After the financial ‘Big Bang’ – 9/11 week 2008

       Terry Boardman

       [for D.]


Big Bang’ was the theme of last week, seven years to the week after those ‘Big Bangs’ of September 2001. There was a big bang of sorts in Zimbabwe.The ‘Big Bang particle collider machine’ was switched on at CERN, but a few days later turned  out to be a damp squib. And then of course, there was the real Big Bang – once again, as seven years ago, in New York.

Where we are now

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 Tony Blair made a well-publicised speech in which he said (not verbatim) that the kaleidoscope had been shaken, the pieces were all in flux and it was up to ‘us’ to reorder them as we will before they settle again. 7 years on, last Sunday, Blair’s successor Gordon Brown, in an interview on the BBC TV’s Andrew Marr Show (N.b. Marr used to be an editor on the elite globalists’ favourite mag, The Economist and already runs a flagship BBC radio programme) said that the present financial crisis was an opportunity to create a new financial global architecture, a new international regulatory system, because “we are now in a new world”, in which the nation state can no longer deal with global problems. Yesterday, the *23*rd Sept, 7 days after the present financial architecture all but collapsed, at the Labour Party annual conference Brown made the speech that may make or break his political career and again alluded to such changes. This political instrument of New World Order elitists, who has spoken  countless times on the theme of the ‘New World Order’ and always in advocacy of it, will doubtless say more after his trip to the US about the ‘opportunity to create a new financial global architecture and a new international regulatory system.’ We can ask ourselves whether in fact last week’s events were not the conclusion of a well-planned campaign to push the NWO agenda onto the next level in terms of this global financial architecture, or ‘freemasonry’. This will involve major changes for the USA, changes to be pushed through by the architects’ on-site builder, Barack Obama.

In a year that falls 66 years after the Battle of Stalingrad, we have just been through a time as momentous in its way, although more abstract, as the week of 9/11 seven years ago and as the week of the Fall of the Berlin Wall 19 years ago.  Mugabe has finally been forced to give ground in Zimbabwe – and as yet without mass bloodshed. Beyond this, we have all seen a massive weakening of US financial power, the nakedness of the parading American Emperor. The USA has from last week on, in effect, become, like the Ottoman Empire, the Sick Man of the World, by which is meant that the fundamental weakness of the American economy has been laid bare to the whole world. The USA will doubtless struggle on for a few decades more but as long as she maintains her present ways, which will not be ameliorated even by an $800 billion or $1 trillion bailout, she is being readied to merge with Canada and Mexico into the North American Union, and the dollar is being readied to become the amero. The powers-that-be are revamping the USA and preparing it for a different role, for merger in a larger whole. Do we seriously imagine that the likes of Alan Greenspan  oversaw the US economy for all those years until his resignation 2 years back and did not foresee the consequences of the grotesque self-indulgence of Wall St? Gordon Brown was on the BBC this morning maintaining exactly that for himself. Were Greenspan and Brown not like city police chiefs turning a blind eye to  continuous shipments of cocaine and other drugs into their cities and pretending such activity would have no ultimate serious fallout effect on the cities’ socio-economic fabric? But ever since the late 80s, Greenspan’s ilk, connected to the Rockefellers, had been calling for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933) that was put in place after the Great Crash to *stop* banks indulging in exactly the kind of profligate casino economics they have been bingeing on since 1999, when Greenspan and friends got their way, and the Act was repealed by Clinton.

The EU was created after the European peoples had been so battered by war that they allowed their elites to lead them into what was touted as a solution to their problems. The American people would never voluntarily have surrendered the dollar and their national autonomy, so they have in the last 8 years been so battered by the consequences of political and economic crimes that they too are now being led by their elite into the ‘solution-structure’ prepared for them. The elite are tiptoeing carefully in the aftermath of the crisis they themselves have brought to a head over the past 9 years for they know that a wrong move might just possibly result in some kind of popular revolt. But by another dose of FDR-ish New Dealism they hope to paper over the domestic financial cracks (or rather, gaping holes) and push the battered populace into accepting the end of US national sovereignty. Meanwhile, the only major financial investment bank to have come out of all this with a Cheshire cat smile on its face would seem to be Goldman Sachs, which this morning (24th Sept) received a $5 billion buttressing from Warren Buffet. It was interesting to hear the Chief Economist at Goldman Sachs (London) on  BBC radio this morning (The Today Programme) saying almost complacently that the current crisis was not THAT bad, certainly not as bad as 1929 and the 1930s and that what people needed to keep focused on was growing opportunities in the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Well, he would say that wouldn’t he, as his bank have come out very much on top of the investment bank greasy pole. Even Morgan Stanley looked to be tottering last week and  needed assistance. Only Goldman Sachs seemed to be in the clear. Watch that space.

