economic empires less, well, embarrassing. Today, we see this same thing in institutions such as the World Economic Forum or in the foreign policy statements of modern governments, and, some would say, especially the British government, where over the past two centuries, hypocrisy has been made into an art of sorts.

Russia’s national myths

Russia, meanwhile, had developed two national myths of its own, one from the past and one from the present. The myth from the past, from the Greco-Roman Byzantine age of Constantinople, was that there had been the first Rome and it had fallen in 476 AD to the Goths and had been replaced by the second Rome – Constantinople – and this too had fallen, in 1453, to the Turks and it had been replaced by Moscow, which had taken on the mantle of Orthodox Christianity. According to this idea, which emerged in Russian ecclesiastical circles towards the end of the 15th century, Moscow had become “the Third Rome”, as   Metropolitan of Moscow Zosimus expressed it in 1492 and  called Ivan III “the new Czar Constantine of the new city of Constantine — Moscow.” The monk Philotheus wrote in the early 16th century: “So know, pious king, that all the Christian kingdoms came to an end and came together in a single kingdom of yours, two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there will be no fourth. (5) [emphasis added]. No one shall replace your Christian Czardom according to the great Theologian” [i.e. St. John the Apocalyptist]. (see pic below) This must have made Russians feel that their country was in some way divinely sanctioned. The Russian Czar – the very name of course comes from ‘Caesar’ – was thus the protector and father of all Christians just as the Byzantine Emperors in the 1000 years after Constantine had regarded themselves. The Patriarch in the Orthodox Church was always subordinate to the Emperor, unlike the Roman Popes, who regarded themselves as above kings and emperors and who until the 1860s were territorial rulers in their own right. Consequently, the impulses of the Russian State were regarded as at least semi-religious in nature, when for example, Russia sought to push the Ottoman Turks out of Crimea or the Balkans. It regarded itself as the Christian Orthodox patron of the southern Slavs.

Furthermore, from the early 19th century onwards, as doctrines of nationalism and racialism began to spread from western Europe and were picked up in Russia, another national myth emerged – the idea of Pan-Slavism in two forms, notably in a Russian imperial, conservative, traditionalist form (as promoted by the Savoyard diplomat Joseph de Maistre, who lived for many years in Russia and exercised a considerable degree of influence as well as in a republican nationalist form.

Pan-Slavism and the Hatred for Russia

This secular nationalist Pan-Slavism was supported by the British elite, as we can see from the book The Ottomans in Europe (1876) by the Turcophile British historian John Mill (Nb. not the philosopher, economist and Member of Parliament, John Stuart Mill). This book gives us a vivid idea of the degree of sheer hatred of Russia that had built up in England in the 19th century (and which is still expressed, albeit rather less viscerally, in the British media today through the regular, Orwellian ‘anti-Russia, hate Putin’ propaganda slots on BBC news and current affairs programmes). After praising the Turks to the skies as “the Englishmen of the East”, Mill says of the Slavs:

“The Slav is almost the greatest failure nature ever made in her attempts to create a civilised man. …. The prime cause of Russia’s weakness lies in the innermost core of the Slav heart. It is void of truth, and this want of veracity threads its rottenness into every department of the State…” […] “For many years past Russia has been, like one of the magicians which we read of in the books of the Occult Brethren, who ‘call spirits from the vasty deep’, with this shade of difference, that they called those they could master and allay. She, by her greed, rapacity, and brutal lusts, has awakened demons which she is quite unable to control. They have taken possession of her body and soul, and they are all imps of blood.” [….] “Russia is…the land of hatreds; of mistrusts, of brutal force, and abject cowardice; of profuse waste in some parts of the public service, of galling wretchedness in others. …The conviction has sunk into the pale, wan heart of Russia that she cannot be worse, and although the Emperor and his party, to some extent, guide and curb the military passion, and keep the peasantry in subjection, this cannot last long; the bloodhounds will slip the collar sooner or later, and then will the cry of ‘havoc’ arise…..” “The Eastern Question has to be solved in blood. It is simply a series of surgical operations, which will have to be performed with more or less skill, and the final question is which of the parties upon whom the amputations are to be performed can best endure the depletion. There are three: Russia, Austria, and Turkey who must go into the operating room; others, especially England, may be dragged in, but for the three former, there is no escape.” […] “The solution, then, or rather the dissolution, of Russia, is the real Eastern Question….it is rather a Northern than an Eastern question.” (7) (emphasis TB)

One can find equally racial invective against Russians and the Slavs in general in the writings of Karl Marx when he was in Britain and collaborating with another inveterate Russophobe, David Urquhart (1805-1877), diplomat, writer and politician, (see pic below) who single-mindedly devoted some forty years of his life to pro-Turkish and anti-Russian propaganda, including starting a newspaper for the purpose, and writing endless articles and letters to the Press.

Mill and those in Britain who thought like him, and they were many, was thus concerned to bring about the break-up of the Russian Empire for the sake of preserving the British Empire of which he and they were immensely proud. We should bear in mind that the only reason that Britons such as Mill actually cared a jot about Turkey is because they regarded it as the gateway to their Raj in India, a gateway they were determined to keep shut to challengers.

Similarly, today it is improbable that the likes of UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and recent British Prime Ministers Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak care a jot for Ukraine, but they doubtless regard it, as do the higher level geostrategists of the West, as the instrument with which the West can hammer at Russia as well as the channel through which, having failed in Central Asia between 2002 and 2021, the US and UK can hope eventually to penetrate back into Central Asia, as Zbigniew Brzezinski advocated (8). Britons “in the know” in the 19th century, such as John Mill may well have been, were seeking to use what they called republican nationalist Pan-Slavism as a hammer against what they called Russian imperial Pan-Slavism. Republican nationalist Pan-Slavism could, they imagined, be used to draw Russia into a major war with Germany and Austria, a war which would result either in the break-up of the Russian state or in a Communist takeover of Russia, which might also, through civil war, end in the dissolution of Russia. Mill’s book contains maps of future plans for Russia, eastern and central Europe – maps which, he said, were circulating in secret societies that served Russian imperial aims as well as others that revealed the goals of secular nationalist and republican Pan-Slavists such as the Narod Odbrana and Omladina organisations, (9) which represented the nationalist republican heritage of the French Revolution. For the latter groups’ goals to be realised, however, the traditional alliances, friendships and enemies of Britain and France would have to be reversed. Britain’s traditional enemies – France and Russia – would have to be brought together in opposition to Germany and Austria so as to encircle the Central European Powers. And all these remarkable things, hardly conceivable in the 1860s, were actually achieved in the diplomatic revolution mentioned earlier, which was driven through, step by step, between 1887 and 1907, so that by 1907, the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia faced off against Germany, Austria and nominally, Italy. That diplomatic revolution led directly to the First World War seven years later in 1914, a war which began in Bosnia over the issue of Serbia’s nationalist Pan-Slavism which wanted to see a federation of all the South Slavs under Serbian leadership. This was opposed to Russia’s Imperial Pan-Slavism and its still burning desire to recover Constantinople for the Orthodox faith and its own ‘Christian Empire’.

In Ukraine today, the British and Americans have been using the strategic playbook of the late Polish-American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski to manipulate similar Slavic ethnic hatreds in order to draw Russia into another long war with the intention, as in 1914, of ruining her again. The difference between Russia in the situation of 1876 that Mill was writing about and Russia in 1914 is that by 1914, Russia had developed into a Great Power that both the British and German elites now saw as a major threat to the survival of their own empires. The British were more concerned than ever, as usual, for the survival of their control over India and their world empire as a whole; as Lord Curzon, the Viceroy in India, said in 1901: “As long as we rule India, we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it, we shall drop straight away to a third-rate Power”.(10) The German Foreign Ministry, aware of the Russian Empire’s own Pan-Slavist ambitions, understood that Russia regarded Germany and its allies Austria and Turkey as standing in the way of those ambitions, which centred on recovering Constantinople and controlling the Balkans. What the Russians likely did not suspect was that their British ‘allies’ in the Triple Entente were actually planning a war that would destroy, break up, or severely weaken Russia. American historian Sean McMeekin in his book The  Russian Origins of the First World War (2011) was right to point the finger of blame at Russia for turning what could have been just a third Balkan war into a pan-European and world war, but what he failed to see, or did not want to see,  was that it was the British,  concerned for the survival of their world empire that depended on control of India, and the French, still burning for revenge over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871, who had for nearly three decades been the two main forces driving the unfolding tragedy that began with the assassin’s bullets at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.  The Germans, Austrians, Russians and Turks all ended up in Mill’s “operating room” for “amputation” as the victims of this Anglo-French paranoia and revanchism.

In 1993 a book was published that bears out the British intentions only barely masked by John Mill in his 1876 book The Ottomans in Europe. The subtitle of that book was “or Turkey in the Present Crisis, with the Secret Societies’ Maps”. According to Mill, those secret societies were the political secret groups that stood behind the Pan-Slavists, namely the republican Pan-Slavist Omladina group, which represented the nationalist republican heritage of the French Revolution, and also the secretive groups that backed Russian imperial Pan-Slavist goals. The 1993 book was The Transcendental Universe by Charles G. Harrison – a collection of six profound lectures on occultism given by Harrison a hundred years earlier in 1893. He predicted “the next great European war”, “the death of the Russian Empire so that the Russian people could live” and also that “the national character [of the Russians] will enable them to carry out experiments in socialism, political and economical, which would present innumerable difficulties in western Europe.” (emphasis TB)

This is what John Mill meant in his 1876 book when he wrote: “if an army of the Emperor [of Russia] should ever fall into another Sedan beyond the Danube, a Commune would very soon be declared in Moscow.” (11) The expectation in occult and political circles in Britain was that communism would soon be coming in Russia and that the West would bring it about. Because of his friendship with Friedrich Eckstein, who was an internationally active Theosophist with his finger on the pulse of what was going on in esoteric circles in London in the 1890s, Steiner was very aware of this agenda at which Mill had hinted and Harrison had stated more clearly. Steiner felt that if people don’t wake up to the lies and deception with which the elite forces of the West must operate, the consequence will be terrible suffering and violence until those elites’ actions are overcome through impulses that stem from the Germanic and Slavic cultures. (12)

On 22 December 1900 in the American magazine The Outlook, readers were told that “the true statesman looks to the future. It is clear to one who does thus look to the future that, as the issue of the past was between Anglo-Saxon and Latin civilization, so the issue of the future is between Anglo-Saxon and Slavic civilizations. [...] The wise statesman will make every provision possible by establishing cordial relations between all the kindred races for the final victory of the Anglo-Saxon type of civilization.”(13) Today in Ukraine, in another proxy war,  we are witnessing that struggle between the Anglosphere and its client states on the one side and Russia (and perhaps China too) on the other.

The last article in this series (http://threeman.org/?p=3104) will consider the Anglo-Russian antagonism from 1900 until today.

Endnotes

1 Markus Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch (2014) p. 927.

2 G. Mettan, Creating Russophobia, p. 191.

3 “Clive, Robert Clive, Baron, Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.   pp. 532–536.

4 Lecture of 20.2.1920, Dornach in Ideas for a New Europe (Rudolf Steiner Press) 1992, pp 57-58.

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow,_third_Rome

6 For illuminating insights into the character of de Maistre, see lecture by Rudolf Steiner, 1 May 1921 in Materialism and the Task of Anthroposophy (RSP, 1987).

7 John Mill, The Ottomans in Europe or Turkey in the Present Crisis, with the Secret Societies’ Maps (1876). The full text is available to read at archive.org

8 Z. Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard (1997) see chaps. 4 and 5.

9 Rudolf Steiner discussed such groups at some length in his lectures of 9,10,11 Dec. 1916, in The Karma of Untruthfulness, Vol. 1 (RSP) 2005.

10 In Nicholas Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience (1969), p. 256.

11 A reference to the Battle of Sedan, a major French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

12 For the full Steiner quote, see my article ‘The Anglo-Russian Antagonism Part 1’ in New View #104 July-September 2022, p.17.

13 Markus Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch (2014) p.928.

Terry M. Boardman

 It seems to be the destiny of “the West” to pass through the trials of the lonely and isolated individual who overcomes selfishness and self-assertion to the point where he or she can build new communities together with other individuals who have been through similar trials. This is a very risky and dangerous process which must eventually destroy all the old social forms continued from ancient times. Rudolf Steiner pointed out in 1919 that the mid-point of the 20th century “coincides with the end of the period in which the forces from before the middle of the 15th century – still atavistically with us to some extent – reach their ultimate decadence.” In the western historical context, this means all the legal and social forces of the Greco-Roman period, as well as all those theocratic commandments from ancient Israel, Babylon, Egypt, and Persia. “We are living in a period of evolution when the gods are only too ready to help, if human beings will come forward to meet them. But the gods have to work in accordance with their own laws, which stipulate that they must work with free human beings and not with puppets.”(1)

 While “the West” is going through this dangerous process, it sems to this writer that the East, and other regions of the world, will keep humanity alive, so to speak, while the narrow path towards the new conscious community life is being discovered in the West over the coming centuries. The East, Africa and S. America, will keep humanity alive through the instinctive, still vital but slowly fading forces from the past until the time comes when the West can bring to the East the example of the new communities of free, striving individuals. Precisely because of its ancient heritage and its faithfulness to that heritage, the East will be able to take up this new community impulse and make more of it in the future than westerners will be able to do.(2)

 It is not difficult to recognise that the wave of culture and civilisation has gradually moved westwards from the time of ancient China and India. From the Near East and Egypt, it moved to the lands around the Mediterranean, southern Europe, Greece and Rome. Then from the mid-15th century it moved north beyond the Alps, and since the time of Gutenberg, Dürer, Luther, and Copernicus, it has increasingly been the Germanic peoples of northern Europe who have moved to the fore. According to Rudolf Steiner, From the middle of the 4th millennium, the peoples of eastern Europe, the Slavs, and notably the Russians, (also perhaps the Finns and Romanians) will be in the vanguard of the impulse to new community for the following c.2000 years. But until the 4th millennium, the dangerous drive through the eye (“the I”) of the needle to individualism is being led by the peoples of northern Europe (beyond the Alps) and their American extension across the Atlantic, especially the English-speaking peoples. Part of the danger of this period is that elements within the elite of these peoples, elements who wish to preserve the traditional hierarchies of the past from before the late 18th century, the culture of lords and serfs, seek to hold evolution back at that point of selfish individualism that benefits themselves and to hold down the mass of the population though the use of economic relations and the law. Nevertheless, these elites recognised that ‘the lower orders’ in northern and western Europe and in America would seek to assert their individualism too, and this would lead to the drive for democracy and for new, non-hierarchical social forms. These social, and democratic impulses, the western elites determined, must be held back as far as possible in the West and must be diverted from the West and transplanted to the Slavic East where the instinctive sense for communal life and brotherhood  – everything that is bound up with the various meanings of the Slavic word mir (peace, joy, world, community, village, pronounced ‘meer’) was stronger and would be able to absorb them. With the appropriate use of western propaganda, once transplanted ‘over there’, they could even be made to appear dangerous and threatening to the West, which was to be made into a culture that stands for the rights of the individual as contrasted with those of the community. This polarity would become the basis of the bipolar world of the 20th century, which the current western, anti-Russian propaganda is seeking to recreate.

 Illuminating Observations

An entry, most likely from 1918, from one of Rudolf Steiner’s notebooks sheds much light on this entire process and on the ongoing struggle between Russia and the West: “What forces are confronting each other in this war and for what is it being waged? Driving things forward is a group of people who seek to dominate the earth through dynamic capitalist economic impulses. To these people belong all those circles which this group is able to bind and organise through economic methods. The essential point is that this group knows that on the territory of Russia there is an unorganised collection of human beings who, with regard to the future, bear in themselves the seed of socialist organisation. [By ‘socialist’ here, Steiner does not mean as in political movement or party but as in social community living, social relations - TB.] To bring this socialist seed impulse within the realm of power of the anti-social group is the calculated aim of that group. This goal cannot be reached if Middle Europe, with understanding, seeks an association between itself and this seed impulse in the East. Only because that [anti-social] group is to be found within the Anglo-American world has the present constellation of forces arisen as a temporary phenomenon, which is disguising all the real polarities and interests [by “the present constellation of forces”, he means here the Triple Entente alliance of Russia, Britain and France, who were fighting against Germany and Austria in World War One - TB]. It is disguising above all the true fact that a fight is going on for the seed of Russian culture between the Anglo-American plutocrats and the peoples of Middle Europe. In the moment when this fact is revealed to the world by Middle Europe, an untrue constellation will be replaced by a true one. The war will therefore go on in some form or other until German and Slavic culture have found their way to the common goal of freeing humanity from the yoke of the West.

 There are only these alternatives: either the lies with which the West has to operate if it wants to succeed will be unmasked and people will come to realise that those behind the Anglo-American cause are the bearers of a stream which has its roots in impulses which stem from before the French Revolution and in their  effort to dominate the world by capitalist means, and effort  which only employs the impulses of Revolution as a phrase [or slogan] in order to disguise itself behind them – or people will yield the rulership of the world to an occult group within the Anglo-American world until, from the subjugated German and Slavic region, through rivers of blood, the true spiritual goal of the earth will be saved.”(3)

 In other words, if people don’t wake up to the lies and deception with which the elite forces of the West must operate, the consequence will be terrible suffering and violence until those elites’ actions are overcome through impulses that stem from the Germanic and Slavic cultures. There is a great deal in Steiner’s words here. They point to an elite group in the West which functions economically and seeks world domination i.e., self-seeking economic control through a system of capitalism that is essentially selfish and immoral, concerned only for the profit of owners and investors.(4) These people have insight into the ethnic characteristics of target cultures and seek to use these characteristics to exercise power over those target cultures e.g. the Slavic populations of eastern Europe.

 Brooks Adams

In Steiner’s time such members of the western elite were for example, Lord Salisbury and Lord Alfred Milner in Britain and the Adams brothers, Henry and Brooks Adams, in the East Coast American elite. The Adams brothers were two of those who stood close to the plutocrats of the American ‘Gilded Age’ of the 1890s and 1900s.

 Steiner was well aware of Brooks Adams (pic above) and in his lectures on the causes of the First World War in 1916 (GA 173) Steiner encouraged people to read Brooks Adams’ book The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895) to understand the thinking of these western elitists. In that book we see how Adams sees nations in terms of phases of birth, growth and decay and also considers that there are ‘young’ peoples who are both imaginative inwardly creative and warlike and there are more ‘mature’ peoples who are sober, scientific and commercial. He considered the Russians to be the first kind and the Anglo-Americans the second. The first kind he regarded as backward and the second, as progressive.

Where did Adams go with such ideas? He was already arguing in 1900 that in fifty years’ time (i.e., by 1950) the world would be divided in two poles by the power struggle between the sea-based system of the USA and the land-based system of Russia: “Americans”, he said, “must recognize that this is war to the death, – a struggle no longer against single nations, but against a continent. There is not room in the economy of the world for two centres of wealth and empire. One organism, in the end, will destroy the other. The weaker must succumb.”  He felt that the key to victory in the future “lay in the development of China, which was why the USA had to do everything to bring China under its own economic control and ‘reduce it to a part of our economic system’, before Russia and continental Europe (e.g. Germany) gained possession of Chinese markets. This idea became the theme of his book America’s Economic Supremacy, in which he prophesied the fall of the British Empire and its replacement by the USA,”(5) a notion forcefully argued by James Burnham in his very influential book, The Managerial Revolution in the 1940s. “In 1902 Adams’ next book, ‘The New Empire’, appeared, in which the rise of the USA to world power was again postulated as inevitable. Within the next fifty years, he wrote, the USA would ‘outweigh any single empire, if not all empires combined’.”(6) Here we have the origin of the plans for the kind of US-dominated unipolar order that emerged in the 1990s after ‘the end of the Cold War’.(7)

 Brooks Adams thought that if Asia were to industrialise and become independent, the decline of the USA and Europe would be inevitable, in accordance with the Adams brothers’ motto: civilisation = centralisation = economy. If an independent, decolonised Asia were able to industrialise, it would become more successful at doing this, the Adams brothers felt, because economic efficiency depended on cheap labour which was so plentiful in Asia. Hence the consequences for China and the modern capitalist world of the entry into global capitalism of some 400 million cheap labour Chinese workers after 1990, the result of Deng Xiaoping’s opening up of Communist China to western capitalism. This went back to the ground-breaking visit of US President Nixon and Henry Kissinger to China in 1972 and the visit of David Rockefeller to Deng Xiaoping’s mentor Zhou Enlai in 1973. The Rockefellers were plutocrats with a farsightedness similar to that of the Adams brothers. German historian Markus Osterrieder writes: “For reasons of security alone, therefore, America [or rather, American plutocrats - TB] would in the future have to control Asia, Europe, and indeed the whole world. Brooks Adams had thus shaped the fundamentals of a philosophy of history and geopolitics” upon which the imperialist policies of the US elite could be constructed. …in the summer of 1914, Brooks Adams finally saw all his ideas confirmed and spoke of a war that would last thirty years (1914–1944!) as the necessary result of international economic competition, which would ‘[…] give […] us a new world whoever wins. […] The world, socially and economically, [could] never again be the same as it was before the breakdown of the old order of things which began the war.’”(8)

Osterrieder notes that on 22 December 1900 in the American magazine The Outlook, readers were told that “the true statesman looks to the future. It is clear to one who does thus look to the future that, as the issue of the past was between Anglo-Saxon and Latin civilization, so the issue of the future is between Anglo-Saxon and Slavic civilizations. [...] The wise statesman will make every provision possible by establishing cordial relations between all the kindred races [of the English-speaking world] for the final victory of the Anglo-Saxon type of civilization.”(9)

This was one of the three key aims of the Anglosphere elites in the world war that began in 1914: to unite the English-speaking world in order to secure its dominance in the world. The other two aims were to reduce the economic power of Germany and place it under Anglosphere control (finally achieved in 1945) and to divert socialism (Bolshevism) to Russia where it would become a Marxist socialist experiment there that was not to be allowed to occur in the West. In a lecture of 1 Dec. 1918 (GA 186) Steiner said: “What has developed in Russia [i.e. Communism] is basically only the realisation of what the West wants to take place there. […] Whatever people [in the West] may say they want consciously, what they strive for is to create a caste of masters in the West and a caste of economic slaves in the East, beginning at the Rhine and extending eastwards into Asia. […] A caste of slaves which is to be organised socialistically and which is to take up all the impossibilities of a social structure which are then not to be applied to the English-speaking population.” This was the western elites’ goal in 1917 and was still the goal in the 1990s when Communist China became the workshop of the world.

1917, the West and the Bolshevik Revolution

Raymond Robins, an American economist and labour activist who played a significant role after the Bolshevik Revolution in persuading people in the US to accept Bolshevism in Russia and eventually to establish formal relations between the US and Bolshevik Russia (which did not happen until 1933), said in 1919 before a US Senate Committee formed to investigate Bolshevik propaganda:  “Let us assume that I am here to capture Russia for Wall Street and American businessmen. Let us assume that you are a British wolf and I am an American wolf, and that when this [civil] war is over, we are going to eat each other up for the Russian market; let us do so in perfectly frank, man fashion, but let us assume at the same time that we are fairly intelligent wolves, and that we know that if we do not hunt together in this hour, the German wolf will eat us both up, and then let us go to work.” Robins said on 22.3.1919: “There are only two possible centres for the new economic organisation of Russia: either the Central Empires [i.e. Germany and Austria-Hungary], or America and the Allies. Which shall it be?”(10) Robins declared that the Bolsheviks’ economic formula was “economically impossible and morally wrong” but that he was interested in the Soviet form of government as “an experiment at once tremendously vital in Russia and possibly useful in the history of human progress.”(11) Guaranty Trust, a subsidiary of J P Morgan, was both pressing for recognition of the Bolsheviks and was also funding the “ultra-conservative, anti-Soviet organisation United Americans, which warned incessantly of the danger of a ‘Red invasion’ of the USA and powerfully stirred the rampant ‘Red Scare’”.(12) The Anglo-American financiers funded both sides; Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan also funded Mussolini’s Fascists. The bankers were concerned with power; the means to achieve it were secondary.

Today, we are witnessing in Ukraine a massive struggle: the Five Eyes states of the Anglosphere (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), the powerbrokers of the present, vs China and Russia, the peoples of the ancient past and of the distant future, with the financiers of the West seeking to profit from both sides.

The Rudolf Steiner notebook entry from 1918 mentioned earlier refers to the importance to future human evolution of the relationship between central and eastern Europe, between the German and the Slavic peoples. This has to do with building the bridge between the present and future epochs, the bridge between individualistic and communal cultural development.  Consequently, the spiritual forces seeking to frustrate that development have been trying to block such efforts at bridge-building between the German and Slavic peoples, between central and eastern Europe.  The leaders of the West understood well how to involve those two peoples and regions in major wars against each other in the 20th century.

Markus Osterrieder writes that an unpublished note by Steiner from August 1917 reveals that one of the ways in which the British and Americans will seek to dominate the world will be through trying to get the Slavic peoples  to believe that “their national aspirations can be realised under the leadership of the English-speaking peoples and that thereby they can come into an economic  relationship with England and America over the heads of the Germans, that will result in a positive export balance for those [two] countries [Britain and America].” Steiner goes on in the note: “….one has to see how, along secret pathways, England – and behind it, America – has guided Slavic developments in the Balkans with great historical farsightedness, how it has held its hand over Russia, so that Russia has run its politics in accordance with the goals of the English-speaking peoples.”(13) The Poles and the Czechs are two Slavic peoples in particular who have looked to the West for leadership and protection over the past 100 years – with disastrous results in 1938, 1939 and 1968.(14) But the Russians too allowed themselves to be led by the Franco-British Entente into the catastrophe of 1914 and the subsequent Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War which destroyed their society and so much of their culture. This was partly also due to the Russians’ own centuries-old illusions about Moscow being the ‘Third Rome’, that is, the successor to Rome and Constantinople and also to the Russians’ longing to take Istanbul (Constantinople) from the Ottoman Turks. It was also due to Russia’s other, more recent illusion – that of Panslavism, the racial and nationalist dream that had emerged since the mid-19th century to unite all the Slavs of Europe under the Russian Empire, which is what more conservative and imperially-minded Russians wanted,   or else at least to unite the Slavs in a Panslavist federation under Russian patronage, which is what many more liberal nationalist Russians wanted. The British elite knew how to exploit these dreams too: to present the Central European empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary alongside Turkey as Russia’s enemies who frustrated her dreams of Panslavist unity and the taking of Constantinople. By allying herself with France and Britain, these deluded Russians felt, they could achieve their nation’s two dreams.

