David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, read out Israel’s Declaration of Independence in the Tel Aviv Museum Hall on 14 May 1948; it included the following words:

“In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country. This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home. [.…]

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel [the Land of Israel]; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable. This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State. Accordingly, we, members of the People’s Council, representatives of the Jewish Community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist Movement, are here assembled on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Israel and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.”¹

The phrase above  - “national rebirth in its own country”  - is strange because before 1917 few would have denied that the Jews were a nation or a people. They clearly already existed as such and so hardly needed to be ‘reborn’; what was being referred to here was rather, a nation state. The Balfour Declaration issued in the name of the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour on behalf of the government of the UK (following no parliamentary discussion or public debate) in 1917 said nothing about a “national rebirth”. It referred to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”; it did not say “the establishment in Palestine of the national home for the Jewish people”. There was no precedent for the term “national home” in international law; it was unclear from the text whether a Jewish state was intended. However, the phrase “in its own country” in the Independence Declaration of 1948 implied that all of Palestine belonged to the Jews. By then, there were some 650,000 Jews in Palestine, far more than in 1917, and most had arrived since the late 1920s. On 3 February 1919 the World Zionist Organisation submitted a statement to the Paris Peace Conference which referred not to “a national home” but “the national home”. The Zionist Statement made much of the Jews’ “historic title” to the land of Palestine, claiming that “Palestine can be made now as it was in ancient times…”, but in ancient times the Jews constituted a kingdom in the land for several periods i.e. an autonomous Jewish State, and this was indeed what the Zionists were always aiming for but which, from the period before the Balfour Declaration on 1917 to the establishment of the Palestine Mandate in 1922, they could not officially mention.  The Zionist Statement also claimed that “by violence they were driven from Palestine”, no doubt referring to an expulsion by the Roman Empire, but such an expulsion did not happen; Palestine was by no means devoid of Jews between 136 AD and the arrival of the Muslim conquerors in the 7th century, despite the Romans’ cruel treatment of the Jews after the suppression of the Jewish revolt led by Simon Bar Kokhba  in 132-136 AD.² Galilee was the main Jewish religious centre after 136 AD. And even for centuries before the two disastrous Jewish revolts against the Romans in 66-70 and 132-136 AD, far more Jews had chosen to live outside the Jewish homeland than inside it: “Perhaps three to five million Jews dwelled outside Palestine in the roughly four centuries that stretched from Alexander to Titus… through most of [this] era, a Jewish regime existed in Palestine. The Jews of the diaspora, from Italy to Iran, far outnumbered those in the homeland. Although Jerusalem [and the Temple] loomed large in their self-perception as a nation, few of them had seen it, and few were likely to.”³

     The Declaration of Independence in 1948 acknowledged that the new State of Israel was brought into being by: a) acts of will by Theodore Herzl until his death in 1905 and by the Zionist movement from 1897 until 1948 b) the Balfour Declaration by the UK Cabinet in 1917; c) the Mandate of the League of Nations (1922) d) an “irrevocable” vote by the UN General Assembly in November 1947. It should be noted that, apart from the first of these four factors, the other three all resulted from the actions of the elites of the UK and the USA, which issued the Balfour Declaration, and created both the League of Nations and the United Nations; indeed, the result of the UN vote itself in 1947 was largely due to American pressure on other countries, notably France (see below).

     The sentence in the 1948 Declaration of Independence “This right”  - of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country – “…was re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home”  is problematic, because the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) report of 1947 (Article 160, Chapter II: The Elements of the Conflict) stated that:

“The Arabs have persistently adhered to the position that the Mandate for Palestine, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration, is illegal. The Arab States have refused to recognize it as having any validity. (emphasis – TB)

(a) They allege that the terms of the Palestine Mandate are inconsistent with the letter and spirit of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations for the following reasons:

(1) Although paragraph 4 of Article 22 stipulated that certain communities had reached a stage of development where their existence as “independent nations” could be provisionally recognised, subject only to a limited period of tutelage under a mandatory Power in the form of administrative advice and assistance until such time as these communities would be able to stand alone, the Palestine Mandate violated this stipulation by deliberately omitting immediate provisional recognition of the independence of the territory and by granting to the mandatory Power in article 1 of the Mandate “full powers of legislation and administration”.

(2) The wishes of the Palestine community had not been “a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory Power”, as provided for in Article 22, paragraph 4 of the Covenant.

(b) The principle and right of national self-determination were violated.

(c) The Arab States were not Members of the League of Nations when the Palestine Mandate was approved, and are not, therefore, bound by it.”⁴

“International law”

In the aftermath of the bizarre events of 7 October 2023, when one of the world’s most technologically advanced states, widely regarded as having the world’s most sophisticated intelligence and security system, supposedly ‘failed’ for over seven hours (!) to foil a serious cross-border incursion involving genocidal attacks by terrorists on foot, on motorbikes, in trucks and on paragliders – a circumstance that has largely been overlooked by media and governments around the world but which certainly bears comparison with the equally bizarre events of 11th September 2001 in the USA – many western governments have since frequently stated that “Israel has the right to defend itself under international law” and also that “Israel must abide by international law with regard to the treatment of civilians in wartime”.

      In democratic societies “law” is supposed to be decided by the majority votes of the democratically elected representatives of the populations of those societies. But when it comes to “international law” and international treaties between governments or between governments and international organisations such as the UN, then the populations of those “democratic societies” and their representatives are often suddenly left out. It seems to be accepted, even in democratic societies, that proposals and decisions in these areas are made by the foreign policy and legal ‘experts’ in the countries in question, i.e. by small circles of individuals, and not by the populations or their representatives, most of whom have neither much interest in nor knowledge of international affairs. The consequent result, however, of these completely undemocratic procedures that result in new “international laws” is that the populations of democratic societies can find themselves bound for decades afterwards by “international laws” that they themselves were neither consulted upon nor played any part in deciding or voting on. Furthermore, extra-parliamentary private lobby groups can have considerable impact on governments’ behaviour and decisions with regard to international law.

     How, for example, did the State of Israel actually come about in 1948? It was due to decisions made under “international law”, namely the UN Partition Plan for (Mandatory) Palestine, which was passed by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947 by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions. The UK, which was one of the abstaining countries, had been granted a mandate in 1922 to administer Palestine by the League of Nations, a body which had not existed before 1919. With regard to these League of Nations ‘Mandates’, it should be noted that on 17 May 1922, Lord Balfour informed the Council of the League of Nations that his government’s understanding of the role of the League in the creation of mandates was that:

“[the] Mandates were not the creation of the League, and they could not in substance be altered by the League. The League’s duties were confined to seeing that the specific and detailed terms of the mandates were in accordance with the decisions taken by the Allied and Associated Powers, and that in carrying out these mandates the Mandatory Powers should be under the supervision—not under the control—of the League. A mandate was a self-imposed limitation by the conquerors on the sovereignty which they exercised over the conquered territory.”⁵

These League of Nations “mandates” were in effect acts of ‘legalised theft’ by the victorious Powers (Britain, France, USA, Japan) after the First World War. Certainly, such acts of theft had not been unusual after wars between colonial Powers over the preceding 250 years, but theft it was nevertheless. Britain and France, as colonial Powers now (in 1919) severely indebted to the USA, proposed to help themselves to colonies and territories governed before 1914 by Germany and Ottoman Turkey, the defeated Powers in 1918, and to do so in accord with their national self-interest. However, the USA, which during the war had become the world’s creditor nation, and under the supposed influence of its ‘idealistic’ and ‘anti-colonialist’ President Woodrow Wilson, insisted that, in accordance with the largely American creation of the League of Nations, the defeated Powers’ former colonies should not be simply transferred to the British and French colonial empires but the peoples in those colonies should be prepared for self-government by those imperial states’ administrations. Such was the League of Nations’ understanding of the “Mandates”.

     On Wilson’s leaving office in March 1921, the new US administration declined to participate in either the League of Nations or the Permanent Court of International Justice, both of which the USA under Wilson had foisted on the world in 1919 and 1920 respectively. Thus, acts of veiled theft⁶ by Britain and France in the Middle East (Britain got Palestine; France got Syria) were followed by American irresponsibility in ‘legitimising’ those acts of theft, determining their nature and then declining to take any further responsibility for those ‘international’ actions. British foreign policy mandarins – since all this of course had nothing to do with British voters, who were not allowed to be involved with any of these processes  - having in effect ‘stolen’ the Turks’ colony in Palestine, were thus saddled by this American-devised institution of the League of Nations with the burden of ‘administering’ the former colonial territory of Palestine for unspecified decades into the future.

A “National Home”?

The British mandarins had, however, earlier imposed further burdens upon themselves, during the world war, when they had given contradictory promises to both Jews and Arabs in order to gain their support against Britain’s wartime enemies. To prompt the Arabs to rise in revolt against the Turks, in 1916 the British elite had promised the Arabs that they would have independent states after the war, which would be ruled by Arab princes. Also, to obtain the support of wealthy Jews both in America and Russia as well as elsewhere, in the war effort against Germany⁷, the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had in November 1917 given a written promise on behalf of the government –  later known as the ‘Balfour Declaration’, which was personally addressed to Lord Walter Rothschild, whom Balfour evidently regarded as the leader of the Jewish Zionist movement in Britain (he was not formally that but was widely regarded by Jews and non-Jews alike as the ‘prince’ of the Jews in the British Empire, one might say)  - that the British government would

“favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and [would] use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

     There would soon be much controversy over the phrase “a national home for the Jewish people” – did it mean ‘a Jewish State’? The evidence seems to be that most of the mandarins involved felt that sooner or later it would indeed mean that, even if in the early years they claimed to deny this.  For instance, the Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill would later meet with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann at Balfour’s home in London on 21 July 1921, where

Lloyd George and Balfour assured Weizmann “that by the Declaration they had always meant an eventual Jewish State”, according to Weizmann’s minutes of that meeting. Lloyd George stated in 1937 that it was intended that Palestine would become a Jewish Commonwealth if and when Jews “had become a definite majority of the inhabitants”, and [former Colonial Secretary] Leo Amery echoed the same position in 1946.⁸

The final draft of the ‘Balfour Declaration’ was made in Balfour’s name, but he had actually had little to do with the text; it was written by Leo Amery, Jewish himself, who had been the secretary and righthand man of the figure who was arguably the most powerful man in that War Cabinet – Alfred, Lord Milner, Minister without Portfolio (1916-1918)⁹. But Amery later

“testified under oath to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in January 1946: ‘The phrase “the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people” was intended and understood by all concerned to mean at the time of the Balfour Declaration that Palestine would ultimately become a “Jewish Commonwealth” or a “Jewish State”, if only Jews came and settled there in sufficient numbers.” ¹⁰

Over the following 30 years they did just that. Nor, until 1939, did the UK government seek to prevent them.

How had it come to this? That a people who supposedly had lost their homeland in ancient times were able to regain it some 1900 years later and create a State there? That countless peoples and cultures throughout the world had lost control of or had been driven from their homelands over that same long period, never to return or to regain control of them, whereas the Jewish people had managed to convince ‘the world’  - i.e. the elites of Britain and America, who at that time controlled the destinies of the world and also controlled the UN – that they, the Jews, should be allowed to return to and rule that ancient homeland, but other peoples should not be allowed to return to their ancestral lands? For obviously, if the same principle were applied across the historical board, so to speak, then the world map would look very different: England would have to be returned to the Welsh, for example, and the USA to its native American tribes.

The Age of Gabriel, Arabs and Jews

The answer to the above questions, from an anthroposophical perspective, drawing on the spiritual research of Rudolf Steiner, is this: from the early 16th century, guidance of human history passed from one mighty spiritual being to another – from the Mars Archangel Samael (1190-1510) to the Moon Archangel Gabriel (1510-1879). There are seven such Archangels active in rotation, each ‘responsible’ for an approximately 350-400 year period of history. During the phases of the Moon Archangel Gabriel, humanity turns its attention under Gabriel’s impress, very much to the material world and the demands of physical life, that is, to everything that is bound up with the word ‘incarnation’. This was the period of natural science, of western colonialism and empire, of world trade, capitalism, industrialism and nationalism. It was also the period when the English-speaking people rose to world power and when the influence of Semitic culture – that of the Arab and Jewish peoples – rose to particular power within western culture but especially within English-speaking culture e.g. Britain and, later, the USA. In the 17th and 18th centuries, natural science, often based on translations from the Arab texts, began its march of triumph over the Church. (Interestingly, coffee, imported from Muslim Turkey, accompanied this expansion of the intellect). Deism, a peculiarly English form of philosophical religion, transcendental, abstract, and not a little redolent of Islam and Judaism, became the preferred faith of many ‘enlightened’ Englishmen, not least among the Freemasons, whose occultism and ritual owed much to the Temple of Solomon and to the writings of Jewish Cabalists.  Expelled by King Edward I in 1290 in the Age of the Mars Archangel Samael, the Jews had been readmitted to Britain by Oliver Cromwell in 1655, in the Age of the Moon Archangel Gabriel. By the later decades of the Age of Gabriel, the name of Rothschild was known the world over. Indeed, British imperial power in the Victorian age was unthinkable without it. In the decades after 1810, Rothschild money financed British military campaigns, built British railways, gave financial advice and extended loans to the Royal Family, bought the Suez Canal, steadied the economy and buttressed other British banks. The Rothschilds were also among the first to fund Jewish immigrant settlements in Palestine.

     The success of the Rothschilds in Britain was but a symbol of the rising profile of Jewish culture in British life. Take for example, the 17th century English Puritans; in their religious life they based themselves on the people of ancient Israel and especially on the Old Testament and its strictures. They wore black and white, like the Jews, they covered their heads at all times, they opposed religious imagery, they honoured only the text of Holy Writ and its interpreters, they saw themselves as exiles, fleeing sinful ‘Egypt’ for the God-given Promised Land of America, where they took their fundamentalist values and transplanted them. Their successors in England, the Dissenters, banned from political life, turned to business and industry and became successful capitalists.  These Puritans and Dissenters, later followed by the Methodists and Evangelicals in the 18th century, saw themselves as ‘Israel’, looked to the model of ancient Israel and to the prophets of ancient Israel to read the future and discern God’s Will. They came to believe not only that now they were the new ‘Chosen People’ but that the Messiah would not come again until His ‘ancient Chosen People’, the Jews, had been gathered back in the Holy Land and converted to Christ. Many of the English-speaking Puritans believed that it was the task of the Lord’s (new) Chosen People to enable the Jews to return to the Holy Land. Such notions and interpretations of the Bible took firm root in English-speaking culture during the period 1600-1850 across broad sections of Bible-reading Protestant society, from Low Church Evangelicals and Baptists to High Church Anglicans. Politicians such as David Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour were well aware of such interpretations.

     The Age of Gabriel ended in 1879 but its impulse did not stop then; such archangelic impulses are always strongest at the end of their period and continue for several decades until they begin to fade out as the new archangelic wave comes in. Nationalism was thus at a peak in the years 1870-1970, and especially during the time of the two world wars. Jewish influence in the West also rose to a peak in this period, notably in America. It was hardly surprising then that the Zionist movement, the Balfour Declaration, and the effort to found a political State of Israel should also have occurred in this time. It was, strictly speaking, the early period of the Age of the Sun Archangel Michael, but his impulse was only beginning to grow at that time. His is a truly Christian impulse, and the impulse of Christ is the creation of a kingdom that is not of this world.

National motivations

The League of Nations was a typical manifestation of the outgoing Gabrielic and the incoming Michaelic principles. It was founded by the English-speaking elites to serve their own cultures’ national interests and yet it also had a supranational impulse to it. It was a contradiction in terms – an intended supranational institution that was based on the principle of national self-determination! The Arabs protested already in 1919 that the Wilsonian principle of ‘national self-determination’, the supposed cornerstone of the new League of Nations, meant that it was not right that European Powers should presume to encourage Jews to migrate to Palestine which, as ‘southern Syria’ under Turkish rule in the mid-19th century, had had a Jewish population of only some 5-7% as against 80% Muslims and 10% Christian Arabs.¹¹ By the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, the population of Palestine was 10% Jewish and 90 % Muslim. ‘National self-determination’ was widely interpreted to mean that Palestine would belong to the majority Muslim Arab population. But the British and American elites had ‘determined’ otherwise, in accordance with their own British imperial or American pseudo-imperial interests. The Arabs were too backward, they felt, to serve those interests in the region, and those interests above all were the security of the Suez Canal and the safe transport of Mesopotamian oil across the region to ports in Palestine, such as Haifa, on the Mediterranean. For the British, the Suez Canal meant the safeguarding of their imperial interests in India and the rest of Asia and southeast towards Australasia. Mesopotamian oil guaranteed the future of the Royal Navy, without which there would simply be no British Empire; this had been the reality since oil had begun to replace coal as the fuel of the Royal Navy shortly before the world war. Britain had plenty of coal but no oil; it therefore needed to ensure control of those regions which possessed plentiful supplies of oil. The Americans would have the same motivation when their native supplies of oil began to diminish in the 20th century. The Jewish emigrants to Palestine were comparatively modern, educated and culturally European, many of them predominantly secular. Their Zionist champions and leaders in Britain, such as Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) and Herbert Samuel (1870-1963), emphasised this fact that the emigrants would render effective service to the British Empire if they were allowed to become the controlling element in the region.

Balfour and his Declaration

A further factor was repeatedly stated by Balfour and the circle around Milner during the First World War and it continued to be of great importance in the interwar period: namely, that Zionism – the cause that since 1897 (the first Zionist Congress, in Basel, Switzerland) had sought a nation state for the Jewish people and later specifically a state in Palestine, the ancient ‘Land of Israel’ as the Zionists called it (Eretz Israel) – was of interest to many influential and wealthy Jews  in the USA, Jews whose support Britain could not afford to lose: on 3 September 1917 Balfour

“pointed out that this was a question on which the Foreign Office had been very strongly pressed for a long time past. There was a very strong and enthusiastic organisation, more particularly in the United States, who were zealous in this matter, and his [Balfour’s] belief was that it would be of most substantial assistance to the Allies to have the earnestness and enthusiasm of these people enlisted on our side. To do nothing was to risk a direct breach with them, and it was necessary to face this situation.”12

     In April 1917 Balfour visited the US and amongst others, met with Louis Brandeis, president of the Zionist Organisation of America and one of US President Wilson’s closest advisors. Balfour gained from Brandeis the impression that American Jews, especially the wealthier ones, supported Zionism.

“According to an account written in 1923 by the British Foreign Office, it was during Balfour’s visit to America that the idea solidified of issuing a statement of support for Zionism: ‘[D]uring this visit the policy of the declaration as a war measure seems to have taken more definite shape. It was supposed that American opinion might be favourably influenced if His Majesty’s Government gave an assurance that the return of the Jews to Palestine had become a purpose of British policy’.”¹³

Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader in Britain, tried to persuade the British government that the Germans, who were allied to Ottoman Turkey, might seek to use the Zionist tactic to persuade wealthy Jews in America to favour pacifism and thus undermine US support for the war which America had only just joined (April 1917). In the autumn of 1917, evidence appeared which seemed to substantiate Weizmann’s claims.

     The only member of the five-man War Cabinet who spoke against a declaration in favour of supporting a Jewish national homeland in Palestine was Lord Curzon, who argued that:

“….important as may be the political reasons … for adopting such a line of action, we ought at least to consider whether we are encouraging a practical ideal, or preparing the way for disappointment and failure….” Curzon claimed that “most of the Jewish agricultural colonies [in Palestine] had not been successful. And that ‘the Arabs have occupied the country for the best part of 1,500 years. . . . They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants, or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter.’”¹⁴

This would turn out to be prescient on both counts.

 But in the War Cabinet meeting on 31 October 1917, Curzon’s objections were overruled. Balfour

“chose to rest the case for the declaration mainly on its value as propaganda.” He related that “the vast majority of Jews in Russia and America” favoured Zionism. ‘If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal,’ he said, ‘we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.’ The war cabinet then and there authorised Balfour, in his capacity as foreign secretary, to issue a declaration…[It] was issued two days later, with only minor clerical corrections.”¹⁵

The British government’s formal promise of “the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people”  - the Balfour Declaration – was made for the sake of a temporary tactic to gain advantage in time of war. A confidential memorandum in 1924 by the Colonial Office, also showed that the Balfour Declaration was a war tactic. The Declaration, it said:

“had a definite war object. It was designed to enlist on behalf of the Allies the sympathy of influential Jews and Jewish organizations all over the world. The Declaration was published at a time when the military situation was exceedingly critical. Russia had dropped out of the Alliance. Italy appeared to be at her last gasp; and the Germans, freed from anxiety in the East, were massing hugh (sic) forces on the Western front in preparation for the great offensive of 1918. The promise to the Jews was in fact made at a time of acute national danger.” ¹⁶

     Once the Declaration had been made public, however, the British government was stuck with it and felt it could not go back on it. It soon realised after the war was over that it was hoisted on its own petard, although the original reason for the Declaration – its use as a war propaganda tactic – no longer applied. Despite opposition to the Declaration, to the appointment of Herbert Samuel as High Commissioner and to the government’s general pro-Zionist stance from many within the military in Palestine and within the echelons of the Civil Service, the government stubbornly clung to the Declaration, claiming to try to satisfy the demands of both the Zionist and Arab communities.

     The British and French governments issued a hypocritical statement in Syria on 9 November 1918:

“The object aimed at by France and Great Britain in prosecuting in the East the War let loose by the ambition of Germany is the complete and definite emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations.”¹⁷ (emphasis – TB)

But in December 1918 the British and French agreed that Britain alone would rule in Palestine, thus changing their secret agreement finalised with the Russians in January 1916 – for which negotiations had commenced in 1915, the Sykes-Picot Agreement – according to which, after the war, Palestine would be administered internationally.

     Other statements by Balfour show the extent of his cynical appraisal of Britain’s self-interest: in an August 1919 memo discussing the Covenant of the League of Nations, he explained:

“What I have never been able to understand is how [our policy] can be harmonised with the [Anglo-French] declaration, the Covenant [of the League of Nations], or the instructions to the Commission of Enquiry … I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs; but they will never say they want it. Whatever be the future of Palestine, it is not now an ‘independent nation,’ nor is it yet on the way to become one. Whatever deference should be paid to the views of those who live there, the Powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the matter, to consult them. In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate,” and: “The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the ‘independent nation’ of Palestine than in that of the ‘independent nation’ of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”¹⁸ (emphasis – TB)

     Two things, it seems, may have come together here in Balfour’s mind: although as an offshoot of the powerful aristocratic Cecil family with its strong traditionalist High Church Anglican convictions, he came from a very different branch of Christianity than the Welsh Baptist David Lloyd George, the two men, like so many of their contemporaries, had been brought up on the Bible and knew it very well, Lloyd George famously saying he knew the kings and placenames of ancient Israel better than those of England. Both men being romantics at heart, they had a certain penchant for the ancient fate of the Jewish people and both had been seduced by the charm of Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and his appeals to their sense of history and religion with regard to the fate of the Jewish people.

     But both men were also well aware of the power of Jewish finance in Britain, especially since the days of Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777-1836), who had financed Wellington’s victorious Waterloo campaign against Napoleon and much British railway development in subsequent decades. As leading politicians, Balfour and Lloyd George were also aware that Britain’s first Jewish Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) had used his connections with the Rothschild family in 1875 to secure a Rothschild loan that gained for the British government the controlling share in the Suez Canal. Both men too had bent an ear to the practical and strategic arguments advanced by Britain’s first Jewish Cabinet Minister Herbert Samuel, a committed Zionist, who soon after war broke out between Britain and Turkey in November 1914, said that “

by supporting the creation of a Jewish colony east of Suez, Britain could deny that territory to rival foreign powers who might then threaten its control of the Suez Canal…Samuel argued in March 1915 that ‘help given now towards the attainment of the idea which great numbers of Jews have never ceased to cherish through so many centuries of suffering cannot fail to secure, into a far-distant future, the gratitude of a whole race, whose goodwill, in time to come, may not be without its value.’”¹⁹ (emphasis – TB)

The British government would later make Samuel its first High Commissioner for Palestine (see photo below: Samuel right with Balfour centre and Gen. Allenby left.) Serving from 1920 until 1925, he was the first Jew to govern there for 2000 years. Samuel’s appointment was not popular with the Arabs, but he tried to appear impartial and was reasonably successful in his role. However, Jewish historian Bernard Wasserstein wrote that his policy was “subtly designed to reconcile Arabs to the… pro-Zionist policy” of the British²⁰, and Sahar Huneidi, in A Broken Trust – Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians (2001), wrote that most of Samuel’s policies in Palestine actually went beyond the notion of  the “Jewish national home” promised in the Balfour Declaration and were aimed at the realisation of a Jewish state.