The Preparations for the New World Order 1971-2008

The current events can be seen as connected to those of the early 1970s. The present crisis began last summer with the alleged proximate trigger {not cause] that was the so-called sub-prime mortgage crisis, and then the  onset of the credit crunch. That came 33 years after the disastrous year of 1974, following the Arab-Israel War and the First Oil Shock. In ’71 Nixon had effected a financial revolution when he floated the dollar and ended any remaining illusions of money being related to anything real. The following year, ’72, he and Kissinger  visited Beijing and effected a diplomatic revolution, recognising China’s coming emergence. David Rockefeller followed them to Beijing the next year, and then bingo! – war and oil shock in the Middle East. The Rockefeller-connected Club of Rome and others began prattling about an environmental crisis and then the coming ice age – no talk of global warming then. In ’73 Rockefeller and friends founded the Trilateral Commission to integrate the elite management of America, Europe, and Asia by bringing in ‘cooperative’ elite elements from Japan and China, including the Chinese outside the People’s Republic. In the same period Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski and others set up the 1980s Project to plan the termination of the USSR experiment.

By 1978 preparations were over, and the plan was set in motion: one Pope was assassinated and a Polish Pope installed; the Trilateral-controlled Carter administration was installed, in which the Polish-American, Russia-hating Brzezinski was National Security Advisor. He proceeded to create for Russia its own Vietnam in Aghanistan, the USA having by its actions and policies  in effect handed Iran over to Khomeini by 1979. The independent-minded Bhutto was removed in Pakistan, executed and the fundamentalist militarist Zia put in his place. Thatcher and Reagan, the dogmatic ideologists of free market capitalism, of financial deregulation and privatisation, were manoeuvred into power. Brzezinski and his controllers now had in place fundamentalists in the US and UK, in the Vatican and in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan that they could use to put pressure on the Soviets from the East while in the West they put pressure on them by supporting Solidarnosc in Poland and the Polish Pope in Rome; Reagan’s regime was unusually staffed with Catholics for the purpose. Reagan and Thatcher completed the process by their unrelenting verbal and financial pressure re. ‘Star Wars’ , hardball rhetoric and the threat of armageddon. Then London and Washington carried through in tandem the financial Big Bang of the 1980s – the liberalisation of financial services, deregulation and privatisation of the global capitalist economy, which laid the ground work for the post-Cold war, telecoms and Internet-driven globalisation of the 1990s. After 10 years of all this pressure, the USSR was finished, and in 1989, after an experiment lasting 72 years, it was effectively terminated, final closure being effected by “our man in Moscow” Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1991. So in the early 1970s the High Priests of the West, operating through their chief public instruments, the Rockefellers and their affiliates and subordinates, began to plan for the world that would emerge after the final passing of the great historical wave that had commenced with the onset of the Industrial Revolution 200 years before and had led ultimately to the struggle between capitalism and socialism/communism. This is what last week’s events were part of since British and American predominance played a crucial role in that great wave.

As I see it, the powers-that-be are keen to see the materialist values promoted by British and American culture continue on into the next post-Industrial Revolution era and are now rearranging the pieces on their chessboard to ensure that this happens.

