Into the “New Normal”? Part 2

                             
                                            

This article was first published in New View magazine Issue 97 Oct-Dec 2020

IS it not obvious to everyone that COVID-19 is not just a temporary, unexceptional public health crisis, after which, once we have all taken the vaccine which is apparently due to be rolled out sometime next year (or this autumn in Russia), we can all go “back to normal”? Is it not obvious that “going back to normal” was never the intention of those who, around much of the world, have imposed upon populations such harsh authoritarian measures, such as quarantining a country’s entire population in their own homes? From almost the very beginning of the lockdown, were we not told repeatedly by the mainstream media that we would not be going back to normal, but rather, forward to a “new normal”? How did they know? First the media were awash with enthusiastic talk of the “new normal” that would come after the pandemic, but recently, they have been telling us there will be no “new normal”. There will be no normal at all, they say, because we shall have to get used to constant abnormality, constant change and new measures. Why did they decide that this pandemic was going to be very different from those that had occurred in recent years – A/H5N1 (avian flu, since 1997 in humans), SARS (2003), the H1N1 influenza pandemic (2009, “swine flu”), MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) in 2012, Ebola (2014) – and that this SARS-CoV-2 pandemic should be the one that would change the world?  Very soon, we were also told  – by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which hosts the annual meetings of the world’s business elite and other alleged ‘luminaries’ in Davos, Switzerland – that the COVID crisis had made possible something called “the Great Reset”, which, the WEF assured us, would mean no less than the total transformation of our society and economy. As if acting in synch, the BBC promptly started an open-ended series of programmes called “Rethink” across its entire network, which assumed that indeed, this particular health crisis would be the spur to radical changes in society.

Isolation and quarantine have since ancient times been measures taken to tackle epidemics, but it was always the sick who were kept in isolation, not the healthy! And this quarantining of the healthy this year was done in Europe, first by Italy and then by most other countries, in imitation of the harsh measures taken by the totalitarian regime of Communist China! Public health authorities and policies have existed in the more advanced European countries for a century or more, and as recently as 30 years ago such countries would certainly not have thought of looking to Communist China for a model of what to do in an epidemic. Today, however, Communist China is fully integrated in those international institutions set up by the Anglo-American elites after 1944/45 and the following decades. Hence the dubious role of Dr Anthony Fauci (American physician and immunologist advising the US government) in facilitating, also financially to the tune of millions of dollars, research at Wuhan’s Level 4 Bio-Safety lab, (as described in Peter Taylor’s article in the Summer 2020 issue of New View1). Those countries that coped reasonably well with the virus without “locking down” their populations, such as Sweden and Japan, were largely ignored by the rest of European governments and media, or else criticised and sneered at.

The drive and the yearning for societal transformation.

Of course, many people have long wanted to see radical changes in society, in our whole mode of civilisation. Rudolf Steiner’s work aimed at this; many Anthroposophers have longed for it, and there was evidence of that in some articles in the last issue of New View (Summer 2020). People resonate with those words of Christopher Fry: “The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move; The thunder is the thunder of the floes, the thaw, the flood, the upstart spring.”2

Many on the political Left have long urged on the end of capitalism, which they have regarded as incapable of evolution even though there have actually been many positive developments in capitalist societies and practice over the past 100 years in terms of fairness, compassion and equality. Capitalism today is not as brutal as it was in the 1840s or the 1920s, even if some of its basic principles and practices (e.g. stock exchanges, the prioritisation of the profit motive, hostile takeovers) are still in place. The Greens (people politically motivated, originally, by concerns for the environment) have wanted to see fundamental transformation since the 1970s, though many of them seem more concerned about the fate of Gaia than about humanity, which many of them regard as a mere epiphenomenon, and last year the most histrionic manifestations of ‘Greenness’ – the ‘domestic terrorists’ Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Greta Thunberg, (“I want you to panic”, “our house is on fire”) called for fundamental, government-led transformations of society and economy by 2025; otherwise, they claimed, the consequent climate change would mean we would be in an irreversibly bad situation by 2030 when “UN Agenda 2030” is supposed to be implemented. XR, which, as I write, is carrying out ‘actions’ in Britain to try to stop certain major newspapers from being printed and delivered – such is its concern to suppress viewpoints it does not agree with3 – have been following the playbook of US Senator Al Gore, who since 2013 has been calling for a Second World War-style “national mobilisation” to “defeat” climate change.4 During the two world wars, governments in democratic countries opted to take on features of more totalitarian regimes in order to maintain and direct the national will for the sake of the war effort. In the combatants’ countries the State involved itself in areas of life in which it had never before been engaged.