The British played a key role in the first Russian Revolution through Lord Milner and his Round Table group,(15) MI6 having already supervised the assassination of Grigori Rasputin at the end of 1916(16) because Rasputin was felt to have undue influence over the Czar’s German wife, and Rasputin had always been opposed to the war, which he felt threatened to destroy the dynasty and Russia. The British and the Americans colluded in getting Trotsky to Russia in the spring of 1917 via the USA and providing the funds for his trip(17). Wall St bankers and financiers such as Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan and William B. Thompson, Director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, did their utmost to ensure that the Bolsheviks would survive and remain in power through the Civil War and afterwards. Thompson donated US$1 million to the Bolsheviks and declared to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George: “Let’s make these Bolsheviks our Bolsheviks, don’t let the Germans make them their Bolsheviks” – a remark which apparently pleased Lloyd George, who himself provided political backing in the West for the Bolshevik Revolution.(18)  US and British business interests then helped to industrialise the USSR in the 1920s and 30s even while at the same time funding anti-Bolshevik propaganda in the West.(19)

The Cold War

Carolyn Eisenberg of Hofstra University, New York, in her 1996 book Drawing the Line  – The American Decision to Divide Germany 1944-1949 details how the western Allies drove the  decision to divide Germany and Europe in the mid to late 1940s. She concludes that “Despite their manifold violations of human freedom, the Soviets were not the architects of the German settlement. It was the Americans and their British partners who had opted for partition with the associated congealment of the continental division.” It is long forgotten, she says, that “the Americans and the British had initiated all the formal steps towards separation…”  The   priorities for “the small circle of Americans who set policy for Germany” did not include weighing alternatives. What drove them “was a conception of national security that took the expansion of West European free trade as an absolute requirement for the United States. Though this reflected the aspirations of large internationally oriented corporations, it was less clearly in line with the predilections of the public, for whom issues of East European freedom and the maintenance of peace held greater salience….The oppressive internal policies of the Soviet Union that were gradually imposed upon the population of East Germany were not the source of the postwar schism….what produced that unwanted result  was an ambitious  American agenda, which was juxtaposed on a European continent that was more impoverished, strife-ridden, and unruly than anyone in Washington had envisioned….Had American officials been more flexible and sought a compromise solution in occupied Germany, it is possible that the Soviets would have blocked or overturned it. But this is something we cannot know since the United States selected a different course. In the wreckage of the Cold War, America has yet to acknowledge responsibility for the structures that it built.”(20)

The Cold War division of Europe and Germany, then, was made in Washington and London, rather than Moscow, and in any case, the division that was forced through by 1949 had already been envisaged by Lord Milner 30 years earlier, in 1919, when he had advocated dividing Germany in two: a western capitalist Germany and an eastern Prussian Bolshevik one. He had already identified in 1919 the young man who he thought would be the best candidate to govern the pro-western half of Germany – the young mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, who in 1949 actually became West Germany’s first Chancellor.(21) The Cold War in Europe was an Anglo-American production.

A year after the disappearance of the USSR, in 1992, Zbigniew Brzezinski (pic above), National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, began his article on the history of the Cold War in the 70th anniversary edition of Foreign Affairs magazine with a reference to the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz and his often-quoted maxim: “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. The Cold War was a war, Brzezinski wrote, “for control over the Eurasian landmass and…for global preponderance.” The US ‘offensive posture’ in the 1950s, he wrote, “never materialised” because “the American side never fully meant it. The policy of liberation was a strategic sham, designed to a significant degree for domestic political reasons…The policy was basically rhetorical, at most tactical.”(22) In other words, it was intended to fool the citizens of the West as much if not more than the Russians.

 Dividing Russia

In that 1992 article, Brzezinski let some other cats out of the bag: for example, the notion that post-Soviet Russia may be split up: he wrote: “Russia’s own unity may soon also be at stake, with perhaps the Far Eastern provinces tempted before too long to set up a separate Siberian-Far Eastern Republic of their own.”(23) Brzezinski would return to this notion of a Far Eastern Republic five years later, in his key work The Grand Chessboard. But this disintegrated Russia also featured in an article in the British weekly magazine The Economist – a major propagandist journal for the globalist New World Order -  in the winter of that same year 1992.(24) The anonymous Economist writer was imagining the future over the next 50 years and suggested that during that period, all of Russia east of the Ural mountains, a vast territory, would be lost to “a Muslim superstate-like entity” and to China. Russia would revert to its European borders of the 16th century and thus, presumably, could then be integrated into a transatlanticist European Union under the ‘guiding hand’ of the USA and the Bank of International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.

Indeed, this transatlanticist future was the only future that Brzezinski saw for Russia. In the chapter titled ‘The Black Hole’ in his Grand Chessboard book (1997), he wrote about what he called Russia’s “Dilemma of the One Alternative”: all counteralliance options (with China, Iran, Eurasia, the Franco-German axis) “evade the only choice that is left open to Russia. Russia’s only real geostrategic option – the option that could give Russia a realistic international role and also maximise the opportunity of transforming and socially modernising itself – is Europe. And not just any Europe, but the transatlantic Europe of the enlarging EU and NATO. Such a Europe is taking shape….and it is also likely to remain linked closely to America. That is the Europe to which Russia will have to relate if it is to avoid dangerous geopolitical isolation.”(25) Brzezinski even dangled the prospect of “ever-closer association with NATO” in front of Russia, but only association, not full membership. Putin asked Clinton about Russian membership of NATO in 2000, but Clinton declined, saying simply: “You’re too big”. Russia, said Brzezinski, “could increasingly become an integral part of a Europe that embraces not only Ukraine but reaches to the Urals and even beyond.” Indeed, Brzezinski’s obsession was “the redefinition of Russia” and the end of what he called “the Russian Empire”. Russia’s refusal to accept Brzezinski’s transatlanticist European future or its refusal to accept Ukraine’s fully partaking in the EU and NATO – and we should remember that behind Brzezinski were the plutocrats of the West, such as his long-term sponsor, David Rockefeller -  would, Brzezinski said, “be tantamount to the rejection of Europe in favour of a solitary ‘Eurasian’ identity and existence. … One cannot predict how fast that process can move, but one thing is certain: it will move faster if a geopolitical context is shaped that propels Russia in that direction, while foreclosing other temptations… Indeed, for Russia, the dilemma of the one alternative is no longer a matter of making a political choice but of facing up to the imperatives of survival.”(26) This was clearly the language of intimidation and the height of hubris by an influential American statesman in America’s ‘unipolar moment’ in the 1990s.

Of course, Brzezinski in the mid-1990s did not foresee Xi Jinping and his vast Eurasian Belt and Road transport infrastructure project, sometimes dubbed “the New Silk Road”, which got underway when Xi came to power in 2013. Today, Russia, despite the sanctions imposed by the West and its puppets since February this year, is very far from the geopolitical ‘isolation’ and ‘solitude’ of which western media continually speak. In 2014, the year that began with the Maidan coup in Kiev, and only a year after Xin Jinping came to power in China, Russia and China signed the giant US$400 billion “Power of Siberia” gas pipeline project to supply Russian gas to China over 30 years. The negotiations had been going on for almost 10 years. The gas started flowing to China in December 2019.

 Russia and The Eurasian ‘Pivot’

When that deal was being negotiated, the western media were often speaking about President Obama’s new “pivot to East Asia” strategy (2012). The use of the word “pivot” was interesting, as it recalled a key concept of one of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s long-dead mentors in geopolitics, the Edwardian geographer Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947). In his Grand Chessboard book, Brzezinski referred to Mackinder and his concept and appeared to downplay it, claiming that “geopolitics has moved from the regional to the global dimension, with preponderance over the entire Asian continent serving as the central basis for global primacy”. But in fact, Brzezinski’s entire book contradicts this claim; his own concerns bear out the ongoing focus in Anglo-American strategic thinking on Mackinder’s original insights. In 1904, the year of the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War (another British proxy war against Russia), Mackinder, a protégé of Lord Milner and Director of the London School of Economics, had produced a text that soon became famous, The Geographical Pivot of History, in which he advanced his ‘heartland’ or ‘pivot’ theory. A vast area east of the Urals, including most of Siberia and Central Asia extending southward to the Himalayas and China, was the key to world power, Mackinder said, because of its enormous material resources, its water sources and the energies of the many populations that lived in the region and had emerged from it or crossed it over the centuries. Any state that owned this huge territory and could build a network of railways across it would be a land power impregnable to attack from sea powers such as Britain and America, and if it was able to ally with a major coastal power such as China, Japan or Germany, it would have the human and material wherewithal to build a great fleet that could challenge the sea powers for the hegemony of the world.

Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road project is Mackinder’s nightmare come true. To gain access to this pivot or heartland region, Mackinder said, control of eastern Europe was crucial. Today, that means Ukraine, and it is why Ukraine is such an important chess piece on Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard. A Ukraine that is firmly part of the West, integrated into the EU and NATO, which he expected would happen sometime between 2005-2015 would a) make it impossible for Russia to continue as an ‘empire’,  b) encourage Russia to orient, or rather ‘occident’ itself towards the West and c) enable the USA to project power via France, Germany and his ancestral Polish homeland into Ukraine  – much of which used to belong to the Polish aristocracy, to which his own forebears had belonged -  and beyond to central Asia and the ‘pivot’ region. Given that between 2001 and 2021, the USA was gradually pushed out of the several bases it had established in Central Asia for the first time in its history following its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Ukraine became an even more crucial chess piece for the western penetration of Central Asia. Following the outbreak of conflict in the Donbass and the Crimea in 2014 after the Maidan coup, the US began to supply Ukraine with military equipment and training to the tune of US$2.5 billion (2014-Feb.2022), US$400 million of which was in 2021 alone, and since Feb. 2022 it has provided Ukraine with US$5.6 billion in “security assistance”.(27)  “On 28 April 2022, US President Joe Biden asked Congress for an additional $33 billion to assist Ukraine, including $20 billion to provide weapons to Ukraine. On 21 May 2022, the United States passed legislation providing $40 billion in new military and humanitarian foreign aid to Ukraine, marking a historically large commitment of funds.”(28) This contrasts with US$40-50 billion a year spent on average between 2011 and 2020 on total US foreign aid per annum, and gives a clue as to how important the US elite consider Ukraine and the current conflict to be. Such figures suggest that the USA is indeed fighting a proxy hot war against Russia, a war in which Ukrainian troops are dying instead of Americans, all in order to achieve Brzezinski’s goal of a Ukraine in the EU and NATO and thus with NATO bases in northern Ukraine and NATO missiles only a few minutes’ flying time (300 miles) from Moscow.

In 1919, Mackinder extended his heartland region eastwards into northern China and westwards to central Europe so that it included all of European Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland and eastern Germany. In fact, his new western boundary line for the pivot region corresponded almost exactly with the Cold War borders of Germany 30 years later. Let us remind ourselves that for Mackinder, the nightmare scenario was if Russia, the impregnable land power, with its huge labour force and its vast material resources, would ally itself with a vigorous, disciplined, intelligent people like the Germans or the Japanese. If that happened, those allies together might be able to create a fleet that could defeat Anglo-American naval power.

Mackinder’s nightmare – the nightmare of the Anglo-American elites – cropped up again in 2015 in a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs by the very well-connected geostrategist, Hungarian-American George Friedman, who was then head of the foreign affairs consultancy firm Stratfor. In answer to a question as to whether ISIS was an existential threat to the USA, he replied:

 “The primordial interest of the United States, over which, for a century, we have fought wars   – the First, Second, and Cold War – has been the relationship between Germany and Russia,  because united, they are the only force that could threaten us, and to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”(29)

 A remarkable statement that no British or American politician had made in public before this, it sheds tremendous light on the history of the past 120 years, because it helps explain why the Cold War was the sham that Brzezinski had revealed it to be 23 years earlier. In other words, the purpose of dividing Europe and the world, ‘containing’ Russia without fighting her directly, was not to defeat Communism or even Russia or China, but rather, to keep the energies of Germany and Japan under control, well integrated into the post-war Anglo-American capitalist system, and prevent them from getting close to Russia and China economically or politically. This was exactly what Mackinder had recommended 111 years earlier, in 1904, and was the line that British and American foreign policy had followed with such brilliant success since 1904. The British Entente with France in 1904 led to the Entente with Russia in 1907; the Entente with Russia led to the First World War seven years later in which Russia fought against Germany. From the First World War came the Bolshevik Revolution, Fascism and Nazism, and also the Second World War, in which again Germany and Russia fought each other; the Second World War led to the Cold War and the global bipolar order – the division of the world which isolated the USSR and Communist China from the capitalist system and therefore ensured American economic dominance of the world for 45 years. It also provided the elites of the West with models of authoritarian surveillance and control which could prove useful in the future.

 Chessmasters?

 But those elites, Rudolf Steiner frequently said, were farsighted and possessed occult knowledge of how history works and of the understanding of national characteristics that could be manipulated by those elites. So after exactly 72 years, 200 years on from the French Revolution, the Soviet Marxist experiment in Russia was forcibly terminated by the powers of the West who had begun to prepare the termination in 1972/1973 when the Rockefellers’ Trilateral Commission was founded and the World Economic Forum was established, when the petrodollar era began, when Middle Eastern terrorism took off, and when Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller all visited Communist China. In those years too, the bipartisan Council on Foreign Relations in New York, steered for decades by David Rockefeller, set up “The 1980s Project”, one of the key aims of which was to deconstruct the Soviet Union. Rockefeller made sure his protégé Brzezinski became National Security Adviser in President Jimmy Carter’s government, which featured a number of other Trilateral Commission members. The Polish-American Brzezinski just happened to be in post when Pope John Paul I strangely died after only 33 days in office and was replaced by the first Polish Pope, John Paul II, who was soon making connections with the rebellious Polish trade union movement, Solidarnosc. During Brzezinski’s time in office, the Shah was toppled in the Iranian Revolution and replaced with the radical cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, and with the aid of the Muslim world, both Shia and Sunni united in opposition to the atheist communists in Kabul, Brzezinski was able to succeed in ‘giving Russia its own Vietnam’ experience in Afghanistan, as he himself put it.

Caught between, on the one hand, the challenges provoked throughout the Warsaw Pact bloc by the rebellious Poles of Solidarnosc, who were aided by an ‘unholy alliance’ between the Vatican and the Reagan White House(30),  and on the other hand, by a war against the turbulent Afghan mujahideen which dragged on for 10 years, and also rocked by economic pressures on its ramshackle economy trying to compete with the Star Wars missile programme of the USA, the Soviet Union began to implode: the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in northern Ukraine in 1986 was a mighty symptom of the looming collapse, then came the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet satellite states 33 years ago in 1989, exactly 200 years after the French Revolution. Two years later, on Christmas Day, the USSR disappeared from history. To the elites of the West, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR was not the great ‘surprise’ that the western mainstream media made out to western publics that it was. This latest upheaval in Russian history had been planned in the West since the early 1970s. Reagan and Thatcher made sure that the threat of ‘socialism’ to the western elites, a threat identified over a century earlier, was effectively buried; in the 1980s trade unionism was emasculated, and the enthusiasms of the 1970s for political socialism waned. The ‘experiment’ to divert the dangers of Marxist socialism away from the West to Russia(31) and the East had ‘succeeded’ and could therefore be terminated; meanwhile, the capitalist ‘experiment’ in Marxist China was about to take off…

In the 1990s there were those in globalist circles in the West who were hopeful that Russia and China could both be integrated into the global capitalist system of the new One World Order and brought under western control. Brzezinski too, appeared to hope that Russia would accept the ‘one alternative’ he prescribed for it in The Grand Chessboard, but it is unlikely that he was sincere in doing so; his great antipathy for Russia leaches out between his sentences in that book and in his subsequent statements over the years. Meanwhile, paranoid Russophobic suspicions remained in conservative western circles; the NATO military alliance, with its dangerous and irresponsible Article 5 in the North Atlantic Treaty (“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all…”) was not disbanded, as its communist Cold War counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, had been. NATO’s first Secretary-General, Lord Ismay, had said that NATO had been founded “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. Those have evidently remained the priorities of the western elites until today; they still want to keep the Germans and the Russians apart, the Russians out of Europe and the Americans very much in. With the death of Stalin in 1953, the USSR applied in the following year to join NATO; Ismay opposed the application, comparing Russia to “an unrepentant burglar requesting to join the police force.” He felt that NATO “must grow until the whole free world gets under one umbrella.” After the end of the (first) Cold War, throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, NATO steadily advanced up to the very borders of Russia despite well-known verbal assurances given to the Russians by western leaders in the early 1990s that this would not happen.  After Vladimir Putin refused to cooperate with or approve of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the western media as a whole turned against him (the more conservative media, ever suspicious of Russia, had always been hostile), and he has been added to the list of western media bogeyman – after Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevich, Osama bin Laden, Muammar al-Gadaffi, Bashar al-Assad, and Donald Trump, the dragons that the English-speaking St. George feels obliged to conquer. But in this latest case, of Russia and Vladimir Putin, the western media and the western elites have perhaps overlooked or else think it of no importance that on the standard of the president of Russia is a double-headed eagle that adorns the tricolour Russian flag and on that eagle’s breast is an image of…..St George conquering the dragon.

The second part of this article (http://threeman.org/?p=3097) will diagnose further deep-rooted aspects of the Anglo-Russian antagonism before attempting to outline a ‘cure’ for this particular social and cultural ‘illness’.

NOTES

1. Lecture of 14.12.1919, in Rudolf Steiner, Collected Works GA 194.

2. For example, the individualistic,  proto-Protestant impulse at the beginning of the modern epoch began in England with John Wycliffe (c.1331-1384) and his followers, the Lollards, but it did not develop into a major social and communal movement in England and was rather easily suppressed by King Henry V (1413-1422) but it spread from England via Queen Anne, the Bohemian wife of the English king, Richard II (1377-1399), to Bohemia where, among the western Slavs, it became a powerful communal force in the Hussite movement (followers of the martyr Jan Hus 1372-1415), that could not be suppressed either by the Vatican or by the Holy Roman Empire and resisted five papal crusades over a period of 14 years (1420-1434).

3. Andreas Bracher (ed.), Kampf um den russischen Kulturkeim (2014) untranslated. The translation in the article above was made by the author.

4. Just two American companies, BlackRock, Inc. and the Vanguard Group, Inc., which are worth at least $US20 trillion, own the commanding heights of the Anglosphere economy:
See:https://www.conservativebusinessjournal.com/2021/11/blackrock-and-vanguard-the-two-headed-thing-that-ate-america/  and https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/who-owns-world-blackrock-and-vanguard

5. Markus Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch (2014), p. 1224.

6. Osterrieder, loc. cit.

7. For example, the “Defense Planning Guidance of 1992” document by Paul Wolfowitz, Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy and his assistant, Scooter Libby. This was known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine.

8. Osterrieder, ibid., pp. 1224-1225.

9. Osterrieder, ibid., p. 928.

10. Osterrieder, ibid., p. 1358.

11. Osterrieder, ibid., p. 1359.

12. Osterrieder, ibid., p. 1361.

13. Osterrieder, ibid., p. 1382, n. 3620. Typed note by Jürgen von Grone, Bundesarchiv Koblenz BAK/NS 15-302, in: Zur Geschichte der anthroposophischen Bewegung und Gesellschaft in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. Dokumente und Briefe. Vol. IV. Ed., Arfst Wagner. Rendsburg 1992, p. 116.)

14. 1938 – Munich Crisis; 1939 – Poland ; 1968 – Prague Spring.

15. Osterrieder, ibid., pp. 1310-1311.

16. See A. Cook, To Kill Rasputin (2005) pp. 215-221.

17. Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974) pp. 21-34; J. MacGregor and G. Docherty, Prolonging The Agony (2017) pp. 453-475;  Osterrieder, ibid., pp. 1316-1318.

18. Osterrieder, ibid., p. 1341.

19. Osterrieder. ibid., pp. 1360-1363; Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974) pp.121-181.

20. Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line  – The American Decision to Divide Germany 1944-1949 (1996) p.493.

21. Osterrieder, ibid., pp. 1442-1451.

22. Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71 No. 4, pp. 31, 37.

23. Ibid. p. 33.

24. The Economist, 26.12.1992-8.1.1993 end of year issue. Article: ‘The Twenty-first Century: A View from AD 2992’. See T. M. Boardman, Mapping the Millennium – Behind the Plans of the New World Order (2nd ed. 2013), pp.104-160.

25. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard (1997), p. 118.

26.Ibid.,p.122.

27.https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12040.

28.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foreign_aid_to_Ukraine_during_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War#Future_military_aid

29. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeLu_yyz3tc Watch from 53:50.

30. TIME magazine 24.2.1992 : ‘The Holy Alliance: Ronald Reagan and John Paul II’

https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,974931-1,00.html

31. See my article ‘2022 – War in Ukraine’ in the quarterly New View magazine Issue 103 April-June 2022, p. 86. Also, C.G. Harrison, The Transcendental Universe (1893, republ. 1993) lecture 2, pp. 98-99.

This year, which happens to be the Year of the Tiger in the traditional Chinese calendar, the month of March (in the western calendar) was dominated by the movements of the planet after which the month is named – Mars. When Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on 24 February, Mars (lower aspect: aggression; higher aspect: courage and daring) was conjoined with Venus, and the two fast-moving planets were approaching conjunction with the very slow-moving Pluto (lower aspect: annihilation; higher aspects: spiritual intuition and resurrection) in the (Tropical) sign of Capricorn (the sign of government and authority, amongst other things).  By 27 February, Mars and Venus had conjoined with Pluto, and the Ukrainian airforce had already largely been destroyed. On that same day, Mercury was conjunct Saturn, and the Sun was conjunct Jupiter and Neptune:  a significant group of positions for 8 planets! By the 6 March, Mars and Venus, still together, had moved out of Capricorn into Aquarius and away from Pluto; by 9 March, the Mars-Pluto conjunction effect was definitely over. In the following days, Russian military momentum began to slow. But by mid-March, Venus had pulled away from Mars (both still in Aquarius), while Mars began to approach a stressful square relationship (90°) to Uranus (lower aspect: dramatic, even revolutionary shock; higher aspect: spiritual illumination) in Taurus. This stressful square became exact on 22 March; around this time President Biden began claiming – without offering evidence – that Russia might soon start using chemical weapons, which would mean a major escalation. On 26 March at the end of a speech in Poland, President Biden blurted out “For God’s sake, this man [Putin] must not remain in power”, which many took to mean an intention to force regime change in Russia; the US authorities quickly moved to assure the world that Biden had not meant that. At the time of writing, Mars and Venus have reached conjunction with Saturn (in Aquarius), the limiting, disciplining energies of which might be expected to restrain Mars’ aggression, and negotiations in Istanbul between representatives of the combatants appeared to yield some hope for an agreement. Western media have been much given to (over-optimistic?) reporting that the Russian campaign has stalled due to the Russians’ own errors and unexpectedly stiff and brave Ukrainian resistance, and certainly, the Russian armed forces lack recent experience; they have not fought a war on this scale since 1945.(1) In the first week of April, the Mars-Saturn conjunction will be exact, and then by the middle of April, Mars will have moved away from Saturn and into the sign of Pisces, a ‘watery’ sign in which Mars is not normally ‘comfortable’. The end of the Mars-Uranus square by late March, the Mars-Saturn conjunction in early April, and the Mars entry into Pisces (mid-April) may be indications that the fighting will stop and peace may be achieved. However, those who do not want peace may well be aware of those heavenly energies and may strive to oppose them, perhaps by sensationalist fake news stories, in order to keep the war going as long as possible in their own interests. [This happened: the fake Russian massacre in Bucha stories were concocted in the first week of April - TB] The longer the war goes on, the worse the economic consequences will be, not just for Russia and Ukraine but for all of us – given the scale of the West’s sanctions against Russia, Russian countermeasures, and the importance of Russian and Ukrainian raw materials, including food and fertiliser, in the world economy (Russia will very likely insist on payment for Russian energy in roubles or gold), and there may be a spread of military actions beyond Ukraine and even the danger of a nuclear strike by Russia or NATO.

To judge by the coverage of the Ukraine war in the western mainstream media (MSM) and by the statements of western politicians, who have responded to this conflict with the same kneejerk uniform collective reaction that they showed during the Covid crisis, one might think Vladimir Putin woke up one morning sometime between December and February and thought to himself, out of the blue: “I’ll launch an invasion of Ukraine, because the Ukrainian state doesn’t and shouldn’t really exist and is actually part of Russia and I want to reconstruct the USSR. Oh, and also, Ukraine is full of Nazis who have been mistreating the Russians in the Donbass region.” All of this, say the MSM, is sheer fantasy, and a sign that ‘Putin has lost his mind, an unstable autocrat who is a serious danger to the “rules-based world order” like Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Gadaffi, Assad and of course….Hitler. He, like them, must therefore be ousted, preferably by his own people, whose lives we shall now make miserable by our sanctions against Russia, so that they will overthrow him, which we cannot do because we are afraid that might cause a nuclear war. In the meantime, we shall go on increasing NATO forces on Russia’s other borders to which we have steadily advanced since 1991 and we shall continue to send lethal weapons to Ukraine so that they can fight for their country (and for us) until the last Ukrainian, or Putin, is dead.’ If this sounds cynical, let us recall how many millions of young men the aging politicians of Europe were prepared to send to their deaths in the horrors of the First World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, or let us recall the words of America’s first female Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who as US Ambassador to the UN (!), declared on the prestigious US TV show 60 Minutes in 1996 that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to US sanctions on Iraq was “a price worth paying”.

Countless people in the West have swallowed this MSM version of Putin and the war in Ukraine just as they swallowed the government and MSM line on Covid for the past two years. Or else, if they are anti-Establishment and deride the MSM, they are influenced by social media and alternative websites to believe that ‘Putin, Zelensky, Biden, Xi Jinping and Klaus Schwab are all in it together, as they were with Covid’ and that this Ukraine war is, like Covid, just another step on the path to Schwab’s nightmarish “Great Reset” – the remaking of society worldwide into a totalitarian technocracy ruled over by billionaire globalist elites.

But neither of these two views does justice to the current situation. This war did not just begin this year, nor is it even really a war between Russia and Ukraine, however much it may seem so. It is but the latest phase in a struggle that began 200 years ago when, in the years after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the British elite first really began to identify Russia as their main enemy that could take India  – and thus their world power and much of their wealth – away from them.(2) The deeper roots go back much further even than that – back beyond British involvement in the assassination of Czar Paul I in 1801….beyond British advisors at the court of Peter the Great a century earlier….beyond James I’s planned expedition to land troops in the frozen wastes of northern Russia in 1613 at a time when both England was beginning to expand across the world’s oceans and Russia was expanding across the solid ‘ocean’ of Siberia, eventually to confront each other in Central Asia and North America over 200 years later….back beyond Ivan the Terrible’s rude letter requesting the hand of Queen Elizabeth I in marriage in 1570….back beyond the Anglo-saxon exiles who settled in the Crimea after the defeat at Hastings in 1066….back to the distant 9th century, when Danish pagan Vikings from Scandinavia began the effort (which ended in 1066) to conquer and settle in England and other pagan Vikings from Sweden also accepted the invitation to become the rulers of the pagan Slavs who lived in northern Russia. It was from pagan Scandinavia that the rulers of the English (Vikings and Normans) and of the Russians (Ruotsi  – old Finnish for ‘rowers’) both came, rowing in their longships. Once established, they both ruled over peoples of a different, though not vastly different, stock from themselves: Anglo-Saxons and Celts, and Slavic tribes.

Ukraine 2022 and 1914-18: bullies and underdogs

Today, all eyes are currently on “brave Ukraine”, as in 1914 they were on what the western MSM called “plucky little Serbia” and “gallant little Belgium”, who were cast as fighting for their lives like David against the imperial Goliaths of Austria-Hungary and Germany respectively, or in September 1939 when “brave Poland” was invaded by the military machines first of Hitlerian Germany and then the Soviet Union 17 days later. The British like to side with the ‘underdog’ and against the ‘bully’. But the fighting in Ukraine, which actually began in 2014, is but a symptom of a much larger, world-spanning conflict that has already lasted, and may well yet last, for centuries. Who is actually the underdog, and who the bully? Do they even exist?

As with so much else in the past century, we can relate the pain of Russia and Ukraine today to the events of that crucible of cruelty, the First World War – when Ukraine as an independent state almost emerged but was soon suppressed by the Bolshevik International Socialists, who also suppressed the Russians themselves  – for 70 years. When the fighting in the First World War began, on 28 July 1914, the real antagonists  – Britain, France and Russia – did not enter the fray for several days, and when they did, it was apparently on the same side!