In 1991-2003 came the US’ unipolar, historical 12-year moment of self-indulgent hubris. But that was only a transition before the arrival of the New World Order that Bush Snr. announced in Congress already on 11 Sept 1990. He announced it then, and preparations for it began, as they had in the early 70s for the end of the Soviet Experiment. In 1993, the Rockefeller’s political instrument Clinton expedited  NAFTA, and the World Trade Centre was attacked for the first time. Those two events can be seen as linked. Since 11 Sept 2001 we have been seeing the onset of what was prepared then, like that other onset in 1978. The attacks of 9/11 were not only brought about by the Neocons of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)  in order to justify the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan; they occurred as the first strike of the globalist elite (the ‘ahrmanic brotherhoods’, if you will) on the USA itself in order to bring to an end the century-old era of US nationalist-imperial predominance that began with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the ‘trance-formation’ of the USA from national-imperialist hegemon into major *component* of the globalists’ new Transatlantic Order, or Union, of America and Europe, which is intended to face down the challenge from China and Russia. The real High Priests had operated through the British Empire, had allowed the USA to separate itself from Britain in order to become an independent nation state that would later serve to block and suppress the challenges from Germany and Russia that Britain would not have been able to deal with by itself. But after less far-seeing elements in the British elite had tried to apply the old formula of ‘divide and rule’ to the USA by supporting the Confederacy in the Civil War and had failed, the High Priests reestablished the connection between Britain and the USA via Cecil Rhodes and his ‘Anglo-saxon empire project’ and all that came out of it so that for almost all the 20th century, Britain and the USA worked together, and the US pushed the British empire into imperial receivership: the junior partner in The Firm appeared to take the place of the senior partner. The Romans had defeated the Greeks again…the High Priests were still operating between Britain and the US but required Britain to take a back seat in the relationship for a time.

Rudolf Steiner indicated that those investigating the world have to observe how events in their own  lives relate to outer events. In my case I observed last week that this financial earthquake in NYC, coming as it did 7 years after the 9/11 attacks on the same city, happened at the same time as I became interested in the ancient legend of the Palladium and also when I first noted that the mineral Palladium was mined in just 3 locations round the world, one being Zimbabwe, where this week, another earthquake of sorts took place, as Mugabe was finally forced to share power with the opposition MDC. Another ‘chance’ personal contact drew my attention to the Emperor Hadrian, who was responsible for the Jewish Diaspora in 136 AD with all its consequences that have reached right down to our time. Then I learned that there is a major exhibition on the theme of Emperor Hadrian at the British Museum this autumn. Hadrian’s reign was not only the high point of the Roman Empire, but I learned that Hadrian was also responsible for ensuring the subsequent succession of the Antonine dynasty, which, after “the good” Marcus Aurelius, produced the appalling gladiator-Emperor Commodus – the subject of the Ridley Scott  blockbuster “Gladiator”, the big film of the year 2000. I had long felt this film was significant;  it signalled a major crisis in the Roman Empire both then and now, and indeed the reign of Commodus was the beginning of the end for Rome, which declined steadily over the next century.

Rome, Byzantium and the Palladium

This reminded me of the book “The End of the American Era” by Charles A. Kupchan (2002), publicly recommended by Henry Kissinger and endorsed by the powerful Council on Foreign Relations, in which the author lays out that the present situation is similar to the handover from Rome to Constantinople (Nova Roma) in 330 by Constantine, who was based in Britain before he became Emperor. The USA, writes Kupchan, with his impeccable US elite credentials, is going to hand over to a new Byzantium – the EU. And the financial centre of “the new (East) Roman Empire” will move from NYC to London. Things began to fall into place when I remembered what Steiner had said in a lecture of 6 Nov. 1921 about the event of 330, namely, that Constantine, fearing the Sibylline prophecies about the end of Rome, sought to forestall them and save the Roman Empire (even if Rome itself could not be saved) by transferring the Palladium from Rome to Constantinople. Not only had the Palladium (a statue of Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom and defensive war) been the protector, first of Troy, then of Rome – as long as it was kept within those cities – it was also, according to Steiner, the outer symbol of the deepest western mystery – that of the threefold Sun – the Sun as ‘reflector’ of the light of the planetary heavens, and the fall, (or ‘darkening’) of the Sun mystery (spiritual knowledge of the heavens) from heaven to earth to the point c.330 AD, where it had disappeared deep within the unconscious darkness of the human will.