In today’s COVID event, many who see themselves as being in the ‘progressive’ camp, as well as not a few in non-libertarian conservative circles, want the State to take control and force through what they see as necessary changes. Only the State, Leftists and radical Greens believe, can transform society, coercively if necessary, in the direction of the “sustainable goals” of UN Agenda 20305; they point to how the Labour Government, in its effort to create a ‘New Jerusalem’, used the powers of the State to force through changes after 1945, nationalising various sectors and creating the National Health Service (NHS) – medical treatment funded by general taxation and free at the point of use – which has always been held up as the shining example of State-led positive change. Indeed, in recent decades, the NHS has become something of a holy icon/relic/cow (choose your noun) for many, “the best of British”6, which is why so many chose to stand on their front doorsteps at 8 pm for a few minutes and applaud NHS workers during the weeks of the peak of the lockdown in a communal clap-in. Children were urged by parents and teachers to draw rainbow symbols and put them in windows as a sign of their affection for and gratitude to the NHS. The NHS has in modern Britain rather taken over the position the Royal Navy used to have before 1939 as the focus of adulation by the public and promotion by the State and the media. The government and the media told the people this year that the brave NHS workers were “battling” the “terrible killer” virus and that the lockdown was necessary so that the virus would not “overwhelm the NHS”. Sometimes it seemed that the prestige, status and functioning of the NHS was more important to the government than caring for the many patients who had conditions other than COVID-19, who could not get operations or beds during the first months of the lockdown. In fact, during those worst weeks of the lockdown, the NHS was only treating COVID patients. It was not doing its job by other patients with heart conditions, cancer, arthritis and the host of other conditions. All the focus was on COVID-19, a condition which many experienced medical experts and epidemiologists soon told us was very far from being a plague or a serious pandemic and was only slightly worse than the flu epidemics of recent years7. It would follow the pattern that such other epidemics had taken, they said, and would soon fade away.

The narrative of fear and paranoia

And that is indeed what has happened. The pot of fear and paranoia that governments are still stirring six months (!) later is one only of cases and statistics. That is what we are witnessing, not a miasma of ongoing megadeath such as humanity suffered in 1918-1919 when 20-50 million died. Yet governments and the World Health Organisation have been treating COVID-19 as if it were such a miasma since February this year. This state of apparent mass paranoia among the ruling elites of the world can only mean that massive coordination is going on, not so much in terms of the details of how countries have responded to the pandemic, which have varied, but in terms of the propaganda about the disease, the narrative that is spun about it. Consider, for example, that in Britain, hardly any Members of Parliament have spoken out in public about this misrepresentation of the disease, the excessive measures which the government has enforced since March, and the disastrous effects these have had on the culture, the economy and the social life of the country, not to mention mental health and suicides. In English-speaking countries, for example, dissident voices critical of the governments’ attitude towards COVID-19 (not their policy decisions but their view of COVID-19 itself) have been almost entirely excluded, shut out, or even suppressed, or else slandered and discredited as “conspiracy theorists”, “irresponsible” and the like. Youtube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki said in the spring that “(YouTube) will ban videos that contradict the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance on the pandemic or share fake or unproven Coronavirus remedies.” It would appear that Youtube/Google regard the WHO as some kind of global medical government, the statements of which are to be regarded as conclusive.

Meanwhile, although very few are dying of COVID-19 here in Britain, and the “pandemic” here has actually been over for several months, we are told, by the British government, that it is still ongoing and that it may even be getting worse! Supposedly for fear of a dreaded “second wave” of the disease, governments in various countries, notably ‘the Anglosphere’, have been intensifying their repressive, authoritarian measures against citizens’ civil and human rights.

The scenes of recent police actions in Australia (above), Canada and the USA against COVID-19 dissidents and mask refusers have been appalling, especially when the evidence is overwhelming that face coverings provide no protection from viruses: “SARS-CoV-2 is a beta-coronavirus with a diameter between 60 nanometers (nm) and 140 nm, or 0.06 to 0.14 microns (micrometers). This is about half the size of most viruses, which tend to measure between 0.02 microns to 0.3 microns. Virus-laden saliva or respiratory droplets expelled when talking or coughing measure between 5 and 10 microns, and it is these droplets that surgical masks and respirators can block.” At present, there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID-19 and in healthy people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19. [emphasis – TB] 8

During the national lockdown, many older patients in Britain and New York City were transferred to care homes where, under often inhuman conditions, isolated and deprived of the company of their loved ones, they succumbed, usually not to COVID-19 itself but to other conditions, and many died alone. The way British society treated its old people during lockdown  – despite the government’s claim that the measures were being taken to protect old people from the virus which was more harmful to them than to the young and the middle aged – was as scandalous as the way the British government dealt with the animal holocaust of the foot and mouth outbreak, 19 years earlier, in 2001 when great pyres of burning animals were seen up and down the country and many farmers were ruined. Here too the heavy hand of the State’s commands was all too evident – always in the name of ‘safety’, which had become an obsession in risk-averse, modern Britain years before COVID-19. Computer modelling forecasts by Prof. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, played a significant role both in the 2001 disaster and in this year’s catastrophe.

Free speech has all but disappeared on COVID-19-related issues in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Needless to say, all this drastic extension of State power goes right against Anthroposophical notions of what form of polity is needed in the 21st century and the centuries ahead, namely, a threefold society in which the activities of the State are restricted to the State’s proper area i.e. the legal/political sphere, consisting of: legislation, law enforcement, security (internal and external) and government. In threefold thinking, medical matters belong to the cultural sphere (comprising religion, philosophy, medicine, scientific research, the arts, education, and the judiciary), which should be autonomous and independent both of the political sphere and of the third sphere, economic life. Instead, what we are rapidly heading for is a form of medical authoritarianism, not a threefold but a onefold society in which considerations of “health and safety” are increasingly used to dictate all aspects of policy. Education and criminology are also areas that are gradually being drawn into the area of “health and safety”. Schools which have existed, serving the public and generations of children, for 70 years and more are permanently closed on grounds of temporary safety issues; criminals are said not to be responsible for their actions, which are increasingly claimed to have resulted from “health issues”. The issue of “climate change” is itself presented as a giant, apocalyptic “health and safety” issue: if we don’t do what the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement and the radical Greens want, “Gaia will die! Humanity will die!” One of the original symbols of the XR movement was the skull. As we approach the year 2033, the 2000th anniversary of the Mystery of Golgotha (the word means ‘place of skulls’, the execution ground outside Jerusalem), this XR symbol and the other one, the abstract hourglass  symbolising extinction and time running out, is not exactly the image that chimes with Anthroposophy’s understanding of Christ’s Deed at Golgotha.9