How did the fighting in the First World War actually begin? With Austro-Hungarian shelling of Belgrade on 28 July 1914, following Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia on 23 July. There had been a month of tension between the rather ramshackle Central European empire and the small, pugnacious and prickly Balkan state after the assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne and his wife on 28 June by a Bosnian Serb nationalist student who was part of a group that had plotted and trained for the deed in Belgrade. The Austro-Hungarians regarded Serbia as a terrorist state that had committed a number of murders and attacks on Austro-Hungarian officials over the years which had increased in the period before 1914, as well the brutal murders of the King of Serbia and his wife in 1903. And indeed, until days before the assassination itself, the murder gang had been aided with weapons and training by the proto-masonic secret society Unification or Death (aka the Black Hand) which was headed by Col. Dragutin Dmitrijevic, the commander of Serbian military intelligence; he had been involved in the killing of the Serbian royal couple in 1903. The Austro-Hungarians also suspected that behind Serbian nationalist aggression against the empire was Russian, British, and French encouragement and support, including weapons supplies. The guns used for the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince were later sourced to Belgium, a country very much under the British wing, and the Serbian officer who had taken them to Serbia had Freemasonic connections with Belgian lodges. The Austro-Hungarians attacked Serbia pre-emptively, expecting that Serbia would soon be the battering ram for the destruction of their empire. The Russians had planned to attack Germany pre-emptively, because Germany’s ally Turkey was about to receive brand new battleships from Britain that could defeat the Russian Black Sea fleet, and the Russians’ main war aim was to take back Istanbul (Constantinople) for the Orthodox faith.(3) Germany too declared war on Russia pre-emptively, thinking that if they did not, then by 1917, Russia would be strong enough to overwhelm them. Germany also declared war on Russia’s ally France pre-emptively, assuming that France would join the war in support of its Russian ally, which France certainly intended to do. The British declared war on Germany pre-emptively, thinking that Germany’s economy would outstrip Britain’s within a few years, even though the Germans had effectively given up the naval race of battleship-building two years earlier. Fear of the future was therefore what drove many of the combatants, just as it has driven Vladimir Putin, who sees Ukraine much as Austria-Hungary regarded Serbia – as a spear that had been aimed at Russia (and Austria-Hungary) for at least two decades by forces in the West.

In lectures in late 1916 Rudolf Steiner pointed out that a “Slav Welfare Committee” organisation “under the protection of the Russian government” had in fact been found to have been sending weapons under cover as far back as the mid-1880s to stir up trouble for the pro-Austro-Hungarian Obrenovich dynasty in Serbia.(4) It was King Alexander Obrenovich and his wife who were murdered in 1903 by Col. Dmitrijevic and his fellow conspirators and replaced by King Peter Karageorgevic, who was more inclined to favour Russia, France and Britain. In 1914, the Triple Entente alliance (Russia, France and Britain) used Serbian nationalism as an instrument to bring about “regime change” in Austria-Hungary and Germany, through the means of a general European war. The British and Americans furthermore, used this same war to force regime change in their ‘ally’, Russia, first by replacing the Czarist regime with a provisional republican government, and then by facilitating the journey of Communist agitator Leon Trotsky to Russia in 1917(5) (via New York and Canada), and by supporting the Bolshevik revolutionaries after their coup in Nov. 1917 and in subsequent years with considerable financial investments in Bolshevik Russia.(6) The so-called “German threat” was but the excuse to get Russia involved in a major war that would lead to the overthrow of the Czarist state.

                                                   Historical Map of Ukraine showing how territories were added to produce today’s state: 1654 -2013

And here we gain an important clue to what the current Ukraine war is all about. To understand why this war is about something far larger than just a war between Russia and Ukraine, we have to make something of a detour back to the circumstances of the First World War, the war from which Ukraine almost emerged for the first time as an independent state in 1918-21. “Brave Serbia”, the ally of Britain, France and Russia in 1914 which was much lauded in the western Press during the 1914-1918 war, had lost a quarter (850,000) of its pre-war population by the end of the war, but that was of little consequence to the Allied elites, who by 1918 had achieved their aims as a result of having stirred up and manipulated Serbian nationalism to become the spark that lit the powder keg: by the winter of 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was no more and its Emperor an exile (the German, Russian and Ottoman empires had also gone under). The western Allies’ ‘reward’ for Serbia was the creation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (under Serbian leadership) out of the ruins of Serbia and of the Habsburg empire of Austria-Hungary. The break-up of the Habsburg empire was embraced as a war aim during the war by the Allies, notably Britain. Today, Ukraine is being used, just as Serbia was from the 1880s until 1918, and the target this time, taking the place of Austria-Hungary, is another large multi-ethnic state – Russia, which elite forces in the West have long wanted to break up in order to exploit its natural resources.(7) Rudolf Steiner indicated(8) that the war of 1914-18 was not only fought between Britain, France and Russia against Germany; that was the appearance on the physical plane. In the spiritual world it was fought by British and French souls against Russians, due to fundamental differences in attitudes to life and death between western and eastern peoples. Furthermore, he insisted that the key to the future lay in good relations between the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, between German-speaking culture and Slavic cultures, especially the Russians, while the elites of the West sought to prevent this from happening so that the English-speaking peoples could manipulate the destiny of the Slavic peoples into the future.(9)

Western Goals

It is known that, at least as far back as the early 1890s, esoteric circles in Britain were envisaging a great European war that would come about through Slavic nationalism and impulses of Slavic ‘brotherhood’ and would result in a socialist (Marxist) revolution in Russia and “enable experiments in Socialism, political and economical” to be carried out which would destroy the Russian Empire and realise “the dreams of the Pan-Slavists” whose Slavic race was now “beginning to live its own intellectual life” and was “no longer in its period of infancy”. This was spoken of in a lecture by the ‘High Church’ esotericist, Charles George Harrison (1855-1929), in London in 1893(10) as an example of the first two of the ‘three great axioms’ which Harrison claimed were “the foundation of occult science”:

“1. Seven is the Perfect Number

 2. The Microcosm is a Copy of the Macrocosm

 3. All Phenomena have their Origin in Vortices.”

The goal here for the leaders of the Anglo-saxon cultures, who saw themselves as the rulers of the dominant culture in the world in this modern era (since the 16th century), was, according to Harrison, to ensure that English-speaking culture would be the ‘tutor’ and ‘protector’ of the ‘young’ Slavic cultures, so that in the future, the values of Anglo-saxon culture would also be those of the Slavic cultures, and notably the largest of them – the Russian culture.

Harrison spoke approvingly of, and was allied to, the Lux Mundi movement within the Church of England, a movement that emerged in 1889 and sought to unite the High Church wing of the Church of England with the latest developments in natural science and biblical criticism. An elite family that had regarded itself as faithful members of the High Church since the days of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) was that of the Gascoyne-Cecils, who had provided Queen Elizabeth and her successor King James I (1603-1625) with their Secretaries of State, the most powerful bureaucrats in the land, and performed the same function for both Queen Victoria (1837-1901), whose Prime Minister three times was the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (aka Lord Salisbury), and for her son, King Edward VII (1901-1910), one of whose Prime Minister was for three years (1902-1905) Lord Salisbury’s nephew, Arthur Balfour.

These latter-day Cecils, uncle Robert and nephew Arthur, very different in character but amateur experimental scientists both, carried through a remarkable diplomatic revolution in British foreign policy over a period of 20 years (1887-1907) in deliberately turning Britain’s two former arch-enemies, France and Russia, into her allies, and her two former most friendly countries, Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary, into her enemies.

What was the purpose of this? It was threefold: to ‘bring to heel’ through a great war both Germany and Russia. Germany was Britain’s rising rival in the modern era; the war would reduce Germany’s economic power and its growing navy, and Russia was the potential rival to the British Empire in the more distant future; the Russian Slavs were to be tamed through the carrying out of those “experiments in Socialism [Marxism], political and economic”, of which Harrison had spoken in 1893. Amongst other things, these would reduce the growing economic potential of Russia and expose it to exploitation by Anglo-American capitalism. The third aim was that  a great war against Germany would serve to bind together the English-speaking Dominions of the Empire more tightly, and the constant threat of a “Red menace” in the decades after the war would frighten the elites in the Dominions and in the United States of America into remaining closely allied to Britain.(11)

Arthur Balfour (1848-1930), arguably more farsighted than his uncle, realised that in the 20th century, British global power could only be maintained in alliance with that other rising power, the USA. This view he shared with the mining magnate and arch-imperialist, Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), for whom the loss of the American colonies in the American War of Independence had been an unmitigated disaster. In 1891, Rhodes founded a secret society (The Society of the Elect, nominally modelled on the Jesuit Order), dedicated to maintain and expand British world domination and reunite Britain and the USA.(12) To this end, he founded the Rhodes Scholarships, which were centred on what he regarded as the ‘spiritual home’ of the British Empire – Oxford University, notably its Balliol and All Souls Colleges. His successor, Lord Alfred Milner (1854-1925), took Rhodes’ project a major stage further in establishing the Round Table group (aka the Milner Group) in 1909. This group performed effective work in binding together the elites of the Dominions before and during the Great War, in bringing about the (Royal) Institute of International Relations (aka Chatham House) and the Council on Foreign Relations in the USA (1921), the two premier foreign policy thinktanks of the English-speaking world and thus in laying the foundations of what is today referred to as the alliance of “The Five Eyes”, the five English-speaking countries (USA, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Thus, although not yet fully realised, the dreams and goals of Rhodes, Milner, Balfour and the men of the Milner Group have been maintained for over 130 years.(13)

In order to secure their goals, it was essential, thought the Cecils and Milner, that any alliance or cooperation between Germany and Russia had to be prevented at all costs, for such an alliance could endanger Britain’s world dominance. This idea was most comprehensively first put forward during the premiership of Arthur Balfour in 1904 by Halford Mackinder, imperial geographer, co-founder (in 1895) and Director (1903-1908) of the London School of Economics. Mackinder’s main idea was that the key to world power was the region he called ‘the Heartland’, the vast region bounded by the Ural mountains in the West, the Himalayas to the South and the mountains of eastern Siberia in the East. This region, then and now so rich in material resources and human populations, could, said Mackinder, if spanned by a comprehensive rail network – (such as China is building across Eurasia today!) – pose an effective challenge to Anglo-American global naval power, as troops and resources could easily be transported to wherever Russia’s enemies sought to put pressure on the country. Furthermore, an alliance between Russia, which controlled almost all of the Heartland, and a more energetic culture such as Germany or Japan, might also be able to bring about the construction of a naval fleet that could defeat the Royal Navy, thus ending the Age of the British Empire.

That this must not be allowed to happen was the fixed intention of those steering the ship of British foreign policy. During Balfour’s premiership, they therefore brought about Britain’s first formal alliance, with Japan in 1902, and just two years later, a war between Russia and Japan, in which Japan was supplied and part financed by Britain (and especially by US banks). The Russo-Japanese War (1904-05, in which the Japanese acted, in effect, as Britain’s mercenaries) blocked Russia’s advance in East Asia, weakened the Czarist regime considerably and laid the basis for the revolutionary upheavals of 1917.  A month after that war began, Mackinder gave the lecture that marked the founding of Anglo-American geopolitics. It was the lecture and article titled “The Geographical Pivot of History” for the Royal Geographical Society and it put forward Mackinder’s Heartland Theory. In 1919, in his book Democratic Ideals and Reality (p. 150), Mackinder summarised his key geopolitical insight in a pithy three-line epithet:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;

who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; [i.e. Eurasia]

who rules the World Island commands the world.

This epithet is a major key to understanding events in the Ukraine today, in the age of China’s Belt and Road transport infrastructure that has been gradually extended since 2013 across Eurasia and into Europe. Mackinder saw that rail networks could both facilitate Russian advances within and beyond Siberia and Central Asia and also facilitate attacks on Russia from its periphery.

Ukraine on The Grand Chessboard

Anglo-American geopoliticians since Mackinder, most notably the Polish-American Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928-2017, National Security Adviser 1977-1981 under President Jimmy Carter) in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, followed Mackinder’s indications and identified the great importance of Ukraine as the eastern European springboard from which to project power against Russia, and beyond into central Asia. As Brzezinski put it in the book that is one of the most significant texts for understanding the present crisis, “America’s central geostrategic goal in Europe can be summed up quite simply: it is to consolidate through a more genuine transatlantic partnership the US bridgehead on the Eurasian continent so that an enlarging Europe can become a more viable springboard for projecting into Eurasia the international democratic and cooperative order.”(14) We have seen in the wars fought by the US and its allies and proxies in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and now Ukraine the consequences of this ‘projection’ “into Eurasia [of] the international democratic and cooperative order”!  Because America, through its actions in the 20 year (!) Afghan war, ultimately failed, despite much effort, to establish any permanent military presence in the post-Soviet states in Central Asia, and because India has long maintained good relations with Russia and continues to do so, Ukraine became all the more important to the US as the potential ‘springboard’ into Eurasia: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland….” Ukraine certainly occupied much of Brzezinski’s attention in his Grand Chessboard book.(15) It was a crucial ‘chess piece’ for him, and events since 2004 (the Orange revolution) and 2014 (the Maidan coup) have shown that it remains so for the US foreign policy elite today, so much so that the US has shown itself prepared to restart the Cold War in a major way, after Russia’s pre-emptive attack on Ukraine in February this year, although Russia took no similar action with regard to US aggression in the Balkans in the 1990s, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria. Only in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, did Vladimir Putin’s tone towards the USA begin to become more confrontational.

Brzezinski (pic. left) wrote in his 1997 book that sometime between 2005 and 2015 “Ukraine….should become ready for serious negotiations with both the EU and NATO.”(16) It was clear to the Russians that the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Kiev in 2004, in which an election result in favour of President Yanukovych was reversed in favour of the US choice, Viktor Yushchenko, signalled American interference. For Brzezinski, Ukraine was crucial to determining which way Russia would go: “The loss of Ukraine was geopolitically pivotal….[and] geopolitically catalytic” (p. 92) “for it drastically limited Russia’s geostrategic options.”(17) The Grand Chessboard, by this scion of a Polish Catholic aristocratic family, is full of a barely suppressed contempt and antipathy for Russia. In the Chapter titled ‘The Black Hole’ (i.e. Eurasia) and the subsection ‘The Dilemma of the One Alternative’, Brzezinski insists that Russia has only one geopolitical alternative: to become part, along with a separate Ukrainian state, of a “transatlantic Europe” in the structures of the EU and NATO: “That is the Europe to which Russia will have to relate, if it is to avoid dangerous geopolitical isolation”.(18) “No Russian Ataturk is now in sight”, wrote Brzezinski in 1997(19), failing to spot one Vladimir Putin.

But Brzezinski was disingenuous in holding out the carrots of EU and NATO membership to Russia; they were carrots which the West was never actually prepared to proffer: “And if Russia consolidates its internal democratic institutions and makes tangible progress in free-market-based economic development, its ever closer association with NATO and the EU should not be ruled out.”(20) “Ever closer association” with the EU is not membership, as Turkey, waiting for many decades despite being a member of NATO since 1952, has been forced to experience, and in 2000, US President Clinton responded to Russian President Putin’s suggestion that Russia might join NATO by declining with the words “you’re too big”. In any case, in an article for Foreign Affairs magazine in autumn 1997,(21) Brzezinski proposed that in the 21st century, Russia’s future should be as merely a loose confederation consisting of three states: European Russia, Siberia and a Far Eastern Republic; these states, he claimed, “would find it easier to cultivate closer economic ties with their neighbours”. His geostrategic allies at The Economist had already forecast in late 1992 that China and a mysterious “Muslim entity” would be likely, sometime before 2050, to pounce from the south and east and seize Siberia and any such ‘Far Eastern Republic’. Russia’s refusal to accommodate western, transatlanticist wishes, Brzezinski wrote, “would be tantamount to the rejection of Europe in favour of a solitary Eurasian identity and existence”: “the defining moment for Russia’s relationship to Europe [that is, a US-controlled Europe! – TB] is still some time off [that was 1997; in 2022, the ‘moment’ appears to have arrived – TB] – ‘defining’ in the sense that Ukraine’s choice in favour of Europe will bring to a head Russia’s decision regarding the next phase of its [Russia’s] history: either to be a part of Europe as well or to become a Eurasian outcast, neither truly of Europe nor Asia and mired in its [US-UK-fostered] ‘near aboard’ conflicts”….for Russia the dilemma of the one alternative is no longer a matter of making a geopolitical choice but of facing up to the imperatives of survival.”(22)

Brzezinski’s American rival in geopolitics but ally in American imperialism, geopolitician Samuel P. Huntington (see pic, below left), the author of the controversial book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), another American who was close to The Economist, saw little hope of agreement with post-Soviet Russia and wrote that:

“The conflict between liberal democracy and Marxism-Leninism was between ideologies which, despite their major differences, ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equality, and prosperity. [!!!] A traditional, authoritarian, nationalist Russia could have quite different goals. A western democrat could carry on an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would be virtually impossible for him to do that with a Russian traditionalist. If, as the Russians stop behaving like Marxists, they reject liberal democracy and start behaving like Russians but not like westerners, the relations between Russia and the West could again become distant and conflictual.”(23) [emphasis TB]

When it had suited them of course, the British elite had been very content to have a “traditional, authoritarian, nationalist Russia” as their ally during the First World War just as they were very content to have “Soviet Marxist” Russia as their ally in the Second World War, although it is true that the first period of allyship lasted only 10 years (1907-1917) and the second only 5 years (1941-1946).(24)

For Brzezinski, there was no sense in which Russia could be a ‘bridge culture’ between East and West; it either had to be in the US-controlled ‘transatlanticist Europe’, as he called it – and by ‘Russia’, he meant essentially European Russia west of the Urals – or it had to be in Asia i.e., with China. The goal set out by Brzezinski and The Economist’s Brian Beedham in the 1990s  – of forcing Russia away from Europe, and towards China, and using Ukraine to do so, with the eventual aim of getting China to attack Russia and amputate much of it, has been a long-term aim of western geostrategy for about three decades now. The appearance on the scene of Xi Jinping and his pan-Eurasian “Belt and Road” plans (2013) might seem to go against this goal, because Russia and China are closer today than they’ve ever been, but we should recall that something like this situation has occurred before – when Britain chose to make its 100 year old enemy (Russia) into its ally – in order to destroy it in a war. By pushing Russia and China together, as they have done since 2004, the western elites can set up yet another global dualism – a struggle between what they like to call ‘democracy vs autocracy’, the ‘liberal, rules-based order’ vs the ‘system of anarchy and barbarism’.

Unless the Taiwan issue causes a major war in the near future between China and the West, eventually, the western elites will seek to persuade China to betray Russia and turn on it. In the early 70s the West did something similar, when Nixon and Kissinger chose to mend fences with Communist China, which had fallen out with its former Communist ally, the USSR, even to the point of armed conflict in 1969. Today, with the current war in Ukraine, the West has begun to suggest to China that it will suffer sanctions if it remains linked to Russia. The hope here in London and Washington is that China will be ‘encouraged’ to turn against Russia, and then, as The Economist predicted in 1992, Russia might well lose its vast Siberian territories with all their precious minerals, rare earths, oil and gas, and European Russia, reduced back to the size of the Muscovy rump state of the first Czar, Ivan IV (the Terrible) in the 16th century, can then be captured by ‘transatlanticist Europe’.(25) In terms of George Orwell’s world picture in his novel 1984 of three competing power blocs and their respective allies: ‘Eurasia’ (Russia) will be overwhelmed by Eastasia (China), which will then face off against Oceania (US-UK-Europe). Just as in the two world wars of the 20th century, the middle term (Central Europe: Germany and Austria-Hungary) is destroyed, leaving the two poles of East and West to face each other in a divided world. It is this grim dualist scenario that the elites of the West are evidently seeking to bring about by undermining and destroying Russia, and since at least 2004 (the Orange Revolution) they have been preparing Ukraine as a battering ram to do it. First, they will seek to compass the destruction of Russia and then, if that is successful, and no doubt with the eventual assistance of India, Japan, S. Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and the AUKUS countries,(26) they will move on China and, like Russia, aim to break it up too.(27)

For a detailed discussion of how the West has systematically sought to use Ukraine, in line with Brzezinski’s thinking, to bring down Russia, see Iain Davis’ excellent four-part article series: Ukraine War! What Is It Good For?(28) which studies the historical background, the nationalist background, the Nazi background and the globalist background, and see also the two films about Russia and Ukraine made by US film director Oliver Stone, both available online: Ukraine on Fire and Ukraine Revealed.(29)

In January this year came the failure of an attempted coup in Kazakhstan on Russia’s south Central Asian border,  which was put down with the help of troops from Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, which, with Kazakhstan, are fellow members of the Eurasian Economic Union (2015) and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (1992). Perhaps we shall discover in a few years’ time that the January coup attempt was made with support from the West, another failed American attempt to open a bridgehead in ‘the Heartland’ against Russia. Certainly, in early 2019 the RAND think tank (which is financed by the Pentagon) published a plan for a series of offensives against Russia; it was titled Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground :

“We examine a range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad. The steps we examine would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose, although they might contribute to both. Rather, these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, leading Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, and causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically or causing the regime to lose domestic and/or international prestige and influence.”

The RAND report went on to list 6 “geopolitical measures” that the US could take to weaken Russia; 4 of them have already been implemented in the last two years: 1. Provide lethal aid to Ukraine 2. Increase support to the Syrian rebels 3. Promote regime change in Belarus 4. Exploit tensions in the south Caucasus 5. Reduce Russian influence in Central Asia 6. Challenge Russian presence in Moldova.(30)

Zelensky and Arestovych

With the election of the comic actor Volodymyr Zelensky (73% of the vote, pic below) as Ukraine President in 2019, a man backed by the billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who has also funded Far Right ultranationalist groups such as Right Sector, Aidar Battalion and also, allegedly, the notorious  neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, the tense situation in Donbass and between Russia and Ukraine only got worse.(31) Zelensky had promised the electorate he would ease the situation in the Donbass, but he was soon forced to realise that the ultranationalist forces that were part of the Ukrainian armed forces and security State would not allow him to do that, and he had to back down and cooperate with them. Nor did he improve the language rights situation for Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine.

One of Zelensky’s very close advisors in the Ukrainian government, Oleksiy Arestovych (see pic. below), a man who is on record as expressing (in 2019) as saying that he was ready for “havoc” in Ukraine if the eventual result would be NATO membership, was asked in 2019 if the war then going on in the Donbass would soon end if Ukraine made a formal application to join NATO, and he replied: “No, we can’t talk about….ending the war here; on the contrary, it will most likely push Russia to [launch] a large-scale military operation against Ukraine, because they’ll have to degrade us in terms of infrastructure and turn everything here into ruined territory so that NATO would be reluctant to accept us.” Interviewer: “You mean that Russia will confront NATO directly?” Arestovych: “No, not NATO. They will have to do this before we join NATO, so that NATO are not interested in us as a ruined territory. With a probability of 99.9% our price for joining NATO is a full-scale war with Russia. And if we do not join NATO, then absorption by Russia within 10-12 years. That’s the whole dilemma in which we find ourselves.” Interviewer: “If you weigh up the options, which is better in this case?” Arestovych: “Of course, a major war with Russia and a transition to NATO as a result of the victory over Russia.” Interviewer: “And what is a “major war” with Russia?” Arestovych then describes (in 2019!) almost all the major moves that have been happening in the conflict that began on 24 February 2022 and then says: “That is what a major war is [i.e. would look like] and the probability of it is 99.9%.” Interviewer: “When?” Arestovych: “After 2020, the most critical years are 2021 and 2022, then 2024-2026 and 2028-2030 will be critical. Maybe even three wars with Russia.” Interviewer: “How can Ukraine get a MAP [membership application plan] with NATO, and not get stuck in a full-scale war with Russia?” Arestovych: “No way, well, except that they [the West] will hit Russia with means that will make it clear that they are not welcome here….sanctions, embargoes….They can make it so that power in Russia will change…..Liberals can come and Russia will again be a good country [i.e. as in the Yeltsin years ! – TB]… Interviewer: Is the option of a peaceful settlement being considered? Arestovych: “No, it won’t happen.” However, Arestovych didn’t think that sanctions would be effective against Russia and pointed to their failure against Iran over 40 years. The only way forward for Ukraine, he said, was war with Russia, and after it would come the reward: NATO membership. He goes on to say: “There is no chance of neutrality in Ukraine. One way or another, we will drift into one or another supranational military alliance. Only, it will be either the “Taiga Union” [Eurasian Union] or NATO. We were in “Taiga” [the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States] and I personally don’t want to. We haven’t been in NATO [so] let’s try [it]. We will definitely not maintain neutrality. This means that the main task is to join NATO, and no social and economic sacrifices are such in the face of this task [emphasis – TB], even if the US dollar goes to 250….the price of joining NATO is likely to be a war with Russia or a sequence of such conflicts. In this conflict we will be very actively supported by the West, – with weapons, assistance, equipment, new sanctions against Russia and the quite possible introduction of a NATO contingent, a no-fly zone. We won’t lose, and that’s good.”(32)

Arestovych comes across as a thoroughly cynical and Machiavellian character who was and is prepared to see his country and people devastated in order to achieve the one goal he thinks necessary to secure its future – NATO membership – even though other goals would be possible for Ukraine, such as what has been called ‘the Finnish solution’. Finland has a very long border with Russia, as does Ukraine, and it has never been a member of NATO. As such, even though it joined the EU, it has enjoyed good, if wary, relations both with the USSR and with the Russian Federation; like Switzerland, Finland maintains a very capable armed neutrality. It has long been, even before joining the EU, a prosperous, democratic country.

But Volodymyr Zelensky and Oleksiy Arestovych have shown no sign of wanting to adopt the Finnish solution for Ukraine. The actions and numerous staged video appearances of comic actor President Zelensky outside at night in Kiev (all too obviously in front of a green screen)  and on video screens in numerous foreign parliaments have so far seemed to go along with the line advanced in Arestovych’s 2019 interview. In 2019 and still today, Arestovych has felt so confident because he knew Ukraine would have the will of western power circles behind it, and so it has turned out. The elites of the West have, on the whole, rallied behind Zelensky and Ukraine as they did behind COVID-19 lockdowns, restrictions and anti-COVID-19 injections – with almost total uniformity. And the response of the western media controlled by those same elites has been as uniform and conformist as it has been over COVID-19.

The Motive of National Survival

Vladimir Putin, for his part, seems prepared to devastate parts of eastern Ukraine (while western Ukraine – a very large region – has so far been mostly untouched by the war) in order to achieve his aims, which he sees ultimately as the survival of the Russian people and the Russian state. It is not so much the Soviet Empire that Putin wants to resurrect as the greatness of the Russian State, which he feels reflects the greatness of the Russian people, and he wants that greatness to be recognised in the world. The Russians are a great people with a great culture, but they, like the Ukrainians, have very little political, and close to zero democratic  experience: only some 30 years, since the end of the USSR.  When faced with the question of national survival, however, most countries have been prepared to flout international law. The USA, for example, did so, in 2003 in invading Iraq, which it spuriously claimed had weapons of mass destruction, and arguably, in 2001, in invading Afghanistan, where, on the basis of all-too fallible evidence, that unhappy country was invaded by the US-led NATO and subjected to 20 years of war and occupation. Afghanistan is thousands of miles away from the USA, whereas Ukraine shares with Russia a border 1,282 miles long. If NATO bases and missiles were installed in Ukraine, they would indeed pose an existential threat to Russia in the event of a war, which is how the USSR saw American missiles in Turkey before the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. With Ukraine in NATO, the distance to Moscow from a NATO missile base in northern Ukraine would be less than the distance from London to Edinburgh, and the missile, if not shot down, would arrive in Moscow in five minutes or less. To preclude a similar such scenario in the western hemisphere, President Kennedy in 1962 threatened the Soviets with nuclear war. They backed down and withdrew their missiles from Cuba, having obtained secret American guarantees that US missiles in Turkey would also be removed. On that occasion, Kennedy was prepared to risk world annihilation; the Russians saved the world from that fate by backing down and doing a deal.

