This article was first published in New View magazine, Issue 93 Oct-Dec 2019

It is a challenge in today’s world to think for oneself when from all sides of our electronic public arena, from news broadcasts and current affairs programmes to dramas and advertisements one is being bombarded by the same messages, day in, day out. It is hard enough for supposedly educated mature, middle-aged people who were brought up in the world of print culture and private thoughts and imaginations to think for themselves in this situation, let alone for young adolescents who have known nothing but the 24/7 world of social media and are at all times at the mercy of their screen-mediated groupthink and peer pressures. Two of the prominent phenomena of 2019 – the teenage ‘climate change’ campaigner Greta Thunberg and the “climate change” campaigning movement Extinction Rebellion – share the striking characteristic that, unlike virtually all great radical causes of past decades and centuries, their cause is almost entirely supported by the Establishment and by many, though not all, of its usual propaganda instruments in the media. From the global business elite at their annual jamboree in Davos, Switzerland in February this year – where Ms Thunberg told them she wanted them “to panic” because “our house is on fire”, but did not tell them to change the fundamental nature of western capitalism – to the Pope in Rome, to the leaders of the EU and of the British political class, Ms Thunberg has been welcomed and feted by the rich and powerful everywhere she has been, by the leadership class in religious, political and business circles. This salient fact seems to escape Ms Thunberg’s younger supporters and also many of her older ones.

Four Points of Reflection

Why is this so? Why, her supporters will reply, it is because those world leaders, the rich and powerful, all recognise the truth and justice of what she is saying, and saying with the heartfelt insight of a child. But before we are carried away by “the heartfelt insight of a child”, there are a number of points we ought to reflect on: Firstly, Anglo-American culture has long claimed to uphold and develop the rights and qualities of the individual, so if you want to make an impact in this culture, of whatever kind, the impact is culturally greater the more you can focus your message, whatever it happens to be, through a single individual, and the younger that individual the better. We can recall the way in which those images of a single young man, who seemed to be a student (although we have never learned his actual identity) blocking the path of a line of tanks near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June 1989 were used in the western media, or the way in which video footage of a single 15 year-old girl Nayirah giving tearful testimony – which later turned out to be completely fake¹ – to an international tribunal about Iraqi troops who she claimed had thrown babies out of their incubators in Kuwait and left them to die on the floor, was used to justify military action against Iraq in the name of the UN and was supported by countless media  organs around the world.

After all, how can one argue with the tear-stained testimony of a young girl who furthermore clearly comes from that same region? Then there was the global media anguish over 3 year old Syrian refugee child Alan Kurdi, whose dead body was photographed on a Turkish beach at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe in September 2015 and used, amongst other things, to justify opening European borders to refugees from Syria and elsewhere, often places that had suffered as a result of wars in which the US, the UK or Israel had been involved. Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon has said: “In addition to the cognitive impact that [a humanitarian crisis] is happening, you have to [evoke] emotion and feeling. Emotion is a critical factor in helping us understand an event, and it is a motivator that impels action as opposed to just abstract thoughts. Writers know this [when they] impress upon us the importance of a larger issue by telling the story through the eyes of one individual.”² Advertisers and propagandists know this as well as journalists, novelists and filmmakers. Older readers will recall shocking images of individuals in the Vietnam War: the images of a self-immolating Buddhist monk, a Vietcong prisoner being executed by a Saigon police chief, a naked 9 year old girl fleeing from a napalm attack all went round the world. The focus on individuals stimulates and amplifies mass emotion.