The “Great Reset”

And yet many would see XR as modern ‘Knights Templar’ and Greta Thunberg as a new ‘Joan of Arc’, fighting to save the world, paladins of virtue and truth. But in their self-righteous, aggressive behaviour and tactics, how different are the young activists of XR and Black Lives Matter (BLM) from the equally self-righteous, Red Guards of the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China? There is a video online which directly combines the two, showing film footage of both, and the similarities are obvious.10  Just as the passion and misguided idealism of those young Red Guards was but the instrument of Mao Zedong and his clique, so is the passion and misguided idealism of today’s XR activists the instrument of capitalist power circles of whom they are not even aware. Yet these circles show us in plain sight what some of their intentions are. They are visible for all to see on the website of the World Economic Forum11, which hosted Greta Thunberg last year at its annual meeting in Davos.

There we see a podcast about the WEF’s chief project, “The Great Reset”, and a whole section on “Racism and Racial Injustice”. Countless corporations now publicly support and fund BLM. There is also a section on Climate Change. These two issues, along with prominent support for LGBTQIA activism12, feature throughout the WEF website. The Board of Trustees of the WEF includes Laurence D. Fink (USA), chairman and CEO of Blackrock, the world’s largest investment management corporation, with assets of almost $7 trillion, Senator Al Gore (USA), Mark Carney, (Canada) who was until this year Governor of the Bank of England, and Christine Lagarde (France), who is now President of the European Central Bank (ECB) and was 2011-2019 chair and managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), André Hoffmann, (Switzerland), billionaire vice-chairman of the world’s second largest   pharmaceutical company, Hoffmann-La Roche, the President of M.I.T., L. Rafael Reif (Venezuela/USA), and David Rubinstein (USA), Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, Co-Founder and Co-Executive Chairman of The Carlyle Group, a global Washington DC-based private equity investment company. The WEF was founded by German engineer Klaus Schwab in 1987 out of the previous organisation European Management Forum, which he founded in 1971 with his wife Hilde. “In the summer of 1971, Schwab invited 444 executives from Western European firms to the first European Management Symposium held in the Davos Congress Centre under the patronage of the European Commission and European industrial associations, where Schwab sought to introduce European firms to American management practices.”13 (emphasis – TB) He is a former member of the steering committee of the shadowy Bilderberg Group, which was founded in 1954 to supervise from behind the scenes, the development of the European unification project and ensure it remained tightly bound to the USA. The security costs of the annual, invitation-only WEF jamboree in Davos, which has by now become de facto the world’s parliament of the ultra-rich and powerful, now total some CHF45 million (Swiss francs) p.a., almost all of which is paid by Swiss national and local taxpayers; the WEF itself pays only CHF2.25 million. Davos has now become a fixture on the calendar of the world’s Establishment media and is followed by the Oscars awards ceremony in Los Angeles; the world’s media troop from one to the other.

When one goes to the “Davos Manifesto” on the WEF web site, one finds Schwab writing: “’Stakeholder capitalism’ is gaining momentum, in part thanks to the ‘Greta Thunberg effect’. It offers the best opportunity to tackle today’s environmental and social challenges. The World Economic Forum is launching a new ‘Davos Manifesto’. What kind of capitalism do we want? That may be the defining question of our era. If we want to sustain our economic system for future generations, we must answer it correctly. Generally speaking, we have three models to choose from. The first is “shareholder capitalism,” embraced by most Western corporations, which holds that a corporation’s primary goal should be to maximize its profits. The second model is “state capitalism,” which entrusts the government with setting the direction of the economy and has risen to prominence in many emerging markets, not least China.”  What does Schwab mean by “stakeholder capitalism”? He claims that “stakeholder capitalism” (something that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair talked a lot about 20 years ago) is gaining momentum thanks in part to Greta Thunberg – who is now back at school after her year-long annual activist ‘sabbatical’; she has played her part – but he goes on to say that he himself proposed stakeholder capitalism 50 years ago. It “positions private corporations as trustees of society”, he writes. As one reads one’s way through the whole website, one realises that what Schwab has in mind by “stakeholder capitalism” is the substitution of the business elite – i.e.  the ‘new’, friendly, Green, pro-LGBTQIA, pro-BLM, ‘trustee capitalist’ class  – for the democracy of the past two centuries. National democracies will, in effect be replaced, by the globalist “economic parliament” of Davos. Direction and power are to come from this “new model” global capitalist class rather than from national electorates and their democratically-elected representatives. Cory Morningstar, a more genuine Green activist than the planners at WEF, has shown in numerous articles how the agendas promoted by groups like the World Economic Forum (WEF) are utterly false and deceptive and aim primarily at making billions of dollars for western corporations and at ‘marketising’ and ‘financialising’ (putting a monetary value on) the entire natural world.14

The Strategic Intelligence section of the WEF site15 shows the grand plan of “The Great Reset” (see above; it even looks like a coronavirus!) in an inverted seven-pointed star consisting of seven main topics: 1. Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 2. Shaping the Economic Recovery, 3. Redesigning Social Contracts, Skills and Jobs, 4. Restoring the Health of the Environment, 5. Developing Sustainable Business Models, 6. Revitalising Global Cooperation, 7. Strengthening Regional Development. Some might opine: “what’s wrong with them? They all seem positive and beneficial” But let’s look further. The key theme is the first one:  “Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution”. This is the meta-level which determines the others in a sense, because it is the one that circumscribes the whole by its definition of the age in which  – it claims  – we now live. The world must be organised, it believes, so as to be in harmony with this “age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution”.