The Struggle for the Seed of Russian Culture

The war in Ukraine is not a simple story of a bully and an underdog, ‘the Dragon Putin and his barbaric Russian hordes vs St. George Zelensky and his noble suffering Ukrainians’ as those under the spell of the mainstream media might be led to think – as they were in 1914 (Serbia/Belgium) and 1939 (Poland) – nor is it a mere distraction from Covid or just the next phase en route to Klaus Schwab’s ‘Great Reset’ dystopia, as many in the anti-Establishment scene think. Some of them see the war in Ukraine as a symptom of a major historical shift in the world order, as the declining American empire seeks to fend off a Russian and Chinese effort to overturn the US-led ‘New World Order’; others see Russia and China as just as bad and as technocratically tyrannical as the West, as we saw during the COVID pandemic. The real war is waged by technocratic elites against all of humanity, they argue, and the Russia-Ukraine War is merely being used by those elites to further their agenda:

“….it is a war between Technocracy and the rest of the world. As the nation state model of government dissolves, it will be replaced by leaders of the corporate world, central bank oligarchs and private financial institutions. During the breakdown of the global supply chain, the financial and currency systems will also break down, allowing central banks emergency powers to replace currencies with a system of digital currencies. Digital currencies require digital identity. Digital identity will enable Universal Basic Income and rationing of all necessities of life. Governments will bow, Technocracy will take over and the Great Reset will be complete.”(33)

However, this war has its own genesis, context and background, and it happens to coincide with the larger global crisis of the 21st century, through which Messrs Schwab, Gates, Musk, Fink & Co. are seeking to take us all into their technocratic, AI-driven One World Order of the “4th Post-Industrial Revolution”. If there is an underdog in this fight, with its back against the wall, it is actually Russia, or rather, Russia is the bear being baited by the dogs of the West who are determined to force the Russian bear to comply with the dictates of  the elites of the Anglosphere and with the intended world government, led by them, which they regard as desirable and inevitable. Ukraine has been used by the West over the past 20 years as the stick to poke the Russian bear, and in his desperate fury, the bear has now lashed out at his brother and sister Slavic nation which he recognises – too late? – has been prepared by the West for aggressive use against him, rather like Japan was used against Russia by the West in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Without the support of the West, it is very likely that Japan would not have triumphed against Russia. On that occasion, Russia was also partly to blame for having expanded imperialistically into northeastern China, where it ran into the ambitions of the equally greedy and imperialistic Japanese. In this early 21st century, however, before 2004 Russia was not seeking to expand its territory. It was the West, in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, that sought to prepare Ukraine as its weapon against Russia. The hapless Ukrainian people, with little experience of democracy, have been manoeuvred by unscrupulous forces at home and abroad into electing a series of corrupt, oligarch-driven governments who have been subject to western pressure and bribes (not least from Joe Biden and his son Hunter) and who have placed their population at great risk, ready to sacrifice many of them to win NATO membership, the goal of all the pro-western Presidents since 2004: Yushchenko (2005-2010), Turchynov (2014), Poroshenko (2014-2019), and Zelensky (2019 -)

The esoteric aspect of this conflict is that it is the next phase in what Rudolf Steiner called “the struggle for the kernel of Russian culture between the Anglo-American plutocrats and the people of Central Europe”. “The war”, he said, “will… go on in some form or other until the German and Slavic cultures have together united in the common goal of freeing people from the yoke of the West.” This will require us, he said, “to see through and reveal the lies with which the West has to operate if it is to succeed,” one of which is the pretence to champion revolutionary impulses of ‘freedom’ while actually seeking to impose world domination through capitalist methods. Otherwise, he said, if people fail to resist and do not reveal those lies, “they will yield control of the world to an occult group within the Anglo-American world until, through the shedding of blood in the future, the true spiritual goal of the earth will be saved by those in the subjugated German-Slavic region.”(34)[emphasis – RS]

Today, a prime symptom of this ongoing struggle has been the Nordstream II gas pipeline from Russia across the Baltic Sea directly to Germany. Through this pipeline, the relationship between Germany and Russia would have been expanded and developed, and not only in economic terms. But through the West’s response to the war in Ukraine, the German leadership have been prevailed upon to shelve the controversial pipeline, which several US Presidents have been determined to see cancelled. Instead of cheap Russian gas for Germany and the EU, more expansive American gas will now be transported all the way across the Atlantic Ocean by an endless stream of tankers.  This kind of thing has long been the Anglo-American goal: to minimise and terminate as far as possible connections between Russia and Central Europe, in order that the Anglo-American West can take control of Russia and the Slavic East.

The nightmare of a global Technocracy or nuclear annihilation will become true unless a different model of a future society is advanced and becomes widely understood, one that was rejected in Central Europe a hundred years ago because too many people were mesmerised by the power of the state at that time. Even Rudolf Steiner, the proclaimer of that model, known as social threefolding, said a hundred years ago in 1922 that the historical moment for the social threefolding movement, which he had initiated in 1917 and had been publicly proclaiming since 1919, had passed and that it would have to wait another hundred years for another opportunity until the time was again propitious for it. The time for it is now not only propitious but critical.(35)

Notes  
1. They committed some 190,000 troops to the invasion and were supported by 34,000 troops from the People’s Republics of Lugansk and Donetsk. Ukraine’s armed forces numbered 209,000 regular troops and 600,000 reservists, 102,000 paramilitary troops and 20,000 foreign volunteers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#Foreign_military_involvement
2. See Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac, Tournament of Shadows – The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Asia (2001), chapter 5.
3. See Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War, (2011) chaps. 1 and 4.
4. Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Untruthfulness Vol. 1, Collected Works GA 173, lecture of 4 Dec. 1916.
5. See J. Macgregor and Gerry Docherty, Prolonging the Agony (2017) chaps. 30 and 31.
6. See Antony. C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974).
7. See Z. Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard  (1997). He envisaged Russia split into three parts: European Russia, Siberia and a Far Eastern Republic. Ukrainian ultranationalist leaders such as Yehven Karas of the C14 group fantasise about Russia being broken into 5 parts. The whole book can be read here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210812092815/https:/www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/36/36669B7894E857AC4F3445EA646BFFE1_Zbigniew_Brzezinski_-_The_Grand_ChessBoard.doc.pdf
8. See R. Steiner lecture of 28.11.1914 GA 157.
9. Andreas Bracher (ed.) Kampf um den Russischen Kulturkeim [The Struggle for the Seed of Russian Culture] (2014).
10. As in the Anglican ‘High Church’ stream of the Church of England. Harrison’s lectures were republished with a lengthy and very helpful introduction by Christopher Bamford in 1993 by Lindisfarne Press under the title : The Transcendental Universe.
11. Today, the alleged ‘threat’ of the Russia-China axis is being used to justify ever tighter relations between the “Five Eyes” English-speaking countries: US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
12. See Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (1949) p. 33f.
13. See John E. Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (1974) and W.T. Stead (ed.) The Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes (1902).
14. The Grand Chessboard, p.86.
15. See, for example, Brzezinski on Ukraine: The Grand Chessboard, pp. 84-85, 92, 104, 113-114,121-122.
16. See The Grand Chessboard, pp 84, 121.
17. The Grand Chessboard, p.92.
18. The Grand Chessboard, p.118.
19. The Grand Chessboard, p.120.
20. The Grand Chessboard, p.120.
21. Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 1997, Vol. 76, No. 5.
22. The Grand Chessboard, p.122.
23. Quoted in T. Boardman, Mapping the Millennium – Behind the Plans of the New World Order (1998 and 2013), pp. 139-140.
24. 1907: Anglo-Russia Entente signed; 1917 overthrow of the Czar. 1941 Hitler invaded the USSR; 1946 Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in the USA.
25. The Economist, double issue 26 Dec. 1992 – 8 Jan 1993.
26. AUKUS defence treaty August 2021: Australia, UK and US.  New Zealand and Canada will no doubt join at a later date, thus completing and formalising the defence and intelligence structure of the “5 Eyes” – Orwell’s “Oceania”.
27. A detailed, June 2005 article “How we would fight China” in leading American East Coast Establishment monthly ‘The Atlantic’ by Neocon foreign policy specialist Robert Kaplan: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/06/how-we-would-fight-china/303959/
28. https://in-this-together.com/ukraine-war-part-1/
29. E.g.: https://www.bitchute.com/video/vLjA2LucDkuI/  and:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7uquXmOMIg
30.https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR3000/RR3063/RAND_RR3063.pdf
31. https://pete843.substack.com/p/zelensky-and-kolomoisky?s=r   and:
https://festival-fumetti.com/host-https-www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/1/who-are-the-azov-regiment
32. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8
33. https://www.technocracy.news/war-in-ukraine-is-the-wefs-doorway-to-global-technocracy/
34. Andreas Bracher (ed.), Kampf um den russischen Kulturkeim (2014) p. 344.
35. See R. Steiner, Towards Social Renewal (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999), R. Steiner, The Social Future (Anthroposophic Press 1972) and Johannes Rohen, Functional Threefoldness: In the Human Organism and Human Society (2011)

In the [Greco-Roman] epoch the Christ Impulse was born out of the forces of death for the salvation of mankind.  …. in [our current] epoch mankind is led by a strange paradox to a renewed experience of the Mystery of Golgotha through the forces of evil.

R. Steiner 25.10.1918

Rudolf Steiner often said during the First World War that never in human history had public lies been as numerous as they were in those days. In the winter of 1916-1917 he gave a course of 25 lectures in Dornach, Switzerland titled Thoughts on Contemporary Issues: The Karma of Untruthfulness, one of the important themes of which was to analyse the mendaciousness and destructiveness of propaganda and public statements at that time. Since the end of that war, the mendaciousness and destructiveness of propaganda and public statements have increased immeasurably. At the time of writing this article, we are still enmeshed in another web of lies surrounding Coronavirus and the “vaccines” designed to “defeat” this virus. The growing resistance around the world to this web of lies is hardly mentioned in the mainstream media of the “developed countries”, which continue to censor news that is contrary to the government’s narrative on COVID.¹

Health or ‘hellth’?

Just as 9/11 (often dubbed the Pearl Harbor event of the 21st century, not least by President George W. Bush himself) and the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 had actually little to do with Osama Bin Laden and everything to do with the far-reaching geopolitical aims of the Neoconservative clique that controlled the regime of George Bush², a regime which, like that of Joe Biden, had come to power in very conflicted and dubious electoral circumstances, with accusations of fraud and corruption, so the “Coronavirus pandemic” has nothing to do with health and everything to do with hellth. What do I mean by that stark assertion?

We could look first at remarks in an interview³ released on 27 April 2021 on the Rumble Internet platform by Mike Yeadon, former chief scientist and vice-president at the allergy and respiratory medical research division of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer:  “I believe [the COVID injections] are going to be used to damage your health and possibly kill you. Seriously. I can see no sensible interpretation other than a serious attempt at mass depopulation…This [injection campaign] will provide the tools to do it and plausible deniability because they’ll create another story about some sort of biological threat and you’ll line up and get your top-up vaccines and, in a few months, or a year or so later you’ll die of some, you know, peculiar explicable syndrome and they won’t …associate it with the top-up vaccines.” Yeadon went on to tell viewers that “everything your government has told you about this virus, everything you need to do to stay safe, is a lie.” “This system is being put in place using lies, and it’s been put in place for some purpose, and I believe that purpose is complete totalitarian control and I think the purpose of that is going to be mass depopulation,” said Yeadon [emphasis – TB]. “I can’t think of a single benign interpretation for the simple creation of these top-up vaccines, let alone the lies that surround them, [I’m] absolutely terrified that the combination of vaccine passports and top-up vaccines is going to lead to mass depopulation. Deliberate execution potentially of billions of people.” Yeadon’s view is that within a few years of having taken the injections, many of those who have had them will be dead. Such scenarios are very hard for many people to even contemplate but Yeadon’s credentials surely give him an informed voice.

Why would billions need to be thus ‘disappeared’? The answer to that question lies in the looming scenario of the 21st century: the interface between the COVID-19 crisis, the global warming thesis and its accompanying environmental ‘panic’ (as promoted by Extinction Rebellion et al), and the “4th Post-industrial Revolution” notions of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF), which are allied to the UN’s Agenda 2030 and its programme of 17 “Sustainable Goals”⁴. In short, the idea goes that all the millions of workers who were needed in the Industrial Revolution phase of modern development and all the millions of peasants who have been working the land these 200 years will no longer be needed because the work will be done in cities and on the land by machines, directed by artificial intelligence (AI).

Moreover, reducing the world’s population – to perhaps 2 billion or less would presumably mean that “the Planet” would be saved from the depredations visited upon it by an excessively large human population that has been causing destructive “climate change”. The inhumanity of suggesting that, for economic reasons, humanity and the planet would be better off without hundreds of millions of people is not, of course, new. In essence, the ‘scarcity of resources’-based reasoning employed by the WEF and the UN differs little from that of Thomas Malthus in the late 18th century,⁵  who maintained that food resources would not keep pace with the growth of population. Following him, others argued that the unworthy poor should therefore be thinned out and reduced by not passing legislation or instituting other measures designed to support or ease their existence. Such inhuman, rationalist and materialist notions resulted in, amongst other things, the Irish Potato Famine of 1844 when the economic orthodoxy of the day, influenced by Malthusian notions, opposed aiding the starving Irish people.

Needless to say, Mike Yeadon, despite his previous career at Pfizer, one of the companies now making the ‘anti-COVID’ injections, has been shut out by the mainstream media. He has also been pilloried by Wikipedia and the so-called “factchecking” organisations (e.g. Snopes, Fullfact et al) that invariably take the side of the Establishment on numerous contentious issues. On 5 May 2021 Snopes posted: “As no additional doses are recommended at this time, Yeadon is pushing hypothetical conspiracy theories regarding ‘top-up’ vaccines that have yet to pan out.” But since May, governments around the world have already been making plans for future booster shots to be administered at 5-6 monthly intervals, and in Israel, which has been at the forefront of the injection campaign and where 2.5 million of the Israeli population of 8 or 9 million have already had the third shot, double jabbed people are already regarded by the government as “unvaccinated”; only people who have had a third shot now qualify as properly “vaccinated”. The man whom the Israeli media call “the virus Czar”, Prof. Salman Zarka, stated in August that “this is our life from now on, in waves… given that the virus is here and will continue to be here, we also need to prepare for a 4th injection … .”⁶

The Four Counterforces

When I say that the Coronavirus pandemic has more to do with ‘hellth’ than health, I mean that it has everything to do with the goals of the spiritual counterforces (traditionally called the forces of hell) arrayed against humanity and more specifically, against the human ‘I’ (the essential human self, the spiritual kernel of our being) and the attempt of those counterforces, in this 21st Christian century, to realise these goals. Humanity has been forced to undergo this latest mendacious fraud, this global psyop (psychological operation), precisely because it failed to see through the momentous event of 20 years ago, the titanic and spectacular event which ushered in both the 21st Christian century and the third Christian millennium – the event of 9/11 and the numerous lies and manipulations that surrounded that event and the Establishment narrative about it that has been maintained for 20 years. Humanity also failed, for the most part, to see through the two other psyops that have occurred since 9/11 – the financial crash of 2008/09, and the more recent psyop of “global warming” (aka “climate change”).

Swallowing the media lies about these psyops, it has unwittingly prepared itself to be fooled by the COVID psyop also. The goals of this latest and greatest psyop seem to this writer to be the perversion, seduction, and enslavement of the human being and the annihilation of a considerable portion of the global human population, who are regarded by the counterforces as unnecessary and useless life. What does spiritual science say these counterforces are? And what is their relation to the goals of the perversion, seduction, enslavement and annihilation of the human being?

Before discussing this, I should remind readers that we are living through an absolutely momentous time – a time in which the spiritual counterforces rise up in their power from what Steiner described as the 9 subterranean layers of the earth⁷, precisely in this 21st Christian century, in order to attempt to divert humanity from its proper goals⁸  in what he calls this “Age of the Consciousness Soul”  by ensuring those goals are not reached and instead, destroying a great portion of humanity and capturing the rest for the purposes of the counterforces and the elites that serve them. Steiner maintained that humanity lives through successive epochs of development, over great periods of time. According to him we are living through the 5th Post-Atlantean Epoch (that he dates as lasting from 1413-3573)⁹, and the task of humanity in this epoch, is to comprehend the relation of good and evil, 5 being the number of that indicates the challenge of evil in Steiner’s view (or rather, we could perhaps say, the number of the human choice between good and evil)¹⁰. It is well known, for instance, that the inverted pentacle is used in black magic rituals, whereas the upright pentacle (see Leonardo’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ for example) is a sign and right orientation for the moral forces at work in the human being. We can place our own human forces of thinking, our capacity to think for ourselves, which was secured in the previous 4th epoch (747 BC-1413, the Greco-Roman/mediaeval epoch) – into the service of the Good. This ‘doing the Good’ is the leitmotif of our epoch, and it cannot be done without passing through “the valley of the shadow of death”, as it were – experiencing and above all, understanding both the forces of Evil and those of Good. In the following 6th epoch, from the 4th millennium (the Age of Aquarius beginning in the year 3573), assuming we have achieved the goals of the 5th epoch, as we did those of the 4th epoch¹¹, we shall progressively be able to transmute the forces of Evil into those of Good through a new form of social life and enhanced feeling which, according to Steiner, the reincarnated Mani (the teacher of the Manichaean path, that of the transformation of evil) will show us. That will be an epoch not so much of intensified personal thinking (thinking in the service of the Good) as of intensified and refined social feeling and community life. But first, we must pass through the eye of the needle in this 5thepoch, and in this 21st century, when the Christ Being, the global I of ‘christened’ humanity can be born in the consciousness of a great many of us, as the I in a person’s individual biography is fully born in their 21st year, when we become adult and able to take responsibility in the world.

            Steiner described in various lectures and writings how human clairvoyance was necessarily lost as humanity learned to think for itself; this happened during the 4th Epoch , the epoch of the Intellectual-Mind Soul.¹² In the West, this was essentially the period of the Greco-Roman cultures and their ongoing influence in mediaeval Europe. As the human race descended deeper and deeper out of the spiritual world into earth existence, a particularly dark phase of that descent began c.3000 BC and ended around 1900 AD; however, judging by human experience since 1900, we could perhaps say that that very dark phase has not quite ended yet! In lectures in 1919 Steiner described how c.3000 BC the being known to us in the West as Lucifer incarnated into a human body in China, and in the same lectures he spoke of how the being Ahriman (roughly commensurate with the being known in the West as Satan) would incarnate, also into a human body at the very beginning of the third millennium “in the West”¹³ (there are strong reasons for thinking this will be in the USA, although Steiner did not specify this).¹⁴ Between their two incarnations, which occur only once in history, came the Incarnation of Christ in Jesus at the Baptism in the River Jordan in Israel.

Some 2000 years ago, the early Christian Church, like the rest of humanity, had already largely lost natural clairvoyant insight because of the gradual unfolding across Eurasia of personal human thinking capacity, which had increasingly been directed to the material world. The Church therefore also lost real spiritual insight into the nature of the spiritual worlds ‘above’ (‘heaven’) and those ‘below’ (‘hell’). Real understanding of the nine hierarchies of beings that inhabit these two regions was thus lost to the Church.

            Anthroposophy seeks to restore to humanity real knowledge of the beings of the spiritual worlds, celestial and infernal. It expands on the teachings of the 5^th century writer known as Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, with regard to nine celestial dimensions of beings grouped in three hierarchies, by speaking of  nine hierarchies of the underworld,¹⁵ and in addition, it identifies four main beings that lead the counterforces working against human development. In saying that, we immediately meet a paradox, because we need to recognise that without the resistance posed to our development by these counterforces, there would be no human freedom possible and therefore, ultimately no possibility for love either. No great drama, especially the great drama of the story of mankind, is possible without the challenge from forces of darkness within us. An audience would fall asleep or else be bored stiff in a drama without such a challenge. Imagine a ‘drama’ about a family in which everyone did as they were told by the parents or grandparents and lived nothing but happy lives… .

            Casting light on the beings who oppose human freedom (while paradoxically also making it possible), and so that we may realise what we are up against, Anthroposophy speaks of four beings who lead the hosts of the spiritual counterforces: Lucifer, Ahriman, the Asuras (Steiner always referred to these as plural, not singular) and Sorath (whom Steiner also calls the Sun Demon). During this 5th epoch, which is so concerned with the theme of the Mystery of Good and Evil, we would do well to learn to familiarise ourselves with these four beings and their impulses and recognise their signatures in human affairs. They are especially evident right now, in our time, as humanity is crossing from the 2nd to the 3rd millennia, because, as mentioned above, Steiner indicated that Ahriman is approaching ‘his’ incarnation, and indeed, working from Steiner’s indications, I have concluded that Ahriman’s incarnation is most likely already underway, probably having begun in May 2000, but that ‘his’ human vehicle has not yet ‘emerged’ on the stage of human affairs; if this view is correct, then in May this year the human vehicle of Ahriman   became 21 years old.¹⁶The other three beings have been working in their various ways to assist this colossal phenomenon that has been prepared for almost 1000 years since –- in my view – the Norman Conquest of England, which led eventually, some 700 years later, to the creation of the United States of America in 1776. The USA may well provide the cultural stage for the incarnation of Ahriman, as China provided for Lucifer and Israel provided for Christ in Jesus.

            The four beings attack the four main aspects of the human entelechy: human thinking, human feeling, human willing and the human I. Each of the four focuses on one of the four aspects of that entelechy: Lucifer seeks to seduce human feeling, which is rooted in the human astral body; Ahriman (Satan) seeks to enslave human thinking in materialism; our thinking is rooted in the human etheric body. The Asuras seek to negate human willing by destroying the human physical body, the vehicle of human will in the material world, while Sorath seeks to pervert, or one could also say invert the human I itself, i.e. turn it into its opposite. The human I is the sun within the human entelechy; its perversion or inversion would eclipse that sun and turn it into a ‘black sun’, a bestial human being, and indeed Steiner identifies the worst of Sorath with the power of black magic. So the following four demonic gestures result: seduction (Lucifer), enslavement (Ahriman), annihilation (Asuras), and perversion (Sorath).

            When the human physical body is destroyed, the human spirit cannot act, cannot will, in the material world, unless it is able somehow to act across the threshold after death, and in most cases seeking to influence incarnated human beings in this way, through channelling for example, would not be desirable. The Asuras also destroy the human will and body through physical addiction and physical infection, including sexual diseases. When Ahriman tries to enslave human thinking, ‘he’ does so through arid materialism and the forces of contraction and coldness, in rational logic, for example. ‘He’ seeks to constrain human thinking within the limits of the five senses, a thinking that recognises no spiritual world or even imagination and clips the wings of the human spirit. By contrast, the word ‘seduction’ means to ‘lead away’ from, ‘lead astray’ or ‘lead apart’ from. Lucifer attempts to lead human feelings away from what is truly genuine, sound, balanced and caring for others, to lead us away in fact from earthly realities and obligations altogether and focus instead on our own self-centred personal affairs, our subjective imaginations and fantasies and through these, to lead us into ‘his’ luciferic sphere¹⁷. We have all met people who are always dreaming, hotheads, fantasists, people who do not seem to have their feet on the ground; they are somehow ‘off-planet’, living in a world of their own. Lucifer either has these people under his will or is drawing them towards him.

Jeffery Epstein and 9/11

Let us consider two other phenomena of recent times, in which the four counterforce beings were at work: first, the Jeffrey Epstein case. Epstein (1953-2019) was a Jewish-American financier, convicted sex offender and so-called philanthropist, who was actually more of a philanderer, because he created a set-up in which wealthy and important people, especially Americans, were blackmailed through sex with minors, and through this, he passed on information to various people including intelligence agencies.

He is said to have died under mysterious circumstances in jail, supposedly suicide, but he was most likely murdered, or even possibly smuggled alive out of the country. Epstein’s life revolved around shady financial dealings, sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, secret intelligence and blackmail. He was also a man with an eye for beautiful women, properties and objects, and lived a fantasy lifestyle, notably on his Caribbean island paradise to which he would often fly famous people in his private jet and where he kept a number of young women to be used for sexual favours for himself and his guests and friends. Beauty and seduction, enslavement to material pleasures, for which he applied his considerable intelligence and knowledge of finance and secret operations; lust and sexual depravity; the perversion of young girls; the use of his personal charm and social skills to infiltrate, entrap and exploit others, from young girls to politicians and academic institutions – all of the gestures of the four beings of the counterforces can be seen to have been operative in this man’s life.

            9/11 provides an even clearer example. Here the Asuras come into their own, in the sheer, sudden, ruthless physical destructiveness of the event. But the attack was very complex, involving many detailed, sophisticated technological systems, and not only the endless mendacity about the causes and consequences of it, but financial, political and media manipulations of a ‘high’ order, so Ahriman, the spirit of lies and devious thinking, and those that serve ‘him’, were also obviously heavily engaged. Lucifer’s fingerprints were also on the event in the sheer spectacle, the ‘artistry’ of it, which even the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen remarked on,¹⁸ attributing it specifically to Lucifer; the way in which so many people thought the 9/11 events resembled a Hollywood movie plot, and indeed a TV series (The Lone Gunman) featuring just such a plane attack on the World Trade Center (the kind of attack that President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice later said had been “unimaginable”) had been aired on US TV in the spring of 2001.¹⁹

Furthermore, the Hollywood blockbuster movie of 2001 was Pearl Harbor, a very sensuous movie made by producer Jerry Bruckheimer about the Japanese attack of 7 December 1941. The film was released in May 2001, so it was seen by millions worldwide in the months before 9/11. Comparisons with Pearl Harbor were also made many times after 9/11, by President Bush and other politicians and media people. The President wrote in his diary that same evening: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century took place today”, and Pearl Harbor had been specifically referred to exactly a year earlier in the document Rebuilding America’s Defenses – Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century produced by the neoconservative thinktank Project for a New American Century led by William Kristol, Robert Kagan and John Bolton: The amount of money and time needed, the report recognised, to create a new vision for American foreign policy in the new century was likely to be considerable, unless there were “some catastrophic event — like a new Pearl Harbor,” because, as Zbigniew Brzezisnki had written in The Grand Chessboard, his influential 1997 book, subtitled American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, “The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor” and “…the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of well-being.” Would the public have supported America’s engagement in World War II if they had been aware that their President Roosevelt had lied to them, knowing as he did that the Japanese attack was very far from a surprise – the US had had prior intelligence on its timing, hence the absence of aircraft carriers on the day of the attack which were normally based at Pearl Harbor – and that his Administration had actually goaded Japan into the attack by its stringent economic sanctions, including sanctions on oil supplies?²⁰  Only the month before, Roosevelt had won his second presidential election victory by promising to keep America out of the war (!) yet it is now well-known to historians that he had long wanted to involve the US in the war, precisely for reasons of ‘American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives’. Already in 1939 the leading US foreign policy thinktank The Council On Foreign Relations had launched the “War and Peace Studies” project, which was funded ($350,000) by the Rockefeller Foundation and from March 1942 was linked into the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Post-war Foreign Policy. The goal of Roosevelt and his elite backers was not just to defeat Germany and Japan but to create a post-war new world order that would be totally dominated by the economic interests of the USA. It was to defend and advance this new order that the US Department of Defense had begun construction of the Pentagon, still the world’s largest office building, in Washington DC on 11 September, 1941, exactly 60 years (to the day) before the Pentagon was also hit on 9/11. That was the consequence of Roosevelt’s lies in 1941, when he and his advisers had aimed to create an American new model world empire that would take over from and replace the British Empire. It was this new order, enabled by Roosevelt, that would start to come crashing down with the fall of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center 60 years after Pearl Harbor to be replaced by yet another New World Order. Today, 20 years further on from 9/11 and the lies of another US President (George W. Bush), we see in the Afghan debacle the consequences of that neo-imperial adventurism: disaster for the ordinary American and Afghan victims of the American grand chessboard players, and checkmate for the players themselves. That policy was informed and organised largely by Ahrimanic calculations and carried out with Asuric execution of those calculations in the tremendous violence visited upon one of the poorest countries in the world by the world’s greatest superpower: a pattern repeated in Vietnam, Iraq and Syria, and a policy wrapped up and decorated by the western media in all kinds of fine-sounding, rhetoric about human rights, democracy, women’s emancipation etc.