This is especially the case in western culture when the people involved are young, and this is the second point:  the emphasis on youth. Since the 1950s a cult of youth has spread from English-speaking societies throughout the world. In the 1950s and 60s it accompanied growing prosperity in post-war societies, when teenagers and young adults had more money to spend and businesses and advertisers calculated that young people were a more gullible market because they were especially prone to make judgments based on emotion, image and peer pressure. One of the ways in which young people were appealed to by advertisers was through clothing and fashion. These are an outer expression of feeling, and young people live especially in their feelings between the ages of 14 and 21 and 21 and 28, the times which Rudolf Steiner identified as those periods in an individual’s life when the growing human ego acts primarily through its feeling life, when the Sentient Body (14-21) and the Sentient Soul (21-28) respectively are developing.³ In the flower power years of the 1960s, that decade when the youth culture really broke through and challenged all previous norms, very colourful, even shocking and increasingly or deliberately outrageous  clothes were very much in fashion. There was a reaction against this in the late 1970s when black, the ‘Goth’ look and sombre colours became more fashionable and since the late 1980s, under the influence of minimalist Japanese designers such as Rei Kawakubo, Yoji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake, black and other sombre colours have been increasingly popular. When, after crossing the Atlantic on Prince Albert of Monaco’s racing yacht, with its all-black sail and large red letter ‘A’, 16 year-old Greta Thunberg stepped ashore in New York on 28 August, she was kitted out in a designer chic all-black outfit which prominently bore her name and the slogan UNITE BEHIND THE SCIENCE in capital letters. Her fellow crew members wore the same outfits with the same slogan, which was also featured on the black sail and on other parts of the yacht – all intended for the cameras of the global media.

This brings us to the third point we need to reflect on before being carried away by adolescent Cassandras such as Greta Thunberg – the scientific and technological obsessions of our age. Greta Thunberg had arrived to address the United Nations Climate Action ‘Summit’ on 23 September and will then go on to address another UN climate conference in Santiago, Chile, in December. No accident perhaps that her slogan begins with the letters “UN” – UNITE BEHIND THE SCIENCE. What does that say? This imperative tells us that there are scientific experts whose judgment we are all to accept and ‘get behind’: they lead, we follow. It implies that ‘the science’ on climate change is understood and fixed – by the scientific experts, whereas in fact, any scientists worth their salt would tell us that no science is ever fully understood or fixed, as human knowledge is forever growing. Even the nature of gravity is not yet understood, and in recent years cosmologists have had to admit that they do not know what 96% of the matter of the Universe is made of.⁴ Yet in our time “the scientific facts of the effects of vaccinations”, “the scientific facts of climate change” and so on  have become sacred cows that only ‘heretics’ dare to question, and if they do, they are labelled as “deniers” or ”conspiracy theorists” and  are “burned” at the stake by sections of public opinion. For many people, the truth of these issues is considered to be ‘fixed’, ‘settled’, as if they were as certain as the boiling point of water or the speed of light. The veracity of the seemingly untouchable ‘idols’ involved in such issues seems never to be called into question. Those who do question the dogmas of our ‘scientific age’, online for example, are being steadily censored from the Internet by the tech companies that control the electronic public Forum of our times.⁵ This censorship has been greatly stepped up in the last few years.

This leads to the fourth point – the increasing singularity and uniformity of opinion and focus in today’s western societies, especially among the politically active young, which has resulted from the growth of highly polarised identity politics. If one dares to have dissident views that differ from the norm, one is regarded as a ‘crazy conspiracy theorist’, a “denier”, a “fascist”, a “danger to humanity” or “a threat to the health of humanity” depending on the issues involved. One is then shunned, ‘de-platformed (from public speaking)’, harangued, insulted, or physically attacked. For those doing the shunning and the attacking, the claim is made that issues of physical survival are at stake, whether for minorities or for the human race as a whole, or for the planet itself. If this is the case, for example when the issue of compromising ’herd immunity‘ is raised, in the vaccination debate, then many seem all too ready to set aside the individual rights of parents on behalf of their children. In other words the rights of the individual are being subsumed in the in the rush to ‘fry bigger fish’.

The Chilean Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights since 2018, has warned humanity about the danger of the approaching “harm to Human Rights” and “major conflicts” that will break out because of “climate change.” She has “used the ‘climate scare’ in order to promote widespread migration and globalist solutions, suggesting that refusal on the part of sovereign states to follow the United Nations on those counts would lead to disruption and injustice the world over.”⁶ She has praised freemasonry’s firm defence of the liberty of conscience and the autonomy of thought, and it is the Gran Logia de Chile, one of Chile’s leading masonic lodges, that sends its representatives to Chilean high schools to encourage young people to join the UN climate conference in Santiago de Chile in December⁷, the conference at which Greta Thunberg will speak.

Emergency! Unite!