Allenby (left), Balfour (centre), Herbert Samuel (right)

     Riots broke out a number of times due to Arab feelings of betrayal by the western Allies and against rising Zionist immigration. On 18 August 1921, as the inter-communal situation worsened, although there was no Arab violence directed against British troops in Palestine, the British Cabinet met to discuss the situation, but only the last of the four main points discussed related directly to Palestine:

1) “The honour of the government was involved in the Declaration made by Mr Balfour, and to go back on our pledge would seriously reduce the prestige of this country in the eyes of Jews throughout the world. 2)  The Prime Ministers of Canada and South Africa had recently stated that our Zionist policy had proved helpful in those Dominions. 3) It was not expected that the problem could be easily or quickly solved,

especially in view of the growing power of the Arabs in the territories bordering on Palestine. 4) it was urged that peace was impossible on the lines of the Balfour Declaration, which involved setting up a National Home for the Jews and respecting the rights of the Arab population. The result of this inconsistency must be to estrange both Arabs and Jews, while involving us in futile military expenditure. Against this position it was argued that the Arabs had no prescriptive right to a country which they had failed to develop to the best advantage.”²¹

So, the Declaration had to be adhered to for the sake of Zionist interests in Canada and South Africa and for the sake of the “honour” of the UK government – this after nearly a million Britons had died fighting in the war for that government, often in appalling circumstances  – even though it was recognised that “peace was impossible on the lines of the Balfour Declaration”!

In July 1922, the League of Nations approved the Palestine Mandate, Britain as the mandatory power, and Britain’s implementation of the Balfour Declaration. In August, the Palestine Arab Congress rejected the Palestine Mandate, calling it a violation of Arab rights.

The secret Cavendish report of 1923

Less than a year later, in February 1923 the new Colonial Secretary, Victor Cavendish, the 9th Duke of Devonshire (one of England’s pre-eminent aristocrats), had a secret 10-man committee carry out a comprehensive re-assessment of British policy with regard to Palestine,    including the question of whether to retain the Balfour Declaration and even the Mandate. Cavendish concluded in his report to Cabinet after the committee’s findings that despite the difficulties with the project that he admitted was unpopular with Press and public, Britain should continue with both Declaration and Mandate essentially for the sake of the country’s, i.e. the Establishment’s ‘honour’: “repudiating the Declaration”, “breaking a promise made to the Jews in the face of the whole world”, and “returning the Mandate” to the League of Nations would mean that

“We should, indeed, stand convicted of an act of perfidy, from which it is hardly too much to say that our good name would never recover…. We shall stand for all time as the Christian Power which having rescued the Holy Land from the Turk, lacked the strength or the courage to guard what it had won.”²²

Concerns of honour typical of a 13th century aristocrat. No matter that the Declaration no longer corresponds to reality and makes no sense, it had to be continued with – such was Cavendish’s reasoning in effect.

However, Cavendish also came up with two distinctly dishonourable reasons for continuing with the Mandate.  In 1922 Britain had been negotiating a withdrawal from Egypt. In those circumstances, it would suit Britain, indeed it would be vital he said, to retain forces in Palestine, east of the Suez Canal in order to keep a military presence close to the Canal. This self-interested motive went right against the principle of Mandates, which were supposed to benefit the people of the mandated territory not the mandatory Power, but the League of Nations never got to know, because “the Cavendish memorandum… was made public only well after Britain had withdrawn from Palestine”²³ (i.e. after 1948).

     The second dishonourable motive was that Cavendish claimed that the Jews were bringing much investment into the territory and benefiting the economy: “It may well be argued that, by giving them the opportunity of doing so, we are serving the interests of civilization as a whole, quite apart from any sentimental considerations about restoring a scattered people to its ancient fatherland.” But this was untrue, as Jewish investment benefited only the Jewish economy in Palestine, not the Arab. Jewish capital was employed to buy Arab-owned land, and only Jewish labour was allowed on land owned by the Jewish National Fund. A 1921 report for the Zionist Executive noted that:

“the situation might have been less acute had Zionist activity brought the Arabs the material advantages they had been invited to expect from it.”²⁴

      The Cabinet in 1923 therefore concluded that a Jewish national home could not be realised together with the protection of the interests of the Arab population and their eventual independence. Nevertheless, despite this continuing contradiction the Cabinet decided, for reasons of imperial self-interest once again (i.e. the loss of ‘face’ that would result), to go on with the Declaration’s promise of a Jewish national home. The consequence was inevitable conflict between Arabs and Jews, with which Britain, in its straitened economic circumstances after 1945, would not ultimately be able to cope and which finally led to its ignominious departure from Palestine in 1948, the besmirching of its ‘honour’ and ‘name’ notwithstanding, and leaving behind a situation of terrible conflict that is still ongoing a hundred years after the secret Cavendish report of 1923.

The American historian J.B. Quigley commented:

The Cabinet approved the committee’s report, with minor amendments, on 31 July 1923. The report was nothing short of remarkable. Had it been made public at the time, one can only speculate at the furor it would have caused. The British government was admitting that its support for Zionism had been prompted by considerations having nothing to do with the merits of Zionism, or its consequences for Palestine. The government, for reasons unrelated to Palestine, was willing to relegate Palestine to a posture in which inter-communal conflict was all but inevitable.”²⁵

          The Cavendish committee proposed setting up an Arab Agency in Palestine to serve Arab interests and which would operate alongside the already existing Jewish Agency  – but only if the Zionists agreed and if the Arabs agreed to cease all further agitations. News of this proposal was made public, but the Cavendish committee report stayed secret. The public did not know therefore that the Cabinet actually regarded the Mandate as unworkable.

“The statement that was made public read, disingenuously, that the Government had endeavoured so to conduct the administration of Palestine as to do equal justice to the interests of both the parties concerned. …This public statement was directly at odds with the conclusion the Cabinet reached in private. It did not become known that Britain was more concerned about keeping the Mandate than about the advisability of promoting a Jewish national home. It did not become known that Britain had no plans for implementing the Balfour Declaration in a way that was anticipated to yield an acceptable outcome.²⁶

The British government was telling the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations in the 1920s that the interests of both communities in Palestine were being served appropriately, but as early as July 1923 its own real assessment was that this was far from the case and was in fact virtually impossible.

     Meanwhile, Jewish immigration continued to rise steadily. The population of Tel Aviv increased from 2,500 in 1920 to 25,000 in 1924, and the overall Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine rose from 90,000 in 1923 to 450,000 in 1940, most arriving after 1929 with the rise of Nazism in Germany; the Arab population was about a million. At the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the Jewish population was 650,000. The greatly increased numbers in the 1930s led to major Arab protests, rioting and violence, culminating in the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-39, during which irregular Jewish armed forces collaborated with British troops in fighting the Arabs and after which the British government finally imposed considerable restrictions on Jewish immigration and announced that it would end the Palestine Mandate within 10 years i.e. withdraw. In 1937 the British had announced a plan to partition the territory three ways: an Arab state, a Jewish state and a continuing British Mandate over Jerusalem and the port of Haifa; the British obviously still wanted to control Jerusalem and their oil port at Haifa. These British plans of 1937 and 1939 led to illegal immigration and terrorist violence against the British authorities by the Jewish Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) and Irgun (National Military Organisation) movements in the 1940s. The British had finally succeeded in turning both Arabs and Jews against them. Jewish violence culminated in the bombing atrocity at the British HQ at the Hotel King David in 1946 where 91 people were killed and 45 injured.

The Americans and the UN vote in November 1947

After the Second World War, the Labour government, under great economic duress, and considerable US pressure, resolved to quit India and Palestine as soon as practically possible. Meanwhile, the Anglo-American-devised League of Nations had given way in 1946 to the Anglo-American-devised United Nations. How did this body give its blessing to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948?  After the death of President Roosevelt in April 1945, Jewish lobby groups sought to put pressure on the new and inexperienced President to force the British to increase immigration quotas to Palestine. One of them, the American League for a Free Palestine (ALFP), was a front for the Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, and was led by Hillel Kook, a senior member in the Irgun.²⁷ In 1946, with the ghastly film footage from concentration camps in Germany in people’s minds, and many Jews still waiting in miserable conditions in Europe, American Jews were in no mood for compromise. Their lobby pressure was relentless and much money was raised, from Hollywood celebrities and even from the Mafia for the militant Jewish groups fighting the British in Palestine. Kook and others represented those groups’ armed struggle as the struggle of the American revolutionaries for freedom from the British in the 1770s, and as in the 1770s, Kook and his allies did not hesitate to involve the French, setting up a French branch of the ALFP and gaining the support of such luminaries as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Under political pressure from the significant Jewish lobby in New York City, President Harry Truman called for “a viable Jewish state”, and the Republican governor Thomas Dewey urged that “hundreds of thousands” of emigrants be allowed into Palestine. Truman expressed his exasperation at forceful Jewish lobbying, but felt he had to bend towards it, not least because of the number of Bible Belt American Protestant voters who felt they had to help “the Hebrews” regain the Promised Land. A factor here was the very influential Scofield Reference Bible of American fundamentalist minister Cyrus I. Scofield²⁸ (published in Britain by Oxford University Press) that since 1909 had become popular in the USA with its extensive notes to the King James Version. By the end of the Second World War the Scofield Bible had sold more than two million copies. The Scofield Bible’s notes, amongst other things, promoted eschatological dispensationalism  – the notion that God intervenes in human history in discrete historical phases.²⁹

     Jewish terrorist actions grew more daring, ever more violent and more successful. Gradually, as had been the case with the IRA in Ireland in 1919-21, the British buckled under the terrorists’ ever more gruesome attacks and it became ever clearer that they were losing control of the situation despite their heavy-handed efforts to repress the Jewish armed groups. In September 1947 the British announced they would pull out unilaterally on 14 May 1948, whatever the situation and whatever the UN might decide. On 29 November 1947 the UN debated the partition proposal drawn up by the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). The proposal required a two-thirds majority to pass. New York Jews lobbied effectively both inside and outside the UN building; their focus was on France which until then had taken no clear position. Bernard Baruch (1870-1965), an ardent Zionist and a real powerbroker who had funded Woodrow Wilson to become President in 1912, had advised Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, was a close friend of Winston Churchill and moreover was also a supporter of the Irgun and the ALFP, put direct pressure on the French UN delegate,  Alexandre Parodi, telling him personally that the French stock market would dive if France did not support partition in the UN vote and implying that President Truman might choose to send aid meant for France elsewhere. The clear message was relayed back to Paris. In the UN General Assembly vote on 29 November Parodi voted for partition and so did France’s three neighbours Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Those votes helped to secure the two thirds majority (33-13) for partition. In Palestine, Jews shouted “Vive la France!” but they should rather have shouted “Vive Baruch!” Thus it was that the Zionists got their UN support for the State of Israel they founded on 14 May 1948.

The old rivalry: Britain and France

Meanwhile, French money for weapons for the Jewish armed groups in Palestine continued to arrive in Palestine: in January 1948 the French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault authorised US$26 million worth of arms for the Haganah group.

     Until the very end of the British Mandate in May 1948, the two old imperial rivals Britain and France were still trading blows over the Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean that they had been struggling over since the 1870s, when Disraeli had outmanoeuvred France with Rothschild money to buy the controlling shares in the Suez Canal (which had been built by the French!), since 1882, when the British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone had sent British troops to occupy Egypt to consolidate that control of the Canal, and since 1915 when the prickly diplomats Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot had wrangled over delineating British and French spheres of influence and control in the region and had created the infamous Sykes-Picot lines on a map which largely determined the borders of the postwar territories that still exist today and which as recently as 2014 ISIS declared it would erase to recreate the Islamic ‘Caliphate’.

      It was in fact due to Britain’s frustration over France’s determination to gain control over Syria during the First World War that the British government had first lent an ear to Herbert Samuel’s proposal to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. When the Turkish sultan, who was also the Caliph of the entire Islamic world, had declared a Holy War (a great jihad) against Britain in November 1914, Britain had responded by launching a massive imperial assault on Constantinople via Gallipoli the following year. This failed disastrously, so in 1916 the British turned to Hussein the Sharif of Mecca, who was descended from the Prophet Muhammed and as such was the one man in the Islamic world who outranked the Sultan/Caliph, but the Sharif’s price for joining the fight against the Turks was high: it included Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine.

     However, Britain’s allies, the French, insisted on having Syria, even though they did not occupy it. Their claim was based instead on age-long romantic cultural ‘ties’ between France and Syria going back to the time of Charlemagne, the Crusades, and Franco-Ottoman alliances in the 16th and 17th centuries as well as educational and trading links with Syria and Lebanon. The French had also wanted Palestine, but Sykes managed to persuade Picot that Palestine should be governed internationally after the war, a solution that pleased neither of them. The British had at least gained control over the oilfields of Mesopotamia, over the port of Haifa and over Transjordan and the Negev desert which bordered on the Sinai and the Canal. Nevertheless, they would much have preferred France to have gained nothing in the region.

“Resentful that they had been forced into the deal [3 Jan. 1916] by Georges-Picot, they immediately began to look for ways to circumvent it and in particular to plug the gap in their defences left by its unsatisfactory settlement of Palestine. To do so, the British turned to an idea that had been circulating in government circles for a year. This was that support for Zionism – the as yet unsuccessful political campaign to create a Jewish state in Palestine – represented a better way for Britain to secure its position in the Middle East.” ³⁰

     Also, following the failure of the Turks’ attempt to take the Suez Canal via an assault on the Sinai in January 1915, the British recaptured the Sinai but were defeated in two battles at Gaza in the spring of 1917. General Edmund Allenby (a descendant of Oliver Cromwell), then led the British forces in a victorious campaign northwards from Sinai to Jerusalem (Dec. 1917) and Damascus (Oct. 1918). This campaign would not have been successful without the support of the Arab forces of Sharif Husein, led by Col. T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), a close ally of Hussein’s son, Prince Faisal, who was set on independence and statehood for the Arabs.

     The age-old imperial rivalry between England and France going back to the 18th century and beyond that, to the Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries, thus had a not insignificant hand in the events that led to the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. Allenby entered Jerusalem on 7 December 1917, on foot, out of modesty, at the head of the first European army there since the 13th century. He is said to have remarked: “Only now have the Crusades ended”, but he did not allow his press officers to use the words “crusade” and “crusaders” and thought of himself as fighting the Ottomans, not Islam. However, the 20th century Zionist settlers in Palestine were overwhelmingly European, and the Arabs saw them and still see them as such – as modern crusaders of a kind, colonial invaders who must be resisted and ejected, as the Crusaders were, 700 years before. The Zionists, following a nationalist impulse from the Age of Gabriel, and believing in their people’s unique and ancient claim to the land, sought to establish a modern nation state in a land that had been inhabited by others for over a thousand years.

Notes

1 https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-declaration-of-independence-may-14-1948/

It may be noted that this essay does not make reference to the Nazi genocide against the Jews 1939-1945. This is because the section of Israel’s Declaration of Independence quoted from David Ben-Gurion’s speech above does not refer to the genocide but rather, to the four factors mentioned on page 19 of this article (the paragraph beginning: “The Declaration of Independence in 1948 acknowledged…”). If the genocide had not happened, the Zionist movement would still have pressed their case for a Jewish State and if necessary, would have fought the British government militarily in order to drive the British out and gain their objective.

2 See The Invention of the Jewish People (Eng. transl. 2009) by Shlomo Sand, Israeli Emeritus Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, p.181f.

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_for_Palestine#cite_note-247 Notes [t]

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_for_Palestine#cite_note-224

6 The imperial Powers had of course acquired many of their own colonies by other acts of theft, conquest or deception.

7 Previously, many Jews, especially in the USA had been pro-German, and the German government had sought to keep their support.

8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration

9 More powerful than the Prime Minister Lloyd George, who, in order to ensure the continuance of the war, had been put in power by a coup d’état in December 1916 by Milner and his supporters who had been planning such a move for many months. Milner, a greatly experienced colonial administrator and then banker himself, had deep links to high finance and to the Establishment more widely; by comparison, Lloyd George was merely a gifted political rhetorician and former lawyer, a political opportunist, while Milner followed his own thoroughgoing convictions and credo with regard to Britain’s imperial future.

10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration#cite_note-250

11 Cheryl A. Rubenberg, Israel and the American National Interest: A Critical Examination. University of Illinois Press, 1989, p. 26.

12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration#CITEREFHurewitz1979

13 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1650658. J. B. Quigley, ‘The Perfidy of Albion: Britain’s Secret Re-Assessment of the Balfour Declaration’, Ohio State University, 2010, p. 3.

14 ibid. p. 4.

15 ibid. p. 5.

16 ibid p. 5. This British government Memo was not quite accurate; the Declaration was made on 2nd November 1917, five days before the Bolshevik coup d’état in St. Petersburg. It took at least three months before the Soviets finally sued for peace with Germany on 18 February 1918, and the Germans could then begin “massing huge forces on the Western front in preparation for the great offensive of (21 March) 1918”.

17 op. cit., Quigley, p. 6.

18 https://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/60431057?access_key=key-136ulpy32ssl2l27p8nb

Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939. (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1952), 340-348 Nº. 242. ‘Memorandum by Mr. Balfour (Paris) respecting Syria, Palestine, and  Mesopotamia’, 11 August 1919.

19 J. Barr, A Line in the Sand – Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East (2011) p. 32.

20 B. Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict 1917–1929 (1978), p. 92.

21 Quigley, p. 11.

22 op. cit., Quigley, p. 13.

23 op. cit., Quigley, p. 14.

24 op. cit., Quigley, p. 14.

25 op. cit., Quigley, p. 18.

26 op. cit., Quigley, p. 19.

27 See  J. Barr, A Line in the Sand, pp. 326-335.

28 Scofield had received much help from wealthy Jews in the creation and promotion of his new Bible, the study notes of which were seen as pro-Zionist. Scofield’s theology was based to a large extent on the dispensationalist teachings of one of the founders of the Plymouth Brethren, the Anglo-Irishman John Nelson Darby (1800-1882).

29 These, it was claimed, would include the return of the Jews to Israel and also ‘the Rapture’, the gathering up of “the Church” of the faithful into heaven during ‘the Time of Tribulation’; these would become major themes of Christian fundamentalism and ‘Christian Zionism’ in the USA in the 20th century.

30 J. Barr, op. cit., p. 32.

On 5 September the British government revealed, on the basis of what it called “exhaustive CCTV analysis”, the identities of the two men it claimed had arrived in Britain on 2 March and had been responsible for deliberate nerve agent poisonings in and near the city of Salisbury. It said that these men were Russian agents working for the Main Intelligence Directorate (GU, formerly GRU), the military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The BBC and other British media were soon laying the blame for the attacks directly at the door of President Putin himself. On 13 Sept. the two men appeared on Russian television to say they had simply been on a tourist trip to Salisbury; this was immediately dismissed as a fabrication and an insult by the British. This British government claim of Russian State criminality is but the latest in a stream of such claims about the Salisbury incident since the accusation was first made by the British government on 12 March, on the basis of zero actual evidence presented to the public, that it was “highly likely” that the Russian State had poisoned the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal, now resident in the UK, and his daughter Yulia, a Russian citizen,  on 4 March. But despite the fact that the British legal system has always prided itself on maintaining the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”, Theresa May’s government declared on 12 March that there were only two possibilities that accounted for the attack: either deliberate action by the Russian State or the loss of control by the Russian State of the poison and its acquisition by “others”. UK government demanded a response from the Russians within 24 hours as to which of these two possibilities was true (a similar 24 hour ultimatum had been given to Germany on 3 August 1914 before the declaration of war).

A key part of the British government’s argument was that the Russians ‘had form’ when it came to assassinations abroad and covering them up, and that is certainly true; the Czarist secret police were doing it over 100 years ago. Whether Russian agents did so in the case of Alexander Litvinenko, a  Russian who died in London in suspicious circumstances in 2006, has yet to be proven in a proper court of law. But the media and the UK government also overlooked the historical fact that the British government and secret services have also ‘had form’ in telling lies about their own heinous actions abroad over the past two centuries at least. One can cite British involvement in the murder of Rasputin in December 1916¹  and the transport of Leon Trotsky to Russia in 1917², the fabrication of the infamous ‘Zinoviev Letter’ in 1924 which contributed to the downfall of Britain’s first Labour government and numerous other cases, not least the provision of false information to the USA after 9/11 about Saddam Hussein’s alleged acquisition of uranium from Niger, a charge used by the US to justify the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is also documented fact that the British government clandestinely tested new bio-weapons on its own citizens³. The possibility then, that there was a third explanation for the Salisbury incident – that it was arranged by the British secret service apparatus as part of an ongoing anti-Russian campaign – was, however, not considered by the mainstream media nor, of course, by the government or even the political class; no British politician has raised his or her head above the parapet even to voice this possibility, let alone stand for it.

On 9 March the Russian government had declared it was “ready to cooperate” with the British and had requested access to the samples of the nerve-agent Novichok which the British claimed had been used in the attack. The British government refused this request. On 13 March, the British government expelled 23 Russian diplomats and took other punitive measures against Russia. On 16 March the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, again without proffering any evidence, directly accused President Vladimir Putin of having ordered the attack on the Skripals, an  accusation made numerous times since by others. The Russian authorities have repeatedly asked for access to Yulia Skripal, who is a Russian citizen, but all requests have been declined by the British. Since her release from hospital on 10 April she has only a made a brief innocuous video statement and has since disappeared from view; neither have the British media since then shown much interest in finding out where she and her father are. In the interim, the Russians hosted a very successful World Cup in the summer and in July Presidents Putin and Trump finally met for talks in Finland, which passed off well. But the British have kept up the pressure over the Salisbury incident just as, in the USA, pressure has been intensified month by month on President Trump over his alleged “collusion with Russia” in 2016. Here too no solid evidence has thus far been adduced by Special Counsel investigator Robert Mueller, yet the narrative and the accusations and allegations are kept up in the media month after month. What do these two cases have in common?

Narratives of War 1914-1919

An antipathy towards Russia has been building in western media since the Georgian war in 2008 and especially since the events in Ukraine and Crimea in 2014. But the two cases mentioned above also have in common the very close ties between the British and American elites which go back to the decades after the American Civil War, when those ties first began, a process detailed by the historian Markus Osterrieder in his magnum opus World in Upheaval: The Nationalities Question, World Order Plans and Rudolf Steiner’s Stance in the First World War (2014)⁴ as well as by a number of other historians⁵. Rudolf Steiner indicated in a notebook entry he wrote in 1918 what these ties amount to: an “anti-social group… within the Anglo-American world” that “seeks to rule the world by means of dynamic capitalist economic impulses” “is above all concealing the actual fact that a struggle for the kernel of Russian culture is going on between Anglo-American plutocrats and the people of Middle Europe. As soon as this fact is revealed to the world by Middle Europe, an untrue situation will be replaced by a true one. The war will therefore go on in some form or another until the German and Slavic cultures have found their way together to the common goal of freeing people from the yoke of the West.”⁶ The key strategy of the Anglo-American plutocrats and the governments they influence and control is to prevent any combination between Russia and Central Europe (notably Germany) and to keep Germany firmly under western, transatlantic control, away from Russia as much as possible. The Trump government’s recent sharp criticism of the Russo-German project to lay the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline under the Baltic, and even western criticism of seemingly trivial events such as Mr Putin dancing with the Austrian Foreign Minister at her recent wedding party can be seen in the light of this perspective: ‘Putin trying to seduce Austria away from the West!’. Similarly trivial events were blown out of all proportion by the paranoid British government and Press before the First World War, warning against visits by German professors and politicians or even German brass bands which were suspected of harbouring spies. Artificially induced invasion fears and spymania were rife in Britain from the mid-1890s until 1914.⁷ This was all part of the anti-German propaganda build-up prior to the First World War. When the elite Round Table group, led by Lord Milner, published the first issue of its journal The Round Table in Nov. 1910, its key foreign affairs article was titled ‘Foreign Affairs: Anglo-German Rivalry’. It was written anonymously by Philip Kerr, who would later draft the infamous ‘war guilt’ clause, Article 231, of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which insisted that Germany bore sole responsibility for the war. This article portrayed Germany in the darkest possible terms and Britain in the brightest. Ignoring the recent Boer War (1899-1902) and Britain’s invasion of Tibet in 1904, Kerr described Germany as having a “relentlessly aggressive policy, recognising neither right nor justice beyond the orbit of German national existence” while “’…the [British] Empire ….is not an imperium but a system of government which gives peace to one quarter of mankind and better government to hundreds of millions of backward people than they could get in any other way….’”⁸ The Round Table’s founder, Lord Milner, former High Commissioner in S. Africa, is regarded by historians as the individual most responsible for bringing about the Boer War!

From 1910 until the outbreak of war in 1914, the Round Table journal painted a picture of Britain as the land of light and progressive civilisation and of Germany as the land of barbarity and backwardness: Greece vs Persia or Athens vs Sparta. The implication of the historical analogy was obvious – that conflict and war between the two countries were inevitable. Prof. Carroll Quigley, an academic expert on the Round Table group, wrote that “History for this group…presented itself as an age-long struggle between the principles of autocracy and the principles of commonwealth, between the forces of darkness and the forces of light, between Asiatic theocracy and European freedom…the one permitted diversity, growth, and freedom, while the other engendered  monotony, stultification and slavery. The struggle between the two had gone on for thousands of years… ”⁹ The Round Table and their allies in the British and American Establishments persuaded themselves that in the latest iteration of this struggle the English-speaking peoples were the forces of light and the Germans were the forces of darkness. It is not difficult to see that in our own time the narrative spun by the Anglo-American mainstream media in recent years is that this light/dark analogy is now being applied to the English-speaking peoples and their allies (often referred by the mainstream media as the “international community”) versus Russia respectively. This is a highly misleading and dangerous narrative, as it was in the years before the First World War. But it continued to be believed by the Round Table members between the wars, and between 1919 and  1924, the Round Tablers were a fifth of the British Cabinet, a quarter in 1931-35 and a third in 1935-40¹⁰. During that interwar period the Round Table group came close to achieving some their pre-1914 goals: foreign policy solidarity between Britain and the Dominions, alignment of US and UK foreign policy, and preferential trade within the Empire. But the perceived challenges from Germany and Russia (now the USSR) remained to be dealt with. Things had turned out well, from the Round Table perspective, in the Great War; ‘the forces of darkness’ – Germany and Russia – had gone to war with one another and ‘the forces of light’ had emerged victorious, indeed, by the end of hostilities in 1918, America and Britain were more closely aligned than ever before.

