The Anglo-Russian Antagonism Part 3 (Conclusion)

This article first appeared in New View  magazine #106 Jan.- March 2023

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’.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Britain_Needs_You_at_Once_-_WWI_recruitment_poster_-_Parliamentary_Recruiting_Committee_Poster_No._108.jpg

                                                                                                    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