The Palldium’s Pallas Athena, standing on a small column with a snake entwined around it, wore her helmet and carried her spear and at her side was a lion. Constantine took this statue from the Temple of Vesta (goddess of the hearth or home) in the very centre of Rome (the Forum) and had it buried in Constantinople under a huge porphyry column surmounted by a statue of Apollo with a face modelled on that of the Emperor. Apollo was given a nimbus crown which supposedly included relics from the True Cross of Christ. This was a symbol of the final burial of the ancient Sun wisdom, as Constantine sought to make Christianity the religion of his unified State. According to legend, the Palladium had been brought to Italy by the Trojan Aeneas, who had fled  from the sacked Troy – via N. Africa and his relationship with Dido who had founded Carthage – to Latium. There his descendents later founded Rome, and according to other legends, his descendent Brutus made his way to Britain, named it after himself and founded the forerunner of London. What matters is that people believed these legends were true. So Constantine transferred the Palladium back from west to east, to the very same region where it had been before – the site of Troy is not far Constantinople, and just ‘up the road’ from the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, where in 1915, the British had tried and failed to invade the Ottoman Empire. Dardanus was the father of Illus, legendary founder of Troy, who found the Palladium; it had fallen from heaven, or rather, was thrown down by Zeus, but that’s another story….

Modern economic life since the 17th century is based on credit. What is credit? It is when you say “Yes” to someone. It is your affirmation of someone: “I believe in you”. Affirmation, saying yes, is in that 1921
Steiner lecture about the Palladium related to the spiritual power of the Sun, or rather, the reflected light of the heavens – it is spiritual light within the soul, risen to the level of the mind, of judgment. When we affirm or say Yes, we enlighten; when we negate or say No, we darken. Love in the will, life in the feelings (sympathy and antipathy), light in the mind – this is the threefold Sun, as brought to expression in the ancient Persian, Egyptian and Greek cultures respectively. NYC and London are twin financial centres. The Twin Towers were destroyed in 9/11, but in fact 3 towers were destroyed, if we include WTC7. At the same time 3 towers were being built in London, at Canary Wharf and opposite them a huge Dome had been constructed for the Millennium – the Millennium Dome. This is an echo of the great church Hagia Sophia (Holy Spirit), with its great dome that seemed to float on a ring of light, as the light poured in through the ring of windows below it. This architectural miracle was erected by Constantine’s later successor, Justinian, in Constantinople. It was a symbol of the rigidly MONOlithic, temporal-spiritual, unifed Empire that Justinian sought to consolidate: ONE Empire, ONE Church, ONE Emperor. The 6 Towers of WTC and Canary Wharf can be seen as towers dedicated to business, and thus to credit – an abstract, modern form of the Sun power of YES. NYC’s credit was taken down as London’s stock of credit went up. The week of 11th Sept 2001 to the week of 11th Sept. 2008 has seen the end of US ‘credit’ in the wider financial or economic sense. The US will no longer be able to boast about its economic or financial model. It has suffered a severe loss of face in the eyes of the rest of the world. The BRICs especially will be looking to how they can remove their eggs from the American basket, connect with each other and diversify their interests.

Since Canary Wharf has gone up in London, the ‘Palladium’ has been in the process of transferring back east, and to London, the financial centre of the Nova Roma, the EU. But that Palladium, as in Constantinople, is in fact darkened, buried. As yet, London and the UK show no more sign of producing a new economics than did NYC and the USA. The Sun mystery has not yet illumined a new ethical, Sun-lit economic life. It would appear that the powers-that-be, operating perhaps out of old karmic ties within their own souls, nevertheless feel this connection to bring the Palladium back to the formerly Trojan, then ‘Greek’ world of Asia Minor in the East (now represented by the EU). They hope for a reinvigorated, unified transatlantic Roman Empire, the focus of which has been shifted  east. Meanwhile, in the west, they will seek to create a new North American structure – the North American Union – and will look forward,  as did some of the Founding Fathers’ generation in the USA, to extending this eventually to include the whole American continent. This huge western realm would supply the will force at the disposal of the head force of the new unified Empire, which is to be not in Rome, not in Frankfurt or Berlin, and certainly not in Paris, but in London, and I would guess they will seek to make the effective transfer of financial power clear by the time of the London Olympics in 2012.