For Ms Thunberg, there is only one issue that is of concern: our survival and that of countless species on this planet are threatened, she says, because “the science” tells us that greenhouse gases, notably Co2, are causing catastrophic global warming (or ‘climate change’) due to human action. With the singularity of her focus no doubt also affected by her medical condition – she has Asperger Syndrome, a milder autism spectrum disorder – her slogan also tells us to get behind the science that is coordinated by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in accordance with the IPCC’s data and computerised climate models. We are to UNITE – to become ‘one’ under and with the United Nations, a supposedly cosmopolitan organisation that, like its forerunner the League of Nations (1919), was created by Anglo-American elites in 1945 to facilitate world domination by those same Anglo-American elites after the two world wars of the 20th century.⁸ Evidently, we are to become ‘one’, a single world brain with a single world thought about various issues, even while we are repeatedly told by the media and the political class that we must be ‘diverse’, ‘diversity’ being one of today’s sacred cows in this age of identity politics. E pluribus unum – ‘from the many, one’ – the Latin motto of the allegedly modern United States of America: is this affirmation of the American ‘melting pot’ to be humanity’s motto? A girl who has a form of autism, which is known to restrict feelings and social sensibility and to accentuate a narrowly focused, rationalist mindset, tells us that we are to unite ‘behind’ the science and the scientists, not the artists nor the men and women of politics, law, religion or business. Modern natural science is largely based on the rationalist, calculating side of the mind.  Of course, some will say: “But the slogan ‘unite behind the science’ only refers to climate change”. But does it? With such a prominent media event and a cause that its proponents argue is all-embracing and supremely important, will many people not be tempted to apply the slogan to society and culture in general?

Almost every day since the Spring, voices on BBC radio and TV have been referring to “the climate emergency”, “the extinction crisis”, asking: will the public accept drastic changes to their lifestyle (e.g. giving up meat or flying or travelling by cars etc.) over the next 10 years or will they have to be nudged, pushed, or forced into accepting them? Just the other day I heard on BBC radio that the public will all have to do this; no-one left behind or left out, they will all have to… unite behind the science. And what is the “climate science” we are supposed to unite behind? It is the computer models of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But what do we or Greta Thunberg know of the UN bureaucrats in New York or of the ‘scientists’ at the IPCC? We are simply expected to trust them, because the media imply we should do so.

Former US Vice-President Al Gore, who in the early 1990s was one of the most prominent advocates both of the global warming hypothesis and of the emerging Internet (which he dubbed “the Information Superhighway”) and in the 2000s, after failing to win the Presidential election, reinvented himself as a public advocate for “climate change” awareness, gave a lecture⁹ in which he said that the Depression and mass unemployment of the 1930s was not solved by the New Deal of President Roosevelt, as many still mistakenly believe. No, said Al Gore, it was solved by the Second World War and the central government-led “national mobilisation” that was required for the war effort. The entire nation was mobilised for this great cause, and that, he said must happen again in relation to the “climate emergency” in our time. What happened in the western democracies in the 1940s, of course, was a major extension of the power of the State over the lives of individual citizens and the habituation of the citizens to that aggrandised State power, which carried over, especially in Britain, in the years after the war – the notion that the government must be responsible for and take a lead in all aspects of national life, controlling a country much as a board of directors does a company. If we are to survive the climate emergency, goes the logic today, we must imagine we are at war and must submit to the same kind of strictures, limitations and deprivations that we accepted during wartime. Our society would be put on a permanent ‘war footing’ for the rest of the century.

Gore’s very words and phrases from 2013 are echoed almost exactly today by Greta Thunberg and by the leaders of the Extinction Rebellion movement in Britain, Gail Bradbrook and Roger Hallam. These two self-confessed professional revolutionaries claim that we must change our entire lifestyles and do so by 2025 in order to achieve “zero net (Co2) emissions” by that date in western societies. What they are calling for is what Al Gore implied in 2013 already: radical, all-embracing, authoritarian government controls to enforce austerity on western societies rapidly in the name of the “Green New Deal” (again harking back to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his “New Deal” programme of the 1930s) by the year 2030, which is the date by which the UN’s “Agenda 2030” is supposed to be achieved. Agenda 2030 refers to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, 17 global goals set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 to be achieved by the year 2030. This program began as “Agenda 21” at the first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) or Earth Summit, which was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Maurice Strong, Jacque Fresco and Technocracy