The “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and the “Fourth Turning”

The concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution was first articulated by the founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab in 2015 in an article in the US elite geopolitics magazine Foreign Affairs, but we should note that on the board of trustees of the WEF is Sen. Al Gore, and he was so impressed by a certain book, published back in 1997, that he called it “the most stimulating book on American history that I have ever read” and sent a copy to every member of the US Congress. One man who also read the book and was similarly impressed was Steve Bannon, President’s Trump’s controversial former advisor in 2017, so much so that some people have speculated that in his activities Bannon has actually been trying to realise the book’s implications.  The book was “The Fourth Turning” by the American writers William Strauss and Neil Howe. It conceives of a four-phase development within American history, which the authors also apply to the world. These four phases of American history, roughly 80-90 years in length, tie in with four alleged phases in the development of material technology over the same period, from the 18th to the 21th centuries.

What are the characteristics designated for this Fourth Industrial Revolution? Around the central seven meta-themes is a circle of 56 sub-themes. When the meta-theme “Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution” is selected on the circular periphery of sub-themes around the central seven-pointed star, twelve further sub-themes are then indicated. Lying all alongside each other in the upper right quadrant of the circle of 56 sub-themes, they are, from top to bottom: a. Future of Computing, b. Blockchain16, c. Fourth Industrial Revolution, d. Drones, e. Digital Economy and New Value Creation, f. Future of Media, Entertainment and Culture, g. Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, h. 5G, i. Digital Identity, j. Vaccination, k. Quantum Computing, l. Internet Governance (each one of these subthemes in turn, when selected, includes various sub-themes of its own). The future of computing is to be based on blockchain technology, which will facilitate “the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (digital tech, virtual tech, biogenetics) that will be mediated via a global network of drones, both human and mechanical, on the ground, in the air, in the virtual world of cyberspace, underwater and in earth orbit (satellites). This new tech Revolution and drone network will make possible the digital economy and the creation of ‘new values’, which will bring about a new future for media, entertainment and culture, in which physical travel will become largely unnecessary because everything can be simulated and ‘virtualised’. The whole system will be micro-managed through A.I., robotics and 5G, and in order to be a “citizen” or “netizen” within this ‘global Net’ and to ‘move’ within this new world, we will all need a digital ID and a vaccination ‘passport’ of some kind. Over all this will be watching the ‘Internet Governance’ through the medium of Quantum supercomputers. In the words of the poet Richard Brautigan (1967, pictured below), we shall all be “watched over by machines of loving grace”. The poem of the same name by the Californian Brautigan enthusiastically, though some would say, ironically, “describes a technological utopia in which humans and technology work together for the greater good. Brautigan writes about ‘mammals and computers liv[ing] together in mutually programming harmony’, with technology acting as caretakers while ‘we are free of our labours and joined back to nature’.”17

Brautigan was, and the WEF is, looking forward to a technocratic future in which man will be merged with machine, a future they regard as the ‘inevitable’ world of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Perhaps many of the billionaires at Davos every year have not realised it yet, but this technocratic vision of the WEF, and the  technology and ‘new values’ that emerge in this new era will lead ultimately to Transhumanism and the end, the genocide, in fact, of the biological human beings we have been until now. This termination of the biological human being, and its merger, its subsumation into a non-biological form, is what is really meant by the “Singularity” that cyberneticist thinker and futurist Ray Kurzweil (a director of engineering at Google since 2012) has written about in his best-selling books on the subject over the past 21 years. These new human beings will be herded out of the countryside  – this will please the Greens – into ‘smart’ technocratic cities where all aspects of their technology-driven existences can be surveilled and controlled; we already see the beginnings of this in China today with their hi-tech Social Credit system which controls people’s lives through a smartphone personal points system – and the West is not far behind. It is just that the political history of the West and its experience of democracy, something most Chinese have never known throughout their long history, means that the rulers of western societies have to proceed more stealthily, in accordance with the ‘boiling frogs’18 method, whereby the State introduces increasingly repressive measures, censorship etc so gradually that most people do not notice what is happening.