But London, despite its acknowledged cosmopolitan nature, is not a Sun city nor is Britain, despite its increasingly international mix of peoples, a Sun nation. On the contrary, their culture is ruled by the Moon and is obsessed with genetics. The figure of the seated Britannia in the 19th century with her trident and shield, helmet and lion is obviously based on the seated figure of Athena with her spear and shield, helmet and lion. But in the region of Troy and the not-so-distant island of Samothrace it was not the cult of Athena’s Sun wisdom but rather, the cult of the Great (Earth) Mother Axerios, later called Cybele (a Moon Goddess) that predominated. Ancient figurines of this seated goddess dating back to 5000 or 6000 BC have been found in Turkey. So in the the myth the heavenly feminine Sun wisdom of Athena fell with the Palladium and later became associated with the Moon and the Earth. Actually, of course, the matriarchal and matrilineal cultures are older, but what we are looking at here is the fact that just as Athena herself was born fully armed from the head of Zeus, she signified the coming thinking power of humanity – the Sunlight of consciousness in the mind, whereas the older cults of the Great Mother and Cybele were cults of the instinctual life of the rhythmic system and abdominal organs, shrouded in the darkness of the will. This is above all what remains respected in Britain today rather than the life of mind, of philosophy and intellect. To this extent, Britain maintains an ancient instinctive culture that relates more to Moon and Earth than to Sun and heavens. The culture of Oxbridge* intellect is a mere Moon icing on this older, instinctive British Earth-Moon cake, which Steiner associated with that spirit within British culture that is analogous to the pre-Homeric Greek age. [*for non-Brits, Oxbridge means Oxford and Cambridge Universities]

No more than the Byzantine Empire was destined to flourish is the new EU Empire destined to flourish, because like Byzantium, the EU is currently based on old dessicated thoughts, old economics, old politics, and the effort of the Vatican to reaffirm an old form of Christianity. The architect of the EU, Jean Monnet, may have said that he was trying to create a ‘new Europe’, but in fact he was merely replacing the Europe of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), the Europe of autonomous nation states, with a Europe based on the late 18th century model of the American Hamiltonian federal republic – nothing ‘new’ in that, not for the 21st century anyway. During the first century of the existence of the USA, its constituent States were steadily pressured to relinquish ever more power to the centre, as the Jeffersonian notion of a loose confederation of agrarian, autonomous States was forced to give way to an industrialising, ever more centralised federal State on the Hamiltonian model. The justification for this was that only in this way could the American States defend themselves and compete against the European Powers (the challenge from ‘the East’). Today the justification for a centralised federal European Union is that only by becoming an ever tightly bound and regulated Union will European countries be able to defend themselves and compete against the challenge of the East. But ‘the East’ today (Russia, India, China) has no new ideas; they merely apply modifications of the old western ideas. So until the West comes up with genuinely new economic and political thinking instead of endless calls for a ‘New’ World Order, the East will continue to be wary of the West, and conflict will indeed be latent. Europe needs to demonstrate to the Easterners a completely different way of doing business not just a stronger economic fortress equipped to fight the same old battles in the same old way.

Nevertheless, the Western elite will seek to forge this ‘new’ Byzantine empire in the hope that this time, they can keep the unified empire in east and west together, and that the hispanic ‘barbarians’ at the gates of New Mexico and Texas will not overwhelm the western half of the empire as the germanic tribes overwhelmed the western Roman empire.  In the end, however, they will fail, just as the anti-christic forces failed c.666 with their efforts at Gondishapur. (Recall that we are only 10 years after the events of 1998 (3 x 666), which also saw huge economic turmoil.) After Justinian died in 565, the Byzantine empire entered into a long drawn-out contraction for almost 900 years, until in 1453 it had become just one single city and was then snuffed out by the rising power of the East, the Ottomans. For the Palladium, according to the legend, was destined not to remain in Constantinople but to move to ‘the North’, and Steiner also says ‘the East’. This was what for centuries lay behind the Russian dream of gaining control of Constantinople; the Palladium could then be transferred to Moscow, which was called in Russia the ‘Third Rome’. This has to do with the beginning of the 6th post-Atlantean epoch, the Slavic epoch or Age of Aquarius, in c.3573. Steiner indicated that this move to the north/east signified that the Palladium (i.e. the Sun-force and Sun-mystery within the human soul today) would need to be illumined by light from the West because the spiritual culture of the East had become decadent, and in this sense he called for the building of cultural bridges between central Europe and the Slavic world, between Europe and Asia.

