This article was first published in New View magazine #116 July-Sept. 2025

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

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

Gaza, Jan. 2025

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

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

Uriel, stained glass window,

Chester Cathedral, England

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

The spectres

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

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

Populists, nationalists and elitists

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

Canadian truckers’ protest, (2022)

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

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

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

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

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

The elite’s view of populism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ghost of Rome

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

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