Bacon 1628 New Atlantis title page wpreview.png

But we can see that this COVID crisis has already facilitated a number of developments en route to this technocratic future, which in some respects, was already envisioned in the ‘beehive society’ ruled over by the 36 natural philosophers (or technocrats and scientists as we would call them today) of “Salomon’s House” by Sir Francis Bacon in his utopian book New Atlantis (1626; see above illustration: 1628 ed.). They are called in the book “the wise men of the Society of Salomon’s House (which house, or college… is the very eye of this kingdom)” (emphasis TB). Over 40 years after his death, Bacon was adopted as the ‘patron spirit’ of the newly founded Royal Society (1660), which regarded itself as the ‘Salomon’s House’, the national scientific ‘think-tank’ of its day. His philosophy of inductive, experimental science, which he outlines in New Atlantis and other works, a science which dismisses the internal life of the human being, has informed western science ever since, and the Royal Society has played a key role in its development. Those in Salomon’s House also boasted of their ability to fake miracles: “And surely you will easily believe that we, that have so many things truly natural which induce admiration, could in a world of particulars deceive the senses if we would disguise those things, and labour to make them more miraculous.” This has to do with the “new values” and the “new future for media, entertainment and culture” mentioned in the WEF’s Great Reset, namely, the way in which narratives, deliberate public lies told by the State and the media frame and direct public discourse and understanding – lies in which the media immediately produce an explanation of an event and then repeat it ad nauseam to the virtual exclusion of all other explanations until most of the public have accepted it. Dissidents from this narrative and critics of it are excluded from mainstream public discourse. Only months or years later, when the issue has been forgotten by most, do the mainstream media quietly drop in an account of what really happened, or might have happened.

As I write, I hear a BBC news item19 about the introduction of robots to look after old people in care homes and keep them company, a project recently trialled in England and Japan. Needless to say, the item was presented positively by the programme – “fun, enjoyable, no threat to human carers”, “I’m a big advocate of technology in care settings”, “absolutely fascinating” etc. This is an example of the ‘boiling frogs’ technique. A similar item will likely be presented within a couple of months and another a few months later. The news presenters might like to reflect that robot newsreaders have already been manufactured in China and Japan!20

The deeper agenda

There has been much discussion of how the COVID-19 ‘crisis’ began – was China to blame? Did the British and American governments act promptly enough etc? These will be interesting historical questions, but only in the sense that the question of how the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand led to the outbreak of the First World War some five weeks later is an interesting subject of historical enquiry. However, in both cases, the more significant questions are: what was the deeper, longer-term agenda behind the outbreak of the Great War and what is the deeper, long-term agenda behind “the war against COVID-19” (Nb. there was the War against Drugs, then the War on Terror and now the War against COVID-19). If the assassination had not succeeded in 1914, the war would have broken out in some other way, because certain Great Powers wanted  war in order to achieve certain goals. In the case of Britain, for example, Steiner made it clear that certain circles in the ruling group in Britain had for decades before 1914 been aiming at: a) a significant reduction in German economic power vis-a-vis Britain; b) the federation of the British Empire or, if that was not possible, a much closer union of the English-speaking countries; c) the injection of radical socialism into Russia through the war and the consequent weakening of Russian strength.21

Certain circles and individuals today – businesspeople such as those involved with the WEF, politicians, some scientists and academic institutions, and of course the mainstream media  – have been constantly stirring the pot of paranoia and fear over COVID-19: for example, Bill and Melinda Gates (see above), who want to ‘crown’ what they have called “the decade of vaccinations” with the COVID-19 vaccination for everyone on the planet (!) next year.  It is to the larger aims of people behind groups such as the WEF that we should be paying attention. We should note how the massive expansion in the role of national governments, which have been behaving in a manner that can only be described as fearmongering and vandalistic with regard to the economy, health conditions other than COVID-19 and the cultural life, to say nothing of social life in general, causing massive unemployment and enormous debt just as the post-2008 Crash ‘age of austerity’ was supposed to be coming to an end. When we pay attention to what the representatives of these circles say about how this ‘crisis’ can and/or will radically transform society, we should recall that this State-led and global NGO-led move for a radical transformation of society was exactly what the likes of XR, Greta Thunberg, Al Gore and left-wing Democratic Party Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, among others, were calling for last year, their pretext then being climate change. “We will not, we cannot go back to the way things were…there will be no return to the old normal in the foreseeable future”,  Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director of the WHO, has said, and also: “…the COVID-19 pandemic has given new impetus to the need to accelerate efforts to respond to climate change.”22 It is the response to climate change that provides the scale needed to justify the transformation of the economy into the direction of digitalisation, so-called Green energy (which today really ought to be called ‘Blue energy’, i.e. hi-tech energy) biogenetics, and the financialisation of the natural world, as described by Cory Morningstar and others. The “financialisation of nature” means “the process by which speculative capital takes control of the goods and components of nature, marketing them through certificates, credits, securities, bonds, etc., seeking to obtain the greatest profit possible through financial speculation.”23

Last year’s efforts by XR and Greta Thunberg, aided by the WEF and the UN, were evidently not enough, because they appealed only to ideological opinion on the issue of the alleged threat of greenhouse gases such as CO2. A piece of medical emergency theatre such as that provided by the dreaded coronavirus exerts a much more powerful effect; it grabs hold of people because it speaks to immediate issues of life and death, the survival of oneself and one’s loved ones. Hence the resort to COVID-19 in the very year when, as I wrote in New View 95 (April-June 2020), the energies of Saturn, Jupiter, Pluto and Mars can be called upon, energies that traditionally have had an incisive effect not only on the course of history itself (Saturn and Jupiter conjunctions: see New View #95 article) but especially on epidemics.