Rudolf Steiner (Dornach, 6th November, 1921 GA 208):
“At all events the Palladium is waiting, expecting to be removed from the *darkening* influence shed upon it by Constantinople to that locality which, by its very nature, will bring it into *complete darkness*. Yes, the Palladium goes to the East, where the decadence of the ancient wisdom still survives but is passing into darkness. And in the further evolution of the world, just as the sun is the reflector of the light bestowed upon it from the universe, everything depends upon whether the Palladium-treasure is illumined by a wisdom born from the riches of the knowledge living in the West. The Palladium, the ancient heritage brought from Troy to Rome, from Rome to Constantinople, and which, as it is said, will be carried still farther into the darkness of the East – this Sun-treasure must wait until it is redeemed spiritually in the West, released from the dark shadows of a purely external knowledge of nature. Thus the task of the future is bound up with the holiest traditions of European development.

The Sun-Mystery must be found again – otherwise the Palladium will vanish into the darkness of the East. It is wrongful today to utter a saying as untrue as Ex Oriente Lux. The light can no longer come from the East, for the East is in decadence. Nevertheless the East waits – for it will possess the sun-treasure, even though it be in darkness – it waits for the light of the West. But today men are groping in darkness, arranging conferences in the darkness, are looking expectantly towards – Washington! [a reference to the Washington conference of 1921 - Terry] Only those “Washingtons” that speak with the tones of the spiritual world – not conferences looking for the darkness that surrounds the Palladium, for an open door for trade in China – only those conferences will bring salvation which are conducted in the West in such a way that the Palladium can be kindled once again to light. For like a fluorescent body, the Palladium, in itself, is dark; if it is suffused with light, then it becomes radiant. And so it will be with the wisdom of the East: dark in itself, it will light up, will become fluorescent when it is permeated by the wisdom of the West, by the spiritual light of the West.”

This points to the need for the English-speaking countries to realise what has happened to their economic system that has existed  since the 18th century when its fundaments were laid – the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, the end of mercantilism, the publication of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” in 1776, the legalisation of corporate personhood in the 19th century. Today a new economic and financial life is called for that is illumined by the  the palladian Sun within humanity, and that means above all, an economic life that is not focused on the adolescent desires and urges of the self-centred individual as in the 18th century – ME, my property, my desires and my desires for more property – a view that can only lead to the kind of grotesque casino finance we have seen in recent years, but rather, an economic life  that addresses the concerns and needs of all economic agents in society, which is all of us – producers, distributors and consumers -  and not just the concerns and needs of shareholders; an economic thinking that recognises the fraternal *interdependence* of economic life and organises that life not through control by the political State but through a truly ‘enlightened’ regulation by economic agents themselves. Rudolf Steiner pointed the way to this 90 years ago in his ideas for the threefold social organism. The western world was not prepared to listen to those ideas then, and continued with essentially the same economic, political and cultural thinking that had led to disaster in 1914-18. The inevitable result was 1939-45. In the hubristic unipolar years from 1989-2008 the elites of the West (US and UK especially) have learned nothing and have even felt their same old thinking to be justified. The only change they wished to make was to remove the powers of the nation states and subjugate the peoples of the world to globalist institutions dominated by western corporate interests. So while they may be seeking to use this financial crisis for their own ends in carrying the construction of their ‘global architecture’ a stage further, as Gordon Brown and his allies will advocate, and they may indeed appear to succeed in doing so for a while, the utter and literal bankruptcy of their economic thinking was revealed for all to see last week as plainly as was revealed the nullity of their defence of the American people 7 years ago, on 11th September 2001.

©Terry Boardman


This page was created 23rd Sept 2008

Last updated 8th May 2012