And behind that entire pattern and policy, which was driven forward with Ahrimanic computerised calculation, luciferic rhetoric and symbolism, and Asuric destructiveness was surely the ‘thinking’ or mindset of the two horned beast of the Apocalypse of St. John, the beast whose name is Sorath, the letters of which add up to the number 666.²¹ It is the aim of Sorath, the Counter-Sun being, to ensure that humanity remains at the level of the ‘lower ego’ (our ‘normal everyday sense of ourselves that is always on a journey, through life experience, of waking up to higher realities and transforming itself), the self-centred materialist concerned only for his physical pleasures and his physical survival. This is what underlies the ‘philosophy’ of western capitalism today as we see it portrayed in its advertising and in most of its entertainment industry. The Sorathic aim is to invert the human pentagram, the human being as he stands forming a pentagram with his head, two arms and two legs (three above, two below), and to turn the human pentagram on its head, so to speak, so that the head is stuck in the earth and the legs and feet are in the air. When Sorath achieves his aim, and he does so with some individual human beings, the human I is perverted and kept at a level hardly above an animal existence and cunning animal motivations. It is prevented from developing the higher nature that it can, prevented from developing the Consciousness Soul, the self-awareness of ourselves as autonomous spiritual beings whose thinking is dedicated to the Good, which Rudolf Steiner described as one of the main tasks of humanity in this epoch, the other being to penetrate the Mystery of Evil.²²

Gondishapur and Sorath, then and now

In their respective attacks on human thinking (Ahriman), feeling (Lucifer) and willing (the Asuras), these three spiritual counterforces assist Sorath’s activity, which, according to Steiner, strikes into human history with particular vehemence every 666 years, the last time being in 1998 (3 x 666), three years before 9/11. Steiner made clear that Sorath never incarnates into a human body but ‘he’ influences certain human beings and not only for one year, e.g. in 1998. My own observations of contemporary history as well as those of the 7th and 14th centuries have led me to conclude that every 666 years, Sorath intervenes for a period, or window, of  about 50 years, during which the 666th year functions as the central axis or fulcrum, like the centrepoint of a stone thrown into a pond produces a series of ripples, like time raying out to past and future around an event. Hence the year 666 in the centre of window of 641-691; the year 1332 in the window of 1307-1357; and the year 1998 in the window of 1973-2023.

Sorath’s first intervention in the Christian era, around the year 666 in the window 641-691, came, according to Steiner, in connection with the Academy of Gondishapur²³, the ruins of which lie in modern SW Iran, near the border with Iraq, in the region where Iraq and Iran fought their 8-year war in 1980-88. That ancient academy was an intellectual hothouse where brilliant minds and ideas converged from all over the Near East, from Greece, Persia and from India. Steiner describes how the scientific, mathematical and philosophical knowledge that was developed there was premature, because it was the aim of Sorath, who worked through certain figures in the Academy, to bring advanced knowledge very prematurely to the early Christian world, which the still immature forces of that world would not be able to handle at that time. If that knowledge had come too soon to the West, the development of Europe, and especially the development of the I in a Christian context, would have been diverted into a completely wrong and unhealthy direction, one which valued knowledge, power and will over the human heart and soul, over the individual I. The lower impulses of the human ego would have used that advanced knowledge in the service of egoism to overwhelm the still immature I. Steiner describes²⁴ how the effort of Sorath at Gondishapur had the effect of ‘injecting’ (his word) a poison, in the form of scientific materialism, into the human physical organism. This resulted in a growing tendency to deny the spirit and to see the human being in a twofold way, as only a being of body (corpus/soma) and soul (anima/psyche). This began to infect the Church, which at the Council of Constantinople in A.D. 869 even proclaimed a dogma to the effect that the human being was a being without an individual spirit, but one of body and soul only.

Steiner describes further how the spiritual world countered Sorath’s intention in three ways: first, in that the Christ Event occurred 333 years before the middle of the Intellectual Mind-Soul epoch, which was in the year 333²⁵; the Christ Event thus mirrored and balanced the Sorathic intervention, which occurred 333 years after that same midpoint. Occurring 666 years before the Sorathic intervention, the Christ Impulse therefore had a chance to implant itself in human consciousness a good while before that intervention. Second, the spiritual influence of the direct companions and pupils of Jesus Christ had by 333 begun to work down from the spiritual world, inspiring people, leading them to Christ and the reality of the divine. Third, the spiritual world arranged that the Sorathic influence of advanced civilisation proceeding from the intellectual hothouse of Gondishapur was largely ‘smothered’ – a ‘lid’ was put on the cauldron, so to speak – by the breakout of a new religious force – Islam – from among the Arabs, who were regarded as uncivilised barbarians in those days by the Persians and by the kind of people who worked at Gondishapur. The two dominant cultures in the region before the death of Mohammed in 632 were the Christian Byzantine Empire (Eastern Rome) and the Zoroastrian Sassanid Persian Empire; these two empires had fought each other to exhaustion over the previous centuries; they did not have the spiritual and cultural force to control what was growing in Gondishapur. What was able to do that to a considerable extent was the fundamentalist theological impulse of Islam, which completely overwhelmed the Persian Empire in the 640s and almost destroyed the Byzantines as well. However, the theological impulse of Mohammed and the Koran did not entirely repress the scientific impulse of Gondishapur over the following centuries. Elements of the knowledge fostered at the Academy seeped out into the Arab Islamic world which had enveloped it and were eventually carried by Arab conquests across North Africa to Spain and also across the sea to Sicily and southern Italy. These elements became the forces of Baconian science in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the basis of the external, scientific and technological power of the modern West and of today’s Anglo-American global ‘empire’.

All of this has ‘come home to roost’ over the past 30 years and also in the Afghan debacle of 2021: the struggle in the mediaeval period between religion and rationalism in the Islamic world, between Islamic fundamentalism and the essentially non-Islamic scientific and philosophical forces that were concentrated in the Academy of Gondishapur and that passed from there via the Baghdad of Caliph Harun al-Rashid²⁶ to Andalusia (Muslim Spain), Christian Europe and America. And we can note that these events of 2021, which have brought a kind of closure to what began on 9/11, have occurred within the Sorathic window of 1973-2023. Incidentally, it was in July 1973 that the 200 year-old Afghan monarchy was toppled and a republic established that was itself overthrown in the pro-communist coup in 1978 that eventually led to the mujahideen war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan and the chaos that followed it.

But in view of events today, we should note that the original centre of the Academy of Gondishapur was the School of Medicine. And what do we see today? An attempt to dominate the world and control its population by the economic forces of the global elite – an attempt that is being made along two main lines: through the fear-mongering associated with “global warming” and through so-called medical procedures involving injections, through needles. The current COVID-related medical tyranny that is being forced upon the world, this attempt to remove individuals’ freedom over their own bodies, and nudge, cajole or coerce them into “accepting” the “offer” of a “vaccination” (which is a lie in itself, as these are not conventional vaccinations but novel and largely untested gene therapies) is a colossal global experiment, unprecedented in history, that is due to end in 2023, as we have been repeatedly reminded by Dr Anthony Fauci, the chief adviser to the American  government in this process and a man who (since 1984) has dominated public health in the USA for all but 9 years of this latest Sorathic window.  These characteristics also suggest that the mark of Sorath is indeed on this event.

In speaking about “the mark of the beast”, something that appears in Chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation, I do not of course mean “the end of the (physical) world” which is what is described in the Book of Revelation. But around every 666 years, Sorath makes a significant intervention which has certain prefiguring resonances with what we can find in that book in the Bible. For example, we find in Chapter 13 of Revelation that the two horned beast (Sorath, 666), who has two horns like a lamb (ram?) but speaks like a dragon (13:11), in effect serves another beast, the one with “seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns and upon his heads the name of blasphemy” (Rev.: 13:1; my emphasis);”and he (the two-horned 666 beast) causeth the earth and them that dwell therein to worship the first beast (of 13:1)… saying to them… that they should make an image to the beast… .” The two-horned 666 beast (Sorath) forces everyone to “receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads” (13:16) without which they are unable to buy or sell. So something is inserted into the physical body without which one is unable to engage in the economic process. That mark also somehow contains the name of the beast (Sorath) and the number of his name (666) (13:17-18)

What we are seeing, in this year 2021 is how the “Corona crisis”, which is itself built on lie after lie, and which has been driven predominantly by two men (Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci) and two academic institutions (Imperial College, London and Johns Hopkins University, New York) –  is being morphed into and combined with the climate change issue, “Agenda 2030” and the “4th Post-Industrial Revolution” agenda of the UN and of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. The website of the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab’s 2020 book Covid-19: The Great Reset make this only too clear. A medical issue is being combined with a complex of environmental, economic, financial, and technological issues. At Sorath’s first intervention, the centrepiece of the Academy of Gondishapur in the 7th century c.666 was the School of Medicine. ‘His’ second intervention in France in the decades preceding the year 1332 had to do with the emergence of the overweening power of the centralised bureaucratic State under King Philip IV (‘the Fair’) and his sadistic destruction of the Order of the Knights Templar for financial reasons through the use of outrageously concocted and widely propagated lies. Today, in Sorath’s third intervention, in the 1973-2023 window centred on 1998, via the “Corona crisis” ‘he’ is preparing the way for the emergence (or coronation) of Ahriman, whose focus is on deceptive thoughts about the material world, about technology and money, as well as lies and deception regarding the scientific understanding of environmental issues, specifically, the nature and role of carbon. Those behind “global warming”, with their obsession about CO₂, are seeking to get us all to fear and hate carbon, which is the very stuff of the human body and essential to all plant life.  This gesture in itself would also seem to indicate the hand of Ahriman. The transformation of the macro-economy in the direction of AI, digital money, nano-biotech and robotics, all accompanied by a Transhumanist philosophy that seeks to change the very nature of human identity, in the manner enthusiastically propagated, for example, by Klaus Schwab, also points to Ahriman and what ‘he’ seeks to do through ‘his’ incarnation, which is to terminate both human notions of spiritual existence and human biological existence itself.

The dark occult agenda in the 21st century

On 16.10.1918 Steiner explained the connection between the Academy of Gondishapur and the future of humanity. What he said on that occasion illuminates much of what global elitists such as Klaus Schwab and the Transhumanists are attempting to do in this 21st century: “The aim of the sages of Gondishapur – in a more amateurish form it is also the aim of certain occult societies in our own time – amounted to nothing else than this: to make man very great, very wise, on the Earth, but, by instilling this wisdom, to lead his soul to partake of death, so that when he had passed through the Gate of Death he would have no inclination to participate in spiritual life or in subsequent incarnations. The intention was to sever man from his further evolution, and so win him for the aims of certain Beings in a quite different world. It was to preserve him as he is in his life on Earth, in order to divert him from the purpose of that earthly existence, which purpose he was meant to discover only slowly and by degrees, thereby finally attaining to Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man.”²⁷[GA 182]

The goal then, is to cut humanity off from the three further stages of its development on earth, described in Anthroposophy, which lie ahead in the 6th and 7th epochs, following the development of the Consciousness Soul in our current 5th Post-Atlantean epoch (1413-3573). Our human task is that of transformation, to transform both ourselves and the planet itself. And thus we can recognise what Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab and the more shadowy elites who stand behind them – the masters of asset management companies such as Vanguard and BlackRock, the two behemoths which through their shareholdings, literally own just about every large company and control almost every sector in the capitalist economy²⁸ – are seeking to do in effecting their own kind of transformation of the human being and human society, beginning with injections that genetically modify human beings and going on to merge us into a global AI brain.

In that same lecture (16.10.1918), Steiner said: “From that Neo-Persian influence [i.e. from Gondishapur] … humanity was given a ‘bite’, if I may use a trivial expression. It was an impulse at that time that penetrated the actual bodily constitution, and we are born with it to this day… There was injected [eingeimpft] into humanity that sickness which, in its effect, leads to the denial of the Father God.” In the lecture Steiner then immediately went on to speak of St Paul and ‘the thorn in his flesh’, which St Paul calls “Satan’s messenger”: “He [St.Paul] speaks prophetically, as an especially advanced man; the thorn was in him already in his own day. To others it was given in the real sense only later on, in the seventh century. But its effects will become more and more widespread, more and more significant. A man today who surrenders wholly to this thorn, to this sickness – for in the physical body this thorn is an actual sickness – becomes an atheist, one who denies God, who denies the Divine. In every human being belonging to modern civilisation there is, fundamentally speaking, the tendency to atheism; the question is only whether a man lends himself to it. He has within him the sickness which incites him to deny the Divine, whereas if he obeyed the promptings of his true nature he would acknowledge God.”

The technology of genetic therapies administered through the COVID injections is a major step towards the realisation of Ahriman’s goals. It accustoms millions of people to accepting medical interventions which can be exploited nanotechnologically for ulterior purposes, for example, by linking human beings directly to the electronic “hive mind” of the Internet, which can already include their medical and financial records and data. The sinister hi-tech social credit system currently functioning and controlling people’s lives in China indicates all too clearly the direction of travel. At present, that system relies on CCTV cameras and  especially the smartphone, which we have only had for about 13 years now, but within 10 or 20 years, the goal will be to incorporate such a device directly into the human body. The final step after that, later in the 21st century, will be to do away with the biological human body altogether and replace it with something ceramic or other non-organic substance. By that point, “the abolition of the human spirit”, which Steiner often spoke of as having taken place at the 8th council of 869 and also as having been directly inspired by Sorath,²⁹ will have been complemented by the abolition of the physical body, the soul having already been ‘abolished’ in the late 19th century by academic psychology and Marxism. What we are therefore looking at potentially, is the genocide not of one ethnicity, as in the 1940s (Europe) and 1990s (Rwanda, Balkans), but of the entire human race. The two-horned Sun Demon Sorath will ally ‘his’ impulse of the lower human ego, the inverted, animal nature of the human being, to Ahriman’s methods of scientific materialist thinking in philosophy, psychology, bio- and nanotechnology, robotics etc. This would result in an Asuric termination of the human physical body as we know it. Lucifer will make ‘his’ (lesser) contribution to this demonic project by distracting human attention through the obsession with sport, fantasies, and the adulation of celebrities of all kinds.

The victory and survival of humanity

This may all seem like a grim prospect, and to those of a pessimistic bent, may even seem inevitable, and it certainly will bring about a great deal of human suffering as the counterforces seek to achieve their aims, because of the ignorance or even wilful blindness on the part of so many people to those aims, but the counterforces actually have no chance whatsoever of succeeding in the long run, because Christ already triumphed over all the four counterforces 2000 years ago through His Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and gift of the holy spirit at Pentecost, through which actions He preserved the human physical body³⁰ and sowed the seeds of victory in countless human hearts and wills. Since that time, human beings have continually reincarnated, in ever greater numbers, bearing the Christ impulse for a truly realised humanity in their hearts and wills.

As in every great drama, the forces of darkness have their allotted time when everything seems to be going their way but they always work with what is in front of them in already incarnated human beings; they never reckon with what comes into human life from the spiritual world through reincarnating souls. They never reckon with what appears from completely unexpected directions in human wills from out of the spiritual world. The English armies that had been ever-victorious in France for 14 years never saw the young peasant girl Joan of Arc coming. Napoleon and Hitler never reckoned with the early appearance of the famous Russian “General Winter” or with the love of country and family in the hearts of the simple Russian peasant soldier; Hitler did not anticipate the Russian counterattack at Stalingrad;  and in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the Dark Lord Sauron, whose massive armies were about to overwhelm the forces of mankind, never noticed that the little hobbit Frodo – to whose character Tolkien gives clearly Christian sentiments –  having completed his epic journey from the Shire to Sauron’s realm of Mordor, had managed to slip right into the centre of that dark realm under Sauron’s very nose, to destroy the One Ring, the basis of Sauron’s power. This victory of the unseen humble ones who, unnoticed by the powerful, rise from ‘below’ to shatter arrogant pretensions is a spiritual archetype which has repeated itself countless times throughout history. While doing our utmost to resist all that Sorath, Lucifer and the Asuras throw at us over the next 20 years or so in their support of Ahriman’s incarnation, we must nevertheless keep the faith that it is the archetype of William Tell, Joan of Arc and Frodo the Hobbit that will ultimately triumph in this critical 21st century and that humanity will prevail and move on past the incarnation of Ahriman, deeper into the Age of the Consciousness Soul.

Notes

1 For 18 months now, mainstream news and current affairs programmes have firmly excluded interviews with the many physicians and other medical specialists who reject the governments’ COVID narrative, and many of them have been banned from platforms such as Youtube, which only allows views that align with those of the World Health Organisation. In a manner unprecedented in the West since the official censorship of news during the Second World War, populations have been presented on TV with an almost entirely one-sided view of the current crisis in a way that fundamentally offends against free speech. By contrast, the channels mRNA Death Toll and Covid Vaccine Injuries on the online Telegram platform, have provided massive evidence (in written and video format) of the damage and deaths that have been caused by the “vaccines”, evidence which flatly contradicts the mainstream pretension that vaccine damage has been “minimal” and “exceedingly rare”.

2 See the 9/11 documentaries of James Corbett: https://www.corbettreport.com/bestof/ and the Project for the New American Century thinktank 1997-2006 and its key policy document Rebuilding America’s Defenses (Sept. 2000)

3 https://archive.vn/l0VtP

4 See the World Economic Forum website: https://www.weforum.org/   SDIS21: How To Save The Planet

5 An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

6 UK Column news broadcast 6.9.2021: https://www.ukcolumn.org/index.php/ukcolumn-news/uk-column-news-6th-september-2021

7 See Sigismund von Gleich, The Transformation of Evil and the Subterranean Spheres of the Earth (Temple Lodge, 2005).

8 See R. Steiner, From Symptom to Reality in Modern History (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1976), especially lectures 1-5 and 9.

9 See R. Steiner, From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, lecture 1.

10 E. Bindel, Die Geistigen Grundlagen der Zahlen (Verlag Freies Geistesleben 4th ed. 1980) p. 53, lecture of R. Steiner 15.9.1907, Stuttgart.

11 The goals in the 4th epoch were to learn to think for oneself and to penetrate the mysteries of birth and death. See R. Steiner, From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, lecture 4 (25.10.1918)

12 It should perhaps be more aptly termed the age of the Intellect and Mind Soul. The word ‘Mind’ here does not mean thinking intellectually and abstractly as in philosophy and natural science, but rather, reflecting on the inner feelings (Gemüt in German) of one’s soul. Japanese haiku are full of this quality of reflection. The 4^th epoch was an age in which thinking was developed both in the intellectual, abstract sense and in the more inner -directed sense.

13 R. Steiner lecture of 1.11.1919. Collected Works GA 191.

14 See essay by T. Boardman, ‘The Incarnation of Ahriman – When and Where?’ http://threeman.org/?p=2905

15 See n. 7 above.

16. See n. 14 above.

17 Both Lucifer and Ahriman seek, in differing ways, to draw man after death into what is called in esotericism the 8th Sphere, an invisible sphere that exists between the Earth and the Moon. See C.G. Harrison, The Transcendental Universe (6 lectures originally given in 1893, reissued in 1993), lecture 5.

18https://images.nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/karlheinz-stockhausen/

19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKM30nuZ48M

20 See Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit – The Truth about FDR and Peral Harbor (2000)

21 In Hebrew gematria (the correlation of numbers and letters in Jewish esotericism). On 666, see R. Steiner lectures 11/12.9. 1924 (Collected Works GA 346) and 11/12.10.1918 in GA 184. Also chaps. 12,13 and 16 in B. Nesfield-Cookson, Michael and the Two-Horned Beast – The Challenge of Evil Today in the light of Rudolf Steiner’s science of the spirit  (Temple Lodge, 1998)

22 See See R. Steiner, From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, lectures 4 and 5 (25/26.10.1918) in GA 185.

23 See also Harrie Salman’s article ‘The Social Context of Technology: Impulses from Gondishapur versus Rudolf Steiner’s Impulse of Social Threefolding’ in New View, No. 99, Spring 2021.

24 Lecture of 16.10.1918 in GA 182.

25 The Intellectual Mind-Soul epoch (also known in Anthroposophy as the 4^th Post-Atlantean and elsewhere as The Age of Aries) lasted from 747 BC to 1413 AD (i.e. 2160 years) so its mid-point was the year 333 AD. As the 4th epoch was the middle epoch in the total of seven Post-Atlantean epochs, this means the year 333 AD was also the middle point of the entire Post-Atlantean period (7227 BC – 7893 AD).

26 Harun al-Rashid, the fifth Caliph of the Abbasid dynasty 786-809. He ruled over the beginning of what is called by some ‘Islam’s Golden Age’. According to Steiner, he reincarnated as Francis Bacon (1561-1526).

27 Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man are the three further developmental stages of the human being after our current 5th epoch, in which the Consciousness Soul is the last of the three historical phases of soul development. It will be followed by three phases in the development of the human spirit.

28 For the incredible extent of the power of these two financial behemoths alone (in 2021, BlackRock manages assets worth US$9.5 trillion and Vanguard US$7 trillion, see the article ‘Who Runs the World?’ (June 2021) by Bill Sardi at:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/04/bill-sardi/who-runs-the-world-blackrock-and-vanguard/

29 “The Catholic Church, strongly influenced by the remains of the impulse emanating from Gondishapur, decreed as a dogma at the Eighth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in A.D. 869 that men were not to believe in the spirit. … Thus the truth that man is a being of body, soul and spirit was abolished by the Catholic Church, acting directly under the influence of the impulse of Gondishapur.” R. Steiner lecture of 16.10.1918 GA 182.

30 See R. Steiner lectures 5, 6, 7 (9-11.10.1911) in From Jesus to Christ (Rudolf Steiner Press 1973) in GA 131.

Terry Boardman 2021

If we contemplate the number 23, we can recall that the most famous Psalm in the Bible – Psalm 23 – speaks of man’s confidence in his trust in God’s support. The Koran was revealed to Mohammed over a period of 23 years. Biologists will tell us that normal human sex cells have 23 chromosomes, and astronomers will re­mind us that the earth is tilted at an angle of about 23 degrees to the Sun (actually 23.5). Without that tilting at 23 degrees, the earth’s seasons and hence its human cultures would be totally different from what they are. So both at the microcosmic level of the cell and at the macrocosmic level of the Earth, which is a giant ‘cell’ in itself, the number 23 – the binary and the triad – is a crucial key in the incarnation of the human spirit on the material plane. The binary, with its characteristic feature of division, is the Ur-principle, the blueprint of material reality. In the course of time the ‘matter-realisa­tion’ of that blueprint has led to a materialistic rejection in human consciousness of any non-material reality at all. The triad is that which overcomes this divisive ma­terialism and reconnects human consciousness with the spiritual world, the visible with the invisible. At Easter we can think of the binary as the necessary crucifixion of spirit in ‘matter’ and of the triad as the resurrection of the spirit which gives meaning to the relation of spirit to ‘matter’, and at midsummer we can think of Rudolf Steiner’s beautiful evocation of the triune St John Imag­ination¹ with its picture of the Christ between the Spirit Father above and the Earth Mother below. Because the triad has this healing capacity, ultimately exemplified in the Mystery of Golgotha, this is also why Rudolf Steiner’s threefold social impulse is so important to overcome the socio-economic crisis of the modern age, especially in the current context of worsening US-China relations. I shall return to this later in this article.

The triad and the ninth century

As soon as he became an esoteric teacher in 1902 (which he remained until his death, 23 years later), Rudolf Stein­er made clear from the beginning that his would be the path of Christian esotericism rather than one that fo­cused more on Indian teachings, as in the Theosophy of Annie Besant, centred at Adyar in India. Moreover, Steiner’s emphasis on the Rosicrucian heritage of Central Europe, with its alchemical focus on the triad of salt, mercury and sulphur, meant that a strong threefold, Trinitarian impulse lay at the centre of his teaching and his activity. His life drama reached a peak when in the years 1917-1922 he found himself within a world war in which Central Europe was fighting against the East and the West and in which he personally was increas­ingly drawn into the centre of social and international events. Indeed, by 1914 he was already in a personal relationship with Helmuth von Moltke, the Chief of the General Staff, who was in command of all German armies on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. After Moltke died in June 1916, Steiner remained in spiritual contact with his individuality for seven years, the only case in his life of which this is known. Steiner realised that von Moltke had previously incarnated as Pope Nicholas I in the ninth century, whose historic task it had been in that incarnation to clearly separate Eastern and Western Christianity. In the 20th century it had been his will to reunite East and West, but tragically, he found himself having to lead the fight against them both. From 1916 onwards, Steiner drew attention to the historical consequences of the 8th Ecumenical Council of the Church in Constantinople which took place in the ninth century (869). The Council’s anathemas had effectively reduced the Trichotomy of the human being (body, soul, spirit) to a Dichotomy (body and soul only). This focus on the binary nature of the human being had laid the theological and philosophical basis for the bi­nary nature of natural science and materialistic thought that later emerged in the 17th century, notably through the influence of the writings of Francis Bacon and Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1582-1648), the ‘father’ of Deism. Throughout his own activities, Steiner urged the modern culture of western civilisation, in effect, to rediscover the Trinity, the essence of the human, the social and the cosmic triad, – or rather, to understand it for the first time² – through the reclaiming of the indi­vidual spirit that could find its own path to the divine. The war itself, he showed, was the consequence of the materialism that had resulted from the errors of the Church in 869, the denial of the individual spirit and the insistence on following the authority and dogmas of the Church. That Council of 869-70 had led first to the Great Schism of 1054 between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches: both Christianity and European culture now appeared to be irrevocably split. A further split occurred with the Reformation, and then came more splits between the adherents of the Reformation. The sickness that had first manifested in the spiritual or theological sphere spread in later centuries to the politi­cal and economic spheres, in revolutions, class conflict, and economic rivalries between nations. Out of these social poisons had come the Great War. Materialism, fear of the spirit, was the great matrix of the war. Capitalism, imperialism, socialism, communism, nationalism and fascism – all were born of that matrix.

Building on his esoteric Christian understanding of the threefold nature of Man (body, soul, spirit), Steiner pointed to the need for a new social reformation in the modern world, which would heal the sickness that had resulted from those deeds of 869-70. The threefolding of society into autonomous but interrelating spheres of economy, politics and culture, which he energetically advocated from 1917, first to the elites, through personal contacts, and then, when the elites ignored him, to the masses of the people in 1919, represented the undoing of the deed of 869-70, and the restoration of the threefold nature of both Man and society. The culmination of Ru­dolf Steiner’s restorative deed for the culture of the West came at the Christmas Conference on 25 December 1923 with his speaking of the Foundation Stone meditation for the first time.