Narratives of War 1919-1940

At 11 am on the 11th day of the 11th month this year (although it’s the 9th month in the old Julian calendar – and thus another kind of “9/11”) many people around the world will commemorate the moment the guns fell silent on the Western Front and what people had already for some time been calling “the Great War” ended. They did not of course call it ‘the First World War’ because they did not yet know there would be a Second World War; apart from a few very far-sighted individuals in public life, most people did not imagine it, as the past four years had been so terrible -  the very idea of another such conflict was too awful for most. 11th November 1918, or Armistice Day,  was not the actual, formal end of the war but only a cessation of hostilities. In the next few months leading up to 11th November this year there will probably be, once again, as there was  in 2014, 100 years after the outbreak of the war, a restatement of the British Establishment view of the conflict, which is that the Allies were right to enter the war, which began when Austria-Hungary took military action against Serbia that it had accused of having been responsible for terrorist actions against Austria-Hungary – most recently (28 June 1914) the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne and his wife. Similar Establishment views are likely to be produced, as they were in 2014, in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the USA, the so-called “Five Eyes” countries, which since the mid-1950s have been sharing military intelligence only with each other and with no other countries e.g. NATO allies.¹¹ They will also no doubt even be produced in Germany by the likes of Establishment media there such as Die Welt, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Spiegel, the broadcasters ARD and ZDF TV and others. In Britain, Establishment historians will appear in the media, as they did in 2014, to reproduce the ‘correct’ version of the war: why it was right to fight it, and why the Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919), which dealt with Germany, was not so terrible after all. Academics such as Professors Margaret Macmillan, Hew Strachan, Andrew Roberts, or Adam Tooze will probably appear. Perhaps some ‘reliable’ German historians such as Annika Mombauer and Holger Herwig might be called on to echo this Establishment view. Academic dissenters from this view, such as Christopher Clark and Douglas Newton, or even Niall Ferguson, are less likely to get a look-in, but as in 2014, one or two of them might be allowed a small slot here or there – to provide a show of ‘balance’.

The ‘correct’ narrative of the First World War is so important to the British Establishment because out of that ‘correct’ narrative came the narrative of the Second World War and above all of the ‘annus mirabilis’ of 1940, the apotheosis of the mythos of 20th century Britain – Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, ‘the Few’, the ‘finest hour’, Vera Lynn and ‘the Blitz spirit’. In other words, the ‘correct narrative’ of Britain’s role in the 20th century as a whole – as champion of light fighting evil. This enables many Britons to feel good about themselves and their country despite the decline in global pre-eminence that has occurred since 1945. During and after 1940, the summer of that year and the struggle against Nazi Germany became the lasting ‘icon’ of Britain’s self-image – the apotheosis of the image of St. George, alone, resisting the Dragon and becoming ultimately victorious over it. It also served as the apotheosis of the narrative of the forces of light and dark.

But of course, as so often in war, when truth is the first victim, and propaganda lies and myth-making are seen as necessary to ‘stiffen the sinews’ and maintain morale, there was much in this narrative about 1940 that was false. Britain was never ‘alone’ in 1940; it was always supported by the considerable armed forces and resources of the Empire, as well as by the tacit support of the USA in 1939-41, which became ever more manifest in terms of money and materiel. It was supported by the Polish, Czech, French, Belgian, Norwegian and Dutch military men who had escaped to Britain’s shores and served alongside the British. In 1940 Britain’s airforce proved more than a match for the Luftwaffe in fighter planes and radar; Britain had also been developing heavy bombers since the late 1930s; the Luftwaffe never had any of these, while the Royal Navy totally outclassed the much smaller German navy. Nevertheless, 1940 was certainly a remarkable moment in historical and military terms. Britain was under pressure, and Britain did not buckle. 1940 has come to be seen as a ‘swansong’ moment in the history of the British Empire, an autumnal moment of martial achievement just a few years before the loss of the Empire. And it was the personal fate of that most martial of Prime Ministers, Winston Churchill,  the arch-champion of that Empire, to have to preside as Prime Minister twice (1940-45 and 1951-55) over the weakening and decay of the Empire with which he, throughout his life, had so much identified himself.

Poland and Belgium

But who was the damsel in distress that St. George was supposed to be rescuing in 1939? For most British people, Poland in eastern Europe in 1939 was like Czechoslovakia in central Europe in 1938 at the time of the Munich Crisis – “a faraway country” in which lived people of whom the British knew little or nothing. But Poland was no shining example of a democracy; it was a de facto dictatorship, ruled by Marshal Rydz-Śmigły; it had unilaterally seized a piece of Czechoslovakia immediately after the Munich Conference in 1938, and was a state that since its independence had been oppressing its various minorities (Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, White Russians) in the name of ‘Polonisation’, as Belgium before 1914 had been savagely oppressing and exploiting its colonial subjects in the Congo). Events in September 1939 echoed those of 1914; the British government recklessly threw down a challenge in both 1914 and 1939 by promising to defend smaller countries (Belgium and Poland) that Britain was in fact incapable of defending, countries that were then rapidly overwhelmed by the enemy before the British had a chance to commit any significant major forces. In 1914 the British committed only six divisions to the ‘defence’ of Belgium (though actually they were intended for the defence of France); they were soon overrun by the German Army and had to beat a long retreat into France. In 1939 the British had no troops anywhere near Poland. On 21 April 1939 Britain committed to send only six regular divisions (again!) and 26 Territorial divisions 30 days after mobilisation (i.e. immediately prior to war) to the Continent, but to France not to Poland. By 27 September 1939, 152,000 British troops were in France, but not fighting Germans; meanwhile Warsaw fell the following day, and the Polish Army stopped fighting on 8 October.

In March 1939 the British government led by Neville Chamberlain had committed itself to the defence of Poland but then took no military steps on the Continent to realise that commitment. Furthermore, just as Sir Edward Grey had on 31 August 1914 urged the Belgian government to resist by force any German move into Belgian territory, knowing full well what this would mean for Belgium, the British government in the spring and summer of 1939 encouraged the Poles to stand firm and reject negotiations with the Germans over ownership of the 98% German Free City of Danzig (today Gdansk, in Poland) and the German request for a railway line and an autobahn across the ‘Polish Corridor’ territory that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany – a not unreasonable request. Feeling confident that if Germany dared to attack Poland, the British and French would attack Germany from the West, as the Belgians had similarly been assured before the outbreak of war in 1914, the Poles continued to reject negotiations with the Germans from March to September 1939. In fact, however, “the British and French Governments had no intention of invading Germany; indeed their planning staffs had not even so much as discussed the possibility.”¹² At the end of August, Hitler finally lost patience and invaded; two days later, Britain declared war on Germany just as it had declared war on Germany a day after German troops had marched into Belgium in 1914. The issue in 1939 was ostensibly over the city of Danzig, a railway and an autobahn. For this, it might seem, the British ruling elite were prepared to plunge Britain into another war against Germany. But they had their eyes on a far greater objective than saving Danzig for Poland; their goal was to emasculate Germany entirely, deprive it of real independence and subject it to permanent control, thus keeping it away from Russia.¹³ This latter aim had been the intention since before the Great War, when it was first devised by the British geopolitician Halford Mackinder in 1904; he stood close to the Round Table Group from 1909, and his career was backed financially by Lord Milner.¹⁴

Of course there were in 1939 those, and there will be those today, who said and will say that “Hitler had to be stopped at some point” and that “he would have gone on and on” – to conquer the world. This narrative usually includes the ‘Lebensraum’ thesis that Hitler had always wanted to conquer territory for German settlement in ‘the East’, as implied in his book Mein Kampf (1925 Vol. 2, ch. 14; the first full English translation of the book only appeared in Feb. 1939). But while Hitler certainly did imply in Mein Kampf that he would seize land in Russia for German Lebensraum and justified this on grounds that can only be called Social Darwinist (‘to the strongest and fittest, the right’), he said nothing in the book about his intentions for Poland. In fact, he had sought an understanding with Poland’s former ruler, Marshal Pilsudski (the de facto ruler of Poland 1926-1935) against Soviet Russia which improved relations between Germany and Poland until Pilsudski’s death in 1935, and in 1939, if Poland had responded to his offers of negotiations, he would have preferred to ally with Poland against the USSR rather than with Stalin against Poland, as he eventually did in August 1939, spurned by Poland, Britain, and France.

As for conquering the world: “if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years [1938-1940] building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines? How do you conquer the world with a navy that can’t get out of the Baltic Sea? If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany? Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk? Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell? Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser’s fleet [after World War One]? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez? Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?” ¹⁵

This raises the question as to whether Poland was for the British elite only the excuse, the pretext to fight a war against Germany that would result in the thorough and final subjugation of Germany, which was perceived by the British elite as the latest in the line of imperial rivals to British aims (Spain, Holland, France…).  And it was indeed the case that Poland was a pretext, as the ‘defence’ of Belgium had only been a pretext in 1914, a rabbit pulled out of a hat before the British people two days before Britain’s declaration of war. There were those in the British government in the 1930s who felt that another war against Germany was necessary to finish off what had not been fully accomplished in 1919. One of these was Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs 1930-1938, and thereafter Chief Diplomatic Adviser. Winston Churchill and members of the Round Table were others. Throughout the 1930s the Round Table, unlike Churchill,  mostly advocated appeasement of Hitler but changed abruptly to a war policy in March 1939, by which time Britain’s rearmament was proceeding apace. That Poland had only been a pretext for another major war against Germany was underlined by the fact that in 1945 Churchill surrendered to Stalin the country that Britain had supposedly gone to war to protect and defend: Poland was left in the hands of Stalin by Churchill (and later Clement Attlee, who followed him as Prime Minister in July 1945) and by US President Truman. Britain (“St. George”) had suffered greatly in the war that it had ostensibly entered in order to save the Polish princess yet after the princess had been raped and abused by two dragons (Hitler and Stalin), the British St. George, having helped to defeat one dragon, agreed that the other one could keep her in chains, presumably for ever.

For six months after March 1939, Hitler had given no public indication that he wanted more from Poland than Danzig and the transport routes to Danzig and East Prussia; the Poles, he said, could keep the Corridor and the Polish port of Gdynia. The British did not go to war to stop Hitler from seizing half of Poland, as he hypocritically went on to do because of his secret deal with Stalin (23 August 1939) to divide up the country between them. It was a deal he would not have concluded before the summer of 1939, and which the Soviets only agreed to because the British, French and Poles had refused to come to an anti-German agreement with the USSR! Before August 1939 and the astonishing Nazi-Soviet Pact of that month, the British had no reason to assume that the Germans were planning to invade half of Poland. So, on the face of it, on 3 September Britain went to war because Hitler had attacked Poland ostensibly over the issue of the city of Danzig. But the men of the Round Table Group in and around the government and their allies knew that Poland was a pretext and that the final showdown with Germany was approaching. In March 1939 the Round Table Group abruptly shifted gears; until then The Round Table journal was still advocating appeasement, but its June issue was titled “From Appeasement to Grand Alliance” (i.e. Britain, France, Poland, Romania). The September issue declared Hitler’s aim was “mastery of the world”: “…any further accretion of German strength – for instance through control of Danzig, which is the key to subjection of all Poland – appears as a retreat from the ramparts of the British Commonwealth”(!) and by the December 1939 issue “the whole tone has reverted to 1911-1918” – the light vs darkness, Athens vs Persia theme of those years; the title of the issue was ‘Commonwealth or Weltreich?’”¹⁶

Woodrow Wilson

The war that ended in 1918/19 had begun  – in Britain at any rate – with a false narrative that the British government had sprung upon the people just one day before the declaration of war,  forestalling any effective protest campaign against that false narrative, which was that Britain was going to war to defend a gallant little country against invasion by a brutal bully. Not only was this narrative a gross oversimplification and deliberate distortion,  a campaign for another sort of narrative had begun in Britain long before – in 1895 – in the pages of the leading weekly journal The Saturday Review : a propaganda campaign urging war with Germany. For the sake of British trade and commerce, it declared, Britain’s latest rival must be destroyed, just as Britain had defeated all her other rivals in war and as Britain’s imperial model, Rome, had destroyed its rival, Carthage. This propaganda was maintained in various forms and media in Britain until 1914. Its success was shown in the ease with which the British people were inveigled into the war in August that year.

This autumn (2018) various articles and documentaries are likely to emerge that will put a good gloss on US President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), who in late 1918 was seen by the Establishment media of the time as the ‘Man of the Hour’, the ‘Saviour of Europe’. Their modern-day successors will in all probability laud the Wilsonian doctrine of the ‘14 Points’ on the basis of which Germany sued for peace in autumn 1918, and the creed of ‘liberal internationalism’ and the League of Nations which Wilson so strongly championed. But for Rudolf Steiner, this act by the German government headed by Prince Max von Baden was a spiritual capitulation paralleling the military capitulation because, he said,  Germany was not presenting to Europe and the world anything constructive that came from Middle Europe, something such as the ideas of the threefold social organism that Steiner himself had personally put to Chancellor Max von Baden on two occasions¹⁷; instead, the German leadership had chosen to make peace on the basis of the ideas of the West, of Wilson, which did not correspond to reality in the complex ethnic make-up of Central and Eastern European regions. Wilson and his advisers did not at all understand this European reality and proceeded on the basis of abstract principles to create new unitary states out of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Their actions, Steiner argued, would only create more disharmony and conflict in Europe; his prognostications turned out to be correct when the majority communities in the newly independent nation states began to oppress minorities in those states. As early as 1904, Wilson, then president of Princeton University, had declared at a dinner hosted by the elite Anglo-American Pilgrims Society (founded 1902) that “when you consider what the different nations of the world stand for, keeping in mind the specific purposes of England and America, you will see that there is but one course to choose and that is to carry forward in honesty and unselfishness that service to the world which has now been carried too far for us to turn back. Anglo-saxon peoples have undertaken to reconstruct the affairs of the world and it would be a shame upon them for them to withdraw their hand now.”¹⁸ Wilson said this two years after the end of the Boer War (1899-1902), which Britain fought in order to monopolise South African gold and diamonds in the age of the gold standard, and two years after the end of the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), which the USA fought in order to establish a base in the Pacific region from which to dominate the China trade and to contain Japan.¹⁹ Wilson argued for the principle of national self-determination and where necessary, majority rule over minorities. He was equally determined that Poland should be independent after the war and must have an outlet to the sea at Germany’s expense. In this case, he therefore set aside his principles regarding national sovereignty and majority rule and agreed to the separation of the 98% German city of Danzig from Germany and its establishment as a ‘Free City’ under the nominal political authority of the League of Nations but under the political administration and economic control of Poland. This was a time-bomb waiting to go off, which it did in 1939.

Presidents Woodrow Wilson (USA) and Raymond Poincaré (France) in Paris

What happened 100 years ago between the Armistice on 11 November 1918 and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919 was the emergence of what can be called ‘liberal internationalism’, a doctrine that was developed in Britain and America by the Round Table Group and its political allies, a doctrine intended to “reconstruct the affairs of the world” – but in the interests of the ruling elite of the English-speaking peoples. As the diplomat Charles Denby wrote after America’s defeat of Spain in 1898 : “We are coming into our own. We are stretching out our hands for what nature meant should be ours. We are taking our proper rank among the nations of the world. We are after markets, the greatest markets now existing in the world. [he was referring here to Asia and especially to China – TB] Along with these markets will go our beneficent institutions, and humanity will bless us.”²⁰ This was the Anglo-American narrative: ‘we have the best institutions because we are the best people, and blessed by Providence, so we deserve to rule the world, which will benefit from our superior institutions, and incidentally, it will also make us very wealthy.’ This is essentially still the Anglo-American narrative, which is now framed by western media such as The Economist, The Financial Times, The New York Times, the BBC, in terms of what is often referred to as the “rules-based international order created by America in 1945” – in order to serve, primarily, the interests of Wall St. and the City of London. Any challenges to this “international order”, from the likes of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump,  independence-minded Germans or any non-transatlanticist British Brexiteers will be met with forthright opposition, first through mainstream media propaganda, and if necessary, with repression and destruction through military conflict. For example, attempts to bypass the US dollar as the means of international economic exchange, which immensely benefits the interests of the USA, have been met with recourse to armed attack, as Iraq and Libya have discovered in recent years.²¹ ‘Narratives’  – often variations on the theme of St. George and the Dragon – have been concocted to mask naked economic motivations and to present the armed assaults and invasions as necessary for humanitarian reasons.

Society Is Made Of ‘Narrative’

Last month, a friend alerted me to an interesting article by the independent journalist and poet Caitlin Johnstone titled: ‘Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix’.²² Reading it, I realised that she was presenting in a contemporary context something of what Rudolf Steiner wrote in his key philosophical work The Philosophy of Freedom, published in 1894. In that book he points to the supreme importance of human thinking and its two products: concepts and percepts. He shows how these two are divided by our physical organisation, which leads to a damaging dualism of thought and to the social and moral consequences of that dualism, and how they can be reunited by thinking, leading to a new basis for ethics in the modern world. Caitlin Johnstone too indicates the ultimate importance of thinking, for it is thinking that creates the narratives, the stories, that we tell ourselves to give meaning to the world. Instead of artificial intelligence (AI) which keeps people asleep in the movie trilogy The Matrix (1999 and 2003) by simulating the outside world and thus preventing them from waking up to reality, in our world, she says, it’s psychopathic  oligarchs who keep us asleep by telling us narratives through the media and education systems that they control: “Society is made of narrative like the Matrix is made of code. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government, they’re all purely mental constructs which exist nowhere outside of the mental noises in our heads. If I asked you to point to your knee you could do so instantly and wordlessly, but if I asked you to point to the economy, for example, the closest you could come is using a bunch of linguistic symbols to point to a group of concepts. To show me the economy, you’d have to tell me a story.”²³ She then draws her readers’ attention to the difference between the ‘real’ percepts, or phenomena, of the physical world and the mental constructs (concepts) we use to explain those percepts, and how those concepts are combined to create stories, narrative explanations. “Almost all of our mental energy goes into those mental narratives. They dominate our lives. And, for that reason, people who are able to control those narratives are able to control us. And they do.”²⁴

Johnstone shows how we all manipulate those around us with narratives and how those with a certain amount of power in society ‘above us’ control us through narratives, and then there are those she calls the master manipulators, society’s oligarchs who “manipulate the narratives of entire societies.” The only thing that keeps rulers in place is our acceptance of the narratives they tell us. This was essentially the same view of manipulated ‘public opinion’ expressed by the Scottish philosopher David Hume 250 years ago: the many believe the stories told them by the oligarchical few and thus it is the many who keep the few in power. Johnstone: “Control the narratives of economics and commerce, and you control economics and commerce. Control the narratives about politics and government, and you control politics and government. This control is used by the controllers to funnel power to the oligarchs, in this way effectively turning society into one giant energy farm for the elite class. But it is possible to wake up from that narrative Matrix.” She then points to how we can ‘wake up’ through patient inner work on ourselves and how, when we do, we can become “a new creature altogether. The ideas, mental habits and ways of relating to the world which were formed in the Matrix are only useful for moving around inside of it. In order to relate to life outside of the power-promulgated narratives which comprise the very fabric of society, you’ve got to create a whole new operating system for yourself in order to move through life independently of the old programming designed to keep you asleep and controlled.”²⁵

So far so good, but then come the following sentences: “Not just in the modern world, but as far back as history stretches when the power-serving belief systems of societal structure and religion were promoted by kings and queens of old, all of society, and all of ourselves, and indeed all of the thoughts in our heads, have been shaped by those in power to their benefit. This is the reality that we were born into, and our entire personality structure has been filtered through and shaped by it”.²⁶ Here we have Johnstone’s own narrative, which tells us that everything we humans have ever been through our thinking is the product of selfish tyrants and oligarchs. Here is faulty thinking of the kind that unites both the political Left and Right, as one can find such an idea on the revolutionary Left as well as on the libertarian Right.  This idea in effect does away with the whole of history and the evolution of consciousness and labels it all as the story of oppression and the denial of freedom; it claims that history is irrelevant to our modern needs and must all be swept away. And indeed, Johnstone now says that once we’ve got clear of the programming, we are “ready to fight” because we feel “the rage” – rage against all the manipulation that has created this insane system of exploitation and inhumanity.

And here unfortunately, she departs from thinking and indulges in feeling, the kind of passionate feeling that can lead to social and political disasters such as the atrocities of the French Terror in the 1790s, of the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966-1976 and the killing fields in Cambodia in the 1970s: feel the rage! Away with the oppressors! Don’t speak to them, deny them a platform, drive them out of the public space, and if necessary, attack and kill them! BAMN (by all means necessary) is the slogan of many left-wing radicals in the USA and throughout the English-speaking world today. Although Johnstone does not herself call for violence, her sometimes aggressive and disdainful tone in her use of language implies it: “And then all you’ll want is to tear down the Matrix from its very foundations and plunge its controllers into irrelevance. You will set to work bringing down the propaganda prison that they have built up around your fellow humans in any way you can, bolt by bolt if you have to, because you know from your own experience that we are all capable of so much more than the puny gear-turning existence they’ve got everyone churning away at. You will despise the oligarchs for the obscene sacrilege that they have inflicted upon human majesty out of greed and insecurity, and you will make a mortal enemy of the entire machine that they have used to enslave our species.”²⁷

This kind of rhetoric fails to comprehend that human beings achieve little without resistance and that evil exists in the world not for its own sake but for us to improve ourselves in our struggle to overcome it or at least not to be defeated by it. Evil, which is not freedom but a form of mental slavery,  thus paradoxically exists for the sake of developing freedom. As Rudolf Steiner once put it in a lecture in October 1918: “the purpose of these forces of evil which pervert the social order is to enable man to break through to the life of the spirit….If he did not open himself to these tendencies [which in our time, Steiner insisted, lie in each one of us not just in some external other – TB] he would not succeed in developing consciously the impulse to receive from the universe the spirit which henceforth must fertilise the whole sphere of cultural life if it is not to perish.”²⁸

Obviously, Steiner is not saying here that we actually become more spiritual by opening ourselves to the forces of evil; he is not advocating Satanism or the like. He means that on this physical plane of existence in which separation is an intrinsic fact, darkness and evil are inevitable as inner corollaries of separation and that we must engage with them if we are to overcome this separation from one another i.e. if we are to bring the spiritual principles of unity and interrelationship into the physical world of separation and division so as to transform them. The light must not condemn the darkness from afar, so to speak, but must enter into it and enlighten it from within. This is how forces of evil and radical separation are overcome, not through seeking to avoid or smash them. Today, many of those who call themselves ‘progressive’ seek to wage a war on ‘hate’ while they themselves are often filled with a hypocritical hatred of those they call the ‘haters’, just as the American government has sought to wage a war on ‘terror’ by means of terror, such as drone strikes on Afghan villages or by threatening other countries with bellicose language. This is doomed to failure. Instead of hating and damning those we see as opponents in life, we need to recognise that they are actually  – despite themselves – our helpers, for they help us to improve ourselves and thus to improve society. On a more trivial level, this is also the moral function that sport can fulfil: we learn from our opponent, improve our skills and thus the game as a whole; we do not hate our opponent just because he is an opponent.

Fortunately, Johnstone shows that she has some inkling of this, for she does not finish in rage. She points out that ultimately, “all they will have to fight back against you is narrative. …They’ve got one weapon, and it doesn’t work on you.” And then she emerges with a positive conclusion: “…since it’s all narrative, anything is possible. Those who see this have the ability to plunge toward health and human thriving without any regard for the made-up reasons why such a thing is impossible, and plant seeds of light which sprout in unprecedented directions that never could have been predicted by someone plugged into to establishment how-it-is stories. Together, we can determine how society will be. We can re-write the rules. We are re-writing the rules. It’s begun already.” Perhaps the word “rules” here should be replaced by “narrative”, a narrative based on a real understanding of the evolution of human consciousness and not just of human bodies. Johnstone is right to point to the great importance of narrative, which is created by our thinking. We urgently need a new narrative of the history of the last 100 years, which will include a different narrative about relations between Russia and the West, if we are to prevent this second Cold War from turning into something infinitely worse.