Rudolf  said of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars: “Let us suppose a winter season, in which there is a powerful influence on the solar activity — and note please, not the operation of light, but the solar action — through the outer planets, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. A constellation of that description in the winter operates quite differently from the unimpeded action of the Sun, when Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are at a greater distance. In such a winter the atmospheric conditions will differ from the norm; and there will be a remarkable influence (on persons constitutionally so disposed) upon the rhythmical activity between chest and head, of which the most conspicuous is the act of breathing itself. We may state, however, that such cosmic conditions considerably strengthen the inclination to make this rhythm regular in people who have been born from sound conditions, and who are inwardly robust — though their external appearance may be very slight and delicate. In the case of such persons the respiratory rhythm is very well regulated and so also is the whole rhythm between chest and head. Such a stabilised inner rhythm is not easily disturbed from outside; serious injuries are required to affect it. But on persons with an irregularity of this rhythm, the external influences referred to work very strongly to disturb still more the already disturbed rhythm. Thus, everyone with this disposition and resident in those parts of the earth under the special influence of the constellation in question, become liable to the complaints grouped as influenza. These conditions and factors must be in operation, in order to create favourable soil for such ailments as influenza.”24 (emphasis – TB)

Saturn and Jupiter were approaching each other last winter and will come into exact conjunction on the winter solstice 21 December this year. Saturn and Pluto were in conjunction in January this year and were joined by Mars as winter moved into early spring in March, the month of Mars. As Mars moved away from the conjunction in April/May, the number of deaths associated with the virus rapidly declined and has not increased since, despite fearmongering by governments and the WHO. Despite the fact that there has been no great increase in deaths due to COVID-19, that there has been no great increase in hospital or ICU admissions of patients with COVID-19, governments go on pretending that this is a serious medical crisis, when it is not. The latest absurdity in Britain is that in early September, the British government imposed a ban on gatherings of more than 6 people from more than one household inside or outside just because in the previous week cases of so-called positive test results had risen from 12.5  per 100,000 people to 19.7 per 100,000 across the UK.

The incarnation of Ahriman

Anthroposophers, who are aware that Steiner spoke in late 191925 of the imminent incarnation of Ahriman in a physical body around the beginning of the third millennium, ought not to be surprised by any of what is happening now. They also ought to be aware that Steiner frequently spoke of Ahriman as the spirit of lies and deception, and the inspirer of materialism. He spoke at length in 1916-17 of these lies and deceptions in relation to the events of the First World War and what led up to it.26 From the end of the Cold War and the outbreak of the first Gulf Crisis and War in 1990/91 to “Russiagate” in the USA (2016-2020) and now COVID-19, we have been subjected to one great public lie after another in the western world. The worst, arguably was the 9/11 event in 2001, just three years after 1998 (3 x 666). Since the Establishment and the media have been able to get away with that one, they have evidently assumed they can get away with almost anything, and as a result, the lies since 9/11 have become ever more brazen.

The incarnation of Ahriman is upon us27, and he is likely to make his major move from the year 2030 onwards, the year of UN Agenda 2030. We are now, in the 2020s, in the endgame of the preparation stage before his ‘emergence’. Anthroposophers should strive to make clear to our contemporaries that Ahriman is not the Anti-Christ or the Al-Dajjal (the Deceiver) of which Christians and Muslims respectively speak, the beings who will appear before the Last Judgment at the end of the physical world, which, according to Steiner, is yet millennia away, far off in the future. Ahriman’s physical incarnation is coming just after the end of a 5000-year period in history known in esotericism as the Dark Age (Kali Yuga). At the beginning of that period, c.3000 BC, Lucifer incarnated in a physical body in China, and not long after the middle of the period the Sun-Logos Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth.

This Dark Age was the period when mankind descended most deeply into the material plane, the realm of spiritual delusion, the realm in which human beings increasingly rejected the spiritual world and found their freedom, but that personal freedom, which according to Steiner, is originally the gift of Lucifer, is perverted by the actions of spiritual beings28 of whom humanity is largely unaware. Modern human beings are insufficiently aware of how, through their subconscious minds, they are attacked and influenced by these spiritual beings. Ahriman is the most prominent of these anti-human beings in our current age of evolution, and it is through ‘his’ brilliant, ultra-intellectual, scientistic inspiration that the entire ‘one-fold’, totalitarian and technocratic, Transhumanist nightmare is emerging, which many people, in their ignorance, regard as “inevitable” and “progress”, when it is in fact neither because we are, if we only realise it, actually free to choose which way we want to shape our culture and society. Ahriman’s incarnation is being especially prepared and assisted by the  powerful Being of evil known to esotericism as Sorath, the Sun Demon, during the period 1973-2023. This Being, according to Steiner, attacks humanity every 666 years but does not incarnate physically, and first attacked us around the year 666 through the Academy of Gondishapur (its ruins are in SW Iran today, near Dizful). At the centre of that Academy’s work was its School of Medicine. The period arpound 1998 saw the third attack of Sorath on humanity. Ahriman is using colossal lies about CO2 and COVID-19 to ‘mask’ his approach and put us all in a global state of fear, obsessed with “health and safety” and the advice of medical experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci and business experts, such as Bill Gates; if we go on like this, we will become like sheep who allow our false shepherds (governments) and their sheepdogs (the media) to herd us into sheep-pens (“smart” cities) where we can be surveilled, controlled, ID-stamped, vaccinated, reduced in number, and eventually genocided through the Transhumanist agenda, which claims to be the next stage in “evolution”. 21 centuries after the Incarnation of Christ, all this is Ahriman’s ‘contribution’ to humanity’s development; ‘he’ creates a gigantic materialist delusion, the aim of which is to make us forget that we humans are ultimately spiritual beings, but in so doing, ‘he’ paradoxically contributes to our freedom, our ability to choose the spirit, because without that delusion which ‘he’ creates, we would have no alternative to choose. Confronting ‘his’ incarnation is part of what “comes up to face us everywhere [as ‘he’ will be everywhere TB], never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul men ever took.”29