Lotharingia (Middle Francia) 855-869

Lotharingia (yellow)
Italy (pink)
East Francia (blue)
West Francia (grey)
Provence (violet)

The numbers in the date 869 add up to 23. The dates 869 + 1054, when added together, come to 1923. Even the arithmetic of history testifies to the reality of Rudolf Steiner’s deed in that year when he refounded the Anthroposophical Society at the Christmas Conference in Dornach, Switzerland on the esoteric basis of the threefold Foundation Stone meditation  From the time of the Coun­cil of 869, dualism came to dominate European culture. This was already reflected politically in the 9th century when Lotharingia (or Middle Francia) was partitioned in 869-70 between the kings of East Francia and West Francia.³ Once again, we see the same dualistic gesture in 869-70: in the East, at Constantinople, a spiritual triad (body-soul-spirit) was reduced theologically to a bina­ry (body and soul only)  at the 8th Ecumenical Council, while in the West, in Frankia, a triad was reduced to a binary politically by the Treaty of Mersen. Rudolf Steiner re­stored the triad to European culture through his work 1917-1923, both philosophically and esoterically in the Foundation Stone, and socially in his advocacy of social threefolding.

The “Great Reset”?

But although the seed of social threefolding was suc­cessfully planted in 1919-1922, it did not grow at that time. The historical moment for it was missed; the An­throposophical movement was not strong and resolute enough to carry it forward; the receptivity of the public to it proved insufficient. There was too much willingness across the political spectrum to allow the unitary State – whether of the twofold order, the twofold, adversarial party system in capitalist countries, or of the ‘onefold order’ – fascist or communist – to deal with the many problems thrown up by the consequences of the war. The historical moment, Steiner said, would not return for a hundred years, after which “a window of the spiritual world would open” to create another opportunity for it.⁴ Not a few Anthroposophers think that time may be now.

And what are we seeing now, in the wake of COV­ID-19? In fact, we are seeing another attempt to ‘reboot’ a onefold order, to create a ‘new’ social consensus under the umbrella of the unitary State. This is being done by appealing to wartime rhetoric of life and death, “fighting the deadly enemy” and national and personal survival – all of which obliges us to “pull together”, we are told, and “do our civic duty” as in wartime⁵, dutifully and compliantly following the dictates of the State. We are told that this crisis will “bring us all together”, make us “stronger together”, “leave no-one behind”, in order to bring about the “New Green Deal” and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, setting up carbon, SARS-CoV-2, China and “white supremacy” as the new scapegoats and enemies to be defeated – objects of fear and hate, in effect, against which all are urged to rally. Since 2016, the era of Trump and Brexit, the media made endless allusions to the 1930s; now, it would seem, we are to believe that we have advanced into the 1940s and are fighting our own version of World War II on the four above-mentioned fronts.

The World Economic Forum (WEF), one of the world’s main breeding stations of globalist capitalism, declares on its website⁶ the need for a “Great Reset”, as if it be­lieves that capitalism must rapidly be transformed into some grand, A.I.-driven, green, egalitarian, socio-eco­nomic paradise inspired by such as Greta Thunberg, Jeff Bezos, and the Black Lives Matter and LGBTQIA+ movements. Establishment media throughout the West echo the WEF’s call; the BBC in Britain promotes the same agenda through its “Rethink” project – which in fact chimes with UN Agenda 21 and its subset, Agenda 2030. Launched on 21 June, the BBC’s “Rethink” project reaches right across the entire BBC programme sched­ules and is obviously designed to ‘nudge’ the populace in the direction that the WEF and the global elite want the world to move. The emphasis is emphatically col­lective – everyone must be included – , conforming to the global elite’s will mediated through the increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic actions of national State governments and through the censorious, freedom-de­nying behaviours of corporate tech companies such as facebook and Google, which are turning the Internet into a glitzier, more subtle version of the controlled and censored media of the Cold War Communist bloc. What is emerging is not only a massive increase in the power of the State through this COVID ‘crisis’ but especially in the cultural sphere, where the ‘identity wars’ are the fiercest, a one-pattern society and culture is developing where only opinions within a very narrow range are tolerated. Any attempt to express dissenting views will have severe legal and/or economic consequences. And all of this is being done in the name of “equality”, “inclusivity”, “diversity”, “combating ‘hate’” and of course, uphold­ing “the science”, a science that is rapidly becoming as dogmatic as the theology of the mediaeval cardinals. Scientists who dissent from the climate change or COV­ID-19 or vaccination orthodoxy are excluded, ignored, or slandered.⁷ “The science” is uniform. Everyone must accept it and conform. No-one must dare to dissent, and everyone will be expected to accept the anti-CoV-2 vac­cine when it arrives, most probably later this year from a British or American laboratory. Otherwise, such vaccine dissenters are likely to be branded selfish ‘domestic ter­rorists’ who are endangering the health of the nation. There will no doubt be calls for them to be excluded from travel and employment opportunities. In short, they will lose some of their civil and human rights, as was the case with religious Dissenters in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. In those days Protestant Dissenters and Catholics were held to endanger and undermine the spiritual health of the nation. This new uniformity will be policed by facial recognition surveillance technol­ogy and probably some form of smartphone-mediated social credit system, as in China, though probably not so blatant, so as to preserve the appearance of democ­racy. The WEF – ostensibly a private organisation – and the US Department of Homeland Security – an arm of government - have already collaborated to produce such a system⁸, which is likely to be rolled out next year.

War drums? Or simply ‘decoupling’ from China?

It is a great irony that all this centralised control and cen­sorship is happening in the West precisely when western elites are using the COVID-19 ‘pandemonium’ to turn against China and identify it as an ‘enemy’ and a ‘threat’. This is happening across the so-called left-right divide, from Donald Trump to Nancy Pelosi, from The Economist to the Murdoch Press, from the so-called quality Press to the tabloids, from Die Welt to Das Bild. “During the recent Munich Security Conference, [Pelosi] replied to [the] question whether she essentially agreed with Trump’s China policy without hesitation and to the surprise of the audience: “Yes.” Pelosi described China as a “government that does not serve our values” and spoke of an “authoritarian form of aggression.” Mathias Döpfner recently wrote in the Ger­man paper Die Welt am Sonntag in an article titled “We have to choose”: “Germany and Europe, together with the USA, should decide to consistently disconnect from China. How this should be structured is one of the most exciting political questions of the future. …The corona recession marks a …unique opportunity to correct a mistake…. In the end, everything is very simple: what future do we want for Europe: an alliance with an imperfect democracy or with a perfect dictatorship? The decision should actually be easy for us. It’s more than money. It is about our freedom, about Article 1, the most beautiful term that has ever been in a legal text: human dignity.”⁹

The Henry Jackson Society (HJS), one of many elite transatlantic think-tanks, and very hawkish on foreign policy, has identified the key areas in which the 5 An­glosphere countries known as the “Five Eyes” (US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada), are overly dependent on China. The HJS advocates active economic ‘decou­pling’ from China as well as a de facto western contain­ment policy towards China. The anti-Chinese rhetoric has greatly stepped up in 2020 with COVID-19 being labelled in rightwing circles as a ‘Chinese virus’ or ‘the Wuhan virus’.

This completely overlooks the fact that the World Health Organisation (WHO) and western governments failed to do their own due diligence with regard to the alleged seriousness of COVID-19. There was no scien­tific need for them to overreact as they did; a number of western epidemiologists and other medical special­ists pointed out¹⁰ in March and April that the virus was not essentially worse than previous seasonal influenza epidemics and would go through a similar process of growth and decline, which it has done. In fact, the an­ti-China rhetoric had been building up for several years. The beginning of China’s colossal “One Belt, One Road” Eurasian transport infrastructure and trade project in 2013 and the signing of the huge 30-year Russia-Chi­na natural gas deal in 2014 were key milestones. From that period onward, talk of a new Cold War began to proliferate in western media, as well as comparisons of the US-China relationship with that between the British and German empires in the decade before the First World War in terms of relations between a rising and an established or declining Power. In those days, German exporters and businessmen were outmanoeu­vring the British even within Britain’s own Empire, so the British resorted to war to redress the balance – first the Boer War (1899-1902), to prevent S. Africa’s gold and diamond mines falling into German hands, and then the two world wars (1914-45)¹¹, to attempt to suppress German competition substantially and bring Germany itself under Anglosphere control.

Today, concerned about Anglosphere inability to compete economically with China in Eurasia, Africa and Latin America, Anglosphere elites are again banging the war drums. Last year, the Rand Corporation in the USA carried out a complex US vs Russia + China war­game simulation assuming war 10-20 years from now, which did not turn out at all well for the US. The lesson the establishment media will no doubt draw from this is that the US needs to further upgrade and expand its military spending, already by far the world’s largest. The author of the RAND report wrote that “$24 billion a year for the next five years would be a good expenditure” to prepare the military for World War III.¹² One can recall Rudolf Steiner speaking of western brotherhoods already planning in the 1890s for a great European war in the near future.¹³

Anthroposophers should not be surprised to see the elites of America and China squaring off against each other at this time, since we are living almost 2000 years after the Mystery of Golgotha, the anniversary years of which will come in 2030-2033 at a time when the mani­festation of Ahriman in human form – the incarnation of Ahriman¹⁴ – can be expected. For China and America are the two cultures in which, according to Rudolf Steiner, the incarnations of Lucifer (c.3000 BC) and Ahriman (very early 3rd millennium AD) historically occur. And in this 21st century, when all of us as mankind, like a human individual aged 21, are to take responsibility for ourselves and the planet, when we are challenged to find and recognise the Christ Being as the Ego of man­kind, Lucifer and Ahriman combine to try to prevent mankind from assuming that responsibility in the right way, that is, in the sense of human freedom. They seek instead, to use the old ways, albeit dressed up in modern rhetoric and modern technology. They seek to have us guided, nudged, led and controlled like sheep by oligar­chical shepherds at the WEF, the WHO and the Chinese Communist Party. They provide, in short, the resistance mankind needs to find its freedom and responsibility.

No surprise then, to see that both China and America were involved in the COVID-19 phenomenon: in the In­ternational Military Games at Wuhan in October 2019; at the Event 201 coronavirus simulation held at Johns Hopkins University in New York at the same time; in the murky financial connections between the US and the Wuhan Institute of Virology – a US$3.7 million research grant to that Wuhan Institute in 2015¹⁵ approved by Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and current­ly the leading medical specialist in the US Coronavirus Task Force; in the close relations between Bill Gates and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: the WHO overreacted to the Chinese and Italian over­reactions to the virus and declared a global pandemic on 11 March. This worked very much in the vaccination interests of the WHO’s second largest donor at the time (now the largest since President Trump announced the cancellation of US funding for the WHO in April), name­ly, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with which Tedros Adhanom has had a close relationship since his time as Minister of Health in Ethiopia 2005-2012. The WHO and many governments around the world influ­enced by the WHO have allowed themselves to be overly affected by the overreaction of the Chinese government to COVID-19 and as a result, lockdowns have been im­posed around the world with all the severely damaging consequences these lockdowns have been having on economies and on the physical and mental health of millions. Mankind has been subjected to a colossal act of vandalism, all to defeat a virus dubbed “terrible”, “dead­ly”, “brutal”, “killer” “plague” by the media. It is a virus which, by itself, has in fact accounted for numbers of deaths on a par with seasonal flu. The American Centers for Disease Control estimated that 46,000 – 95,000 Amer­icans died of influenza during the 2017-18 flu season. At the time of writing, there have been 128,000 deaths in the USA of people with COVID-19¹⁶, i.e. who tested pos­itive for the SARS-Cov-2 virus, but that does not mean they died of COVID-19 itself. Indeed, there has been evi­dence of much manipulation of COVID-19 data to inflate the numbers of deaths due to COVID-19.¹⁷

In 1913 many intelligent people believed that there would be no war between Britain and Germany because the two countries had too many interwoven economic ties and furthermore, because they were both advanced European countries whose educated classes shared many cultural values and habits. One year later, this belief was shown to have been illusory. Yet many people make simi­lar arguments today about the US and China: their econ­omies are too interdependent; they are both ‘mature’ states; they will not risk war in the age of nuclear weap­ons etc. But to repeat, these are the very two cultures of the incarnations of the spiritually polar beings, Lucifer and Ahriman. Billions of dollars have been spent over the decades by US and Chinese institutions and govern­ments in order to ‘understand’ each other’s culture and society better, but if this is done primarily with a view to benefitting materially from the other, and without taking a spiritual view of life into account, it will have no good result, as Rudolf Steiner pointed out in 1922 on the eve of the Washington Conference between the USA, Britain and Japan: “The Asiatic peoples will meet the West with understanding if the West can offer them thoughts of a universal humanity, thoughts that indicate what Man is in the whole universal order and how a social life may be achieved in conformity with what Man is. When the peoples in the East hear that the West has fresh knowledge on those very subjects of which their ancient traditions tell and for the renewal of which they themselves are vaguely striving, then will the way be open for mutual understanding and coopera­tion. If, however, we persist in regarding the infusion of such knowledge into public activity as a fantastic dream of the unpractical, then in the end the East will wage war upon the West, however much they may converse about the beauties of disarmament.”¹⁸ Twenty years later, in the battles in the Pacific, the truth of Rudolf Steiner’s words was very starkly borne out. The growing US-China tensions of the past ten years have shown that the situation between the two countries is only getting worse. Many believe that a state of undeclared cold war already exists between them and that it is only a matter of time before the ‘cold’ becomes ‘hot’. There are various geographical ‘hotspot buttons’ around China that the US is capable of pressing: Tibet, the borders of India, the South China Sea islands, Hong Kong, Taiwan, N. Korea, and relations with Japan.

The Threefold solution: for East-West peace and cooperation

What could serve to avert such a conflict between the collectivist People’s Republic of China and the individ­ualistic USA? A triadic solution, namely, the threefold social organism, which has both collectivist and indi­vidualistic elements within it, would mitigate the perni­cious effects of the extremes of both systems. It does not do away with the essence of capitalism, but recognises the role of the individual in starting economic activity. However, it asserts that the purpose of the economic sphere is to produce goods from the bounty of nature, which is cherished and protected – goods that will serve others; the purpose is not the maximisation of profit for oneself, one’s family or even one’s country. It is to serve other human beings all over the world, as in the mod­ern age the whole world is one interdependent economic organism, although to begin with, economic activity usually starts in one’s own locale. Threefolding does not subordinate any of the three spheres of society (culture, politics, economy) to the other two, and does not seek to mix up all three. On the contrary, it gives autonomy to all three in their own spheres, while enabling them at the same time to interrelate, much as the three physio­logical systems of the human body (nerves, circulation and metabolism) are also separate but interrelate and support each other. The State therefore must not run the economy or the cultural sphere; if it tries to, it will either fail, out of incompetence in those spheres, or it will come into conflict with other States that also presume to run or influence those spheres in their own countries to a greater or lesser degree; this has in the past often led to war, as in 1899 and 1914¹⁹, where private economic inter­ests are identified with those of the State. Equally, eco­nomic interests must not seek to control or influence the State or the political and legal life or the life of culture and the arts and sciences. Neither should the latter try to dictate to politics and the economy, as has happened in some religious communities and states. Each of the three spheres has its own being and life which needs to be respected.

Threefolding first emerged a century ago in Central Europe. It could not succeed then, as too many people across the political spectrum were prepared to allow the State to have its way in all three spheres, even in the cap­italist democracies. But a hundred years later, after much socio-economic pain and suffering, inefficiency and dis­aster, there is now widespread recognition, especially in the West, that some kind of fundamental change is required that goes beyond the egoism both of the indi­vidual and of the political or national group. Communist China has only been part of the capitalist world order for some 40 years, and the wealth it has generated through that participation has enabled both the alleviation of mass poverty and the wage slavery of modern Chinese industrial serfs on the assembly line. It has enabled the enthusiastic creation of many Chinese billionaires and also China’s totalitarian hi-tech surveillance system. China’s current system is a mixture of western capital­ism, western Marxism (with so-called “Chinese charac­teristics”) and traditional Chinese Neo-Confucianism and Legalism. Chinese nationalism and self-confidence is still strong, but the Chinese system is two thirds not their own, and the other third is not modern but ancient and has more in common with mediaeval Tibet or the Vatican than with modern times.

But if the West were to embrace Threefolding – if the State were to restrict itself to its own rightful sphere of law, rights, and defence; if local, regional, national and international economic associations were able to bring both ethics and rationality into the world of business instead of the reckless, inefficient, growth-obsessed, outdated and shark-like economic model we currently have; if the arts and sciences were free from interfer­ence from both the State and from business; if through threefolding, the West were to embrace a social and economic praxis that affirmed both the individual and the community – then millions in China would take no­tice and see that there was a modern alternative both to their own authoritarian mixture and to the old, often inhuman economic ruthlessness of the West. Based on a spiritual understanding of the human being far more radical than anything in Transhumanism, the emergent philosophy of the western elite, this modern alternative of Threefolding offers the way to avert a cataclysmic bi­nary conflict between China (with its allies Russia and Iran) and the USA and its client states in the Anglosphere and the EU. It may already be too late to bring this alter­native forward, but its seeds can at least be sown and its existence brought to the attention of millions, so that after Ahriman’s incarnation has ended, most likely by the mid-21st century, the alternative of Threefolding can be called upon to reshape society.

At this historic time, when Ahriman’s incarnation is about to become manifest, and when the current conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn ushers in a new, 200 year-long era in history²⁰, global elites working through the WEF and the WHO are trying to use false claims about climate change and COVID-19 to bring about a technology-driven, wartime emergency-style, State-led transformation of society that will have the surface ap­pearance of ‘greenness’ and ‘progressivism’ but it will not challenge fundamentals; the elitist 1% and their predatory behaviour will remain, just as they did after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s much-vaunted ‘New Deal’ in the 1930s. FDR in effect injected a dose of socialism in order to save the existing American capitalist sys­tem without fundamentally changing that system. The same is what is being proposed now in, for example, the post-COVID plans of the British government led by Bo­ris Johnson. The global elites’ goal with Agenda 2030 is to bring about a world order that will serve Ahriman’s interests in his incarnation. Those interests require not a threefold society in which the three spheres of culture, law and economy are autonomous but a form of ‘soft’ fascism or communism, a ‘onefold’ world order of ‘onefold’ societies controlled and directed in all three spheres by the State. In 1922 Rudolf Steiner said that he would reincarnate “in 80 years’ time and in America” – the land of Ahriman’s incarnation.²¹ The individuality that was Rudolf Steiner may not be associated with the Anthroposophical Society then but as a Christian esotericist, that individuality will surely somehow stand for Threefolding, for that means, in the modern age, to stand for the cosmic Trinity, and for the real nature of the human being and of human society.

Terry Boardman 2020

Notes

1 Lecture of 12.10.1923, in Collected Works GA 229.

2 Misunderstanding and disputes over the nature of the Trinity in the early Christian centuries had been a major reason for dissension within the Church. Steiner discusses the spiritual background to the debate over the Trinity in his lectures of 23,28,29,30 July 1922 in GA 214 and 16-17 March 1923, GA 222.

3 The Carolingian Empire (800-888) founded by Charlemagne, was divided into three parts between his grandsons in 843 (Treaty of Verdun). When Lothar II, the ruler of Lotharingia (or Middle Francia) , the Empire’s middle portion which ran from Holland in the north to Rome in the South, died in 869, his children were swiftly declared illegitimate, and his two Frankish uncles, Ludwig the German and Charles the Bald, invaded Lotharingia from East Francia and West Francia respectively and divided it between them in 870 by the Treaty of Mersen.

4 See Heinz Herbert Schöffler, Rudolf Steiner’s Millennium Prophecies (Henry Goulden Books, 1999) p. 36

5 See 2013 speech by Al Gore on Youtube in which he says that it was the war, not FDR’s New Deal, that ended the Depression in the USA, and calls for a wartime-style “national mobilisation” to defeat “climate change”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7dWG5ICxAA and also https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/

6 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/

7 E.g. re. COVID-19 – Prof. Bhakdi Sucharit (Ger.), Dr. Anders Tegnall (Swed.),

Prof. Knut Wittkowski (USA), Prof. John Ioannidis (USA), Prof. Sunetra

Gupta (UK), Dr Zach Bush (USA), Dr. Dan Erikson and Dr Artin Massihi

(USA); vaccines – Dr Andrew Wakefield (UK), Dr Judy Mikovits (USA); Dr. Rashid Buttar and Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (USA).

8 See: https://norberthaering.de/en/power-control/eurostar-known-traveller/

9 See: https://chinaresearchgroup.substack.com/p/quotes-from-welt-amsonntag-article    Original text (in German):

https://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/plus207687477/Mathias-Doepfner-Wir-muessen-uns-zwischen-Amerika-und-China-entscheiden.html

10 See n.7 above.

11 See John P. Cafferky, Lord Milner’s Second War (2013) and G.G. Preparata, Conjuring Hitler – How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (2005); G.Docherty and J.MacGregor, Hidden History (2013), K.M. Wilson, The Policy of the Entente (1985), E.E. McCullough, How the First World War Began (1999).

12 https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-09/us-gets-its-ass-handed-itworld-war-iii-simulation-rand

13 See R. Steiner, lectures 1-4 (4,9,10 and 11 Dec. 1916) in The Karma of Untruthfulness Vol. 1 and lect. 20 (15.1.1917), Vol. 2, Rudolf Steiner Press (2005).

14 See T. Boardman, ‘The Incarnation of Ahriman – When and Where?’ Parts 1 and 2 in TPA Vol. 5/Nos.7/8 Oct/Nov 2019 and Vol. 5/Nos.9/10 May/June 2020.

15 https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/why-us-outsourced-bat-virus-research-towuhan/

The Institute opened China’s first Biosafety Level 4 research laboratory in 2015.

16 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

17 E.g. https://youtu.be/3Fic2dlKlhw

18 R. Steiner, The East in the Light of the West (G.P. Puttnam’s Sons, 1922) , p. xi.

19 1898 – the Spanish-American War, 1899 – the Boer War; 1914 – the Great War e.g. the Anglo-German arms race and the Berlin-Baghdad Railway: the struggle for the oil of the Middle East.

20 See T. Boardman, ‘…the diseases we suffer on earth are visitations from heaven’ in TPA, Vol. 5/ Nos. 9/10 May/June 2020, p. 11

21 See n. 4 above, p. 15. Also, C. Villeneuve ed., Rudolf Steiner in Britain – A Documentation of his Ten Visits Vol. II, 1922-1925 (Temple Lodge, 2004) p. 737.

This article was first published in The Present Age magazine Vol. 6 Nos. 3/4 2020/2021

2020 - a year which began with hope in the West, despite the news of a new virus that had very recently emerged in distant China, a year in which many Europeans looked forward to celebrating the 250th anniversaries of the births of Beethoven, Hegel, and the poets Hölderlin and Wordsworth with numerous artistic events, while Japanese and others around the world looked forward to the Tokyo Olympics. But 2020 turned out to be surely one of the worst years in recorded history, not in terms of deaths from disease or war – there had been many worse years – but in terms of the truly pandemic scale of lies, deception and stupidity in 2020, a pandemic wilfully engaged in and driven onwards by the antics of governments around the world. The year had begun inauspiciously with a conjunction between Saturn and Pluto on 12 January at 23˚ of Capricorn and a few days before that, on 3 January, the assassination by Donald Trump’s government of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad by a drone attack. People wondered how long it would be before Iran retaliated. A year has gone by with no such retaliation from the Iranians, but in January 2021 America has suffered a ‘drone strike’ of sorts against its own political system, a strike that began with the presidential election on 3 November and culminated in the so-called ‘storming’ of the US Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January, the day of the Three Kings and Epiphany, the day when three wise men (Magi) ‘from the East’ (most likely Persia = Iran) brought gifts for the baby Jesus (of the Matthew Gospel) and the day when the Christ Logos entered into the body of the man Jesus, who gave up his own ‘I’ for that to happen, and the three-year process of the Incarnation commenced that led to the Mystery of Golgotha.

21 is traditionally the year of adulthood in the West, when after the 3 x 7 year periods of childhood, the young person was recognised as an autonomous adult. Today, in most developed countries, the age of adulthood officially recognised by society is 18, which, interestingly, is 3 x 6 years, but that modern legal innovation does not change the age-old fact of the emergence of the fully developed ego after the threefold development of the physical, etheric, and astral bodies of the human being over 3 x 7 years. This 21st Christian century marks another kind of ‘coming of age’ – that of ‘christened’ humanity as a whole, the word ‘christened’ here meaning of course not only those people who are Christians but all of humanity in the era of time since the Incarnation of Christ, the solar Logos, in Jesus of Nazareth. As the fourth verse of Rudolf Steiner’s Foundation Stone of Love puts it: “At the Turning Point of Time, the light of the cosmic Spirit entered the stream of earthly being/Dark night’s rule had ended/Day-radiant light streamed into human souls.”

In effect, a new humanity, a new period of human life began on earth at that time, a new period which is now in its 21st century. And we can see, from the history of the last 20 centuries, how this new humanity has grown up to adulthood and how it now is calling upon itself to take responsibility for itself and for its earthly home. To take over responsibility from the divine beings who created this planet Earth and this human body which is part of it. One of the great starry markers of the development of time and history has long been the meetings (conjunctions) every 20 years of Saturn and Jupiter, the planets traditionally associated with the past and the future respectively. After they have met three times in 60 years, their three meetings have traced out an invisible equilateral triangle around the Sun – the ancient origin of the well-known symbol of “the eye in the triangle”, as the conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter, the mightiest planets for the ancients were observed by them over millennia. It is a symbol which is also found, among other places, on the back of the US dollar bill and on the Great Seal of the United States. The 60-year equilateral triangle patterns formed by the meetings of Saturn and Jupiter rotate around the Zodiac over 800 years, and this periodicity of 800 years was recognised by astronomers and astrologers in the Renaissance, for example, as signifying the birth of a new and particular historical and cultural impulse. Such a new 800-year cycle began in 1603. Last year’s conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter became exact on winter solstice, the 21st day of the 12th month. It was a beautiful sight for those whose view was not observed by clouds, and it came in Advent, just as in 7 BC the two planets’ conjunction was the ‘Star of Bethlehem’ observed by the Magi as they followed the movements of the two planets to conjunction. So the conjunction of these two mighty planets heralded the birth of Jesus and thus the Incarnation of Christ 30 years later. Likewise, their conjunction 20 years ago, on 28 May 2000, very probably marked the birth of the human vessel for the incarnation of Ahriman in May that year¹. Today (Jan. 2021), they are still in conjunction, but are slowly moving apart, and by mid-February will no longer be said to be in conjunction.

Mars and Uranus

Meanwhile, at the time of writing, Mars approaches conjunction with Uranus in January. Their conjunction will be exact on 20-21 January – Inauguration Day in the USA, when Joe Biden is expected to be sworn in as the 46th US President, but on 6 January, Three Kings Day, we saw a remarkable event occur which already showed all the hallmarks of a meeting of the two planetary energies of Mars and Uranus, known for their violent and dramatic characteristics respectively. First, around noon, President Donald Trump gave a speech outside the White House at a rally attended by hundreds of thousands of his supporters who had come from all over the country. They heard speeches by high-profile supporters of the President and members of his family and then the President himself, who spent most of his speech detailing how the 2020 presidential election had been fraudulent, a “stolen” election.