Terry Boardman

Notes
1. See Andrew Cook, To Kill Rasputin (2005).
2. Markus Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch – Nationalitätenfrage, Ordnungspläne und Rudolf Steiners
    Haltung im Ersten Weltkrieg (2014) p. 1316f.
3.https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/how-the-british-government-subjected-
    thousands-of-people-to-chemical-and-biological-warfare-trials-10376411.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4920558/Royal-Marine-commandos-secretly-given-
    LSD-drug-trial.html
    https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/us-military-simulated-biological-warfare-san-
    francisco/
4. See n. 2 above. The English translation of the book is still awaiting publication.
5. See C. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (1981); A.P. Baker, The Pilgrims of Great Britain – A Centennial History (2002); D. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain – Empire and the Future of World  Order, 1860-1900 (2007); Paul A. Kramer, ‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880-1910′ in The Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 4 (Mar., 2002), pp. 1315- 1353; https://isgp-studies.com/pilgrims-society-us-uk;

6. Quoted in Andreas Bracher ed., Kampf um den Russischen Kulturkeim (2014), p. 344.
7. See A.J.A. Morris, The Scaremongers – the Advocacy of War and Rearmament, 1896-1914 (1984).
8. John E. Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (1974) p. 110.
9. See C. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp.133-4.
10. Quigley, pp. 227-8.
11. “The Five Eyes” go back to the secret formal “UKUSA Agreement” (5 March 1946) which is still the basis of UK and US military intelligence collaboration today. Canada joined the system in 1948, Australia and New Zealand in 1956. Although NATO allies collaborate with the Five, key aspects of  intelligence are shared only amongst the Five, which makes the English-speaking countries de facto, one unit. This was always the goal of Cecil Rhodes, Lord Milner and the Round Table: “Anglo-saxon unity”. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement
12. Andrew Roberts, 30 Aug 2009 Daily Telegraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-
      two/6105782/Second-World-War-Why-we-delayed-declaration-of-war.html
13. See G.G.Preparata, Conjuring Hitler – How Britain and America Made The Third Reich (2005),
      pp. 228-244.
14. See Osterrieder, pp. 731f, 880-883, 1349-1353.
15. See http://buchanan.org/blog/did-hitler-want-war-2068
16. See Quigley, pp. 292-295.
17. Peter Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser – the Struggle for the Spirit (1997), pp. 230-243.
18. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1904/01/30/101384863.pdf
19.Charles Denby, a US diplomat with a focus on China: https://startrekprof.sdsu.edu/110/denby%20on%20philippines.htm
20. See n. 19.
21. Both Iraq and Libya under Saddam Hussein and Col. Gadaffi respectively made moves to drop trading oil in US dollars before their countries were attacked by the US and its allies in 2003 and 2011.
22.https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/08/22/society-is-made-of-narrative-realizing-this-is-awakening-from-the-matrix/
23. See n. 22. Johnstone may appear to demean mental constructs and perhaps even thinking itself here when she says that mental constructs, the product of thinking, “exist nowhere outside of the mental noises in our heads” and are unrelated to the ‘real world’ of objects, such as one’s knee. But one’s understanding of one’s body and of bodily pleasure and pain are intimately bound up with thinking, and her own solution to our socio-economic problems involves the products of thinking i.e. more creative narratives. Rudolf Steiner would insist those those better ‘narratives’ need to be objectively related to the phenomena they describe, that is, they need to be constructed by a thinking that gives a true conceptual account of the perceptual phenomena that are being perceived. For example,the concept of the threefold social organism is not a “mental construct” that “exists nowhere outside of the mental noises in our heads”. The ideas Steiner brought forward about social threefolding in 1917-1922 are derived from the actual threefold nature of the human being and from observation of the evolution of human society and consciousness over the past 5000 years. See his book Toward Social Renewal.
24. See n. 22.
25. See n. 22.
26. See n. 22.
27. See n. 22.
28. R. Steiner lecture, 26.10.1918 (Collected Works GA 185).

This article was first published in The Present Age magazine Vol. 3 No. 11 Feb. 2018

In the January 2018 issue of TPA, (‘The Anglo-Saxons’ and the European Union Project) I wrote, amongst other things, about a book published by Cambridge Scholars Press  in the run-up to the 2016 EU Referendum in Britain titled June 1940, Great Britain and the First Attempt to Build a European Union. The 393-page book was written by an Italian professor of political science who specialises in “the history and theory of European integration”, Andrea Bosco (photo below). He is an ardent advocate of the EU and of federalism in general, which he regards as an ‘Anglo-Saxon idea’, contrasting it with what he sees as the ‘continental idea’ of nationalism. Bosco forecast in 2014 that the EU will expand to 50 states by the mid-21st century and will include the states of the N. African littoral and the Middle East (also Israel and Palestine), but I pointed out in the article that this seemingly utopian view of the future of the EU had actually been underpinned by an almost identical prospect of  EU expansion laid out in that bastion of global elite thinking, The Economist of London, seven years earlier, on 15 March 2007.

Bosco’s 2016 book on Britain and the origins of the EU, rather drily written like all his books, and with many lengthy footnotes, was written not so much for the general public  – it retails for an immodest  £52.99 – but by an insider for other insiders, by a member of a certain academic elite for other members of the same elite. Bosco also happens to be the founder and director of The Lothian Foundation, which exists to propagate the federalist ideas of Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian, usually known as Lord Lothian (1882-1940). A leading acolyte of Alfred, Lord Milner (1854-1925), Philip Kerr was, with his close friend Lionel Curtis (1872-1955), one of the two main ideologues of Milner’s Round Table group (founded 1909) which played a key role in preparing Britain for the coming conflict against Germany which it saw as inevitable, and in transforming the British Empire into the British Commonwealth. Kerr and Curtis saw the British Empire and Commonwealth as the germ of a future world state which they felt would, of course, have to be ‘supervised’ by the English-speaking peoples – by which they meant people rather like themselves -  until the rest of the world had ‘caught up’ with the level of “the Atlantic democracies”. To this end Kerr and Curtis were firm advocates, first of the closest possible transatlantic ties and then, after 1938, of an ‘Atlantic Union of the democracies’, along the lines advanced in the much-hyped  book Union Now (1939) by the American Rhodes Scholar and New York Times journalist, Clarence Streit (1896-1986), whose widely-read writings influenced the process that eventually led to the formation of NATO in 1949.(1)

Bosco’s ‘Second’ Empire book

On 1 January 2017 the assiduous professor Bosco brought out a book titled: The Round Table  Movement and the Fall of the ‘Second’ British Empire (1909-1919) (534 pp.), completed in 2016 and also published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.(2) When it first appeared, at £128, it was twice as expensive as his 2016 book, but  a year later, it now retails at £73.99, so this was another book not exactly intended for the general public. The contents of this volume, however, are far more significant than the rather overblown claims he made about the significance of the British federalists of 1938-1940 in his 2016 book and they deserve to be more widely known by the general public, because what Bosco reveals to his fellow-insiders here is that Lord Milner and his Round Table group were actually the main element in Britain responsible for the First World War and also for the fall of the British Empire, which he calls the ‘Second’ British Empire, the ‘First’ Empire having been lost in 1781-83 after defeat at the hands of the American colonists. The ‘Second’ Empire was that which was focused on Asia, especially India, on Africa and on the white-ruled Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and S. Africa). Milner and his acolytes, Bosco argues – and we should recall that Bosco is himself broadly  in tune with their aims – sought to bring about the war in order to save the British Empire and the principle of imperial federalism, or federation, but only succeeded in losing it because their fellow English-speakers in the Dominions and in the USA succumbed – in Bosco’s view – to a narrow-minded nationalism that was not prepared to tolerate an imperial federation controlled from a British centre. This was as true of Canadians and Australians before 1914 as it was of Americans after 1918 who supported their country’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and who were not prepared to accept a transatlantic foreign relations institute which Kerr, Curtis and the Round Table had wanted to establish in 1919 to coordinate Anglo-American foreign policy through elites operating outside the political system. The Round Tablers and their American friends had to wait until 1921 when the Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan-backed institute, the Council On Foreign Relations, was set up in New York, ostensibly independent of influence from London. But within a decade or so, the London Round Tablers, led by Kerr and Curtis (Milner having died in 1925), desperate for American support for the ailing British Empire and looking now to transform the age of the British Empire into the age of the Anglo-American Empire (or as they preferred to call it, World Commonwealth), had succeeded in forging a tight link between their own Institute of International Affairs, also known as ‘Chatham House’ (founded 5.7.1920, first joint Presidents Lord Robert Cecil, Arthur Balfour and Viscount Grey of Fallodon (Sir Edward Grey)) and the Council On Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York (founded 29.7.1921). Bosco’s book very candidly makes clear that the British foreign policy elite, steered by Milner and the Round Table and later by Kerr and Curtis, carefully laid traps for Germany into which the Germans obligingly fell twice, in 1914 and in 1939, and that these traps were part of the deliberate process by which that same foreign policy elite had determined that the German challenge to the British Empire (1895-1945), already so obvious by the end of the 19th century, would be met and comprehensively defeated. This had to be done in two phases, as it had been done insufficiently in 1919; Germany would be thoroughly overthrown and subjugated and the elites of the English-speaking peoples would go on to lay the foundations of a ‘World State’ in accordance with their own federalist principles, a world dominion ‘supervised’ i.e. ruled, by themselves.

Lionel Curtis                                                                                                       Philip Kerr

This is, de facto, the state of the world in which we live today, and although it is not perhaps exactly the ‘Utopia’ Kerr and Curtis had in mind, the world is nevertheless ‘supervised’ today by the Anglosphere, notably its financial and military forces. However, China and Russia are now attempting to challenge that hegemony and behind them are India, Brazil and the ‘mixed king’ that is the EU.(3) Bosco’s book clearly implies that the Anglo-American federalist principles should continue to dominate the world in the coming century. He writes in the introduction (p. 29) that the book “traces the emergence of the supranational idea within the British Empire, with the formation of a political culture which first triumphed within the Anglo-Saxon world and was then universally exported, becoming the interpretative criterion and guiding principle of the present supranational course of history.” And at the end of the book (pp. 465-6) he writes: “the policy of Atlantic Alliance was not therefore the result of just a temporary convergence of the reasons of state of Great Britain and the United States…..but the accomplishment of a political project pursued by the two organisations [he means Chatham House and the CFR] specially created at Paris in May 1919(4) and active since then on both sides of the Atlantic. They succeeded because the project was in fact rooted in the Anglo-Saxon political tradition – of which federalism is a component – and because of a twenty year-long process of elaborations, debates and clashes among political organisations active on both shores of the North Atlantic. The Round Table was the most prominent among them, playing a pioneering role, both on the theoretical and organisational profiles. The historical role of the Round Table had been that of theorizing, promoting and managing the transition from a British to an American world leadership, playing a decisive role in the survival of Anglo-Saxon world hegemony through the creation of the Atlantic order.”

“The present supranational course of history…”

These ideas present a challenge to anthroposophical thinking because, of course, “the present supranational course of history” is the Michaelic era (1879-c.2300). In the winter of 1919/1920 Rudolf Steiner stated very starkly – and to an audience that included a number of British visitors – that the responsibility for outer dominion in world affairs had now fallen to the victors in the First World War but that the question was: would they be able to add a spiritual dimension to this outer dominion, and if they failed to do so -  if, for example, they failed to complement this outer dominion with “a threefold ordering of society” that reflected the threefold nature of the human being understood in terms of occult science – then the Anglo-American world dominion “will flood the world with the death of culture and the sickness of culture. These are a gift of the Asuras, just as falsehood is a gift of Ahriman, and selfishness is a gift of Lucifer.”(5) It surely ought to be clear to everyone by now that the Anglo-American elites that took on this world dominion – and according to Bosco, they have in fact been exercising it not only since 1919 but, increasingly, for four centuries already, since the defeat of Philip II of Spain – have indeed failed to complement this outer dominion with any spiritual counterpart and that as a result, humanity faces today problems of an existential nature on various fronts. Bosco writes (p. 25): “the Atlantic Alliance rather than representing the passing of the torch – whose delay cost Europe and the world two global conflicts – marked the continuity, the enlargement, and the deepening of Anglo-Saxon hegemony in world politics. Such hegemony has since the seventeenth century been able to prevent the unification of Continental Europe by means of violence by the strongest continental power – Spain of Charles V and Philip II, France of Louis XIV and Napoleon I, Germany of Wilhelm II and Hitler, and Russia of Stalin and Brezhnev. It encouraged, on the contrary, Europe’s economic and political unification through peaceful and constitutional means with the building of supranational institutions.” This is, of course, propaganda; it is the familiar chauvinist refrain of the Anglo-Saxon elite from both left and right and it is susceptible to withering historical criticism. Of the men mentioned above, only Napoleon actually sought to conquer or dominate the whole of Europe and even he was drawn into war by the British, who recognised that he represented a serious potential threat to their control of India which was for them always the cornerstone of their Empire. Neither Wilhelm II or Hitler wanted to unify Europe by violence; they too were skilfully drawn into war by the British, as Bosco himself describes later in his book! Bosco ignores the attempted military invasion of Europe by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in 1920 which was stopped by the Poles at the Battle of Warsaw, while Brezhnev never came close to unifying continental Europe by violence nor did he ever try.

Certainly, it was good for Europe that the British defeated Philip II’s armada in 1588 and made signal contributions to the defeats of Louis XIV and Napoleon. These men all looked backward to the impulses of former epochs. But the British elite’s 30 year war against Germany was something else. This was a struggle between two cultures of the modern epoch. But Bosco makes clear that Britain fought it out of a consciousness of inner weakness and imperial decline and was only able to win with the support of the rest of the English-speaking world (not to mention all the other peoples of the Empire, notably the Indian Army in both world wars, and the assistance of other European peoples). For example, Bosco writes (p. 5): “the place of the Round Table Movement in the history of the British Empire could be compared to that of the sun at noon, the moment of its greatest radiance but also the beginning of a rapid and inexorable decline. What the Round Tablers attempted to do was reverse that inexorableness. Could the history of the British Empire diverge from the fate which marked all the empires in the course of history? This was the challenge which the Round Tablers took up.” On p. 20 he writes: “The study of the Round Table brings us to the central fact of the first half of the twentieth century, the Anglo-German rivalry, which resulted in two world wars because of the weakness of the British Empire… [emphasis TB] [Britain]  prevailed over Germany only thanks to the intervention of the Dominions, India and her thirteen former colonies on the other side of the Altantic.”

Milner and the Round Table

Bosco makes a good case for the warped idealism of the young men of the Round Table, notably of Kerr and Curtis, and of their great leader, their would-be King Arthur, Lord Alfred Milner (above). He describes at length their spirit of self-sacrifice and dedication to the imperial cause which they genuinely believed was one of progress, civilisation and Christianity: the imperialism of the white man was historically necessary to raise the standards of the non-whites and contribute the most to human progress, and of all the white imperialisms, the British was of course best, so the British way must be made to prevail over any challengers. The British Empire was of the light as against Prussian darkness; it was freedom contrasted with Prussian autocracy; it was Athens to Prussian Sparta – such were the mantras of the Round Table from its inception in 1909, which also happened to be the year of the inception of the modern British secret service that gave rise to MI5 and MI6, both aimed from their beginnings at “the German menace”. The young men of the Round Table, inspired by their own ‘King Alfred’ and with St. George in mind, would devote their entire lives to defeating this new dragon which, they believed, had arisen on the Continent, and to asserting the civilizational supremacy of their own race, even while talking endlessly of the brotherhood of mankind.

Bosco paints a balanced picture of Milner, who was clearly a remarkable individual. Of German ancestry on his father’s side, born and educated in Germany, Milner was a complex personality of tremendous willpower, incisive thought and subtle feeling. An intellectual social radical who leaned towards the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, he despaired of democracy and party politics, as he was conscious of their obvious failure to prevent the decline of British society and economy. An idealistic view of the Empire became his religion, his holy cause, inspired by the art critic John Ruskin, the social philosopher Arnold Toynbee, and the radical journalist W. T. Stead. But as a man born in the mid-19th century, Milner grew up steeped in Social Darwinist thought and the racism and materialism of the era. Bosco shows how the ideas of the younger Round Tablers diverged from their chief’s during the First World War. Although Milner acknowledged that Britain and America had to work together as ‘racial compatriots’, his concern was always for the British Empire, whereas by 1917, Curtis and Kerr, who were nearly 20 and 30 years younger than Milner respectively, had realised that the British Empire was finished; it would have to become the Anglo-American Empire, or rather, the Commonwealth of all the English-speaking peoples, in which the USA would lead. Till his death in 1925, Milner never really accepted this, whereas the younger men actively worked for it; “Kerr and Curtis felt they had to prepare the transition from an Anglo-French to an Anglo-American dyarchy in the management of world power.” (p. 438)  Still in service to this aim 20 years later, Kerr even died in 1940 as UK ambassador to the USA.

Kerr is Bosco’s hero, so Bosco evidently feels he has to paint the figure of Milner more negatively in contrast to his hero – Milner as a great man but more stuck in the racial past, while the younger man Kerr, the more ardent federalist, is portrayed as the hope of the future. Of Milner, Bosco writes that he was the lynchpin in an intersecting network of elite figures, notably those of the Cecil family nexus, hence his reach, influence and effectiveness in the worlds of politics, business, finance, the media, publishing and academia. He was “the most lucid interpreter of the British imperialist tradition, which in federalism found a device to perpetuate the privileges of the ‘few’…against the rights and interests of the ‘many’.  Milner  was the ‘strong man’…of that small but powerful group of men  – representing the historical families of the British establishment – who had run Great Britain behind the throne since the Act of Union in 1707. Milner became their intellectual leader, bringing to them as dowry the impressive financial resources of the Rhodes Trust.” (p. 360)

Milner was the main instigator of the Boer War 1899-1902, and according to Bosco he was “one of the major figures who bear the moral responsibility – on the British side – for the First World War” (p. 12) He created the Round Table near an old Druid sanctuary on the island of Anglesey in N. Wales “in order to gain the Dominions’ support for Great Britain in the event of a new European war.”

Milner’s kindergarten in S. Africa

In discussing the significance of Milner, Bosco argues that “Britain’s controversial entry into the Great War could be seen as a desperate attempt to save Britain from a civil war – the Anglo-Irish conflict, in which Milner was about to take on a leading role, secretly arming the Ulster Volunteers, a private army loyal to the Crown – and from the breaking-up of the Empire, without which Britain would have regressed to the rank of a second-rate Power. According to this interpretation [which Bosco does not criticise or challenge – TB], Wilhelmine Germany fell – like the naïve Boers…into a trap skilfully set by the British imperialists to reaffirm with weapons a global and political hegemony by then almost completely lost.” He means lost economically to Germany and the USA and increasingly lost in terms of global strategy to the Franco-Russian Alliance.

‘Milnerism’, he says (pp. 13-14), was “the dominant ideology of the late Edwardian era….It was Milnerism [through Milner’s allies in the Press -TB] which ‘invented’, to a large extent, the ‘German threat’ in South Africa [where Milner had been the High Commissioner and had set up the Boer War 1899-1902 – TB] and in Continental Europe in order to foster the closer union of the Empire, and to maintain Ireland under British rule…..The strategic choice by Milner and his disciples to favour the Tsar, rather than the King’s cousin [Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany] in the creation of a Balkan sphere of influence revealed itself to be disastrous for the Empire and for Europe.” Germany “was transformed into an enemy, in ideological terms, by Milner and his disciples. In order to stand, Empires fed themselves with wars.” (p. 14) Indeed, the very first issue in Nov. 1910 of The Round Table, the movement’s journal, featured an article titled ‘Anglo-German Rivalry’ by Philip Kerr which was what today would be called an agitprop hit piece against Germany and what Kerr claimed it represented in the world. Bosco argues that in most of the key military and strategic decisions made in the Edwardian period, owing to Milner’s extensive network of friends and allies in high places and his groups of energetic young acolytes in the Round Table, “the influence of Milner behind the scenes runs from beginning to end”. (p. 14) “Without the creation of an external threat, the attempt to bring about the political union of the Empire would have been doomed to failure. In order to survive, the Empire desperately needed the Hun….in ideological, political and economic terms…..the creation of the ‘external enemy’ was certainly not the only cause which generated World War I, but in Weberian terms it could be considered the ‘adequate cause’, namely, the cause without which the course of events would have been different.”

British imperial strategy

In the winter of 1916/17 in the lectures known in English as The Karma of Untruthfulness GA 173, GA 174) Steiner pointed out incisively (6 Jan. 1917) that “what the British Empire is striving for is a closer-knit relationship between the motherland and the colonies…Every means that might serve this idea has been found acceptable…To make this possible an impulse was needed that would steal into people’s hearts and turn their minds towards something they would not otherwise have found acceptable [e.g. many articles in the Press such as Kerr’s article Anglo-German Rivalry in 1910, or  slogans such as “we must defend gallant little Belgium!” in 1914 – TB] It is with this that the war in Europe is connected  for out of the mood of this war certain impulses will arise which the British Empire needs in order to create a uniformity between the motherland and her  colonies…if the British Empire wants to draw its colonies closer together, if it wants to generate impulses which will tend towards going along with the motherland, then it needs a war, and this war  is the means to that so-called higher end desired by the state, and wherever such thoughts are thought the end sanctifies the means.” Bosco’s book entirely bears out what Steiner said here in January 1917. An apostle of federalism himself, Bosco argues that there were three Anglo-Saxon federalist moments: the founding of the Imperial Federation League of 1884, the Round Table in 1909, and the Federal Union movement of 1939-1940. Having already described the less than noble motives for the war of men like Milner, Curtis and Kerr (i.e. imperial federation in the face of imperial decline, creating a fictional enemy) he nevertheless insists on seeing the two world wars as Anglo-Saxon federalist crusades against an anti-democratic, nationalist continental enemy. “Created in an effort to halt the decline of an Empire which had reached its apogee, and representing the most advanced and well-organised expression of British nationalism [!], the Round Table with its actions produced precisely the opposite results on all fronts, by accelerating the break-up of the Empire [Ireland, India, Palestine] and demonstrating how the federalist culture is the exact opposite to the nationalist one. In trying to reconcile opposites  – Empire and federation – the Round Table in fact witnessed and to some produced the Empire’s crucifixion…it was just the application of federalist schemes to former colonies which served to speed its break-up.” (p. 18)

After the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, at which Kerr was responsible for drafting the so-called ‘war guilt’ clause Article 231, which attributed sole responsibility for starting the war to Germany, Kerr and others in the Round Table group began to argue that Germany had been treated too harshly. This was traditional British policy: after you defeat an enemy, you affect magnanimity towards him in order to gain his support for any upcoming struggle with your own former ally who may now be your new rival. After Milner’s death, Kerr and most of the Round Table moved to an apparent stance in favour of appeasement of Germany and until after the Munich Crisis of 1938, argued that Hitler’s territorial demands were justified as long as Hitler did not resort to force. “In the implementation of a policy diametrically opposed to that of Milner,(6) Lothian actually contributed to the establishment of Hitler’s supremacy in Central and Eastern Europe, [which was] exactly what Milner…had denied to the King’s cousin [Wilhelm II]. It is interesting to note how the architects of these diametrically opposed policies towards Germany belonged to the same organization, and how those policies were in any case unable to prevent the outbreak of two world wars… At different historical moments, but in the same context, the Round Table had strong ideological reasons for adopting opposite policies, which were the major causes of two world wars. [emphasis – TB] If Milner failed, Lothian at the end succeeded, using Germany for other purposes.”(p. 19) “…opposite policies, which were the major causes of two world wars” – we would do well to reflect on that statement.

Tragic figures?

Bosco sums up his two central characters, Milner and Kerr (above),  as “tragic figures” who combined success and failure: “If Milner was a patriot – who….bears the major responsibility for the crucifixion of the Empire – Lothian [Philip Kerr] on the other hand, laid down the foundations of the ‘Atlantic order’ as we know it, contributing to the resurrection of the ‘First British Empire’….under a new supranational, not yet federal form, at the price, however, of appeasing Hitler. Once again, Germany had been used ….. to rally the Anglo-Saxon democracies against a renewed ‘external threat.’”  Here Bosco is referring to the fact that between the Munich Conference in September 1938 and Hitler’s move into Bohemia in March 1939, Kerr and the Round Table did a rapid volte-face and now adopted a hard-line against Hitler, advocating rearmament and readiness for war. During the years of appeasement and his meetings with Kerr and other members and allies of the by now very well-connected Round Table, Hitler had been suckered into believing that the weak-willed British would give him exactly what he wanted. But he fell right into the carefully laid trap.  The intention all along had been to finish off what had only been half-achieved in 1919 – the reduction of Germany to vassal status and the termination of its cultural, political and economic challenge to the Anglo-American world.(7)

The significance of Bosco’s very well-sourced and referenced book about The Round Table is that, like The Anglo-American Establishment (1949) by Prof. Carroll Quigley, it is told from the point of view of someone who sympathises with the aims of the oligarchical elite group in question but whose work ends up providing very helpful information that reveals the truth  about the nefarious role played by that group in the history of the last 100 years. Like Curtis and Kerr, Bosco is not averse to the blasphemy (“crucifixion”, “resurrection”) of comparing the British Empire to Christ. For these men, their ideology truly is a deity, an idol to be glorified and worshipped, because, as elite representatives of the outer dominion of the Anglo-American world, they failed to provide what Steiner saw as the necessary complement to that outer material dominion, namely, a truly spiritual dimension, hence the title of Curtis’ 1938 book about the evolution of the idea of the Commonwealth or federation – Civitas Dei (The City of God).