I know of no human being in modern times who has better equipped us to comprehend this entire development of humanity over these past 5000 years and also the activities of Ahriman and the other counterforces than Rudolf Steiner. Not only did Steiner enable us to understand this threefold macrocosmic relationship between humanity’s Saviour, Christ Jesus, and the two great counterforces, Lucifer and Ahriman, including the nature of the physical incarnations of these three Brings, he also provided the vision for a new social future for the next several centuries, i.e., for the time after Ahriman’s incarnation has ended, as end it will, most likely by the middle of this century. This new social future is the idea of the threefold society, about which much has already been written in the pages of New View magazine over the years. It is surely Ahriman’s intention to negate any possibility of a threefold society by ‘his’ ‘onefold’ society in which all will be controlled and directed by circles within a materialistic economic sphere acting through the political sphere, using the politicians like marionettes. And also using the scientists of the cultural sphere, for never has science been as politicised and as subject to economic control as it is today. Pulling the strings of the scientists (through control of research grants and career development) and of the politicians are the elites within the pharmaceutical industry and the financial industry. But amidst all the mass of detail in today’s complex social events, we must not lose sight of the key fact that the main aim of the Ahrimanic forces working against the real interests of humanity is to deny the spirit and affirm a materialist agenda. This, ultimately, is the only ‘either-or’ that really matters: to stand for the spiritual world and the spiritual nature of the human being, or to deny them. If we deny the spiritual dimension of human consciousness and affirm that consciousness and thought are only material processes, and thus subject to calculation, we will be lost. Steiner showed in 1894, in his Philosophy of Freedom (or Spiritual Activity), how the individual, through his own inner spiritual effort, can avoid taking the road to the Huxleyan-Orwellian “brave new world” of 1984, a world of slavery.30

Steiner emphasised that Ahriman has to come and do what he has to do, which will be intrinsically of the nature of technocratic authoritarianism, even though it may be disguised as something ever so ‘friendly’ and ‘progressive-seeming’, in terms of what will be claimed is  ‘beneficial’ for humanity, for our “health and safety”, assisted by Luciferic forces  – Ahriman’s iron fist in their velvet glove; the WEF gives a good example of this approach -  so it would be naïve to imagine that a threefold society such as Steiner outlined in 1917-1922 on a global, regional, national or even local level could be realised while Ahriman is in incarnation, for ‘he’ will seek to dominate all and will always seek to eradicate developments and movements of a spiritual nature, as ‘he’ sought to do through Bolshevism.

What we are facing in the next 20 years or so is a form of technocratic dictatorship, very likely based on the lie of (Ahriman’s)  care and concern for our “health and safety”, including the “health and safety” of the planet (the “threat” of CO2) and the “health and safety” of social justice (racial and sexual “diversity” and “equality”, anti-poverty). But after Ahriman’s physical incarnation is over, humanity will have to ‘pick up the pieces’, figuratively speaking, and it is then that we shall need truly new ideas if we are both to prevent what he has brought from taking permanent hold and to build a genuinely human future. Learning from Steiner, then, over the next decade until 2030, we will need first, to become able to recognise the signs of Ahriman’s approach31 and help each other to do so, and second, to prepare the ground for the period after Ahriman has passed, by thoroughly familiarising ourselves with the ideas of threefolding and by building communities of people dedicated to those ideas, which are rooted both in the spiritual understanding of the human being and in the needs of the present era of history.32

We do indeed seem to be living today in 2020 in a darkening time that is rather like the beginning of the 1930s when the great deceivers (albeit with different emphasis) Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill and Roosevelt33, were astride the political stage, which was also darkened by the economic Depression of those years, as the world is darkened today by this exaggerated pandemic. We should be aware, as some people were aware in the early 1930s, that things are likely to get much worse over the coming years before they can get better, but get better they certainly can one day in the future. We must steel ourselves to this realisation and inwardly and outwardly – without simply responding to the prods, nudges and controls of the would-be shepherds and shepherd dogs – we must prepare for the future and where possible, resist. Will we wake, for pity’s sake?34

Endnotes

1. ‘Covid conspiracies – or the Origins of the Matter’, Peter Taylor, New View magazine, issue 96, Summer 2020.

2. “The human heart can go to the lengths of God.

Dark and cold we may be, but this

Is no winter now. The frozen misery

Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;

The thunder is the thunder of the floes,

The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.

Thank God our time is now when wrong

Comes up to face us everywhere,

Never to leave us till we take

The longest stride of soul men ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.

The enterprise is exploration into God.

Where are you making for? It takes

So many thousand years to wake,

But will you wake for pity’s sake?”

 - from The Sleep of Prisoners (1953) by Christopher Fry.

3. XR Birmingham tweeted to Labour Party MP Dawn Butler on 5 Sept. 2020: Thank you @dawnbutlerbrent, it’s nice to see someone appreciates our efforts to silence blatantly incorrect points of view… Mankind must be forced to give up possessions and indulgence and capitalism must end. https://twitter.com/X_R_Brum

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7dWG5ICxAA

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals

6. The NHS was featured  in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony extravaganza.

7. E.g. Profs. Sucharit Bhakdi, Knut Wittkowski, Wolfgang Wodarg, John Ioannidis, Sunetra Gupta; Dr. Dan Eriksen, Dr. Zach Bush, Dr. Judy Mikovits, Lord Sumption et al.