So the events that unfolded that day began with a highly charged speech by the President. Speech is a function of the Mars chakra, the 16-petal lotus in the throat centre. His enemies have accused him of “inciting” his followers to go and “storm” the Capitol. This is untrue; the full speech is online, anyone can listen to it and hear that in fact he told them to walk down to the Capitol and “cheer on our brave Senators and Congressmen and women…because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength ….I know that everyone here will be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”. He told them that “we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”. Some of these are somewhat ambiguous phrases admittedly, but they were hardly a rousing call to storm a Bastille, let alone the ‘sacred temple of American democracy’, or of democracy worldwide, as many Americans like to see the Capitol.

Trump is not an inspiring orator, and not even before this, perhaps his largest audience, did he rise to heights of fury and screaming invective like Mussolini and Hitler. Politicians of all stripes talk constantly about “the need to fight”, it’s one of the problems of our democratic system, so the claim that Trump incited the crowd, whipping them up and rousing them to go and trash the Capitol and overthrow democracy in a coup or armed insurrection is simply nonsense. Anyone can confirm that for himself by watching the speech. He did say, however, that he would never accept the result of a fraudulent election and would never concede.

From the rally to the Congress

Many of Trump’s supporters were certainly angered by the release of a crucial letter by Vice-President Mike Pence at 1 pm, before Trump had even finished speaking, in which Pence announced that he would accept the results of the election. It had been thought that Pence would perhaps not accept the results because of the doubts about their validity; many Republicans, citing an 1877 precedent, hoped that the results of debates in Congress on 6 January about the contested election in half a dozen states would lead to an audit commission being appointed that would investigate the alleged election fraud in those contested states. After Trump’s speech, large numbers of the crowd of about 200,000 then walked over to the Capitol. Meanwhile, in the Senate, the Congress members, led by Pence, were meeting to certify the results of the election. This final step in the long process of the US Presidential elections ends when the Vice-President announces who the President and Vice-President will be on the coming Inauguration Day. Congress began to go through the results of each of the 50 states alphabetically. When they got to Arizona, one of the six contested states, there was an objection from the floor, and Pence therefore broke up the meeting, sending the House of Representatives members back to the House to debate the arguments about the Arizona results; in doing so, he was only following procedure. The sight of all those elected representatives willingly wearing masks in Congress on the day of certification of votes after an election that millions of Americans had come to believe was fraudulent, not one of the members of Congress showing the courage or intelligence to challenge the stupid and ineffective masks, seemed like a double muzzling of America and of democracy,² while outside, Trump’s supporters, representing the 74 million Americans who had voted for him, were shouting their disapproval of the process going on inside, which they saw as certifying a criminal fraud, a crime against democracy being signed and sealed in the ‘shrine of American democracy’ itself.

The US Establishment had tried for four years to get rid of Trump, most notably through the false Russia-collusion charges; they hated him with a vengeance. Do we really imagine that, having tried through all their four years of conniving to bring him down, that they would calmly accept the prospect of another four years of Trump? That they would not try to rig the election? In 2016 they had been supremely confident that their candidate Hillary Clinton would win, and the surprise of Trump’s victory appalled them. This time they were determined that he would not succeed. Last summer the Democratic Party-aligned Transition Integrity Project (launched by Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman) was created to wargame scenarios designed to bring the President down by force in the event of his not accepting the result of the election.³

However, if the certification process in Congress that day had continued without interruption as Pence had intended, then many of the arguments and details relating to the fraudulent election would have been laid out for the American public to hear. The mainstream media had been insisting since the election that all talk of fraud was ‘baseless’ ‘conspiracy theory’ and that Trump and his advisers were lying. The election had been sound and secure, they said, and Biden had won fair and square. Almost all the 60 lawsuits that Trump’s team had brought to contest the results had been thrown out by the courts over the previous weeks since 3rd November, often on formalities. But the media did not present the courts’ reasonings in many of the cases. Media reports often simply stated that the cases were: “Denied” or “Withdrawn”.⁴ “Some judges said the Trump campaign lacked legal “standing” to challenge voting procedures. Others said Trump electors or individual voters lacked “standing”. Many cases were thrown out for laches — a legal principle barring untimely suits. Others were declared to be moot or precluded by ongoing litigation at the state level. At least two suits were deemed to violate the Eleventh Amendment — the constitutional provision limiting federal-court litigation against states and state officials. “The Trump campaign and their allies weren’t working with the most skilled lawyers,” said Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt. “They weren’t paying close attention because, all of a sudden, they found out to their surprise that the courthouse doors are quite narrow. They’re only open a crack.”⁵ Those last two sentences are very pregnant…

The certification process in Congress was thus the last chance for at least some of the evidence to be put before the American people. If things had proceeded normally, the process would have been televised and all would have been over by the early evening. That means the nation would have heard in Congress details of the fraud, and that a 10-day delay had been granted and an audit commission appointed. Neither of these things happened, because the whole process was suspended during the protestors’ intrusion and then after it, 6 hours later, the certification process was resumed and went on until 3:41 am, by which time it was 00.41 am on the West Coast and most people in the whole country were asleep! It was at that time, in the dead of night, that Biden and Harris were officially declared by Pence to become the next President and Vice-President on 20 January.

The so-called “storming of the Congress” thus robbed the Trump supporters of a chance for the country to hear what they had been complaining about – the fraud in the six ‘swing states’ and also, given the shock of what had happened in the intrusion, members of Congress were very unlikely to grant an audit commission. It was a completely useless action on the part of the intruders, because they got nowhere near the assembled Congressmen and women, many of whom were mostly swiftly hurried away from the chambers. The crowd could therefore exercise no pressure on them. They might possibly have done so if indeed they had stood outside the building and chanted slogans while the certification was going on, thus letting the members of Congress know their strength of feeling. Intruding into Congress undermined their own purpose in gathering there. The mainstream media, which has given plenty of evidence of its utter contempt for Trump supporters over the past four years, would have us think they were all zombies ‘incited’ by the words of President Trump to go on a rampage, as if they were incapable of thinking and acting for themselves, and therefore broke into Congress. This can make one wonder: were they in fact instigated by agents provocateurs to break the thin lines of Capitol police officers and penetrate the building? It is very hard to prove that without precise, clear and sustained video footage from various sections of the crowd.

The “storming”

The protestors turned up at the Capitol at around 1.20 pm, but once they got through the outer fence onto the extensive lawn, there was quite a long and noisy standoff right outside the Capitol building itself between sections of the crowd and the Capitol police. This stand-off only gradually built up in energy over about 90 minutes, the police slowly giving ground and responding with chemical sprays and occasional baton blows. The crowd threw no missiles but eventually, some of them forced their way past the police at ground level and up the steps. Around 2.30 p.m., while it is true that a few windows were broken and entry was forced that way (though other protestors strongly objected to the windows being broken), it is also the case that protestors were simply let through by police officers who removed barriers outside the building, and in one case, the doors were opened to them and they strolled in while police officers inside watched and did nothing⁶. This was the US Capitol building, the centre of American democracy and normally a top security location with its own dedicated police force. Yet the police response looked very messy and uncoordinated, undisciplined. There seemed to be no police announcements addressing the crowd. There were definitely too few police to defend such an important building, and they did not have the situation under control inside the Capitol until around 5.00 p.m. – which shows how few police there were at first. They had retreated from the crowd and ran back up the Capitol steps, virtually inviting the crowd to follow them. Policemen were filmed urging protesters to advance to the Capitol through metal barriers.⁷ If there had been enough police at ground level, the crowd would never have been able to get to the steps. At one point, a line of police simply stood and watched from a distance while a group of protestors walked through a door that had been opened for them from the inside by police who were standing inside.⁸ The authorities had had plenty of time to prepare for this event. They knew that Trump was planning to hold a speech near the White House and they knew that the vote certification – a very important Congressional procedure – was planned for 6 January. They had known this for weeks, if not months. Yet the security was minimal, given the potential for trouble. Apparently, the Capitol Police had not asked for reinforcements in the preceding days or weeks from the metropolitan police or the National Guard. In effect, it was as if security at this key national site had been stood down; it was grossly ineffective. One cannot but recall what happened on 9/11 with the equally ineffective air defences… On 6 January, the National Guard – apparently deployed by Vice-President Pence – did not arrive till around 5.30.

All these developments suggest that this event, this intrusion into the Capitol, may have actually been wanted and encouraged in certain quarters within the Establishment and allowed to happen in order to ensure that the fraudulent election results would be certified and to humiliate Trump and drive him from office, or at least begin impeachment proceedings against him which, although they would have no chance of succeeding before 20 January, would serve to permanently stain his reputation and that of his family, thus preventing him or them from leading any future ‘Trumpist’ movement.

The response

The BBC were soon salivating at the prospect that Trump could be ejected by force in line with the 25th Amendment that provides for the removal of Presidents mentally or physically incapable of performing their duties. This would make Vice-President Mike Pence President until Inauguration Day on 20 January. Former Secretary of Defence William Cohen (one of 10 former Defence Secretaries who wrote a letter to the Pentagon urging them to remove Trump) was on BBC Radio 4 at lunchtime on 8 January: “The US is standing on the abyss of the destruction of our democracy”, he said, grossly exaggerating the situation. He ignored the fact that millions of Americans regard the 2020 election as having been fraudulent.

At around 4.37 p.m. on 6 January, in the middle of the intrusion, three powerful business groups – the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable (representing major corporations), and the US Chamber of Commerce – contacted the Vice-President. The first urged him to remove the President from office for having fuelled this attempt at “mob rule”; the other two called on the President to end the intrusion immediately.9 Within ten minutes of receiving those calls, Trump put out a video message urging his supporters to “go home”. He told them “I know your pain. I know your hurt. But you have to go home now… we can’t play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special.” Within 24 hours Twitter had blocked liking, retweeting or sharing tweets of Trump’s message, citing “the risk of violence” and within 48 hours, in an unprecedented step that shows only too blatantly the power of the Big Tech companies and the real abyss facing US democracy, Twitter and Facebook banned the President of the United States (!) from their platforms altogether for the foreseeable future on the grounds of possible “further incitement of violence”.

Having said at his rally on 6 January that he would “never concede” the election, it appears that Trump did, in effect, concede a day later; in a video released from the White House on 7 January, he promised “an orderly transition”. At the rally, he had called his supporters “special” and said he loved them, but in that video he condemned the Capitol intruders in no uncertain terms. Perhaps, counting on the strength of Capitol security, he had not foreseen an intrusion and had been hoping the crowd would just stand outside the Congress and chant slogans, “cheering on our brave Senators and Congressmen and women”, but that would have been a naïve hope. Sections of his audience were already too fired up, not by his lacklustre speech, but by their own righteous indignation about the state of the country and by what they saw as a fraudulent election.

What was “trashed”, or who?

Since the event, Establishment politicians and the media have unrestrainedly slammed the protestors as “insurrectionists”, “thugs”, “zombies”, “goons”, “enemies of democracy”, “domestic terrorists” and of course, “fascists”, amongst other insults. Trump has been accused of “inciting a mob to riot” and “insurrection” but in fact, it was not a very energetic speech, and he was only speaking to a rally of his supporters, a perfectly normal political activity; he did not address them at the Capitol afterwards. He did not walk down to the Capitol with them, though he had told them at the rally that he would do. BBC Radio 4 lunchtime news on 7 January said that the Capitol was “stormed and ransacked”. Actually, only a few windows and door glasses were smashed or damaged and few items removed, usually from the offices of key anti-Trump figures such as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Papers were strewn around her office and her laptop was stolen but her office was not ‘trashed’. The word “ransacked” conjures up images of a total trashing of a building, and that would be a complete lie in this case. Even “stormed” is disingenuous; while the intrusion can indeed be said to have been more of an aggressive action than the so-called “storming of the Reichstag” in Berlin in August last year, this was no 1789 Bastille event or 1917 Winter Palace¹⁰, because the few police outside the Capitol ran away from the protestors up the steps, inviting them, as it were, to go up there. Many police made no move to stop these so-called “domestic terrorists” and some opened barriers and doors for them; Nor did the police open fire at these alleged “armed insurrectionists” and “threats to democracy”, except for one woman who was shot at and killed simply for climbing through a door. In any case, the violence of the protestors and intruders cannot be compared with the BLM/Antifa mayhem and killings across the USA (mostly in Democratic Party-controlled cities) during the summer, when whole areas of cities were trashed, looted, burned and areas of Seattle and Portland were occupied. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris exculpated the rioters as “mostly peaceful protestors”.

If the intruders on 6 January had really been violent, fascist, communist or anarchist insurrectionists, they could and indeed would likely have done what Senator Lindsay Graham has said: “They could have blown the building up. They could have killed us all. They could’ve destroyed the government,” he said, reported by the BBC. And that shows the sheer extent of the Capitol police force’s failure in allowing so many people to get into the Capitol and roam around at will. Yet the Capitol police force is supposed to be highly trained, well-equipped and well-paid: 2200 officers to defend just two square miles and with an annual budget of $460 million. By their weakness and ineffectiveness, the police and their superior officers put the lives of the country’s elected representatives at risk. The intruders got into the Senate chamber but not the House of Representatives chamber, which was defended by armed guards, although most Congressmen and women had been evacuated.

One video that has emerged is a real ‘smoking gun’ of sorts.¹¹ It shows a line of police outside the building just standing there at a distance facing a group of protestors who are walking into the building. Those police officers are not facing outwards to guard against others coming from that yonder side; they are just standing there, watching as the protestors enter the Capitol, the doors having been opened from the inside for them and the Capitol police inside are also just standing there as the intruders walk past them. One policeman is even heard to say “I disagree with it…” but like his colleagues, he does nothing. If these intruders were really ‘domestic terrorists’ trying to destroy American democracy, as Democrat leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have claimed, those police officers should have all been firing their weapons ‘in defence of American democracy’ and its “national shrine”. The same video even shows an intruder who has only just entered the building and is walking up a staircase inside wearing a backpack, which is an unthinkable lapse of security in normal circumstances. Security at the Capitol is not the job of the President, but of the Capitol authorities i.e. the legislature, so that particular buck stops at Vice-President Pence.

It seems increasingly likely that this whole ‘event’ was set up i.e. allowed and even encouraged to happen by the controllers of the Capitol police in order a) to prevent the American people from seeing and hearing evidence of the fraudulent election being presented in Congress (and thus televised) b) to prevent the extra 10 day investigation into the election results which the Congress, and notably Pence, could have ordered, and c) to cast the maximum aspersions on Trump, including a second impeachment, so he would leave office under the darkest cloud and not represent any political threat to the Establishment in the future.

Senator Lindsey Graham said: “they could have blown the building up. They could have killed us all”¹², and yes, they could have, if the intruders had been real armed insurrectionists intent on mayhem, murder and the destruction of the Capitol – but they weren’t! They were unwitting pawns in an utterly cynical game, as most likely, were the police, including the officer who shot and killed one of the intruders, Ashli Babbitt. After all, why on earth did anyone need to be shot upstairs if the police downstairs had let people in? This suggests police with different agendas or different loyalties. One cannot but be reminded of the total (deliberate) security malfunction on 9/11, the failure of the air defences etc. Then too, security was, in effect, stood down and came into operation far too late – after the damage had been done.

The intruders did not do what Lindsey Graham feared, because they weren’t domestic terrorists trying to overthrow the Republic, despite what the Establishment politicians and the media are now trying to portray them as. There were indeed some wilder and more bizarre types among the intruders, but most of those who attended the rally and who gathered outside the Congress seemed simply to be ‘patriots’, concerned that democracy in their country was being destroyed. That they were such people is clear both from video footage of the Trump supporters the day before, the crowd at the rally and outside the Capitol – which is why, apart from a few broken windows and doors, they did not trash this building for which, as ‘patriots’, they had respect as the symbolic home of American democracy. Instead, the intruders just wandered around it for the most part like tourists and were eventually ‘ushered out’ by police. They should not have intruded into the building as they did, and not least because by doing so, they stymied their own cause. But nevertheless, they do not deserve to be regarded as virtually subhuman, which is how they have been described by the media and most of the political class since 6 January.

Trump’s supporters on 6 January were for the most part ordinary Americans who embodied the frustrations of millions like them who have for years, decades even, been fed up with the Washington ‘swamp’ and the gridlocked uselessness of so many American politicians, moneygrubbers like Roman senators of old. His supporters are those who Hillary Clinton called “the deplorables” – the people whose ancestors built the country and died for it in its wars; the people who have, again and again, been abused, exploited and deceived by the business, economic, academic and media elites. But they are also the hardy, ordinary people of the age of the Consciousness Soul, and although most regard themselves as patriots who love their country and its national community, they wish to stand on their own feet as autonomous individuals in self-governing local communities, not existing as puppets or dependents of the State. This is also why few of them wore COVID masks at the Capitol – because they think for themselves and are able to see through the lies and/or stupidity of the highly paid professional experts and authorities who presume to subject them to the tyranny of this COVID dictatorship.

Ashli Babbitt

One of the deplorables at the Capitol was not ‘ushered out’ by the police. She was shot and killed by the police. Ashli Babbitt (pic. above), a 35 year-old woman from San Diego, California, and a former US Airforce veteran of 14 years who had done four tours of service abroad, was carried out on a stretcher after being shot in the neck from the handgun of a plainclothes policeman hiding by doors, one of which Babbitt was about to jump though. She later died in hospital some three hours later. Yet right behind her at the door had been other, uniformed police officers with assault rifles who could have stopped or arrested her. As she lay on the floor bleeding, one of those filming her was 25 year-old John Earle Sullivan from Utah, as ardent a leftwing revolutionary and BLM activist as Ashli Babbitt was a Trump supporter and conservative. What he was doing there among all those Trump supporters no-one knows; he said later on CNN(!) that he was just trying to film what was going on.¹³

The BBC and other mainstream media stated that Babbitt was shot by the Capitol police officer while she was trying to get into a corridor that led to the House chamber where Representatives were “sheltering in place”, and implied that she and her fellows were perhaps going to slaughter or at least physically attack the politicians. Yet no Congressmen or women were harmed by the protestors and most had been evacuated by the police. One Capitol policeman, Brian Sicknick (42), later died from injuries sustained in the intrusion; details at the time of writing are still scant on his death.

Ashli Babbitt was a passionate ‘patriot’, a martial and bold woman, fiercely opposed to communism and what she saw as the excessive State control spreading through American culture and society, as can be seen in videos of her online. She had travelled all the way from San Diego on the Pacific coast of southern California to be at the Trump rally. In her forthright manner, on her way to Washington for the rally she wrote in an online message that “Nothing will stop us….they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours…. dark to light!” – the Mars-Uranus motif again. It seems she sensed something about the coming drama. One is reminded of the second verse of Rudolf Steiner’s Foundation Stone Meditation here: “Work at Spirit-Sensing in balance of soul, where the surging deeds of the world’s becoming unite your own I to the I of the world, and you will truly feel in the soul activity of man….You spirits of light, let there be fired from the East what forms itself in the West, speaking: In Christ, death becomes life.” Ashli Babbitt was a woman in the prime of life, dynamic, fierce even and striving for inner balance at the beginning of the Consciousness Soul phase of her life (35-42). She sought to unite her I to something larger – to the destiny of her country and what was going on in the world around her, engaged in the feverish soul activity of politics, which is the struggle of the balance of interests and feelings. Her last journey was from West to East; in herself, she brought inner fire and passion to the cold formalism of Washington DC and the Capitol.

It may seem perhaps to many that she died in a trivial way, throwing away her life in an ignoble cause, but she surely did not see it like that: she believed that her country and its democracy were threatened by a steadily creeping tyranny (“they can try and try and try…”) and that she had to confront this (“Nothing will stop us…”).

The Capitol and the ghost of Rome

That was also what many Americans believed in the 1770s when they took up arms to free themselves from the British Empire. The American colonials were regarded as near subhuman “deplorables” by many in the British Parliament, the British elite and the British army, all of whom lived lives framed by the Greco-Roman norms of those days, the legal-political intellectual thinking of the 4th Post-Atlantean Epoch, still echoing on in the 18th century and also today, and materialised so powerfully in the architectural forms, statuary and decorations of the US Capitol, a building named (by Thomas Jefferson) after the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on Capitoline Hill, one of the seven hills of ancient Rome.

None of this 4th Epoch formalism, the cold and stiff ceremonies of the US Congress, has anything to do with people like Ashli Babbitt. It all stems ultimately from the ancient Mystery centres of the 3rd and early 4th Post-Atlantean Epochs. When we hear the talking heads and politicians in the media endlessly repeating mindless empty phrases such as “the hallowed shrine of democracy”, “the temple of democracy”, “the sacred halls of democracy” etc. we are hearing politics dressed up in the faded old garments of ancient religion. We witness the same in the formal procedures at the Palace of Westminster (the UK Parliament) in Britain and in British lawcourts. When we watch similar stiff formalities in the US House of Representatives played out before the two symbols of the authority of the Roman Republic (the bundles of rods and axes known as fasces, from which comes the word fascism) located to the right and left of the Speaker’s chair, we are looking at the very ghost of Rome. When we exercise Spirit-Remembering in the sense of the first verse of the Foundation Stone, we recall how the evolution of human consciousness has unfolded and how what was appropriate in the past is no longer so in the present.

A hundred years ago, Rudolf Steiner pointed out that old 4th Epoch ways of thinking and behaving, which are rooted in the spiritual impulses of the Exusiai, the Spirits of Form, had run out of energy and had ceased to have any meaning in the 20th century; he specified the 1950s as a decade by which this must be understood.¹⁴ Our 5th Epoch, the Age of the Consciousness Soul, began in 1413. 1953 minus 1413 = 540 years, a quarter of an epoch (2160/4 = 540). During that first quarter (1413-1953), 4th Epoch impulses of legalism, hierarchy, formalism, symbolism and intellectualism continued on into the 5th Epoch, like a gradually fading echo. The notion that some classes of people with access to formal education, universities and paper qualifications – all of which characteristics stemmed ultimately from the hierarchical structures of the ancient Mystery Schools, mediated via the Church – should regard themselves as somehow superior to “the lower orders”, is something that unfortunately is still, nearly 70 years after 1953, hanging on and all too evident in western societies. Jesus rejected the professionals of His day, the Pharisees and Sadducees, and chose for company those of “the deplorables” of His time. We are seeing now the utter contempt and disdain expressed for the “deplorables” of the Trump movement following the events at the Capitol on 6 January. All recognition of the suffering of ordinary Americans over the past several decades as the US economy has been undermined and ruined, of the continuous violence against conservatives and Trump supporters – which is there for all to see online¹⁵ – is forgotten as politicians and pundits express their outrage and horror that members of the people, the plebians, dared to enter uninvited “the hallowed halls” of what is supposed to be ‘the House of the People’ but which has largely become a pseudo-masonic club, a clubhouse for millionaire ‘gentlemen and gentlewomen’.

The so-called “storming” of the Roman Capitol of the USA on 6 January 2021 may have been a tactical blunder on the part of the populist movement in America, it may have been a defeat in the sense that the intruders allowed themselves to be drawn into a situation in which they and their movement have been made to look foolish, but it can also be seen as a potent sign that the ‘ordinary people’ of the 5th Epoch will no longer put up with governance by high scientific priests and magisterial political judges, leftovers from the 3rd and 4th Epochs, in their gleaming classical ‘temples’ with their all-embracing unitary domes, so redolent of the empire of Hadrian and Justinian.

In 1794, the British philosopher of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, commissioned the architect Willey Reveley to design a logo for Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’– a revolutionary new prison that would enable continual surveillance of each prisoner’s cell from a single dome.16

The logo of Bentham’s Panopticon – another Eye in the Triangle!

Today’s ‘Benthamite’ elites, such as Klaus Schwab, Elon Musk and Bill Gates with their ancient thinking, are on the verge of realising Bentham’s ‘vision’ through modern technologies of surveillance, biotech, and the manipulation of information, and they are seeking to apply Bentham’s 18th century ‘vision’ to the whole of 21st century society; China is already pointing the way with its hi-tech Social Credit surveillance system. If these modern Benthamites succeed, the result will make the totalitarian controls of 20th century dictatorships seem primitive and inefficient by comparison. But unconsciously, more and more people sense that such ancient architectural and social forms, however dressed up in hi-tech guises, do not breathe the spirit of the modern epoch. However, not enough of us yet practise Spirit-envisioning in the sense of the third verse of the Foundation Stone meditation: not enough yet see – just as not enough could see in the late 18th century¹⁷, at the time of the American and French revolutions – that the society of our modern, 5th Epoch must be based on the threefold image of the human being, as Steiner described a century ago, for only in our epoch has the third and most recently developed sector of social life – the economic sphere – emerged as an autonomous sphere alongside the older ones of culture and law/politics.

We have only just arrived in the 21st year of the 21st century, after three 700-year periods have passed since the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn guided the Magi to Bethlehem. The often brash but still youthful American spirit in one such as Ashli Babbitt will continue to throw itself boldly against the ancient hollow halls of hierarchy, even if that spirit is shot down by a gun from a black-suited figure hiding in the shadows, until that American spirit in countless people comes to see and understand the threefold image of man and how that can be realised – peacefully.

Notes

1 TPA, Vol. 5 No. 7/8 Oct/Nov 2019. ‘The Incarnation of Ahriman – When and Where (Part One)’.

2 Meanwhile, here in Britain, on the same day Parliament voted retrospectively (!) – by 524 votes to 16 (!) – to approve Johnson’s new full-on lockdown of the whole country which he announced on TV the previous Sunday night. Most of the MPs voted via computer screens from their homes, because of “social distancing”. Only 16 elected representatives thus had the courage and/or the intelligence to stand up against the absurdity of the COVID measures.

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Integrity_Project

4 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-s-electionfight-includes-over-30-lawsuits-it-s-n1248289

5 https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/01/donald-trump-courtselection-legal-hangover-453217

6 https://twitter.com/christina_bobb/status/1347596278583197698

7 https://twitter.com/bumbera_steven/status/1347270969988173825

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX2gQsQElJY

8. See n.6 above.

9 https://www.mysuncoast.com/2021/01/06/associated-press-timelineevents-capitol/

    https://news.trust.org/item/20210106212934-za0c4/

10 Modern historical scholarship has revealed that neither of those two ‘seminal’ events were as dramatic or bloody as they were made out to be in subsequent centuries and decades, and this may also turn out to be the eventual verdict on the “storming” of the US Capitol on 6 Jan. 2021.

11 See n. 6 above.

12 https://www.wistv.com/2021/01/07/graham-riots-they-could-have-killed-us-all/

13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7PXvchh2WQ

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc1WJA5CE5Q

14 Lecture of 14 December 1919 in Collected Works GA 194.

15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUBpRexwiPg

16 https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201112-the-eye-of-providencethe-symbol-with-a-secret-meaning

17 The threefold slogan of liberty-equality-fraternity emerged from Rosicrucian circles early on in the French Revolution, but no-one was able to translate it from  an idea into social reality.

“We’re living in a world where things just happen, don’t they?” These were words I overheard from a conversation between two women in our local park recently. They were talking about the so-called ‘COVID crisis’ and expressed the view that events these days just seem to occur ‘out of the blue’ as it were, out of nowhere. 9/11, the crash of 2008, the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, the emergence of ISIS in 2014, Donald Trump, the ‘COVID crisis’ itself, the recent military coup in Myanmar, to cite just a few events in recent times – for many people who depend on the mainstream media for their view of what’s going on in the world all these events “just happen”; they seemed to come out of nowhere. People feel they can’t make sense of them, especially those that happen far away, and rightly so, because the mainstream media rarely put them in their proper context to help people understand the deeper issues. Of course, they try to give what is called “background” to an event like the coup in Myanmar; there is the occasional documentary, long article or panel discussion, but after a week or so, or perhaps only a few days, the news cycle, always hungry for new stories, moves on and explanations remain more or less superficial.