Notes

1.See:http://www.gif.org.tr/files/Young%20Academics%20Papers/Charlie_Laderman_Clarence_Streit_Origins_of_the_Atlantic_Alliance.pdf
2. The book’s introduction can be read here:
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/63531
3. The mixed king is the fourth king that features in Goethe’s Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795), alongside the gold, silver and brass kings. He ends up collapsing at the end of the tale.
4. The aim of Curtis, Kerr and their American collaborators in Paris at their discussions in May 1919 was to create a single transatlantic Institute of International Affairs jointly based in London and New York. This turned out to be unfeasible because of isolationist resistance in the USA, so the British went ahead in 1920 with the establishment of the British (later Royal) Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and the Americans created the CFR a year later.
5. Lecture of 15 Dec. 1919 (Collected Works GA 194).
6. After 1918 Milner had favoured creating a West German state under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer and of abandoning eastern Germany (Prussia) to the Bolsheviks. See the text of his letter to Kerr 24 April 1919 suggesting this, cited in Markus Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch Nationalitätenfrage, Ordnungspläne und Rudolf Steiners Haltung im Ersten Weltkrieg (2014), pp. 1442-1451.
7. For details of how this trap was laid by Kerr and others in 1919-1939, see Conjuring Hitler – How Britain and America Made The Third Reich (2005) by Guido Giacomo Preparata.

The Present Age Vol. 3 No. 7 in October 2017

This is the fourth in a short series of articles about the historical consequences of the rivalry between Philip IV (the Fair) of France (r.1285-1314), who destroyed the Order of the Knights Templar, and his rival Edward I of England (r. 1272-1307) who sought to conquer Wales and Scotland. Philip married his daughter to Edward’s son, and out of this fateful marriage later came the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) between France and England, which led to Joan of Arc, the English Wars of the Roses and, eventually, the new Tudor dynasty in England under which the Welsh Cecil family rose to power in the 16th century.(1)The point to keep in mind here is the mediaeval arc of destiny from Philip ‘the Fair’ to Henry VIII of England (r.1509-1547), two ‘golden boy’ princes who became, arguably, the two darkest kings of mediaeval Europe. As a result of this arc of destiny, William and Robert Cecil, in the highest position in the realm under the monarch in the period 1558-1612, as Chief Secretaries of State, were able to exercise a profound influence on the subsequent history of England and thus of Europe and indeed the world.

These two members of the Cecil family, which was originally from Wales,  opened the curtain on the British Empire. They created the preconditions for the Empire(2) just as their relative, Sir Francis Bacon,(3) created the preconditions for the development of empirical natural science in England, which would be so important for the expansion of England’s commerce and colonialism. Remarkably, two later Cecils, an uncle and his nephew, Lord Salisbury (1830 -1903) and Arthur Balfour (1848 -1930), also consecutive chief ministers of the Crown, began to close the curtain on the British Empire 300 years later, although without meaning to. This was described in the previous article in this series (). The present article will outline how these two Cecils began the process that terminated the British Empire and handed global domination over to the USA – the state that had arisen as a result of the actions of their Cecil forebears.

Salisbury’s strategy – three factors

The previous article detailed how Lord Salisbury, who is always associated with the policy of “splendid isolation” i.e. no fixed alliances for Britain, actually began to shift Britain away from its traditional diplomatic ‘friendliness’ with Turkey, Austria-Hungary, and Germany and towards France and Russia, Britain’s imperial rivals. From the late 1880s onwards, Salisbury recognised that a Franco-Russian combination would present too many difficulties for Britain and might well even lead to the loss of India, something the British elite were determined to prevent at all costs, as India, “the jewel in the crown” had become something of an addiction for the British by the last quarter of the 19th century, especially for the upper classes. Salisbury, who acted as his own (very secretive) Foreign Minister as well as being the Prime Minister (1885-1886, 1886-1892, 1895-1902), had by the 1890s also decided that the seemingly decrepit Ottoman Turkish Empire had no future and that the newly united German Empire  was becoming too much of a commercial opponent for Britain, outstripping and out-competing Britain even in its own colonial markets.

By the end of the 1890s, three significant developments had occurred: firstly, France and Russia had entered into a solid military alliance that was clearly directed against Germany in the European context, but also against Britain on the global imperialist stage. Europe was now divided between two armed alliances. How would Britain relate to this development? Secondly, there was the significant worsening in Anglo-German relations. In one sense Germany had become rudderless yet in another sense, also newly ‘ruddered’, that is, the headstrong, young, half-English Emperor Wilhelm II had dropped his country’s skilled ‘pilot’ Otto von Bismarck as Chancellor in 1890, and German diplomacy had thereafter become increasingly inept. One the other hand, the Emperor’s English fantasies and jealousies had caused him to start building a modern navy that seemed to be intended to rival Britain’s own. The German liberal middle classes, especially those in the north and west of Germany, had long sought to imitate English parliamentarianism, commercial and industrial strength, and colonialism and for this, many of them argued that Germany needed a large navy supported by the nation. As the British were already feeling very nervous about German industrial and commercial prowess by 1900, the prospect of a large German navy did not exactly appeal to them, as they knew that the existence of their own global Empire was based only on the Royal Navy.

A serious symptom of worsening Anglo-German relations had been the clash of the two countries’ economic interests in South Africa in 1895-96, after which the Press in both countries remained at daggers drawn. The Colonial Minster in Lord Salisbury’s government, Joseph Chamberlain, had become secretly involved in Cecil Rhodes’ attempt to overthrow the Boer government in S. Africa in order to incorporate the Boers’ territories into a British-controlled South Africa. Chamberlain, a convinced racial imperialist with a young American wife, was keen to see the ‘Teutonic peoples’ (British, Germans, Americans – as he saw them) ruling the world together and from 1898 he urged an Anglo-German Alliance just as Lord Salisbury’s government was about to embark on the Second Boer War (1899-1902) in order to accomplish overtly, through massive military action, what Cecil Rhodes and Chamberlain had failed to do more covertly in their ‘modest’ coup d’etat of Jan. 1896. Chamberlain, however, was neither Foreign Secretary nor Prime Minister; Lord Salisbury held both those posts. He was the man in charge of ‘the big picture’, and it was he who blocked all efforts for an Anglo-German Alliance in 1898-1901.(4)

Furthermore, soon after Wilhelm II became German Emperor, Salisbury had become convinced that Wilhelm was “not quite normal”, a British understatement meaning ‘insane’, or close to it. In turning down an alliance proposal from the German diplomat Baron Eckardstein, Salisbury said to him “Nous sommes des poissons” (we [British] are fish). This meant not only that he saw Britain’s interests as pre-eminently naval; it was also indicative of Salisbury’s fluid modus operandi: the historian John Charmley writes that “Salisbury had an instinctive understanding of …the first essential for a ‘statesman’ concerned with ‘high politics’, namely that ‘in the great high latitudes of policy, all is fluid, elastic, mutable; the friend today [is] the foe tomorrow; the ally and confederate against your enemy, [is] is suddenly his confederate  against you: Russia or France or Germany or America, one sort of Power this year, quite another sort and in deeply changed relations to you, the year after(5). It was in accordance with this ‘mutable’, ‘Venetian’ practice of the constantly shifting balance of power that British diplomacy had always worked since the days of the Tudor Cecils.

The British foreign policy elite, led by the Cecils and their extensive network of aristocratic family connections and links to academia (notably Oxford University) and the Press, had from the late 1880s been weighing up the question of who was the greater threat, as they saw it, to Britain’s world power. Despite the fishy ‘fluidity’ of the diplomacy of Salisbury and Balfour, they never lost of sight of the fact that for Britain, Russia was the main threat, because she was the only Power that could threaten British India. ‘Friendship’ with a Russia that was growing ever stronger thus meant safety for British India; compared to this, they reasoned, Germany had little to offer Britain. They were thus prepared to sacrifice the old friendship with Germany  – despite the numerous cultural ties between the two countries  – for ‘friendship’ with the new Franco-Russian alliance. Salisbury made the first steps in this direction in the late 1880s; his nephew and successor as Prime Minister consolidated them in the Anglo-French Entente of 1904. It was a policy based essentially, but pragmatically, on British weakness, and for the two Cecils, it had the added advantage that if it ever came to war, Germany, a serious commercial rival to Britain, would be ruined.

Anglo-German relations had further been adversely affected by the poisonous personal relationship between the new King of England, Edward VII (r. 1901-1910) and his nephew, Wilhelm II of Germany (r.1888 – 1918); the two men loathed each other. Edward was also a strong supporter of better relations with Russia. Greatly interested in foreign policy, he gathered a circle of aides and advisers around him that almost constituted an informal foreign office. Through these men, he used his influence to have teutophobic supporters appointed to key positions in the official Foreign Office and in the diplomatic corps. Many of these men were connected to the Cecils’ social and political network. Sir Edward Grey, for example, was a social friend of Arthur Balfour, despite their differing political positions.

The third significant factor was that by the late 1890s, the British and American elites had become ever more closely linked. From the 1870s to 1914, about 350 wealthy American heiresses  married into impecunious British aristocratic families – Jenny Jerome’s marriage to Randolph Churchill (their son was Winston) was one of the most notable. Furthermore, despite a serious spat over Venezuela in 1895, relations between the British and American governments were becoming ever warmer, as elites on both sides of the Atlantic basked in the mutual congratulation, the warm glow of Anglo-saxon chauvinism, the feeling that they were destined to rule the world together and bring to it peace, civilisation, and enlightenment just as they believed the  Romans had once done. This feeling was especially strong in the USA in the East Coast circles around Theodore Roosevelt. In Britain, men of the older generation like Salisbury would never have accepted that Britain would hand its imperial sceptre to the USA, but those of a younger generation such as Balfour and Sir Edward Grey were more aware of Britain’s growing weakness and more prepared to give ground to American ambitions. Imperialists like Cecil Rhodes and Lord Rosebery were even enthusiastic about the prospect of Britain and America ‘reuniting’, and the government of the new imperial superstate moving across the Atlantic to Washington. In the decade before 1914, these growing ties with the USA and especially its financial elite (e.g. J. P. Morgan) gave the British elite confidence they could win a war against Germany.

Lord Milner and the Round Table

Given these three developments, when Lord Salisbury stepped down in July 1902 and was replaced as Prime Minster by his nephew Arthur (Edward VII had succeeded his mother Queen Victoria in 1901), the scene was set for a major change of direction and a realignment of forces. Cecil Rhodes also died at this time in March 1902, two months before the end of the Boer War that he had done so much to bring about. That war was actually organised and carried through by a close ally of Rhodes’ since 1891, Lord Alfred Milner (1854-1925) (see photo above), a middle class man of formidable willpower and charisma, and a fanatically determined imperialist. After Rhodes’ death, Milner took charge of the great financial resources of the Rhodes Trust, gathered a brilliant group of young men around him, known as Milner’s Kindergarten, all dedicated to his ideals of imperial federation, and sought to reconstruct S. Africa. Returning to England in 1905, he became Chairman of the Rio Tinto Zinc mining company, and also a banker, developed close links with the Cecil family network to advance his goal of imperial federation, and campaigned for military conscription and a stronger navy. He was convinced that only if the Dominions of the Empire (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, S. Africa) became a single federal state ruled by an Imperial Parliament could Britain hold its own in the 20th century against countries such as the USA, Russia, Germany, Japan, China. Milner believed that “the competition between nations, each seeking its maximum development” was “the law of human progress…the Divine Order of the world, the law of Life”.(6) In 1909, he formed a group called The Round Table to campaign behind the scenes for imperial federation. It consisted mainly of his young acolytes who had been with him in S. Africa, some of whom had since returned to England. He was, in effect, the ‘King Arthur’, the inspirational leader of this Round Table, the two main ‘knights’ of which were Philip Kerr (1882-1940, later Lord Lothian, see photo below, taken in the 1930s; his ancestor had been an intimate friend of King James I) and Lionel Curtis (1872-1955).

The Round Table would become from 1909 until Kerr’s death in 1940, arguably, the most significant pressure group for British imperialism within the British elite.(7) Milner was its inspirer and ‘chief’ but it was led by the indefatigable Kerr and Curtis who, ultimately against their chief’s intentions, from about 1916 onwards, worked to transform the Empire into an informal Anglo-saxon federal Commonwealth headed by the United States, as they realised that Milner’s original dream of a political  imperial federation led by Britain was unachievable because of nationalism in the white Dominions. Curtis, for whom the concept of the Commonwealth was tantamount to religious faith, believed that the British Empire and Commonwealth would gradually expand to become the ‘World State’. The nation state would become irrelevant and all states would belong to a world federation which would be run according to “the fundamental principles which lie at the heart of Anglo-saxon civilisation”.(8) Less overtly racist than Lord Milner, Kerr and Curtis nevertheless always believed that it was the destiny and duty of the Anglo-saxons to govern the world. The worldview of Kerr and Curtis combined the nationalism and racism of the late Gabrielic age (c.1789-1879) with the supranational cosmopolitanism and imperialism of the new Michaelic age (post-1879).(9) From the 1870s until the 1940s there was an overlap between these two impulses, the Gabrielic fading out as the Michaelic faded in and gained in strength.

The scholar who made the most detailed study of the Milner Group and the Round Table, Carroll Quigley, wrote in 1949 : “The power that was utilized by Milner and his Group was really the power of the Cecil family and its allied families…The Milner Group was originally a major fief within the great nexus of power, influence and privilege controlled by the Cecil family [which] has been all-pervasive in British life since 1886.” In a very recent book, written for insiders by another consummate insider, Andrea Bosco, who is Jean Monnet Professor of Political Science at the University of Florence (he is also Director of the Lothian Institute, an institute that upholds and promotes Philip Kerr’s “Anglo-saxon federalist ideals”, with special reference to the European Union), Bosco writes (p. 360, see n.6 below) that Milner was “the most lucid interpreter of the British imperialist tradition, which in federalism found a device to perpetuate the privileges of the ‘few’….against the rights and interests of the ‘many’. Milner was the strong man…. of that small but powerful group of men – representing the historical families of the British Establishment – who had run Great Britain, behind the throne, since the Act of Union [with Scotland] in 1707.”

According to Quigley, the “Cecil Bloc” was built up by Lord Salisbury: “The methods used by this man were merely copied by the Milner Group. These methods can be summed up under three headings: (a) a triple-front penetration in politics, education and journalism; (b) the recruitment of men of ability (chiefly from All Souls College [at Oxford University]) and the linking of these men to the Cecil Bloc by matrimonial alliances and by gratitude for titles and positions of power; and (c) the influencing of public policy by placing members of the Cecil Bloc in positions of power shielded as much as possible from public attention.”(10) The very first issue of the journal The Round Table (1910) carried an editorial by Kerr that identified Germany as Britain’s main enemy. By 1914, the Round Table had established branches and connections throughout the white Dominions of Empire. These helped to provide a background of support for “the Mother Country” when war came. In 1909 Arthur Balfour,  associated with the Rhodes-Milner Group since the early 1890s, sent a letter, under his own name but drafted by Philp Kerr, to ex-US President Theodore Roosevelt, who had just left office. The letter argued in favour of a loose  Anglo-saxon Confederation of all the white English-speaking countries: “The Federal Council would only deal with  the question of preference [i.e. trade tariffs] and …defence…No permanent government would be required…such a confederation would be practically unassailable and would dominate the world…It would practically dictate peace by sea to the rest of the world…The balance of power…would be permanently upset.”(11) The Anglophile Roosevelt was in tune with such ideas; in the presidential election of 1912 he was to play a key role in ensuring the defeat of presidential candidate Taft and the election of Woodrow Wilson and also in bringing America into the war on Britain’s side.

                                                                                     Balfour during the First World War

Arthur Balfour, Milner and the ‘coup’ of  Dec. 1916

The Balfour government of 1902-1905 was short-lived but played a critical role in the diplomatic realignment that had begun with Salisbury in 1887. Although Balfour and Milner disagreed over the issue of free trade vs protectionist tariffs, they were essentially at one on foreign policy. In 1903-1904, the official Foreign Office, now full of teutophobes, and the unofficial ‘foreign office’ around King Edward VII, collaborated – despite their mutual wariness -  in bringing about the Entente Cordiale between  Britain and France. This was the crucial step towards the Entente between Britain and France’s ally, Russia, which was secured by the Liberal government in 1907. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, were in sympathy with the Milner Group’s imperialist aims though not members of the group. Grey’s own foreign policy followed the Milner Group’s anti-German direction. At the crucial Cabinet meeting on 2 August 1914 at which the decision was made to intervene in the war, a note from the Conservative leader Bonar Law was delivered to Cabinet at the crucial point in the meeting. The foreign office historian Zara Steiner “saw Milner behind Bonar Law’s note”. In sending the note, which gave Conservative Party support for  intervention, “Bonar Law had acted under pressure from Austen Chamberlain, Arthur Balfour, [General] Henry Wilson, the Duke of Cavendish, and Lord Talbot”.(12) These men were all members of the Milner Group or its associated ‘Cecil Bloc’. Members of these two groups held numerous positions in the wartime coalition government from May 1915, but their key moment came in December 1916, when Milner and his allies, who had been planning for almost a year, succeeded in effecting a kind of coup d’etat against Asquith’s government, forcing him out and replacing him with Lloyd George. A crucial role here was played by Balfour, whose refusal to serve under Asquith was the final straw that led to Asquith’s resignation. Asquith would later always regard Balfour as having betrayed him.

The Milner Group now took actual command of the State. A new 5-man War Cabinet was set up to run the war. Four of its members were allies of Milner. Lloyd George, with his rhetorical gifts was the Milner Group’s mouthpiece. Philip Kerr was made Lloyd George’s private secretary to keep him in order and supplied with the right ideas and information. Balfour replaced Sir Edward Grey as Foreign Secretary, and Milner himself entered the Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio, a role which allowed him considerable freedom. The crucial importance of this December coup was that it was carried out (7 Dec.) in order to forestall the German peace offer which was known to be imminent and which came officially on 12 Dec. 1916. Milner and his allies were determined that the war should not stop until Germany had surrendered unconditionally. Rudolf Steiner’s lectures in these days of Christmas 1916 are full of anguished hopes that peace would not be shouted down and denied, but it was denied, as a result of the coup led by Milner and his Cecil Bloc allies, notably Balfour who, as Foreign Secretary, was formally responsible for refusing to enter into peace negotiations with Germany. The December coup by the Milnerites ensured that the war went on for another two years, and in those two years the world changed: the age of European domination ended and that of America and Soviet Russia began.

This was not what some in the Milner Group wanted, including Milner himself, but others did. Kerr, Curtis, Balfour and his cousin, Lord Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury’s eldest son, all looked forward to a post-war world that would be governed by a League of Nations, a concept devised by members of the Cecil Bloc and developed by Robert Cecil who became a leading advocate of it. But this League of Nations, they imagined, would be steered and guided from behind the scenes by Britain and America. In 1917, with America now in the war,  Balfour addressed a meeting of the elite Anglo-American Pilgrims’ Society, annual gatherings of some of the richest and most powerful men in Britain and the US, at which he said: “We both spring from the same root…Are we not bound together forever? Will not our descendants, when they come to look back on this unique episode in the history of the world, say that among the incalculable circumstances  which it produced, the most beneficent and the most permanent is perhaps, that we are brought together and united for one common purpose in one common understanding – the two great branches of the English-speaking race?….This is a theme which absorbs my thoughts day and night. It is a theme which moves me more, I think, than anything connected with public affairs in all my long experience.”(13) For Balfour, then, the war was justified because it had brought the English-speaking peoples together, not in an imperial federation perhaps, as Milner had wanted, and as Kerr and Curtis now realised was not going to happen, but in an informal arrangement, a collaboration of the English-speaking elites. Organisations, modelled on the Round Table, they felt, would have to be devised to keep this collaboration on track. To this end, after the war, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Kerr and Curtis, with Milner’s blessing, organised the transatlantic Institute of International Affairs. The British branch, which later became the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as “Chatham House” began straightaway, funded by Milner Group members and allies. Opposition in the US to further involvement in European affairs, however, made the American branch a non-starter; it had to wait for two years, after which, American allies of the Milner Group created the New York-based Council On Foreign Relations in 1921. These two organisations, through their myriad conferences, seminars, and publications, have helped to keep US and UK foreign policy largely in tandem since the Second World War, irrespective of the governments in power in the two countries.

On 6 January 1917 Rudolf Steiner said: “What the British Empire is striving for is a close-knit relationship between the motherland and the colonies. I have told you about the application of occult forces, and it is these forces that are being used to achieve this goal….Those who imagine that world peace can be achieved by means of programmes and an inter-state organisation obviously have no idea what forces have to be used in reality to achieve a welding of the British motherland to her colonies [including the ex-US colonies! – TB.] in a way that will create the kind of totality which suits the British Empire…To make this possible an impulse was needed that would steal into people’s hearts and turn their minds towards something they would not otherwise have found acceptable. It is with this that the war in Europe is connected, for out of the mood of this war certain impulses will arise which the British Empire needs in order to create a uniformity between the motherland and her colonies….if the British Empire wants to draw its colonies closer together …then it needs a war, and this war is the means to that so-called end desired by the state. And wherever such thoughts are thought, the end sanctifies the means.”(14)

The most recent historiography agrees with Steiner’s assessment. Andrea Bosco, a man who approves of the ideals of Milner’s acolyte Philip Kerr, writes in his 2017 book about the fall of the Second British Empire (the first Empire, in N. America, fell in 1776-81): “Milner, the chief architect of the Second Anglo-Boer War, and one of the major figures who bear the moral responsibility – on the British side – for the First World War created the Round Table(15) in order to gain the Dominions’ support for Great Britain in the event of a new European war. Britain’s controversial entry into the Great War could be seen as a desperate attempt to save Britain from the breaking-up of the Empire, without which Britain would have regressed to the rank of a second-rate Power. According to this interpretation, Wilhelmine Germany fell….like the naïve Boers … – into a trap skilfully set by the British imperialists to reaffirm with weapons a global economic and political hegemony by then almost completely lost….It was Milnerism which ‘invented’, to a large extent, the German threat in South Africa and in Continental Europe in order to foster the closer union of the Empire…In order to stand, Empires feed themselves with wars.”(16)

In 1999 the British government made a significant attempt finally to get rid of the principle of inherited titles from the House of Lords, the British Parliament’s second chamber. The attempt had some success, but a vigorous campaign to resist the move to eject Britain’s traditional aristocracy from political power completely was mounted, and as a result, the government, despite its overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, agreed that 92 hereditary peers should be allowed to retain their seats in the House of Lords, and there they still sit today. The campaign to retain the hereditary peers was led by Robert Michael James Gascoyne-Cecil, 7th Marquess of Salisbury, the great-great grandson of Lord Salisbury. The 7th Marquess lives at Hatfield House, the grand home built in 1611 by his ancestor Lord Robert Cecil, Secretary of State to King James I.

Notes
1 See King Philip IV (the Fair) of France and Henry VIII of England (.
    Rudolf Steiner discussed these two kings in a lecture he gave on 1 Oct. 1916 (GA 171).
2 By making peace with Spain in 1604 and maintaining it thereafter, Robert Cecil ensured that English seafarers could both profit from trade with Asia (first trading ‘factory’ in India 1615) and establish settlements in N. America (the first, Jamestown Virginia in 1607) which eventually would become the United States of America.
3 Sir Francis Bacon was the son of Anne Cooke. Her sister was married to William Cecil (Lord Burghley),
   so Francis Bacon and Robert Cecil were cousins.
4 See John Charmley, Splendid Isolation? Britain and the Balance of Power 1974-1914 pp. 254-290
5 Charmley, pp. 295-296.
6 Milner speech, 28.10.1901 Durban, S. Africa, quoted in A. Bosco, The Round Table Movement and
   the Fall of the Second British Empire 1909-1919 (2017), p. 7.
7 For detailed analysis of the influence and reach of the Round Table, see Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-
   American Establishment – From Rhodes to Cliveden (1981) and Andrea Bosco, The Round Table
   Movement and  the Fall of the Second British Empire 1909-1919 (2017).
8 “The future of the world depends upon the gradual recognition, by the rest of the world, of the
    fundamental principles which lie at the heart of Anglo-saxon civilisation” – Kerr to Curtis, 9 June
    1920, quoted in Bosco, The Round Table Movement….prior to Introduction. See n. 7.
9 The Age of the archangel Gabriel (1510-1879, according to R. Steiner) focused mankind’s attention
     on everything that had to do with incarnation into the physical plane. This included identification
     with one’s birthplace, place of habitation, people, language, nationality, race etc. The Age of the
     archangel Michael (1879-c.2300) is the antithesis of this: the focus is on the spirit,on human
     intelligence and the cosmopolitan – all that which goes beyond local and national, physical
     identification.
10 Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment – From Rhodes to Cliveden (written 1949, first
      published 1981), p. 15.
11  Kenneth Young, Arthur James Balfour, (1963) p. 283. For details, see T.M. Boardman, Sir Edward
      Grey, Liberal Imperialism and British Responsibility in 1914 – From the British Empire to the
      American Empire at: http://threeman.org/?p=865  Balfour is also known for the Balfour
      Declaration of 2 Nov. 1917, addressed to Lord Rothschild as head of the Zionist movement, which
      promised Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people, but the Declararation was in fact
      drafted by Milner and Kerr, and merely signed by Balfour as Foreign Secretary. He was, however,
      very much in sympathy with Zionism.
12  Bosco, p. 360.
13  See Boardman, Sir Edward Grey….:http://threeman.org/?p=865
14. R. Steiner, The Karma of Untruthfulness Vol. 2 (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2005) pp. 30-31.
15  The Round Table’s founding meeting took place in 1909 at Plas Newydd, the home of Lord Anglesey, on the North Wales island of Anglesey. Off the western coast of this island is the smaller, Holy Island, which was the main spiritual centre of all the Druids of ancient Britain. It was deliberately destroyed by the Roman army under Gaius Suetonius Paulinus in 60 AD – TB]
16  Bosco, pp.12-14.