8.https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/08/03/no-direct-evidence-masks-prevent-viral-infection.aspx

Also, from the same weblink: “Lab testing has shown 3M surgical masks can block up to 75% of particles measuring between 0.02 microns and 1 micron, while cloth masks block between 30% and 60% of respiratory particles of this size. For example, N95 masks can filter particles as small as 0.3 microns, so they may prevent a majority of respiratory droplets from escaping. They cannot block aerosolised viruses, however, that are in the air itself. Additionally, many N95 masks only protect the wearer, as they have exhalation ports that allow you to exhale unfiltered air.”

9. See Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on the four Gospels. For Steiner, the Mystery of Golgotha, from the Last Supper through Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection and ascension through to Whitsun, was the very central Event of the evolution of humanity and the Earth.

10. I do not endorse all the views of the presenter of this video, Paul Joseph Watson, but they are not in any case important here: the images, which also include clips of the Chinese Red Guards from the film “The Last Emperor” (1988), speak for themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olXipfCKUoo

11. https://www.weforum.org

12.LGBTQIA: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual rights campaigners.

13.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Economic_Forum

14.http://www.theartofannihilation.com/category/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-npic/

15.https://intelligence.weforum.org/topics/a1G0X000006OLciUAG?tab=publications

16. Blockchain: “a growing list of computerised records, called blocks, that are linked using cryptography”, “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way” It “was invented in 2008 to serve as the public transaction ledger of the cryptocurrency bitcoin”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

17. Richard Brautigan was a long-term alcoholic, often severely depressed, who lived through the whole California scene of the 1960s and early 70s and shot himself in 1984, aged 49. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Brautigan

18. The frog is put in a pan of cold water and the temperature is slowly turned up so that the frog does not realise it is being cooked alive and does not jump out of the pan.

19. 8 Sept. 2020 BBC Radio 4 News.

20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFaj4WFN3kI

21. Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Untruthfulness, Vols 1 and 2 (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2005). See also C.G. Harrison, The Transcendental Universe (1993), lect. 2.

22. 13 July 2020 https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/08/03/no-direct-evidence-masks-prevent-viral-infection.aspx

23. https://wrm.org.uy/browse-by-subject/mercantilization-of-nature/financialization-of-nature/

24. Rudolf Steiner, lecture of 7 April, 1920, Collected Works GA 312. Steiner refers here to a ‘constellation’ of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars. This means a conjunction, when the planets are grouped closely together, as seen from the Earth.

25. Rudolf Steiner lecture 1 Nov 1919, Collected Works GA 191.

26. See n. 21 above, The Karma of Untruthfulness Vols 1 and 2.

27. See my article “The Incarnation of Ahriman: When and Where?” at http://threeman.org/?p=2905 or in The Present Age magazine Vol. 5, Nos. 7/8 (Oct./Nov. 2019) and Vol.5, Nos. 9/10 (May/June 2020).

28. The Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Asuric beings, who attack our feeling, thinking and willing respectively, and the Being Sorath (the Sun Demon) who attacks the human Self directly. See Bernard Nesfield-Cookson, Michael and the Two-Horned Beast – The Challenge of Evil Today in the Light of Rudolf Steiner’s Science of the Spirit (1998) and Nicanor Perlas, Humanity’s Last Stand – The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence: A Spiritual-Scientific Response (2018).

29. See n. 2 above.

30. The 20th century novels Brave New World (1932) and 1984 (1948) by the British writers Aldous Huxley and George Orwell respectively are the two classic statements about future totalitarian societies, the first a scientific dystopian world state in which the masses are ruled by pleasure and distractions; the second a nightmare prison state constantly at war against two other states and ruled by fear, terror, and pain. On 21.10.1949 Huxley wrote to Orwell: ‘Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience’.

31. See R. Steiner, The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman – Human Responsibility for the Earth (1993).

32. The present era of history: Steiner revealed that we are living in the Age of (the Archangel) Michael (1879-c.2300), an age in which human beings strive to realise their individuality and spiritual nature and to create societies which will be based on  the threefold nature of Man: spirit, soul and body, and on the three autonomous but interacting spheres of society: culture, politics and economy.

33. When he was in government in both 1914 and 1940, Churchill was a consistent warmonger and deaf to any idea of peace. Roosevelt brazenly told the American people in Congress one of the greatest lies ever told to them: that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had been a surprise, when in fact the US government had expected it for months and by their policies had sought to provoke a Japanese attack in order to get into the war. See Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit – The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (2000). Roosevelt’s lie directly led to the deaths of over 405,000 Americans 1941-45, the genocidal atomic bombs, the post-war division of Europe between the USA and the USSR, – and the beginning of the post-war American ‘empire’.

34. In view of the last line of Christopher’s Fry’s verse (n. 2 above), an awakening does seem to taking shape: an “International Alert Message of Health Professionals to Governments and Citizens of the World” was recently created in which a group of 57 health professionals, on the basis of a detailed critique of the arguments of the governments which have imposed this disaster upon humanity, call on governments to stop what the message calls this “terror, madness, manipulation, dictatorship, lies and the biggest health scam of the 21st century”. This message ought to go far and wide to raise consciousness about what is going on. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dZHqwBLt81BuVVT84rm2Ni0jTgnchx87/view?usp=sharing