One of the key individuals involved in the Earth Summit was the Canadian oil and mineral businessman Maurice Strong (1929-2015), (below, with Al Gore in China) a diplomat who served as Under-Secretary-General of the UN and as Secretary-General of the Earth Summit. He was something of a mentor to Al Gore on ecological issues and could be seen as “Mr Establishment environmentalism”. For decades since his youth, Strong was closely allied to the Rockefeller family, who facilitated his entrée into the UN. Both the Rockefellers and Strong had a keen interest in China and the capacity of its authoritarian government to enforce rapid socio-economic development. Strong spent many of his later years living in Beijing, not least because he was under suspicion of corrupt dealings in relation to the UN’s “Oil-for-Food”¹⁰ programme.

Strong’s interest in China as a model for ‘effective’ top-down social, economic and environmental development, and his childhood in the economically depressed 1930s link him with the American futurist and self-styled designer and social engineer, Jacque Fresco (1916-2017)(pic below right) , whose ideas were also strongly marked by his experiences in the Depression years of the 1930s and the apparent failure of conventional western democratic societies to deal with that crisis. Fresco’s ideas failed to find much headway after the mid-1950s but in the 2000s his utopian visions of a technocratic society that would be inspired and led by engineers and designers (like himself) gained a new lease of life through his association with the young filmmaker Peter Joseph, (pic below left) who created the cultish online sensation of the Zeitgeist films a series of three documentary films released between 2007 and 2011 that posit a number of conspiracies, as well as proposals for broad social and economic changes that attracted many young people and who started a movement for cultural and social renewal based on them. From the second of the three Zeitgeist films (2008) Joseph drew on Fresco’s ideas in what Fresco called his Venus Project, and the two men collaborated until 2011.

Both Strong and Fresco were, in a sense, technocrats, men whose youth was marked by the failure, as they experienced it, of democratic capitalist societies to deal with the pressing problems of their age. However, they did not look so much to the fashionable totalitarian alternatives of the interwar years, fascism and communism, but to ideas of a technocratic bent, melding capitalism with science and technology. In 1919 William H. Smyth, a California engineer, invented the word “technocracy” to denote “the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers”¹¹ In the 1930s and 40s this word ‘technocracy’ was applied to a short-lived movement, Technocracy Inc., led by engineers Howard Scott (1890-1970), Walter Rautenstrauch (1880-1951)  and the geologist M. King Hubbert (1903-1989). They believed that society should be run by engineers in terms of efficiency and material energy; politicians, financiers, merchants and lawyers should disappear.¹² Like the Technocrats, the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement have no use for politicians or for businessmen and financiers; they believed, on the basis of a thoroughly materialistic, even anti-Christian, worldview that those with the knowledge to structure physical reality deserve to be the leaders of society: “unite behind the designers”, one might say. Similarly, Maurice Strong saw the future in terms of the application of science and technology, though melded with a dose of Eastern and neo-pagan, ‘Gaian’ mysticism, to environmentalism. “Sustainability” and a “resource-based economy” were key values for both Strong and Fresco. The point is that the changes they sought were not something that could arise out of an individualistic, democratic society; they need to be imposed from the top down by an elite: Fresco’s ‘designers’, or the Chinese Communist party cadre that Strong admired so much for their achievements, or the bureaucrats of the many UN agencies that he also worked with for so long. Such concepts, which are rooted in early 20th century, non-democratic notions of a technocratic elite, are echoed in the ideas of today’s advocates of technocracy, such as the Indian American academic Parag Khanna in his book Technocracy in America – Rise of the Info-State (2017) in which he argues that the USA should import technocratic ideas and practices  from China and Singapore and direct democracy practices from Switzerland.

Strong often said that he didn’t believe in “world government” but his actions throughout his life contradicted this, as he was always working through his vast network of elite contacts to realise his vision, especially through the UN, which was, as stated earlier, established by Anglo-American elitists during the Second World War to facilitate Anglo-American world domination. What are the regular meetings at Davos, at Bilderberg, at the G7, the G20, the Trilateral Commission, the Group of Thirty, the Bank of International Settlements et al – all of them meetings of the same kind of people sharing broadly the same kind of views – if not a form of world government of the global masses by the technocratic elites, the self-appointed ‘aristocracy’ of the rich countries?