This is the third in a series of 5 articles which is rooted in the tortuous destiny between England and France, the two western countries which ‘pioneered’ modern nationalism, that view of life that has had such fateful consequences over the past 250 years. The modern western concept of the centralised, administrative state emerged in Britain and France 1300-1600 and there was a gradual identification of the British and French peoples with their respective states, which eventually produced what is called the ‘nation state’. This arguably experienced its ‘apotheosis’  with Woodrow Wilson’s ultimately disastrous attempts to redraw the map of Europe after the First World War, based on the concept of the unitary ‘nation state’ that he and America had come to champion. In recent decades, in the EU, we have seen the gradual, but steady, sustained effort to create a single ‘European nation state’, essentially on the American model, federal but unitary, which is intended to supersede the European nation states and integrate them even more fully into the global structure dominated by Anglo-American ideas and patterns of behaviour. In this long process, certain families, or bloodlines, i.e. karmic streams, have played significant roles, and this short series of articles looks at two of them  – the Cecils, and the Herberts – that came to prominence with the Tudor dynasty after 1485. The last article looked at William Cecil and his son Robert who served as Secretaries of State to Elizabeth I and James I respectively and played a key role in preparing the stage for the  emergence of what would later become the British Empire. This article will consider two other members of the Cecil family, an uncle and his nephew, who were present at the closing of the curtain of the British Empire in 1890-1919 and played key roles in that closing, although things did not exactly work out as they had intended.

Lord Salisbury

Throughout the second half of the 19th century British politics was dominated by three figures:  Disraeli, his arch-enemy William Gladstone (1809-1898), the Liberal leader, and Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903), usually known as Lord Salisbury.

The head of the Cecil family from 1868 and three times Prime Minister (1885-86, 1886-92,  1895-1902), Robert Cecil’s other names  – Arthur Talbot Gascoyne  – point back to mediaeval times: the legendary king Arthur, the Talbots, who were a Norman family that later provided one of the greatest commanders of the Hundred Years War (John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury) and Gascoyne, which is  an anglicisation of Gascogne, a province of SW France that belonged to the English Crown from 1152-1453; the dispute over this territory between England and France was the spark that actually set off the Hundred Years War in 1337. The direct descendant and namesake of King James I’s Secretary of State Robert Cecil (the first Earl of Salisbury, d. 1612), Lord Salisbury was 193 cm tall (6 ft 4 inches), very weighty in old age, sported a very full beard and was as aristocratic, High Tory and reactionary ‘true blue’ as they come in British politics, although he was not a harsh, aggressive man nor a member of the hunting and shooting fraternity. His credo was: “Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible” and in government, he disliked removing “older men in favour of rising talent”(1) Rather as Metternich had done in Austria, he tried for as long as possible to stem the tides of bourgeois liberalism and of proletarian socialism, believing that the essence of the country was the Crown, the Established Church of England and the landowning aristocracy. He opposed the more dynamic, populist, jingoistic conservative views of Disraeli, a middle class Jew, and tried to block Disraeli’s bill to enfranchise working class males in 1867. Salisbury was, however, a realist; he could see the way the winds were blowing, and realised the importance of “public opinion”;  so although he loftily held the masses to be ignorant of foreign affairs, and was in the habit of conducting foreign policy in great secrecy from his own desk and not sharing information with his colleagues and subordinates, he was not averse to using the excuse of having to bow to “democratic public opinion” in his conduct of foreign policy when it suited him to do so. In 1900 he told a colleague: “in questions of peace and war, the action of the Government is entirely dependent on [public] opinion”.(2)  Sir Edward Grey would make much of this hypocritical and deceptive tactic during his long years as Foreign Secretary (1906-1916).

“The Cecil Bloc”

Over the second half of the 19th century, Lord Salisbury built a personal power base that ran right through the upper echelons of the British elite and which stood on four legs: blood, journalism, academia and the Church. The network that connected all these has been called “the Cecil Bloc”. In his detailed study, “The Anglo-American Establishment”(1949), Prof. Carroll Quigley describes this bloc as follows: “The methods used by this man [Lord Salisbury] were merely copied by the Milner Group [set up by Sir Alfred, later Lord Milner from c.1900]. These methods can be summed up under three headings: (a) a triple-front penetration in politics, education and journalism; (b) the recruitment of men of ability (chiefly from All Souls [College, Oxford]) and the linking of these men to the Cecil Bloc by matrimonial alliances and by gratitude for titles and positions of power; and (c) the influencing of public policy by placing members of the Cecil Bloc in positions of power shielded as much as possible from public attention.” (3)

Through Lord Salisbury’s five sons, three daughters, two brothers and two sisters, the Cecils were related  through marriage to many of the leading aristocratic families of the day such as the “Lytteltons (Viscounts Cobham), Wyndham (Barons Leconfield), Grosvenor (Dukes of Westminster), Balfour, Wemyss, Palmer (Earls of Selborne and Viscounts Wolmer), Cavendish (Dukes of Devonshire…), and Gathorne-Hardy (Earls of Cranbrook)”.(4) These families were allies of the Cecils in the second half of the 19th century and were a key part of the Cecils’ network, which was essentially a social network used for political purposes and containing members of both political parties. Even Gladstone, who had originally been a Tory politician before changing to the Liberals, was a member of it. This network regarded itself as “Society” or even “England”. Its members met in two gentlemen’s clubs in London, The Club (founded 1764) and Grillion’s (founded 1812); together they had no more than 60 members and had stellar memberships of British political and cultural figures.

In the last two decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th century, the high tide of British imperialism, Cecil relatives were everywhere to be found in government, indeed nepotism was so rife that the government c.1900 was wittily referred to as ‘Hotel Cecil’, and there was even an actual grand ‘Hotel Cecil’ from 1896-1930 (built 1890-96 at the height of Salisbury’s power) on the Strand in central London approximately midway between the financial centre of the City of London in the east and the royal political centre, which is in Westminster in the west. Lord Salisbury’s network also spread to the Church and academia, notably Oxford University’s All Souls College, the ‘spiritual’ hub of British imperial thinking, where he recruited his protégés,(5) [CQ 20-28]; he was a Fellow of All Souls himself from 1853 and Chancellor of Oxford University from 1869-1903 as well as three times Prime Minister during that period. The Milner Group would also later draw most of its key brains from All Souls. Lord Salisbury was also an active amateur scientist and journalist. While contemptuous of what he called the “great democracy we all have to obey”, he understood the importance of public opinion in a society increasingly obsessed with newspapers and journals. Cut off by his father from the family money, he supported himself by writing and wrote many articles in the Press or else, when in government, got his political friends in the Press to write articles expressing his views without naming him.

1887 and 1895 – two critical years on the path to 1914

A foreign affairs specialist who, as Prime Minister, also served as his own Foreign Secretary, his foreign policy was that of “avoiding foreign entanglements” and “no major alliances”, trying to avoid wars and running the empire as cheaply as possible. Primarily, Salisbury sought to keep Russia away from British India, and Germany away from the gold and diamond mines of South Africa. Wary of Franco-Russian opposition to the British Empire, and regarding Russia as a dangerous ‘natural phenomenon’, he tacked towards Bismarck and the Triple Alliance and in 1887 concluded Mediterranean agreements with Italy and Austria in order to do so. But at the same time he sought to improve relations with Britain’s traditional imperial rivals France and Russia. In July 1887 he did a deal with Russia over Afghanistan and in September met his old acquaintance, the French diplomat Baron Chaudordy at Dieppe, which led to a colonial agreement between Britain and France in October; this would foreshadow the much more significant colonial deal between the two countries in the Entente Cordiale of 1904, which was concluded by the government of his nephew, Arthur Balfour. But in the background to this manoeuvring in 1887 were portentous financial rearrangements whereby French capital, led by the Rothschilds in the spring of that year(6) , began to pour into Russia in the autumn. This would eventually lead to the conclusion of the Franco-Russian Dual Alliance in 1894, preceded by several prior agreements, including a secret military convention in 1892 that would be the basis for joint Franco-Russian action in August 1914. Gold was discovered in S. Africa in 1884, and the British were determined to monopolise both it and the already existing South African diamond mines. In the summer of 1887 the megalomaniac imperialist mining magnate Cecil Rhodes secured from the Rothschilds in London and Paris the money he needed to totally dominate diamond mining in S. Africa.(7) 1887 was the critical year in which  the process began that led eventually to the catastrophe of 1914. In the crisis for the British  that developed in 1886-1887  around the tragic figure of the exiled Indian prince Dalip Singh (1838-1893) and the consequent possibility of rebellion in India, Salisbury’s government was suddenly faced with the prospect of a serious Franco-Russian threat to British India. Meanwhile, voices in Britain, notably Randolph Churchill and W.T. Stead, began to speak of the desirability of a rapprochement with Russia.

Salisbury, however, had always taken a longer-range view of Russia. He told Sir Robert Morier, British Ambassador in St. Petersburg, in 1885, that “Russia’s only weak point [is] her ‘financial embarrassment’”, and “if we become her chronic enemy it is to that weak point that our efforts must be addressed. We must lead her into all the expense we can in the hope that a few steps further must push her into the revolution over which she seems constantly to be hanging”(8) The historian John Charmley writes that Salisbury (below, left) felt that “time and chance might provide the answer to the Russian problem….either in the form of revolution, Islamic revival or war against Germany….”(9) Two of these subsequently happened to Russia (1904-1917), with not a little help from Salisbury’s nephew Arthur Balfour (below, right)

“…quite early in the ’90s, Balfour became aware that the era of peace was in all probability drawing to a close…Both in the privacy of his thoughts and in the publicity of the House [of Commons] Balfour began to develop …his rising flair for military matters.”(10) Actually Balfour had no real flair for purely military matters; a very skilled parliamentarian with a lazy temperament and a keen interest in science and philosophy, he did have a flair for grand strategy and foreign policy; this was what interested him, and he sought to arrange military matters in a way that would support his strategic intentions. His biographer does not say anything about how Balfour became aware that the era of peace was drawing to a close. He says only: “… where, when and how war on a large scale would break out was not …apparent to him; but…there were indications from Germany, from France and from the Far East that war was a possibility.”(11) Like his uncle, and like his ancestors, William and Robert Cecil, Arthur Balfour also had an interest in secrecy. As a member of his uncle’s government in 1895, and perhaps with that awareness of an approaching major war in mind, he was responsible for setting up a secret Cabinet Defence Committee in 1895. Rudolf Steiner referred to this – but didn’t name Balfour -  in a lecture of 18 December 1916 (GA 173): “…the conduct of foreign affairs was taken away from Parliament and also from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and made the preserve of a committee whose members consisted exclusively of the cabinet and certain officials in the Foreign Ministry…So, at the moment when it became necessary to commence pulling threads , the scene of action was transferred from external view to a hidden place, to a so-called committee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

1895 was the critical turning point in Anglo-German relations, when tensions over South Africa were mounting. Germans wanted fair access to the gold and diamonds of the region, but the British, notably Cecil Rhodes,  were determined to maintain their own monopoly and to keep Germany away from this strategically important region. Germans also resented the treatment of the Boers at the hands of the British. Rhodes and his allies were determined to bring the Boer Republics under complete British control. On 24 August 1895 the first of three anonymous, extremely anti-German articles appeared in the normally highly regarded Saturday Review weekly newspaper (for which, among many other famous people, Lord Salisbury had also written articles in the past); it included the following words: “we English have always made war hitherto upon our rivals in trade and commerce; and our chief rival in trade and commerce to-day is not France but Germany. In case of a war with Germany, we should stand to win much and lose nothing; whereas, in case of a war with France, no matter what the issue might be, we stand to lose heavily.” (12) At the end of 1895 the infamous ‘Jameson Raid’ took place in S. Africa. It was an attempted putsch by Cecil Rhodes and his men seeking to overthrow the Boer administration, and was covertly backed by the Colonial Secretary in Salisbury’s government, Joseph Chamberlain, but it failed and led to a telegram in January 1896 from the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, congratulating the Boer leader Paul Kruger. This incensed the British foreign policy elite and the Press; it was the beginning of the poisonous anti-German propaganda in Britain that climaxed in the First World War. Later in 1896, another, particularly vicious article appeared in the Saturday Review, culminating in these words: “Were every German to be wiped out to-morrow, there is no English trade, no English pursuit that would not immediately expand. Were every Englishman to be wiped out tomorrow, the Germans would gain in proportion. Here is the first great racial struggle of the future: here are two growing nations pressing against each other, man to man all over the world. One or the other has to go; one or the other will go. [...] The biological view of foreign policy is plain:…, federate our colonies and prevent geographical isolation turning the Anglo-Saxon race against itself…. be ready to fight Germany, as Germania est delenda”(13) [Germany must be destroyed]. In 1897 Salisbury’s government appointed Sir Alfred Milner High Commissioner to South Africa; Milner,  an ally of  Rhodes since 1891, and a key member of the secret society he had founded that year to promote world domination by Britain(14)  quickly determined that the only course was war against the Boer Republics and he strove to bring it about.(15) By 1902, the year of Rhodes’ death, Milner had achieved Rhodes’ goal of conquering the Boer Republics for the Empire and also had became a Trustee of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust and its very considerable funds; Rhodes had trusted him absolutely, although Milner was more circumspect about Rhodes. While in S. Africa, Milner fell in love with Violet Cecil, the wife of Lord Salisbury’s fourth son, Edward Cecil, and they began a long-standing affair. In 1921 Milner married Violet Cecil, who had been widowed in 1918.

Lux Mundi and C.G. Harrison

Balfour’s defence committee proved not to be so effective, as was underlined by Britain’s poor performance in the Boer War, so after taking over from his uncle as Prime Minister in 1902, he revamped the committee into the Committee of Imperial Defence, an altogether more efficient body. In 1909 it would spawn the Secret Service Bureau, from which came MI5 and MI6. From the beginning the Bureau’s work was aimed at Germany. Balfour’s ancestor in the 16th century, William Cecil, had overseen the origins of the very first British secret intelligence service. Arthur Balfour had also always had a keen interest in psychology and in psychic phenomena as well as in philosophy. He was a senior member of the Society for Psychical Research, which was founded in 1882 by the Balfour family and their in-laws.(16)

On 27 October 1919 (Collected Works GA 193) Rudolf Steiner referred for the first time (as far as is known to this author) to the approaching incarnation of Ahriman in the West in the third millennium. He spoke of how mankind has to be able to relate to this incarnation in the right way so as not to be led astray by it, how we have to illuminate both the sciences and the Gospels with spiritual science,  “otherwise, we always get half-truths.” Then he gives as an example the English Catholic Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), who claimed we need a new spiritual revelation. No, says Steiner, we don’t need that; what we need is a new science that is illumined by the spirit. As an example of the kind of thing we do not need, an example of the wrong way to proceed in science and religion, he then immediately refers to the phenomenon of the Lux Mundi movement, whose initial writings appeared in England in November 1889. These essays were permeated by the attempt, says Steiner, to build a bridge from worldly science over to dogmatic religion. “Everywhere a floundering hither and thither, nowhere a bold grasp of worldly science, nowhere an illumination of this science by spirit…mankind today needs to be courageous on both sides and to say: worldly science alone leads to illusion; the Gospel alone leads to hallucination.” Lux Mundi tried to reconcile the thinking of natural science with conventional religion. It was rejected by most traditionalists as too ‘modern’ and by more modern thinkers as too weak and thin, incapable of justifying Christianity, but it was to make a mark in its social teachings and concern for the poor. Those who wrote the collection of essays titled  Lux Mundi  – A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation and who founded what would subsequently become known as the ‘liberal Anglo-Catholic’ wing of the Church of England were mostly members of the Anglo-Catholic High Church ‘Oxford movement’ that had begun at Oriel College at Oxford University in 1833 (Rhodes had studied there in the 1870s and in 1877 became a member of the Apollo freemasonic Lodge no.357).  Cardinal Newman had been a leading figure in this movement before he joined the Church of Rome in 1845. The ‘High Church’ stream has always been that current within the Anglican Church which leans most towards Rome in terms of doctrine, liturgy and ritual; it is the closest stream within the ‘broad church’ of Anglicanism to the church as it was in 16th century Tudor England, and it is the stream that has traditionally been that of the Cecil family. The Oxford Movement attempted to go even further in the direction of Rome without actually abandoning Protestantism altogether, trying to find ‘a middle way’. Now, at the end of the 19th century, ‘in the light’ of the advances of natural science, Lux Mundi wanted to bring science and religion closer together and to emphasise the humanity of Christ rather than His divinity – the Incarnation rather than the Atonement. Those who wrote the essays had gathered in 1882 at the London home of Lord Salisbury to dedicate a college of clergy in memory of Edward Pusey, the leader of the Oxford Movement after 1845. The first principal of this college, from 1884,  was Charles Gore, the cousin of Salisbury’s daughter-in-law. One of Salisbury’s last acts as Prime Minister in 1902 was to appoint Gore Bishop of Worcester, a very controversial appointment.

So Salisbury, who was more earnestly religious than his nephew Balfour, but like him, had a great interest in science, was also connected in a certain way to this new ‘liberal modernist’, ‘half-truth’ wing of the Anglo-Catholic High Church, and it was this very Lux Mundi movement that was spoken of highly by the enigmatic English esotericist C.G. Harrison (1855-1929?)  in his Transcendental Universe – Six Lectures on Occult Science, Theosophy and the Catholic Faith (1893) (where ‘Catholic Faith’ means the Anglo-Catholic High Church, not the Church of Rome) and in his later book, Creed for the Twentieth Century (1923). Indeed, the Berean Society, the group to which Harrison gave his six lectures was “an association of students of theoretical occultism”, a lay group of the Oxford Movement.(17) Christopher Bamford, in his Introduction to a new edition of  Transcendental Universe, published in 1993, writes: “according to certain interpretations, to be an Anglo-Catholic means ….to belong to a national Church and thus to frame one’s spiritual understanding within a nationalist context. Given that Britain is quintessentially an imperial nation, Harrison’s implicit spiritual politics….need to be recognised and taken into account as we read his text.”

Throughout the First World War, Rudolf Steiner, who was alerted to Harrison’s lectures in translation already in the 1890s by his friend Friedrich Eckstein, often drew his listeners’ attention to long-range plans circulating in western occult circles since the 1880s for the instigation of a socialist experiment in Russia that would result from “the next great European war”. He did not mention Harrison’s name but a study of the second of Harrison’s London lectures of 1893 clearly shows that he was drawing on that. Western elites, he said, were using occult knowledge of history and anthropology for nationalist, imperialist purposes, and Central Europeans, ignorant of this, had to wake up to the fact that this knowledge was being used against them. We can recall  John Charmley’s words about Salisbury’s view of Russia in the late 1880s: “time and chance might provide the answer to the Russian problem….either in the form of revolution, Islamic revival or war against Germany….” The occult aim of these western elites was (and still is) to subjugate Russia and the Slavic peoples to western control and tutelage, as Rome had sought to control and tutor the Germanic peoples in the 4th epoch. The British elite, brought up and educated in the classics, saw themselves as the Romans of the modern age.

War between Germany and Russia – keeping these two cultures apart, the very thing that according to Rudolf Steiner, should not happen if the 5th epoch is to pass over to the 6th epoch in the way that will benefit humanity as a whole. Lord Salisbury was imagining war and revolution for Russia already in the 1880s, and from 1887-1907 a diplomatic revolution was effected in Britain, mostly during the time of the governments of Salisbury and his nephew Balfour, that reversed Britain’s traditional foreign policy priorities, and set a course for war between Britain and Germany and between Germany and Russia; the war would initiate the socialist experiment in Russia and would remove Germany as an imperial and economic competitor. The next article in this series will look at how Arthur Balfour and Lord Milner, the Cecil Bloc and the Milner Group, carried the process through to completion. In doing so, despite themselves, they also brought down the British Empire.

Notes
1. John Charmley, Splendid Isolation? Britain and the Balance of Power 1874-1914 (1999), p. 197.
2. Charmley, p. 231.
3. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment – From Rhodes to Cliveden (1981) p. 15.
4. Quigley, p. 15.
5. Quigley, pp. 20-28.
6. Niall Ferguson, The World’s Banker – The History of the House of Rothschild (1998) pp. 904-905
7. Ferguson, pp. 882-886; Robert I.Rothberg, The Founder – Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of
    Power (1988) pp. 202-212.
8. Charmley, p. 201.
9. Charmley, p. 213.
10. Kenneth Young, Arthur James Balfour, (1963), p. 175.
11. Young, p. 175.
12. Markus Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch – Nationalitätenfrage, Ordnungspläne und Rudolf Steiners
      Haltung im Ersten Weltkrieg (2014) p. 711.
13. Osterrieder, p. 713-714.
14. Quigley, chapter 3, ‘The Secret Society of Cecil Rhodes’.
15. John E. Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (1974), p. 8.
16. Quigley, pp. 31-32.
17. Osterrieder, p.924

Back to Article 1  2 in this series

Forward to Article 4  5 in this series

In seinen Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, die er im November 1914 in Homburg niederschrieb, machte Helmuth von Moltke klar, dass «die Niederwerfung Frankreichs im ersten Anlauf misslang, der schnellen Hilfeleistung Englands zu verdanken»(1) war. Der britische Außenminister Sir Edward Grey hielt die britischen Militärpläne und Absichten, Frankreich im Kriegsfall zu unterstützen,  sogar vor den eigenen Kabinettskollegen geheim, bis diese Geheimhaltung 1911 herauskam. Später, in Berlin, im Sommer 1915, beschreibt Moltke, dass während der kritischen Marneschlacht (September 1914) ein französischer Gegenangriff von Paris aus auf den rechten Flügel von Klucks 1. Armee, welche gegen den Osten von Paris vorrückte, «eine 25 km breite Lücke zwischen der 1. und 2. deutschen Armee» öffnete, «in welche drei englische Divisionen vorstießen, während die 2. deutsche Armee ihren rechten Flügel zurücknahm.»(2) Weiter schreibt Helmuth von Moltke, dass seine Entscheidung, zwei Korps des rechten Flügels abzuziehen und nach Ostpreußen zu verlegen, um Deutschland bei der russischen Invasion zu Hilfe zu kommen, «ein Fehler war, der sich an der Marne rächte».(3) Er schrieb weiter: «Die schwerwiegendste Entscheidung, vor die ich als Chef des Generalstabes gestellt war, war diejenige, ob Deutschland in dem zu erwartenden Zwei-Fronten-Kriege defensiv oder wenigstens nach einer Seite offensiv handeln solle. Ich habe mich nach eingehenden Prüfungen und Studium für das Letztere entschieden und den Aufmarsch so angelegt, dass die Offensive im Westen mit möglichst starken, die gleichzeitige Defensive im Osten mit einem Mindestmaß von Kräften geführt werden konnte. Es war zu erhoffen, dass im Westen eine schnelle Entscheidung herbeigeführt werden würde… sie war aber nur zu erwarten, wenn man die französische Armee im freien Felde treffen konnte.»(4)

Gen. Helmuth von Moltke (der der Jüngere)

(1848-1916)

So hofften Moltke und der deutsche Generalstab und vertrauten darauf, die französische Armee in einer entscheidenden Schlacht zu schlagen, wie es tatsächlich bei Sedan im Deutsch-Französischen Krieg von 1870 geschehen war. Nach der Niederlage der Franzosen beabsichtigten sie dann, ihre Truppen nach Osten zu verlegen, um sich mit den Russen auseinanderzusetzen. Das war im Wesentlichen der sogenannte «Schlieffen-Plan», der von Moltkes Amtsvorgänger, dem Generalstabschef Graf Alfred von Schlieffen, vorgeschlagen wurde. Aber sowohl Schlieffen wie Moltke hatten die Beteiligung der kleinen britischen Armee unterschätzt und offensichtlich vergessen, dass Frankreich 1870 von Großbritannien nicht unterstützt wurde. Und so hoffte das deutsche Militär 1914 mit der Anwendung des Schlieffen-Plans wieder auf einen schnellen Sieg. Gleichgültig, ob die Briten sich auf die Seite Frankreichs stellen würden, Frankreich würde entscheidend geschlagen werden, selbst wenn die Briten mitbeteiligt wären. Im November 1914 schrieb Moltke: «Wiederholt ist auch im Generalstab die Frage geprüft worden, ob wir nicht besser täten, einen Defensivkrieg zu führen. Sie wurde immer verneint, da mit ihm die Möglichkeit hinfällig wurde, den Krieg so bald wie möglich in Feindesland zu tragen. Mit der Möglichkeit, dass Belgien zwar gegen einen Durchmarsch protestieren, aber sich demselben nicht mit Waffengewalt entgegenstellen werde.»(5) Die deutsche (insbesondere die preußische) Militärkaste verlangte einen glorreichen offensiven Sieg auf fremdem Boden, wie er 1870 bei Sedan gelang. Sie wollte keinen langen Verteidigungskrieg auf deutschem Gebiet führen; jedoch wäre sie mit einem Verteidigungskrieg an beiden Fronten besser vor der Welt dagestanden. Es ist vielleicht nicht verwunderlich, dass die preußische Militärkaste sich um solche politischen Erwägungen wenig kümmerte. Von Moltke war sich ihrer genügend bewusst, um den Schlieffen-Plan so abzuändern, dass sowohl der Einmarsch in die Niederlande als auch in Belgien vermieden werden konnte. Es war ihm aber nicht möglich, eine Strategie zu entwickeln, die grundsätzlich verschieden von derjenigen Schlieffens war, obwohl er von 1906 bis 1914 Generalstabschef war. Daher hatte der belgische Faktor in der deutschen Militärplanung Großbritanniens Eingriff in den Krieg zur Folge. Das brachte nicht nur die deutsche Strategie in der entscheidenden Marneschlacht von 1914 durcheinander, sondern garantierte auch einen lang dauernden Krieg, wozu britisches Vorgehen in der europäischen Geschichte immer neigte (z.B. Großbritanniens Kriege gegen Louis XIV und Napoleon). Möglicherweise Schließlich erwies sich die britische Teilnahme als Hauptfaktor für Amerikas Kriegseintritt 1917.