After I overheard that woman in the park, I walked on and only a moment later, I overheard a man asking someone on his mobile phone: “are you where you need to be going?” A pregnant question. Are we where we need to be going? It assumes we know where we need to be going, and let’s face it, many of us don’t, individually. From day to day, or over a period of weeks, months or a year perhaps we do. But over the course of our lives? By which I mean: do we know around, say, the age of 21, where we need to be going in our lives? Why are we here? What is the purpose of our general human and individual existence? Has our upbringing, our education up to that point, helped us to gain some clarity on such questions? The same applies to a nation and to humanity as a whole in the 21st century.

In the Middle Ages a person’s destiny would usually be determined by the status of his or her parents. In modern times this has decreasingly been the case. But what, beyond a modern young person’s interests and hobbies, determines for him or her choices about the course of life on leaving the parental home, or even before it? In Japan in the period 1950-90, a young person’s lifepath was largely set at the age of 18 by the juken jigoku (‘examination hell’); this determined whether they would go to a university and thus on to an upwardly mobile career with a major company or public service that would guarantee lifetime employment, or whether they would enter the world of work at a lower or middle-ranking position, where they would probably remain. There was only one gate of opportunity – at 18. If you missed it, your life’s chances were also missed, as multiple doors slammed shut for you. At least, that was the propaganda. That was what the culture continually drummed into the minds of young people for some 40 years.

But of course, that was not the situation for 40 years because it had “just happened”, and when that situation began to break down in the early 1990s, as Japan’s economy nosedived into stagflation, following the bursting of the property bubble and the collapse of the Japanese stock market in 1990, that did not “just happen” either. Both developments – the lifetime employment system and the juken jigoku which underpinned it, and then the gradual collapse of that same lifetime employment system, happened not because the people of the supposedly democratic state of Japan had wanted those things to happen, but because a very small number of people – Bank of Japan and Finance Ministry senior managers and their political allies – had made determinations as to what was in their own best interests, which they also took to be the best interests of Japan.(1) Under the circumstances of the modern global economy since the end of the Second World War in 1945, the ordinary people of any country, i.e. everyone who is not very rich, rarely have the time or resources to think about large-scale themes such as the overall direction their country, let alone the world, should take. Ordinary families are busy enough just trying to make ends meet and make things a bit better for their children.

But at the top of their societies, whether in Japan or Britain, China, the USA, India or Germany, there have always been a few people who have identified their own interests with those of the country and have been busy identifying where the country (or indeed the world) ‘needs to be going’. They have determined that a certain major change should occur in the society at a certain point in history, that a ‘new order’ should continue for a certain period and systems be put in place to support this continuation throughout that period, and then similar people determine that the circumstances have changed and that a new direction is necessary to adapt the country and its population to those changes. Of course, the populations themselves play little or no part in these determinations even though they believe they live in democratic societies, which are supposed to reflect the will of (the majority of) the people. The populations observe the determinations of the elites as presented to them by the media and are expected to go along with the new direction.

The Planners

We have seen this process unfolding once again since 2019. Since the Swedish teenage ‘climate change’ campaigner Greta Thunberg spoke at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, in January that year, urging us all to “follow ‘the’ science”, i.e. follow the lead set by those scientists who cooperate with those at the top of societies, the profile of the WEF has grown ever more prominent, and we have seen how the WEF and other such groups and think tanks and the mainstream media who echo them all regard ‘climate change’ and COVID-19 as being combined phenomena that represent a major historical change with which we are all expected and continually ‘nudged’ to comply. This change has been given various names by those advocating it: The Great Reset, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Green New Deal, The New Economy, The Age of Biotech, The Fourth Turning etc.

For some years now, certain aspects of this ‘new era’ have been presented ad nauseam as something for which ‘there is no alternative’, something inevitable: the massive application of artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnologies, human life extension, the Internet of Things, whereby all products will be able to transmit communications, digital currencies (the end of cash), digital identities, the end of physical shopping, universal basic income for all, agribusiness and the end of traditional farming, global geoengineering projects, human travel to Mars, robot soldiers and robot weapons systems, etc. These have often been regarded by the mainstream media as things which are simply ‘progress’, technological or otherwise and, as such, the media mostly welcome them. In other words, they have been seen as developments that have ‘just happened’. But of course, this is not the case at all. All scientific and technological developments in modern times require considerable financial investment; choices have to be made, often on the basis of long-term calculations or considerations, such as: “where we need to be going…”, as determined by the people making those calculations.

But to these developments, consciously selected and promoted by people in the business, scientific, political, academic and media elites, the COVID-19 ‘crisis’ has added a new element, for which no really suitable word or concept has yet been devised. It might perhaps be called ‘total oligarchical surveillance and control’. It has suddenly and drastically imposed a level of social control and inhuman behaviour across many countries around the world that few, in the western democracies at least, would have thought possible or would have even imagined before 2020 – unless, for example, they were participants at the “Event 201” conference in October 2019 at Johns Hopkins University in the USA, an event sponsored by the WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and devised to ‘game’ a global scenario for a response to the outbreak of a worldwide coronavirus and respiratory illness pandemic. One of the key recommendations of the participants was for the total control of information during the coming pandemic. The phrase used at Event 201 was the need “to flood the zone” with the same messages all round the world, so that populations would receive no alternative message and would be compliant and do what they were told. This “flooding of the zone” would be essential to maintain public support both for official restrictive measures during the pandemic and for the vaccines that would eventually be introduced to deal with the virus.(2) The concept of “flooding the zone” worldwide points up the key propaganda role of the mainstream media throughout the crisis so far. This total information control, which has since extended to the exclusion and banning of alternative views from both mainstream and social media, even those of medical experts and scientists who disagree with or oppose governments’ measures, and also the sheer extent of the totalitarian social restrictions and curtailing of liberties and rights, not to mention the wilful vandalism carried out against entire economies, has led some people to use more brusque language to describe what has happened: “scientific tyranny”, “medical tyranny” “scientific/medical fascism”, “hygienic fascism”, “neo-fascism”.

Fascism?

It might seem to some that use of the word ‘fascism’ or ‘neo-fascism’ is definitely overexaggerated here, but is it? Why is ‘communism’ or ‘neo-communism’ not a more suitable term for what has happened over the past year? This second question is easier to answer. It is because communism is a monist or monopolistic system i.e. both the cultural life and the economic life are subservient to the political state; they are not autonomous – politics, i.e. the State rules. Actually, it is not even politics, as there is no debate allowed. A party oligarchy controls the State and through it, everything else. All three spheres of society (culture, politics and economy) are subsumed in one. Communist systems are thus similar in a way to the theocracies of old (Egypt, Babylon, ancient China); they are all systems dominated by a single philosophical or religious ideology identified with the government. In communist states this is a kind of pseudo-religious, materialist economic philosophy. Although those ancient systems allowed private farming and small businesses to exist (as Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” also briefly did in the early 1920s), there was no sense in which the economic sphere or the political sphere existed in their own right as they do today, or did until 2020. Communism was and is a system in which the cultural sphere, in this case, an economic ideology, in effect, rules over the other two spheres of society – law/politics and economy – through State power. More rigid forms of Communism have abolished all forms of private enterprise altogether as well as all alternative ideologies and philosophies in what communists like to call “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Fascist states do not do this; they allow private enterprise of most kinds to exist, as well as most forms of religious belief, as long as these sectors do not challenge the dominant Fascist ideology of the government. Indeed, they are required to support and show allegiance to the governing Fascist ideology. If they do not, they are suppressed.

Twofold, threefold, onefold

In modern democracies up to 2020, there was no real threefold society, in which all three sectors – culture, politics, economy – are autonomous but also interrelating, like the three physiological systems in the human body (metabolism, circulatory system and nervous system), as Rudolf Steiner called for publicly with his movement for a Threefold Social Organism in 1919.(3) What existed in modern democracies until 2020 was a twofold system in which politics and economy struggled for power and influence between them. Usually, economic interests dominated politics, but these societies – being nominally ‘democratic’ – paid lip service to the pretended supremacy of politics and government, ‘the rule of law’, etc. Societies in the European Middle Ages (c.800-1600) were also dualistic, but then the duopoly was a struggle between the cultural sphere (the Church) and the political sphere (the monarch or, in Central Europe, the Free City); there was still no autonomous economic sphere. In the period 1600-1900 one duopoly faded and was replaced by another, that is, the power of the Church declined and was replaced by that of the economy (business interests), as a materialist philosophical ideology gradually replaced the former religious ideology of the Church and sought to assert its own interests against those of the State. The 20th century was thus dominated by the duopoly of politics vs business. Socialists, representing the economic interests of workers, looked to big government to defend workers and the poor against the economic interests of business circles, whose political allies were first liberal and then later, conservative parties. Most of the latter had shifted their allegiance over time from the older, now largely spent forces of ‘throne and altar’ to the new power of business.

Mediaeval society failed to resolve its dualism. It could not harmonise the powers of the Church and the State, or the Pope and the Emperor (or king), respectively. In those these two powers were frequently identified by contemporary thinkers and writers with “the two lights” – the Sun and the Moon. The anthroposophical historian Karl Heyer wrote:

“The Sun and Moon did not find each other. They remained in conflict. Precisely because the two powers were too similar to each other, they could not arrive at a harmonious collaboration. Both were too Roman, …. both sought external domination over the other. The great cosmic image of sun and moon was mostly interpreted in a very unspiritual way.”(4)

The two could not collaborate because the Church had drifted away from its original spiritual purpose, which had been to christianise and civilise the impulses of the Germanic elites and their populations after the barbarian migrations from the 4th to the 10th centuries. Instead, the Church, especially from the reigns of Popes Gregory VII (1073-1085) to Boniface VIII (1294-1303) sought increasingly to wield worldly power over all temporal rulers. The Roman Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor became rivals for power and territory in this world. In the end, a new force emerged in the 15th century in the towns and cities, that of the freethinking individual and, with it, the economic force of commerce among the merchant and artisan classes, and with John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Martin Luther and other religious reformers, they demanded personal religious liberty, a demand which was soon extended to political liberty; freedom from the control of both Pope and Emperor. It was the beginning of the modern age of individualism. The assertion of personal liberty and autonomy soon spread to the economy, and by the end of the 17th century, this third sphere of society, with its new entities – its shareholder-owned companies, its stock exchanges, global trading networks, central banks and systems of commercial law – had established itself as an autonomous force, vying for power and influence against both Church and State.

Over the century since Steiner introduced the ideas of the Threefold Social Organism, in which he sought to establish autonomy and interrelationship for all three spheres of society and prevent any one being dominated by either of the others, we moderns too have failed, as the people of the Middle Ages failed, to resolve our social dualism, the struggle between the worlds of politics and economy. But whereas the failure of the mediaeval duopoly did in the end lead to the emergence of the third sphere, that of the economy, and as such, this represented a forward movement, albeit one that has been very fraught to say the least, our modern failure to comprehend and realise the threefold social organism over the past century and the consequent failure of our modern duopoly – because a social structure that is built on the tension between two elements, on the number two, the number of division, cannot ultimately stand – has meant that we are now about to proceed backwards to a monopolistic or monist order. This regression was not inevitable, but we have caused it through our cumulative social failures over the past 100 years.

According to Steiner, we are now living through the first third (1413-2133) of the fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch (1413-3573), and this fifth epoch has a deep resonance with the third Post-Atlantean Epoch (2907-747 BC). This is in line with the sevenfold nature of time and historical development which proceeds rather like a musical octave (do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do) in which the notes do, re and mi are mirrored by ti, la and so respectively, around the central axis of the note fa. One can also think of this as a lemniscate, a figure of eight on its side, with the note fa as the crossover point in the middle. Accordingly, the first Post-Atlantean Epoch corresponds to the seventh epoch, the second to the sixth, and the third to the fifth – all around the fourth epoch (fa), which has no mirror image. Of course, this does not mean that the third and fifth epochs mirror each other exactly, otherwise we’d be living again in a world of pharaonic demigods, pyramids and mummification, but nevertheless there are numerous resonances between the two epochs.(5) Some of the cultural resonances are perhaps understandable, but we should not allow our epoch to become a repetition of the third epoch, because this fifth epoch has its own historical developmental task, namely, the elaboration of what Steiner called the ‘Consciousness Soul’ –- the autonomous, spiritually aware, human individual. An important aspect of developing this is the understanding of the problem of good and evil, whereas the moral task of the third epoch, according to Steiner, was to understand ethics in terms of inner/outer beauty and ugliness, and the task of the 4th (Greco-Roman-mediaeval) epoch was to comprehend the relationship of truth and untruth. The third epoch, that of Babylon, Egypt and the other Near Eastern cultures, was one in which, as mentioned above, the principle of oneness, onefoldness was dominant – the rule of the State by the priesthood through demigod kings. Unless we awaken to what is happening today, the form of society approaching in our time will not be a twofold society let alone a threefold one, but a onefold society in which a pseudo-religious ideology – that of Baconian natural science – will, through the instrument of the State subjected to it, utterly dominate our world through the tyranny of medical, ‘environmental’ and technocratic experts – our new priesthood upon whom we will have allowed all aspects of our culture and society to become dependent. Business, the arts, scientific research, politics – all are now increasingly dependent on A.I. and those who supposedly steer it but who are themselves increasingly steered by it. In his book New Atlantis (1627), published the year after his death, Francis Bacon laid out his vision of what we today might call a technocratic society, hierarchically ordered rather like a beehive in which everyone had their place and function. In From Gondhishapur to Silicon Valley (2000), Paul Emberson showed how the guiding college of Bacon’s imaginary island of Bensalem – a college (research institute) which Bacon called “Salomon’s House” – bore comparison to both a “human computer” and “the hierarchical structures of the mystery centres of antiquity”; in Bacon’s book we find the island governed by scientific experts who subtly both informed and controlled the rest of the society and who were served by them. Moreover, Bacon was himself the deviser of the binary thinking that is at the very base of all computer technology; this is clear from his book The Advancement of Learning (1623), where, amongst other things, he sought to reduce all thoughts and thinking processes to a series of a’s and b’s.(6) (in our time with modern computing – zeros and ones.)

Already by the beginning of this century, contemporaries were recognising how far Bacon’s vision had become reality: “At the dawn of the 21st century, scientific dogmatism is more firmly entrenched than ever. The scientist has become the high priest of the industrial world, certifying both the academic training of new users and the relevance of types and means of production. In all areas of human discourse, scientific reasoning has the force of law. What was once a theocracy is now a ‘scientocracy.”(7) We could also call this a technocracy.

The view had already become widespread by the First World War that power had shifted from the powerful men of the 19th century, the industrialists, to the bankers. But as we have seen in the history of a company like IBM, in today’s world, business and finance have come to be utterly dependent on computer technology and on the people who understand and operate it. The same has become true even in many areas of the arts, and no modern government or health and welfare bureaucracy could function today without complex computer systems. Many aspects of our society were already being drawn into the online world by the year 2000; how much more is that the case now, since COVID-19, when so much of our lives has been forced to move online – not by any virus but as a consequence of government action – and most people will not even notice that gradually, incrementally, we are approaching ever nearer to something like China’s hi-tech total surveillance system of Social Credit? Vaccination passes and digital ID systems incorporating iris-scanning technology, subcutaneous inserts etc. will be but the thin end of the wedge. Meanwhile the ‘sustainable’ world of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and the ‘Green New Deal’, both much hyped in the media, promises to be even more hi-tech and dehumanised than the present.

Is all this “just happening”? No, it isn’t. Are we going where we need to be going? No, we are not, for where we need to be going is towards a threefold society that affirms the autonomy and interrelationship of the freethinking human individual, but apparently, we are where we need to be going as determined by the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates and Klaus Schwab of the WEF. The degree of public compliance with the will of our scientific and political masters which most of the population have obeyed so meekly over the past year, a single will that brooks no alternative opinions and is reinforced daily by mainstream media propaganda that excludes any such dissident opinions that challenge the ‘Big State’ or “Big Brother” – all this suggests that we are indeed heading in a monistic, neo-fascist direction. Obedience due to fear, is one key aspect of life in a (neo-)fascist State. A single dominant ideology, reinforced repeatedly with simplistic slogans and images, and endless bombastic assertions about the nation’s achievements in “defeating the deadly enemy” are other such features of a (neo-) fascist State.

The New Order

On 19 February the licence-payer-funded BBC, in recent years very much a supporter of Bill Gates and his twin causes celebres, climate change and vaccines, began a series of radio programmes, broadcast every morning for a week, in which extracts from Gates’ new book How To Avoid a Climate Disaster were read out over the week. An hour later on the same day and on the same channel, BBC Radio 4, another new short series began: “Britain’s Fascist Thread” tracing the history of fascism in Britain over the last 100 years. As we can see from the United States, a tendency is emerging from western governments and the media to lump Trump supporters, anti-lockdown protestors, vaccine refusers and those who disagree with the global warming agenda with the Far Right (and/or ‘fascists’) and with “domestic terrorists”. We see this same tendency in the propaganda put out by the WEF with its affirmation of the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement(8) which also argues for such things as ‘defunding the police’ and ‘decolonising academic curricula”.

Such activist organisations focus on accusing and blaming entire ethnic or racial groups in the name of ‘racial justice’, rather than on reconciliation and harmony, and the result is more racial division, hatred and antipathy. Another key element in 20th century fascism was the stirring up of such ethnic hatreds and antipathies: the extreme insistence on ethnic and racial difference as against the universal human being. 20th century fascism thus affirmed ethnic sameness and ‘purity’ within cultures while radically asserting the difference of its own ethnos vis-à-vis those of other societies. By contrast, the ‘neo-fascism’ of the 21st century is not interested in extreme difference. If anything, it seeks to forge a uniformity of values and practice while at the same time hypocritically urging the importance of ‘diversity’. It affirms diversity in outer, personal lifestyles and ethnicities in a society, but demands uniformity of opinions and values within that same society. The BBC and the American alphabet media companies (ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN et al), for example, may pretend to cater to a large variety of lifestyles, ethnic and otherwise, but the political, economic and philosophical opinions and values which such corporations affirm are constrained within a very narrow span that tends to uniformity and will not challenge the values and interests of the emergent 21st century form of global capitalist oligarchy.

This emergent, 21st century form of ‘soft fascism’, with its links with global corporate interests and NGOs, as evidenced in the intolerant, censorious and manipulative actions of ‘Big Tech’ companies and repressive and vandalistic, COVID-19-obsessed governments, claims to be multicultural, cosmopolitan and globalised, but it actually undermines social values and social harmony by insisting on its one inevitable vision of the future with which all, in the whole world, must comply. Whether by forcing or ‘nudging’, the effort to get everyone to submit to this vision of an inevitable future is bound to cause social acrimony and stress.

This emergent ‘soft’ fascism or ‘soft’ totalitarianism makes out that it is merely a continuation of ‘liberal democracy’ and the heir to the values of ‘The Enlightenment’, but actually, global corporations, and the globalised media and national governments that are aligned with the financial, scientific and technological, environmental and ‘medical’ (pharmacological) interests of those corporations are shaping a society that is moving further and further away from anything that is genuinely ‘liberal’ or ‘democratic’. On the contrary, they are actively engaged in imposing a uniform mode of anti-liberal oligarchy upon the world, with media organisations such as the BBC, ITV, Sky and the American ‘alphabet’ TV stations functioning as propaganda injection systems for these global corporate interests.

The technocratic ‘new order of scientocracy’ that we have seen emerge in the COVID-19 so-called ‘crisis’, in which governments claim to be acting only with the guidance of a priestly cadre of scientists, will not abolish private economic activity, although it has already severely damaged small business interests, many of which have been driven to closure or bankruptcy – not “by COVID” but by government actions in response to the ‘crisis’. Nor did fascist states in the 20th century abolish private industry and business, unlike communist states. Fascist states in the past allowed privilege, luxuries and hedonism for those with money and connections and permitted private business, both great and small, to exist. The same is true today in our emerging ‘new order’. As mentioned above, a fascist State or society today does not need to be one based on racism or other ethnic considerations. But it will be authoritarian, even if ‘softly’ so; it will brook no real opposition. It will censor, block, de-platform, and castigate opinions deemed to be hostile to government policy on key issues, as has increasingly been happening in recent years in various western countries, where, for example, we see Big Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter collaborating with governments to suppress even professional scientific and medical opinions that do not go along with the government or WHO line on COVID-19 or global warming (a.k.a. ‘climate change’). And whereas the fascist regimes in the past enforced social conformity by creating inequality (a second-class citizenry) in a society on an ethnic basis, ultimately our new mode of fascism will also enforce social conformity by creating inequality and second-class citizens with restricted rights and liberties – the unvaccinated, for example, or those who refuse so-called ‘smart’ technology. These will be – indeed, already are being – labelled “Luddites”, “conspiracy theorists”, “Far Right”, “fascists” and “domestic terrorists”.(9)

The very word ‘fascism’ conjures up, amongst other things, images of authority, paternalism and punishment; it comes from the ancient Roman ‘fasces’, a bundle of tall, bound rods carried by the lictors, a corps of men who guarded Rome’s magistrates as they walked around the city. These ‘fasces’ symbolised the authority of the State to punish wrongdoers either by corporal punishment, if the crime was committed within the inner precincts of Rome, or capital punishment if a serious crime was committed in the outer precincts, in which case an axe was added to the bundle of rods carried by the lictors when they were in the outer precincts.

The Incarnation of Ahriman

All of the changes that are taking place in our so-called liberal democracies as we watch them morph before our eyes into something quite different are not “just happening”, nor are they inevitable. They are happening, in the view of this writer, because of a spiritual event that has been taking place behind the scenes of modern life – the incarnation in human form of the being known in spiritual science as Ahriman, the inspirer of materialism, fear and untruth. In the winter of 1919(10) Steiner indicated how this being would appear in human form very early in the third millennium and hinted that it would be “in the West”, which many Anthroposophers have plausibly taken to mean America.

I have argued elsewhere that Ahriman incarnated in the year 2000, and that since May 2020, he has therefore been in his 21st year of life as a human being.(11) According to Rudolf Steiner, his incarnation comes as the third of the three great incarnations of mighty spiritual beings that have shaped or framed human development since the end of the 4th millennium BC. The two previous incarnations were those of the being traditionally known as Lucifer (not Satan) in a priest in China c.3000 BC, and that of the solar Logos (Christ) in Jesus 2000 years ago in Israel. Ahriman will thus be manifesting as a human adult – and Steiner emphasised that the incarnation would be, like the previous two, in fleshly human form i.e. not in some mechanical form or in the form of the Internet etc – 2000 years after the Incarnation, ministry, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We can notice the emphasis laid upon the year 2030 and the decade of the 2030s by the advocates of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Green New Deal lobby, the UN, the WEF, the climate change campaigners, the government of Saudi Arabia and many others. We can recall the terrible events of the 1930s. We can feel how events appear to be approaching a climax – economically, as the system that has been operated since the Second World War totters; politically, in the rapidly worsening relations between ‘the West’ and Russia/China, and the failure of the West to resolve the problems of its tired, broken and often corrupt political system; culturally, as relations between social groups, ethnicities, generations and individuals appear to be disintegrating and a mood of dystopia and despair has been spreading, or rather, has been spread, through our cultural life. All of this points towards a continuous, crisis-ridden situation in which uncomprehending, desperate millions will eagerly welcome the ideas of a saviour, a Messiah, a great dictator-figure or perhaps philosopher-scientist-businessman who will claim to be able to put the world to rights, rather like Obama and Trump claimed they would do for the USA, and millions believed them. These ideas will either be put forward by the individual himself or by proxies acting on his behalf. A similar scenario was sketched out by the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev at the end of the 19th century in his A Short Story of the Anti-Christ. What the world got instead in the years that followed was two very hot world wars, one cold world war, and numerous dreadful genocides. What Soloviev likely correctly pointed to was that most of humanity would fall for the temptation of his Anti-Christ figure but that a minority would not and that through them, humanity would survive and go on.

It is clear from what Steiner said about the incarnation of Ahriman that it cannot be prevented and will occur; it is a colossal event prescribed in evolution. It challenges us to comprehend it, to see through it, even to learn from it where we can, to resist the dehumanising temptation it represents in its technological enticements and thus to enable the human spirit and heart to go on, to suffer this event and come out the other side of it with our spirit and heart intact, capable of creating a new society with new, threefold ideas on the basis of where we truly need to be going in this fifth epoch. Whilst humanity, despite immense suffering, passed through the tribulations of 1914-45, it was unable to find its way to the ideas that truly correspond to the needs of our modern epoch and, instead, either continued old ideas of culture, politics and economy or else was distracted by ‘new’ delusions. In the next two decades, at least one sizeable section of humanity will have to pass through the tribulation that Ahriman brings, come out the other side, and, free of all delusions, be ready to build a human society that the children of the 21st century really need. To prepare for this, to prepare for the 2040s and beyond, and to get through the cascade of crises that will be coming in the next two decades, in order that things do not “just happen” to us, those of us who see through what is happening will need above all to create links with others – community and fellowship for mutual support, not with all and sundry, but with those who are clear-eyed and committed. “Only connect”, wrote E.M. Forster in his great novel Howard’s End not long before the First World War. But we will not have time to connect with all comers. Aware of our errors in the past, we will need to avoid those who drain our energies, who are fanatical and fanciful; we will need to connect with clarity and commitment.

Notes

1 See the documentary “Princes of the Yen” at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2gE4knl2Ac

2 For the manipulation of communications and “flooding the zone”, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBuP40H4Tko

3 See his book The Core Points of the Social Question (Collected Works GA 23), published in English as Towards Social Renewal (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999).

4 Karl Heyer, ‘Social Impulses of the Middle Ages and their Transformation in the Threefolding of the Social Organism’, first published in Das Goetheanum, Vol VI, No. 27, 28, 37, 38, July and September 1927, pp. 213-214, 218-221, 294/295, 303/304 and in Karl Heyer, Wer ist der deutsche Volksgeist? (Perseus Verlag, 1990) pp. 30-32.

5 For example: massive impersonal architecture, pyramidal hierarchical structures, cryonics, mass ritual spectacles, cryonic preservation, materialism in general.

6 Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623). See Paul Emberson, From Gondhishapur to Silicon Valley (Etheric Dimensions Press, 2000, pp.50-59).

7 Bernard Boudreau, (1999). “Pursuit of science, New social factors“. In Canadian Family Physician Vol. 45: 1134–1136, 1141–1136. Boudreau is a Canadian lawyer, politician, and a critic of ‘scientocracy’. 

8 See video ‘A Short History of Black Lives Matter’ on this page: https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/10/trained-marxist-and-blm-co-founder-patrisse-cullors-signs-warner-bros-tv-deal/

9 Opinion piece in The Washington Post (28.2.2021): ‘Anti-vaccine extremism is akin to domestic terrorism’: https://web.archive.org/web/20210301015135if_/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/anti-vaccine-extremism-is-akin-to-domestic-terrorism/2021/02/26/736aee22-787e-11eb-8115-9ad5e9c02117_story.html and Nick Cohen in The Guardian (27.2.2021): ‘It is only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated’: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/27/it-is-only-a-matter-of-time-before-we-turn-on-the-unvaccinated?fbclid=IwAR3wE1EoRSaWHL_Aj_q9ii3cWs3OUBPuPtRLbBLM-sR6CV01mit8Is8YxU4 

10 Lectures by Rudolf Steiner, 1,2,4,9,15 Nov. 1919 in Collected Works GA 191. Lecture of 4 Nov in GA 193.

11 The Present Age magazine Vol. 5 Nos. 7/8, Oct/Nov 2019 and Vol. 5, Nos. 9/10, May/June 2020 Also at: http://threeman.org/?p=2905