Extinction Rebellion

Strong believed in provocative action. When he was young, he argued that  “we will have to recognise that having children is not just a personal issue but a societal issue and at a certain point we may be faced with a need to have a permit to have a child” and that “that was controversial and I’ve been used to controversy ever since. Over the years, I’ve also noticed that this is one way of getting attention. For example, you’d probably never heard of me if people weren’t always attacking me. It is, perhaps, a peripheral benefit that the attacks call attention to the issue.”¹³ Gail Bradbrook of Extinction Rebellion, who repeats the 2013 message of Al Gore about urgent national mobilisation, says that environmental campaigners “have to be disruptive unfortunately”. She said she found the idea for Extinction Rebellion after “praying for the codes for social change” while on a retreat with “psychedelic medicines.” “I’ve always been interested in how things change, in social change. I was involved in the animal rights movement as a young woman. I’ve been involved in issues around gender and racism. I’ve been focused on trying to start civil disobedience since 2010 and tried lots of things that didn’t work. So I actually went on a retreat and prayed deeply, with some psychedelic medicine… it was a really intense experience. I prayed for the codes for social change… and within a month, my prayers were literally answered.”¹⁴ This was how the BBC chose to describe Gail Bradbrook on its global website, as a PhD in molecular biophysics who takes psychedelic substances on retreats and prays for the social codes for social change. The inference could be made that not only does she have a science PhD but that she also has “God” on her side: her “prayers were answered”. Of course the BBC did not ask her, or does not want to tell us, what those “psychedelic medicines” were. It does tell us, however, that Extinction Rebellion has three demands: that the government is transparent on climate change, for the UK to be carbon neutral by 2025, and for a “citizen’s assembly” on environmental policies.” i.e. bypassing Parliament. For a detailed critical analysis of Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg, readers might like to access the detailed, six-part study by Cory Morningstar at the website theartofannihilation.com and also the penetrating analysis of Extinction Rebellion in six articles produced by Nowhere.news¹⁵  The ideas of Extinction Rebellion, the Zeitgeist Movement, the Venus Project, Jacque Fresco and Maurice Strong and Greta Thunberg too, as far as this writer can see, are all based on a materialistic worldview. Hence, in varying ways, they all call for us to “UNITE BEHIND ‘THE SCIENCE’” i.e. the experts of natural science and technology. They do not reckon with an invisible world of spirit that embraces both the human being and the Earth. Their invisible world is one of atoms and molecules and at most, “frequencies”.

The One Ring

In this writer’s view, the actual ‘code’ for social change, the code for society itself, in fact, as well as the code for the human being, is threefolding, as indicated by Rudolf Steiner 100 years ago.¹⁶ In esoteric terms, it is the number 3, which underpins three other numbers: 5 (the number of mankind), 7 (the number of Time, movement) and 12 (the number of Space, fixity): man works through time in space.  In his various works Steiner reveals how these three numbers relate to the human etheric body (5), the astral body (7) and the ego and the physical body (12) to produce a threefold human entelechy of body, soul and spirit.

Those who call for us to “UNITE BEHIND ‘THE SCIENCE’” – and the man who projected Greta Thunberg onto the world stage, Ingmar Rentzhog (pic above), the founder of a Swedish climate-focused social media company, We Don’t Have Time, was himself trained in campaigning by Al Gore in the USA (see pic above)  – have the number 12, they have a sense for Space, that is physical Nature, but lack both the numbers 5 and 7. They seem to have no understanding of what the human being is, beyond the physical, and they have no sense of time, history and evolution, which, according to Rudolf Steiner, is governed by the number 7, or rather, they have a false understanding of time and evolution, believing, as Maurice Strong did, that “we blithely assume that life will continue no matter what because it always has. But it’s not correct that it always has. Look at the history of planet earth – there’s only a minute moment of time when the conditions have been conducive to human life.” This pessimism, which Strong acknowledges, is what drove his impulse to bring about change as rapidly as possible. It is what drives many revolutionaries, who believe that they only have one life on this earth and that humanity has existed for a mere speck of Time. Steiner, however, showed in his book Occult Science – An Outline that human life has always been present in some form at every stage, not only of planet Earth, but of the solar system. Fresco, Joseph, Strong, Gore, Bradbrook, and Thunberg – none of them has a concept of the development of human consciousness that even goes beyond the class consciousness of Marxism. They focus only on physical nature and the physical human being, despite Bradbrook’s words about “prayer” and “psychedelic medicines”.