Obwohl viele behaupten, dass Helmuth von Moltkes Handlungsweise zum deutschen Misserfolg an der Marne führte und sogar, dass der Krieg nach der Marne für Deutschland grundsätzlich verloren war, kann man jedoch behaupten, dass «der belgische Faktor» in Moltkes Planung, welcher die Briten hineinzog, schließlich auch zum Niedergang des britischen Reiches führte. Der Aufwand, welcher für den Sieg über Deutschland notwendig war, erwies sich für die Briten als ein solcher Pyrrhussieg(6), dass das Empire bis 1919 tatsächlich tödlich getroffen wurde und in der darauffolgenden Jahrhunderthälfte mehr und mehr zerfiel. Die Entscheidung des deutschen Generalstabs unter Helmuth von Moltke, einen Verteidigungskrieg an beiden Fronten zu führen, hätte jede Verletzung der belgischen Neutralität ausgeschlossen und damit auch die Möglichkeit des Einsatzes des britischen Heers, um Frankreich zu Hilfe zu kommen. Die britische Liberale Partei als Ganze und das britische Volk hätten einen Krieg für Frankreich niemals gutgeheißen; deshalb war der belgische Scheingrund unerlässlich, um ihre Unterstützung zu gewinnen. Das Lager, welches die Intervention befürwortete, war sich dessen allzu bewusst. Greys historische Rede im Parlament am 3. August sowie die darauffolgende britische Propaganda durch die Regierung und die Presse sicherten diese Unterstützung.

Von Moltkes Taten von 1914 – sein Erfolg und sein Versagen – waren deswegen für den Osten wie für den Westen von weltgeschichtlicher Bedeutung: Sein sofortiges Handeln im August 1914 hielt die Russen davon ab, Ostdeutschland zu überrennen, aber der offensichtliche Fehler seiner Strategie im Westen führte letztlich zum Niedergang des deutschen und des britischen Reiches.


Gen. Sir Richard Shirreff, Nato-General und «Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe» 2011-2014

2017: Krieg mit Russland?

In seinen Post-mortem-Mitteilungen, – Miteilungen, die von 1916 bis 1924 von Rudolf Steiner aufgezeichnet und an von Moltkes Ehefrau Eliza weitergegeben wurden – bringt die Individualität Moltkes deutlich zum Ausdruck, dass er seine Fehlschläge von 1914 und diejenigen Deutschlands in den vorangehenden Jahrzehnten verstanden hat. Weiterhin hat er durchschaut, dass die Zukunft Europas von der gesunden Beziehung zwischen Mittel- und Osteuropa abhängt. Es ist bemerkenswert, dass fast genau einen Monat vor dem 100. Todestag von Helmuth von Moltke, der im 20. Jahrhundert ein solch ungeheures militärischen Schicksal hatte, das Ost-, Mittel- und Westeuropa beeinflusste, im Westen, in England, ein General als Verfasser eines Buchs in Erscheinung tritt, welches einen Krieg zwischen Russland und dem Westen für das Jahr 2017, hundert Jahre nach der russischen Revolution, voraussagt. Am 19. Mai erschien der britische General Sir Richard Shirreff (geboren 1955), der von März 2011 bis März 2014 stellvertretender oberster alliierter Befehlshaber der NATO für Europa war, im BBC-Radio, um über sein am gleichen Tag veröffentlichtes Buch 2017: War with Russia – An urgent warning from senior military command(7) zu sprechen. Im Vorwort zu seinem Roman, den er nicht als «Fiktion», sondern als «tatsachenbezogene Voraussage» bezeichnet, schreibt Shirreff, dass der Krieg des Westens mit Russland bereits begonnen hat: er begann im März 2014 in der Ukraine. Er sieht den Beginn der Krise in der 2008 gemachten «naiven Zusage für die NATO-Mitgliedschaft» der Ukraine: «eine Zusage für die kollektive Verteidigung, die militärisch nie durchgeführt werden könnte.» Man erinnere sich an die anglo-französische Zusage an Polen im März 1939… Diese Zusagen schienen fast wie dazu gemacht, ihre Empfänger zu voreiligem Handeln zu animieren im Hinblick auf die mächtigen Länder, die der Westen eigentlich zu besiegen versuchte. Aber «diesen Krieg», schreibt Shirreff, «könnten wir noch vermeiden, falls wir sofort handeln». Am Schluss seines Vorworts zitiert General Schirreff Trotzki (!): «Ihr interessiert euch vielleicht nicht für den Krieg, aber der Krieg interessiert sich für euch», was mit anderen Worten vielleicht so zu formulieren ist: «Das Volk ist vielleicht nicht interessiert am Krieg, aber die Generäle wollen das Steuergeld des Volkes.»

Schirreffs Buch ist das jüngste in der unwürdigen Tradition der kriegshetzerischen und Angst machenden britischen Fiktion, welche die Öffentlichkeit in eine außenpolitische Richtung zu «schubsen» versucht, die gerade von bestimmten Elitekreisen gewünscht wird. Diese Tradition begann wohl mit dem Buch The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer, ein Roman, der 1871 gleich nach dem deutschen Sieg über Frankreich herausgegeben und von George Tomkyns Chesney, Kapitän der Königlichen Pioniere, verfasst wurde. Es beschreibt die erfolgreiche Invasion Großbritanniens durch ein deutschsprachiges Land und das Ende des britischen Reiches. Auf dieses Buch folgten The Great War in England in 1897 von William Le Queux (1894), War of the Worlds von H.G. Wells (1898), The War in the Air (1907), Riddle of the Sands von Erskine Childers (1903), The Invasion of 1910 von Le Queux (1906), When William Came von «Saki» (Pseudonym für Hector Hugh Munro) (1913) und The Thirty-Nine Steps von John Buchan, das 1914, noch vor dem Kriegsausbruch geschrieben wurde, aber erst 1915 erschien. All diese außerordentlich populären Bücher, von denen einige mit Einleitungen oder Empfehlungen führender Persönlichkeiten wie Feldmarschall Lord Roberts versehen waren, hatten den wesentlichen Zweck, die öffentliche Meinung auf den Krieg vorzubereiten.(8)

Die EU als das neue Römische Reich

Für die klassisch gebildete britische Elite wurde damals die Zivilisation selbstverständlich mit der Welt des antiken Griechenlands und Rom identifiziert, als dessen Nachfolger sie sich sahen. Für die Mitglieder der «Tafelrunde»-Bewegung von Lord Alfred Milner (gegründet 1909) bestand zum Beispiel die Rolle Großbritanniens darin, «Freiheit und Licht» (die Grundlagen desjenigen, was sie für ein föderiertes Commonwealth hielten) gegen «Theokratie und Finsternis» durchzusetzen, welche sie als die autokratischen Grundsätze Asiens und der Mittelmächte betrachteten. Die «Tafelrunde»-Bewegung, in der Milner und seine Gefolgsmänner den Traum des Minenmagnaten Cecil Rhodes von einer Welt unter angloamerikanischer Herrschaft fortzusetzen suchten, wurde von einer geheimnisvollen Gruppe geleitet, welche Rhodes eine Art englischsprachigen Jesuitenorden nannte. Dieser teilte sich 1914 in zwei Flügel: der eine, konzentriert auf den imperialen britischen Staat und von Milner selbst und den älteren Mitgliedern aufrechterhalten, glaubte weiterhin an ein föderiertes Reich der englisch sprechenden Völker. Für diese älteren Männer hatte sich «die Welt um das britische Reich wie um einen Kern zu vereinigen.»(9) Die jüngeren Leiter der «Tafelrunde», wie Lionel Curtis und Philip Kerr hatten mehr mystische Ideen: das Empire sollte sterben und als ein Weltstaat oder «Commonwealth of Nations» wiedergeboren werden; diese Leute bekannten sich später zum Völkerbund und zur UNO. Sowohl die älteren als auch die jüngeren Mitglieder glaubten jedoch an eine Form von globalem Föderalismus unter der Führung der englischsprachigen Völker.

Diese Gedanken von Curtis und Kerr wurden in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts bis heute in verschiedenen angloamerikanischen Institutionen fortgeführt. Eine solche ist die 1988 gegründete Lothian Foundation (Kerr war 11. Marquess of Lothian in Schottland; die Kerrs sind eine alte schottische Adelsfamilie). Diese Stiftung ist bemerkenswert zurückhaltend, auch online. Seit 1989 ist ihr Direktor Andrea Bosco, ein italienischer Professor, ad personam Jean Monnet Lehrstuhlinhaber und Experte des Jean Monnet-Kompetenzzentrums an der Universität Florenz in Italien.(10) Er veranstaltet Vorlesungen und Konferenzen in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs) und britischen Universitäten, um für eine EU-befürwortende britische Außenpolitik einzutreten. Aus den zwei Bänden, die er unter dem Titel The Federal Idea Vols 1 and 2 herausgegeben hat, ist ersichtlich, dass Bosco sehr gute Beziehungen zu den transatlantischen und kontinentaleuropäischen akademischen Eliten hat. Während einer Jean-Monnet-Konferenz über «EU Eastern Partnership», die vom 11. bis 13. Juni 2014 in Riga, Lettland, stattfand, hielt Bosco einen Vortrag mit dem Titel «EU-Russia Relations in a Prospect of Further Enlargement of the EU» [EU-Russland-Beziehungen mit Aussicht auf die künftige Erweiterung der EU]. Diese ist eine der seltenen Vorlesungen Boscos, die online verfügbar sind.(11) Zuerst führt er aus, dass die EU in der Zukunft nicht schrumpfen wird und behauptet dann,  dass sie sich erweitern wird. Wo als Nächstes, fragt er. Es werden die Balkanländer sein und dann kommt das, was er «östliche Erweiterung» nennt. Er sagt, damit meine er «die Türkei…, die Ukraine, aber auch den Nahen Osten [Hervorhebung TB]. In der nächsten Zeit wird der Nahe Osten in die Europäische Union einbezogen werden… nicht nur im Handel, sondern auch in Bezug auf die Stabilität…» Die EU wird imstande sein, «ein Drehbuch zu schreiben», das allen Konflikten und Spannungen ein Ende setzen wird. Er sagt weiter, dass sich «die EU nach Nordafrika erweitern könne… Kandidaten wie Marokko, Tunesien, Libyen, Ägypten mögen einsteigen. Stellen wir uns eine Union mit 50 Mitgliedsstaaten vor! Einige junge Leute in diesem Saal könnten eine Union mit 50 Mitgliedsstaaten sehen» (so etwa um 2050), «wie die USA mit 14 [sic!] Kolonien begonnen haben». Der amerikanische Föderalismus war immer das Modell für europäische Föderalisten, einschließlich der Mitglieder der «Tafelrunde».

                                  Prof. Andrea Bosco als junger Mann

Der Euro, sagt Bosco mit Hybris, hat die EU vom «Objekt der Großmächte», das sie seit den 1950er Jahren war, in ein «global handelndes Subjekt» umgewandelt. Die Anziehungskraft der EU besteht nicht nur im Euro und im Handel, sondern auch «politisch, mehr als ökonomisch»; sie formt «ein System, das so mächtig ist…, dass kein Land, kein Länderbund in der Lage ist, sie herauszufordern». Er betont, dass niemand auf der Welt fähig ist, die NATO herauszufordern, und die «NATO ist das Geheimnis der Stärke der politischen Anziehungskraft der Europäischen Union.» Mit anderen Worten: er sagt, dass die NATO – deren Streitkräfte selbstverständlich immer amerikanischem Kommando unterliegen – de facto die Streitmacht der EU sei!

Die EU und Russland

«Das gegenwärtige Problem ist Russland», meint Andrea Bosco. Heute «ist Russland ein neoimperialistischer Staat»… Was ist heute Russlands Rolle in der Welt? Gleich Frankreich, sagt er, ist Russland ein revolutionärer Staat: «Die französische und die russische Revolution besitzen einen allgemeinen Wert. In der russischen Revolution haben wir ökonomische Klassenprivilegien abgeschafft, in der französischen Revolution haben wir die politischen Klassenprivilegien abgeschafft» (zu beachten ist hier der Wortgebrauch «wir»). Bosco setzt diese zwei Revolutionen in Beziehung zu zwei Pfeilern oder «Beinen», auf denen Europa wandeln muss: «Individualismus und Gemeinschaftswerte». «Die großen Errungenschaften der Erweiterung sind und werden auch weiterhin  diese zwei Werte sein.» Die EU, sagt er, ist keine geographische, religiöse oder an Rassen gebundene Organisation. Was ist sie dann? «Die EU ist hauptsächlich eine Organisation, die fähig ist, zwischenstaatliche Auseinandersetzungen zu lösen – das ist sie. Das ist ihre Stärke und deshalb kann sie exportiert werden. Früher haben wir die Konflikte durch Kriege gelöst und jetzt lösen wir sie verfassungsmäßig.» Und dann kommt er zu einem Punkt, den er früher ausgelassen hat: infolge dieses Aspekts der Konfliktlösung, sagt er, kann die EU Israel, Palästina und Syrien aufnehmen, «was bedeutet, dass die dynamischsten Konfliktquellen der Welt seit dem Untergang des römischen Reiches für immer stabilisiert werden.» [Hervorhebung TB].

Was hat denn Bosco in alledem beschrieben? – Pax Romana. Den Aufbau eines «Staates», einer «Struktur», wie er sie nennt, die alle die früheren Länder des römischen Reiches enthält, ebenso wie diejenigen in Nordeuropa, die nicht zum römischen Reich gehörten. Es ist das wiedergeborene erweiterte römische Reich, vorgeführt von einem Italiener unter der Flagge des französischen Transatlantikers Jean Monnet und des britischen Neoimperialisten Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian. Wir können uns hier an Rudolf Steiners Worte erinnern, die er am 29. November 1918 (GA 186) in Dornach gesagt hat: «Wenn man sachgemäß untersucht: Warum ist das westliche Menschenbild ein Gespenst? – so stellt sich… heraus, dass in die Instinkte, die zum Bild des Menschen geführt haben im westlichen Gebiete… zugrunde liegt das Gespenst des alten römischen Reiches…. Das ist nichts, was lebt, das ist etwas, was spukt wie das Gespenst eines Verstorbenen… Das Gespenst des Romanismus geht um im Westen.»

Bosco weist uns aber am Ende seines Vortrages darauf hin, dass wir in dem Streben nach dieser Pax Romana «ein Problem mit Russland…, einen Zusammenstoß mit Russland haben werden, da Russland die Erweiterung dieser Union nicht gerne sehen wird». Erinnern wir uns, dass das persische Reich in ähnlicher Art nicht gerade «glücklich» darüber war, zuzusehen, wie das römische Reich sich immer mehr in Persiens Machtbereich ausdehnte. Dann erinnert Bosco seine Zuhörer nachdrücklich, dass die EU infolge des Kalten Kriegs eine Gemeinschaft und dann eine Union geworden ist: «Ohne die Existenz der Sowjetunion, wären wir nie das geworden, was wir geworden sind. Die Vereinigten Staaten haben uns unter gewaltigen Druck gesetzt, dass wir uns vereinigen.» Und er fügt hinzu, dass Jean Monnet, der zwischen 1940 und 1943 in Washington war, «sich von amerikanischen Intellektuellen und Beamten dazu überreden ließ, nach Europa zurückzukehren und für die europäische Einheit zu arbeiten.» (Das war vor dem Kalten Krieg!) «Die Amerikaner übten grundlegenden Einfluss auf unser Geschäftsleben aus, da wir einen Kalten Krieg hatten.» Schließlich erwähnt er jetzt Putin, und beschreibt ihn auf rätselhafte Weise als «den erheblichsten Faktor für die politische Union Europas» und schließt mit den Worten, dass Europa ein politischer Staatenbund werden und eine Verfassung bekommen muss, denn «nur eine föderalistische Regierung kann dem Euro und der Eurozone die Instrumente – nicht nur ökonomische, sondern auch politische und soziale – für das Überleben bereitstellen.» Ohne es auszusprechen, behauptet Bosco, dass Spannung, Zusammenstoß und Konflikt – ein neuer Kalter Krieg mit Russland – notwendig sind, damit die EU diejenige Art von politischem Staatenbund und Rechtsstaatssystem wird, die er und seine Verbündeten sehen wollen. Genauso benützten die Amerikaner im ursprünglichen Kalten Krieg den Konflikt mit Russland dazu, die Europäer dazu zu drängen, erst eine Gemeinschaft, dann eine Union zu gestalten. Als Rudolf Steiner am 15. Januar 1917 (GA 174) die britische Weltpolitik darlegte, betonte er: «Will man nämlich eine kommerziell-industrielle Weltherrschaft begründen, so muss man das Hauptgebiet, auf das es ankommt, zunächst in zwei Teile teilen. Das hängt zusammen mit der Natur des Kommerziell-Industriellen. Ich kann mich nur durch einen Vergleich ausdrücken: Es fordert dasjenige, was auf der Welt des physischen Planes geschieht, immer eine Zweispaltung.»

Um ihr politisches neo-römisches Reich zu errichten, fühlen sich die Eurokraten und ihre Kollaborateure, so wie Bosco, gezwungen, sich Russland zum Feind zu machen. Ihre zentralisierten Vereinigten Staaten von Europa können mittels eines Konflikts zwischen Russland und dem Westen aufgebaut werden. General Sir Richard Shirreff und sein Buch 2017: War with Russia sind ein Teil der nächsten Phase in diesem Prozess. Der Versuch aber, das tote Gespenst des römischen Reiches wiederzubeleben, wird im Endeffekt wahrscheinlich nur zu einer weiteren, noch gewaltigeren Ost-West Katastrophe führen, als es die zwei Weltkriege waren.

Im neunten Jahrhundert hatte die Moltke-Individualität als Papst Nikolaus I. die Aufgabe, Mitteleuropa und Osteuropa voneinander zu trennen. 1914 fand sich Helmuth von Moltke an dasselbe Karma gebunden, begann aber, sich davon zu befreien – mit der tatkräftigen Hilfe seiner Gattin Eliza, die sein Gefährte im neunten Jahrhundert gewesen war. Nach seinem Tode erkannte er, dass seine zukünftige Aufgabe darin besteht, sich nach Osten zu wenden und mitzuhelfen, Mittel- und Osteuropa zum Wohle Europas und der ganzen Welt zusammenzuführen. Die Völker Mitteleuropas würden gut daran tun, die Worte der Moltke-Individualität in seiner Mitteilung vom 23. März 1918 zu beherzigen: «Man darf sich dem Osten nicht bloß mit ökonomischen Gedanken nähern; man muss so denken, dass der Osten ein spirituelles Verständnis für den mitteleuropäischen Menschen erreicht… Im Osten ‹warten› viele Menschen, die ‹gefunden› werden müssen, weil sie ‹verstehen› könnten, wenn man in der rechten Art zu ihnen sprechen würde. Jeder Versuch, sich denjenigen ‹östlichen Menschen› verständlich machen zu wollen, welche ‹westlich› geworden sind, ist vergeblich. Mit dem ‹Westen› werden diese Menschen verdorben, weil sie ihr eigenes Wesen ausrotten, wenn sie ‹Westliches› annehmen.» Die Völker im Westen müssen sich klarmachen, wie ihre Eliten, getrieben von ihrem römischen Gespenst, seit mehr als hundert Jahren Unruhe zwischen Mittel- und Osteuropa gestiftet haben.

Terry Boardman, Stourbridge (England)

Übersetzung aus dem Englischen: Gabor Wirth Veres und Brigitte Eichenberger

Anmerkungen:

(1) Helmuth von Moltke 1848–1916. Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Wirken, herausgegeben von Andreas Bracher und Thomas Meyer, Perseus Verlag Basel, Band 1, S. 403.
(2) a.a.O. S. 457.
(3) a.a.O. S. 456.
(4) a.a.O. S. 452.
(5) a.a.O. S. 403.
(6) a.a.O. Band 2, S. 216.
(7) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/17/britain-has-become-semi-pacifist-under-cameron-says-retired-gene/
(8) Vgl. A.J.A. Morris, The Scaremongers – The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896–1914, London 1984.
(9) Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (New York 1981), S. 126.
(10) Der Autor dankt Dr. Markus Osterrieder dafür, dass er ihn auf die Lothian Foundation und Andrea Bosco aufmerksam machte.
(11) Zu Boscos Vortrag siehe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U-BOPN7FRI

Vol. 2, No. 3, June 2016

In his Reflections and Memories, written in Homburg in November 1914, Helmuth von Moltke makes quite clear that “Our failure to overwhelm France in the first attack was due to England’s fast intervention”(1). The British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey kept British military plans and intentions to aid France in the event of war secret, even from his own fellow Cabinet members, until the secret came out in 1911. Later, in Berlin in the summer of 1915 Moltke describes that in the critical Battle of the Marne (Sept.1914) a French counter-attack from Paris against the right of von Kluck’s 1st Army, which was advancing to the east of Paris, opened up “a 25 km gap between the 1st and 2nd German Armies, into which three English divisions penetrated, whereupon the 2nd [German] Army withdrew its right wing.”(2) Further, Moltke writes that his decision to transfer two corps from the German right wing to help counter the Russian invasion of Germany in East Prussia “was a mistake and one that we would pay for at the Marne,”(3) and that “the most momentous decision that I faced as Chief of the General Staff was as to whether Germany should fight the anticipated war on two fronts, defensively, or at least on one front, offensively. After detailed investigation and studies, I decided in favour of the latter course, so that the offensive in the West could be carried out with the strongest possible forces, and a simultaneous war in the East could be fought with the minimum number of troops. There was some hope that a decisive action could be fought quickly in the West…but it could only be expected if the French army could be fought in open combat.”(4)

Moltke and the German General Staff thus hoped and expected to annihilate the French army in a major battle, as indeed had happened at Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Having knocked out the French, they then intended to send their troops East to deal with the Russians. This was in essence the so-called ‘Schlieffen Plan’ that had been proposed by Moltke’s predecessor as Chief of the General Staff,  Count Alfred von Schlieffen. But Schlieffen and Moltke both underestimated any  participation by the small British army and both evidently forgot that in 1870 France had not been supported by Britain. This is why, in 1914 the German military hoped for another quick victory over the French in 1914 by applying Schlieffen’s strategy. If it brought in the British on France’s side, no matter, France would be decisively defeated even with the British present. In November 1914 Moltke wrote: “The General Staff also repeatedly debated whether it might not be better to wage a defensive war. It was always rejected as it precluded the possibility of speedily engaging the enemy in his own territories. It was taken into account that Belgium would protest against our crossing but would not mount an armed resistance.”(5)The German (notably Prussian) military caste wanted a glorious offensive knockout victory on foreign soil as they had achieved at Sedan in 1870. They did not want to fight a long defensive war on German territory; however,  to be fighting a defensive war on both fronts would have stood them in better stead in the eyes of the world. It is perhaps unsurprising that the Prussian military caste would not care too much for such political considerations. Moltke was aware enough of them, however, to amend Schlieffen’s planning so as to avoid having to invade Holland as well as Belgium, but although he was Chief of the General Staff  from 1906 to 1914, he was unable to come up with a fundamentally different strategy from that of Schlieffen. As a result, the Belgian factor in German military planning brought about Britain’s intervention in the war, and that not only upset the German strategy at the crucial Battle of the Marne in 1914 but guaranteed a long war, which in European history, had always tended to be the result of British action (e.g. Britain’s wars against against Louis XIV and Napoleon). Eventually, British participation proved to be a major factor in America’s entry into the war in 1917.

However, although many have argued that Moltke’s actions led to German failure at the Marne and even that after the Marne the war was essentially lost for Germany, it could also be argued that ‘the Belgian factor’ in Moltke’s planning, which brought in the British, also led ultimately to the end of the British Empire, because the effort needed to defeat Germany turned out to be such a pyrrhic victory for the British(6) that the Empire was by 1919 in fact mortally wounded and steadily died away over the subsequent half-century.  A decision by the German General Staff under Moltke  to fight a defensive war on both fronts would have precluded any infringement of Belgian neutrality and any thus possibility of British involvement in support of France. The British Liberal Party as a whole and the British people would not have supported a war for France; the Belgian pretext was therefore essential to gain their support, as the pro-intervention faction were only too aware, and Grey’s historic speech in Parliament on 3 August and subsequent British propaganda from the Government and the Press secured that support.