As the second millennium passed over into the third, 20 years ago, two artistic creations showed that there was an awareness among contemporaries of a very dark force emerging in our culture, in our time, a force that seeks total control of everything on the planet. These creations were the two movie trilogies The Lord of The Rings, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book of the same name, and the dystopian sci-fi film about the near future, The Matrix. The three volume novel by J.R.R. Tolkien on which the first film trilogy was based contained a verse about the One Ring, which is at the centre of the story; it includes these words:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

These two lines were engraved on the One Ring, the Ring of Power. The Lord of the Rings, the dark force, is symbolised by his single eye, which is shown on the cover of the original book as red within a black circle.

The One Ring, the Ring of Power, is made of gold, traditionally the metal of the sun, of the heart and of wisdom. These two things, the gold and the black/red, point to the two aspects of the human I and the directions in which the I can move: to the sun within, which leads to one kind of power, wisdom; or only to the natural world without, which leads to another kind of power – domination of nature and of human and other living beings through a calculating knowledge.

The One Ring symbolises both the dark aspect of human union or community – all- embracing tyranny and servitude – and the dark aspect of the human ‘I’ (the essential self): the ‘I’ that is only an eye that only looks outwards: the dark aspect of the 12-foldness, the wholeness of the I. With the black sail and the words: UNITE BEHIND THE SCIENCE, I cannot think of a more suitable slogan, nor a more suitable cause (“We Have No Time”) nor organisation (Extinction Rebellion) for the dark and deceptive force emerging in our time, a force that is able to mask itself as something progressive and hopeful, even innocent and playful, something that seeks to attract the support of very many well-meaning people who are understandably concerned about the environment and the future of humanity; the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But the real nature of that force is one of control and domination and it can breed fear, panic, and desperation among those who don’t see behind the mask.  …. In neither of the two trilogies does the force of the One Ring succeed. In them and in the work and life of Rudolf Steiner we can look for inspiration in how to meet it.

Notes

1 Nayirah’s false testimony was given before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on 10 October, 1990 in the run-up to the Gulf War. Only her first name was given, but it later turned out (1992) she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Her testimony was widely cited in the media and referred to by US senators and President George H. W. Bush to justify US military action in the Gulf War. It was also exposed that her testimony was organised by the US public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government.
2 Paul Slovic, quoted in “Study: What Was The Impact Of The Iconic Photo Of The Syrian Boy?”
by Diane Cole:  https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=509650251
3 See R. Steiner, Theosophy (1904), Ch. 1.4: Body Soul and Spirit.
4 https://www.space.com/11642-dark-matter-dark-energy-4-percent-universe-panek.html
5 https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-twitter-treats-conservatives-more-harshly-than-liberals/
https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/4/11/18305407/social-network-conservative-bias-twitter-facebook-ted-cruz
https://www.wired.com/story/fight-over-section-230-internet-as-we-know-it/
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/break-up-the-social-media-companies-to-protect-free-speech/
6 Web: September 5, 2019 Jean Smits (LifeSiteNews): “UN Rights Chief: Climate Change to ‘Generate Restrictions and Harm’ to People’s Rights”.
7 See n. 6.
8 US State Dept. Archive: The United States and the Founding of the United Nations, August 1941 – October 1945 https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/pubs/fs/55407.htm
9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KfJx5Cd5ug
10 The Oil-for-Food Programme was established by the UN in 1995 at a time when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was under intense pressure from the USA. It allowed Iraq to sell oil on the world market in exchange for food and medicines etc while conforming to US demands that Iraq not be enabled to increase its military spending.
11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
12 Technocrats believed that society would best be organised in an essentially hierarchical fashion by scientific and technological experts, a kind of modern version of Francis Bacon’s utopian state Bensalem in his book New Atlantis (1626).
13https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/jun/22/maurice-strong-interview-global-government
14 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-49513802
15http://www.theartofannihilation.com/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/  and   https://nowhere.news/?s=astroturfing    
16. R.Steiner, Towards Social Renewal (1923, Collected Works GA 23).