Moltke’s actions in 1914  – his success and his failure  – were therefore of world-historical significance in both the East and the West: his prompt actions in August 1914 prevented the Russians from overrunning eastern Germany, but also the apparent failure of his strategy in the West led ultimately to the downfall of both the German and the British Empires.

2017: War with Russia?

In his post-mortem communications that were recorded by Rudolf Steiner and passed on to Moltke’s wife Eliza from 1916 to 1924, the individuality of Moltke clearly shows that he had understood his failures in 1914 and Germany’s failures in the previous decades. Furthermore, he had understood that the future of Europe depends on a healthy relationship being established between Central and Eastern Europe. It is striking then, that almost exactly one month before the 100th death day of General Helmuth von Moltke, who in the 20th century had such a colossal military destiny affecting eastern, central and western Europe, a General appears in the West, in England, as the author of a book that forecasts war between Russia and the West in 2017, one hundred years after the Russian Revolution. On 19 May the British General Sir Richard Shirreff (b.1955; see photo below), who from March 2011 to March 2014 was Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe, appeared on BBC radio to talk about the subject of his novel published that day: 2017: War with Russia – An urgent warning from senior military command.(7) In a novel that he does not call ‘fiction’ but “fact-based prediction” Shirreff writes in the preface that the West’s war with Russia has already begun; it began in Ukraine in March 2014. He sees the beginning of the crisis in the West’s “naive promise of NATO membership” to Ukraine in 2008: “a promise of collective defence that could never have been implemented militarily.” One thinks of the Anglo-French promise to Poland in March 1939… These were promises that seemed almost designed to encourage the receivers of the promise to act rashly with regard to the powerful countries that the West was actually seeking to defeat. But “this is a war”, writes Shirreff, “that could yet be avoided, if we act right now.” General Shirreff concludes his preface by quoting Trotsky (!): “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”, which is perhaps another way of saying: “the people may not be interested in war but the generals want the people’s money”.

Shirreff’s book is the latest in a dishonourable tradition of warmongering and scaremongering British fiction that seeks to ‘nudge’ the public in a foreign policy direction which just happens to be desired by certain elite circles. This tradition arguably began with The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer , a novella published in 1871, just after Prussia’s defeat of France, by George Tomkyns Chesney, a captain in the Royal Engineers. It describes a successful invasion of Britain by a German-speaking country and the end of the British Empire. The Battle of Dorking was followed by William Le Queux’s The Great War in England in 1897 (1894), H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898) and The War in the Air (1907), Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers (1903), The Invasion of 1910 by Le Queux (1906), When William Came by ‘Saki’(real name Hector Hugh Munro) (1913) and John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, written in 1914 just before the war but published in 1915. These hugely popular books, some of which had introductions or recommendations by senior public figures such as Field Marshal Lord Roberts, all had a very significant effect in preparing the public mind for war.(8)

The EU as the New Roman Empire

For the classically-educated British elite at that time, civilisation was of course identified with the ancient world of Greece and Rome, whose successors they held themselves to be. For the members of Lord Alfred Milner’s Round Table movement (founded 1909), for example, Britain’s role was to assert “freedom and light” (the principles of what they held to be a federated Commonwealth) against “theocracy and darkness”, which were regarded as the autocratic principles of Asia and the Central Powers. The Round Table movement, in which Milner and his acolytes sought to carry on mining magnate Cecil Rhodes’ dream of a world under Anglo-American dominion, led by a secretive group that Rhodes had conceived as a kind of English-speaking Jesuit Order, was by 1914 diverging into two wings: one, focused on the British imperial State and upheld by Milner himself and the older members, still believed in a federated Empire of the English-speaking peoples. To these older men, the world was to be united around the British Empire as a nucleus.”(9) The younger leaders of the Round Table, such as Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr (photo below), had more mystical notions: the Empire was to die and be reborn as a world community, or a “Commonwealth of Nations”; such men would later put their faith in the League of Nations and the UN. Both the older and the younger members, however, believed in a form of global federalism that they trusted would in effect be governed by the English-speaking peoples.

Such ideas of Curtis and Kerr were continued in various Anglo-American institutions in the second half of the 20th century and until the present day. One is the Lothian Foundation, founded in 1988. Kerr was the 11th Marquess of Lothian, in Scotland; the Kerrs are an old Scottish noble family). This foundation keeps itself remarkably well-hidden, even online. Its director since 1989 has been Andrea Bosco, an Italian professor who is Jean Monnet ad personam Chairholder and expert of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of Florence, Italy.(10) He organises lectures and conferences in cooperation with Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs) and British universities to advocate for a pro-EU British foreign policy. From two volumes he has edited, titled The Federal idea Vols.1 and 2 (Lothian Foundation Press 1991), it is evident that Bosco is very well-connected to the transatlanticist and continental European academic elites. On 11-13 June 2014 at the University of Riga, in Latvia, at a Jean Monnet Conference with the theme of “EU Eastern Partnership” Bosco gave a lecture titled “EU-Russia Relations in a Prospect of Further Enlargement of the EU”. It is one of the rare lectures by Bosco available online.(11)  First, he argues that the EU would not be shrinking in the future and then asserts it will enlarge. Where next, he asks? It will be the Balkan countries and then will come what he calls the “eastern enlargement”. By this he says he means “Turkey….Ukraine , but also the Middle East. The Middle East in the new time will be attracted within the European Union… not just trade but also stability…” The EU will be able to “provide a scenario” that will end all the conflicts and tensions in the Middle East. He goes on to say that the EU “might enlarge toward North Africa….candidates like Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt might get in. Let’s figure out a Union of 50 member states. Some young people in this room might see a Union of 50 member states”, (so for example, by 2050), “as the US, they started with 14 [sic] colonies.” American federalism has always been the model for European federalists, including the Round Tablers.

The Euro, says Bosco with hubris, has transformed the EU from being “an object of the Great Powers”, which it was from the 1950s, into a “global actor”. The attraction of the EU is not only trade and the Euro but also “political, more than economic”; it forms “a system that is so powerful… that no countries, no association of countries  in the world is able to challenge it”. He points out that no-one in the world can challenge NATO and that “NATO is the secret of the strength of the political attraction of the European Union”. In other words, he is saying that NATO – the military forces of which of course are always commanded by an American  -  is the de facto armed force of the EU!

“Now the problem, “he says, is “Russia”. Today, “Russia is a neo-imperialist state”…what is Russia’s role in the world today?” Like France,  he says, Russia is a revolutionary state…: “The value of the Soviet and French revolutions is universal. In the Russian revolution we abolished the economic privilege of class; in the French we abolished the political privilege of class” [note the use of the word ‘we’ here]. These two revolutions Bosco relates  to the two pillars or “legs” on which, he says, Europe has to walk: ”individualism and community values”. “The great achievement of enlargement has been and will be to keep these two values together”. The EU, he says, is not a geographical, religious, racial organisation, he says. So what is it? “The EU is mainly an organisation that is able to resolve conflicts among states – that is it. That is its strength and why it can be exported. Before, we solved conflicts with wars and now we solve them constitutionally.” And now he comes to something he left out earlier: because of this conflict-resolution aspect, he says, the EU can enlarge to take in Israel, Palestine and Syria “which means to stabilise forever the most dynamic source of world conflicts since the collapse of the Roman Empire.”

 What has Bosco described? Pax Romana. The construction of a ‘state’, a ‘system’, as he calls it, that includes all the former lands of the Roman Empire as well as all those in northern Europe that were not in the Roman Empire. It is the Roman Empire reborn and enlarged, presented by an Italian under the banner of the transatlanticist  Frenchman Jean Monnet, and the British neo-imperial federalist Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian. We can here recall the words of Rudolf Steiner on 29 Nov. 1918 in Dornach (GA 186) : “If we investigate in the right way the question as to why the Western image of the human being is a spectre, we shall discover….that the spectre of the ancient Roman Empire lies at the bottom of the instincts that have led to the image of the human being in the Western parts of the world…This is nothing that really possesses life but is something that haunts the present like the ghost of the dead…The spectre of Romanism is haunting the world.”

But Bosco tells us at the end of his presentation that, in trying to bring about this Pax Romana,  “we shall have a problem with Russia…a clash with Russia, because Russia will not be happy to see the enlargement of this Union”. Just as the Persian Empire, we can recall, was not exactly ‘happy’ to see the Roman Empire expanding ever more in Persia’s own part of the world. Then, significantly, Bosco reminds his audience that the EU became a community and then a Union because of the Cold War: “Without the existence of the Soviet Union”, he says, “we would never become as we did. We had enormous pressure from the US to get united”. In Washington in 1940-43 Jean Monnet, he says, “was persuaded by American intellectuals and civil servants to go back to Europe and work for European unity”. [N.b. that was before the Cold War!]. “The Americans had a fundamental influence on our business because we had a Cold War”. Finally, he now mentions Putin, who he enigmatically describes as “the most formidable factor for European political union” and finishes by saying Europe has to get a political union and a constitution, because only a federal government can provide the Euro, the Eurozone, with the instruments -  not just economic, but political and social instruments -  to survive.” Without spelling it out, Bosco is saying that tension, clash and conflict with Russia – a new Cold War with Russia -  will be necessary to enable the EU to become the kind of political Union and constitutional state system that he and his allies want to see, just as in the original Cold War, the Americans used that conflict with Russia to push the Europeans into creating first a community and then a Union. Rudolf Steiner pointed out on 15 January 1917 (GA 174)  when explaining British global policy that “in order to found a commercial and industrial world dominance, the first thing to do is to divide the main region into two parts…whatever takes place on the physical plane always requires a splitting into two parts.” In order to found their political neo-Roman Empire, the Eurocrats and their collaborators such as Bosco feel they need to make  Russia into an enemy. Their centralised, federal United States of Europe can be constructed by means of the conflict between Russia and the West. General Sir Richard Shirreff and his novel 2017: War with Russia are part of the next phase in that process. But the attempt to revive the dead spectre of the Roman Empire will lead ultimately only to another, even greater East-West catastrophe than the two World Wars.

In the ninth century the Moltke individuality, as Pope Nicholas I, had to separate Central from Eastern Europe. In 1914 Moltke found himself bound by that same karma but was already beginning to free himself from it, aided by his wife Elixa, who had been his comrade in the ninth century. After death, he realised his future task was to turn towards the East and help to bring Central and Eastern Europe together for the good of Europe and the world as a whole. People in Central Europe today would do well to heed the words of the Moltke individuality in his message of 23 March 1918: “We may not approach the east with purely economic thinking: we have to think in such a way that the East can reach a spiritual understanding with Middle Europe…in the East, many people are waiting who must be ‘found’ for they would be able to ‘understand’ if one spoke to them in the right way. Any attempt to reach an understanding with those ‘people of the East’ who have become ‘western’ is futile. ‘The West’ corrupts these people since they eradicate their own being when they take into themselves ‘the West’.” Those in the West need to wake up to how their elites, driven by their Roman spectre,  have for over a hundred years been stirring up trouble between Central and Eastern Europe.

 Notes

1.Light for the new Millennium: Rudolf Steiner, Helmuth von Moltke, Eliza von Moltke – Letters, Documents and After-Death Communications. Ed. T.H.Meyer, 1997 (rep. 2014) p. 107.

2. Ibid., p.90.

3. Ibid.,p. 89.

4. Ibid., p.85.

5. Ibid., p.106.

6. Ibid., p.235.

7. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/17/britain-has-become-semi-pacifist-under-cameron-says-retired-gene/

8. See A.J.A. Morris, The Scaremongers – The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896-1914 (London, 1984)

9 Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, (New York, 1981) p.126.

10. The author is grateful to Dr. Markus Osterrieder for drawing his attention to the Lothian Foundation and Andrea Bosco.

11.Bosco’s lecture can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U-BOPN7FRI

In his Reflections and Memories, written in Homburg in November 1914, General Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the German General Staff at the outbreak of war in 1914,  makes quite clear that “Our failure to overwhelm France in the first attack was due to England’s fast intervention”(1). The British had been planning since 1906 to send their forces to France to collaborate with the French army in a great attack against Germany in the European war that all the ruling elites of the Great Powers felt was approaching. By 1914, all British preparations had been made down to the last detail to land the six divisions of the British Expeditionary Force in France as  soon as war broke out. The British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey kept British military plans and intentions to aid France in the event of war secret, even from his own fellow Cabinet members, until the secret came out in 1911. Later, in Berlin in the summer of 1915 Moltke describes that in the critical Battle of the Marne (Sept.1914) a French counter-attack from Paris against the right of von Kluck’s 1st Army, which was advancing to the east of Paris, opened up “a 25 km gap between the 1st and 2nd German Armies, into which three English divisions penetrated, whereupon the 2nd [German] Army withdrew its right wing.”(2) Further, Moltke writes that his decision to transfer two corps from the German right wing to help counter the Russian invasion of Germany in East Prussia “was a mistake and one that we would pay for at the Marne,”(3) and that “the most momentous decision that I faced as Chief of the General Staff was as to whether Germany should fight the anticipated war on two fronts, defensively, or at least on one front, offensively. After detailed investigation and studies, I decided in favour of the latter course, so that the offensive in the West could be carried out with the strongest possible forces, and a simultaneous war in the East could be fought with the minimum number of troops. There was some hope that a decisive action could be fought quickly in the West…but it could only be expected if the French army could be fought in open combat.”(4)

Moltke and the German General Staff thus hoped and expected to annihilate the French army in a major battle, as indeed had happened at Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Having knocked out the French, they then intended to send their troops East to deal with the Russians. This was in essence the so-called ‘Schlieffen Plan’ that had been proposed by Moltke’s predecessor as Chief of the General Staff,  Count Alfred von Schlieffen. The plan of a massive attack in the West to destroy the French armies required moving into French via Belgium and thus a deliberate infringement of Belgian neutrality. Those in Britain in the circle of King Edward VII (1901-1910) and others in the elite who were looking forward to a war against Germany counted on using such a German infringement of Belgian neutrality as a pretext to enable Britain to fight alongside France.

But Schlieffen and Moltke both underestimated any participation by the small British army and both evidently forgot that in 1870 France had not been supported by Britain. This is why, in 1914 the German military hoped for another quick victory over the French in 1914 by applying Schlieffen’s strategy. If it brought in the British on France’s side, no matter, France would be decisively defeated even with the British present. In November 1914 Moltke wrote: “The General Staff also repeatedly debated whether it might not be better to wage a defensive war. It was always rejected as it precluded the possibility of speedily engaging the enemy in his own territories. It was taken into account that Belgium would protest against our crossing but would not mount an armed resistance.”(5)   So the German High Command did not want to fight in Germany, although they ended up doing that anyway, as German territory was invaded in force by French and Russian armies before the main German thrust into France via Belgium. The German (notably Prussian) military caste wanted a glorious offensive knockout victory on foreign soil as they had achieved at Sedan in 1870. They did not want to fight a long defensive war on German territory; however,  to be fighting a defensive war on both fronts would have stood them in better stead in the eyes of the world. It is perhaps unsurprising that the Prussian military caste would not care too much for such political considerations. Moltke was aware enough of them, however, to amend Schlieffen’s planning so as to avoid having to invade Holland as well as Belgium, but although he was Chief of the General Staff  from 1906 to 1914, he was unable to come up with a fundamentally different strategy from that of Schlieffen. As a result, the Belgian factor in German military planning brought about Britain’s intervention in the war, and that not only upset the German strategy at the crucial Battle of the Marne in 1914 but guaranteed a long war, which in European history, had always tended to be the result of British action (e.g. Britain’s wars against against Louis XIV and Napoleon). Eventually, British participation proved to be a major factor in America’s entry into the war in 1917.
However, although many have argued that Moltke’s actions led to German failure at the Marne and even that after the Marne the war was essentially lost for Germany, it could also be argued that ‘the Belgian factor’ in Moltke’s planning, which brought in the British, also led ultimately to the end of the British Empire, because the effort needed to defeat Germany turned out to be such a pyrrhic victory for the British(6) that the Empire was by 1919 in fact mortally wounded and steadily died away over the subsequent half-century. Britain’s situation in 1919 was entirely different from what it had been in 1914. The country’s wartime and post-war debts to the USA ($4.27 billion; that was about £40 billion at 2006 rates, and if adjusted by the growth in the Gross Domestic Product, about £225 billion), which it was unable to repay (it ceased to service this debt in 1932), meant that Britain was now subject to the economic and political will of the United States, as evidenced at the Treaty of Washington (1921) when the USA forced Britain to downgrade its navy and abandon its alliance with Japan. A decision by the German General Staff under Moltke  to fight a defensive war on both fronts would have precluded any infringement of Belgian neutrality and any thus possibility of British involvement in support of France. Of course, the British elite might still have pressed for the government to join the war in support of France, as indeed a few leading members of the British Cabinet (Grey, Churchill, Asquith) did on 2 August 1914 along with the leaders of the Conservative Party, who sent a message to the Liberal Cabinet that day urging them to fight for France (no mention was made of Belgium!), but the British Liberal Party as a whole and the British people would not have supported a war for France; the Belgian pretext was therefore essential to gain their support, as the pro-intervention faction were only too aware, and Grey’s historic speech in Parliament on 3 August and subsequent British propaganda from the Government and the Press secured that support.

Moltke’s actions in 1914  – his success and his failure  – were therefore of world-historical significance in both the East and the West: his prompt actions in August 1914 prevented the Russians from overrunning eastern Germany, but also the apparent failure of his strategy in the West led ultimately to the downfall of both the German and the British Empires.

2017: War with Russia?

In his post-mortem communications that were recorded by Rudolf Steiner and passed on to Moltke’s wife Eliza from 1916 to 1924 (contained in  the book Light for the new Millennium [1997/2014], above), the individuality of Moltke clearly shows that he had understood his failures in 1914 and Germany’s failures in the previous decades. Furthermore, he had understood that the future of Europe depends on a healthy relationship being established between Central and Eastern Europe. It is striking then, that almost exactly one month before the 100th death day of General Helmuth von Moltke, who in the 20th century had such a colossal military destiny affecting eastern, central and western Europe, a General appears in the West, in England, as the author of a book that forecasts war between Russia and the West in 2017, one hundred years after the Russian Revolution. On 19 May the British General Sir Richard Shirreff (b.1955), who from March 2011 to March 2014 was Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe, appeared on BBC radio to talk about the subject of his novel published that day: 2017: War with Russia – An urgent warning from senior military command.(7)

In a novel that he does not call ‘fiction’ but “fact-based prediction” Shirreff writes in the preface that the West’s war with Russia has already begun; it began in Ukraine in March 2014. He sees the beginning of the crisis in the West’s “naive promise of NATO membership” to Ukraine in 2008: “a promise of collective defence that could never have been implemented militarily.” One thinks of the Anglo-French promise to Poland in March 1939… These were promises that seemed almost designed to encourage the receivers of the promise to act rashly with regard to the powerful countries that the West was actually seeking to defeat. But “this is a war”, writes Shirreff, “that could yet be avoided, if we act right now.” General Shirreff concludes his preface by quoting Trotsky (!): “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”, which is perhaps another way of saying: “the people may not be interested in war but the generals want the people’s money”.

Shirreff’s book is the latest in a dishonourable tradition of warmongering and scaremongering British fiction that seeks to ‘nudge’ the public in a foreign policy direction which just happens to be desired by certain elite circles. This tradition arguably began with The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer, a novella published in 1871, just after Prussia’s defeat of France, by George Tomkyns Chesney, a captain in the Royal Engineers. It describes a successful invasion of Britain by a German-speaking country and the end of the British Empire. The Battle of Dorking was followed by William Le Queux’s The Great War in England in 1897 (1894), H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898) and The War in the Air (1907), Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers (1903), The Invasion of 1910 by Le Queux (1906), When William Came by ‘Saki’(real name Hector Hugh Munro) (1913) and John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, written in 1914 just before the war but published in 1915. These hugely popular books, some of which had introductions or recommendations by senior public figures such as Field Marshal Lord Roberts, all had a very significant effect in preparing the public mind for war.(8)

The EU as the New Roman Empire
For the classically-educated British elite at that time, civilisation was of course identified with the ancient world of Greece and Rome, whose successors they held themselves to be. For the members of Lord Alfred Milner’s Round Table movement (founded 1909), for example, Britain’s role was to assert “freedom and light” (the principles of what they held to be a federated Commonwealth) against “theocracy and darkness”, which were regarded as the autocratic principles of Asia and the Central Powers. The Round Table movement, in which Milner and his acolytes sought to carry on mining magnate Cecil Rhodes’ dream of a world under Anglo-American dominion, led by a secretive group that Rhodes had conceived as a kind of English-speaking Jesuit Order, was by 1914 diverging into two wings: one, focused on the British imperial State and upheld by Milner himself and the older members, still believed in a federated Empire of the English-speaking peoples. To these older men, the world was to be united around the British Empire as a nucleus.”(9). The younger leaders of the Round Table, such as Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr, had more mystical notions: the Empire was to die and be reborn as a world community, or a “Commonwealth of Nations”; such men would later put their faith in the League of Nations and the UN. Both the older and the younger members, however, believed in a form of global federalism that they trusted would in effect be governed by the English-speaking peoples. Such ideas of Curtis and Kerr were continued in various Anglo-American institutions in the second half of the 20th century and until the present day. One is the Lothian Foundation, founded in 1988.

Kerr (see photo above, left) was the 11th Marquess of Lothian, in Scotland; the Kerrs are an old Scottish noble family). This foundation keeps itself remarkably well-hidden, even online. Its director since 1989 has been Andrea Bosco (photo above, right), an Italian professor who is Jean Monnet ad personam Chairholder and expert of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of Florence, Italy.(10) He organises lectures and conferences in cooperation with Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs) and British universities to advocate for a pro-EU British foreign policy. From two volumes he has edited, titled The Federal idea Vols.1 and 2 (Lothian Foundation Press 1991), it is evident that Bosco is very well-connected to the transatlanticist and continental European academic elites. On 11-13 June 2014 at the University of Riga, in Latvia, at a Jean Monnet Conference with the theme of “EU Eastern Partnership” Bosco gave a lecture titled “EU-Russia Relations in a Prospect of Further Enlargement of the EU”. It is one of the rare lectures by Bosco available online.(11)  First, he argues that the EU would not be shrinking in the future and then asserts it will enlarge. Where next, he asks? It will be the western Balkan countries and then will come what he calls the “eastern enlargement”. By this he says he means “Turkey….Ukraine , but also the Middle East. The Middle East in the new time will be attracted within the European Union… not just trade but also stability…” The EU will be able to “provide a scenario” that will end all the conflicts and tensions in the Middle East. He goes on to say that the EU “might enlarge toward North Africa….candidates like Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt might get in. Let’s figure out a Union of 50 member states. Some young people in this room might see a Union of 50 member states”, (for example, by 2050), “as the US, they started with 14 [sic] colonies.” American federalism has always been the model for European federalists, including the Round Tablers.
    The Euro, says Bosco with hubris, has transformed the EU from being “an object of the Great Powers”, which it was from the 1950s, into a “global actor”. The attraction of the EU is not only trade and the Euro but also “political, more than economic”; it forms “a system that is so powerful… that no countries, no association of countries  in the world is able to challenge it”. He points out that no-one in the world can challenge NATO and that “NATO is the secret of the strength of the political attraction of the European Union”. In other words, he is saying that NATO – the military forces of which of course are always commanded by an American  -  is the de facto armed force of the EU!
    “Now the problem, “he says, is “Russia”. Today, “Russia is a neo-imperialist state”…what is Russia’s role in the world today?” Russia could have become a member of the EU between 1997 and 2000, he says, because the Italians Romano Prodi and Silvio Berlusconi had promoted it. The Americans had wanted to work with the Russians. But “the Germans were against this idea”. We see that Bosco insinuates that Germany was opposed to bringing Russia into the EU. He may have regarded this as a German error, but if Germany did indeed keep Russia out of the EU at that time, Germany may have been doing Russia a favour in keeping it out of a construct that is actually harmful for Europe and for Russia. And anyway, he says, Russia too had its own interests which it wanted to defend. Then of course Putin came to power; Bosco glosses over this without mentioning it.  Like France, he says, Russia is a revolutionary state…: “The value of the Soviet and French revolutions is universal. In the Russian revolution we abolished the economic privilege of class; in the French we abolished the political privilege of class” [note the use of the word ‘we’ here]. These two revolutions Bosco relates  to the two pillars or “legs” on which, he says, Europe has to walk: ”individualism and community values”. “The great achievement of enlargement has been and will be to keep these two values together”. The EU, he says, is not a geographical, religious, racial organisation, he says. So what is it? “The EU is mainly an organisation that is able to resolve conflicts among states – that is it. That is its strength and why it can be exported. Before, we solved conflicts with wars and now we solve them constitutionally.” And now he comes to something he left out earlier: because of this conflict-resolution aspect, he says, the EU can enlarge to take in Israel, Palestine and Syria “which means to stabilise forever the most dynamic source of world conflicts since the collapse of the Roman Empire.”
    What has Bosco described? Pax Romana. The construction of a ‘state’, a ‘system’, as he calls it, that includes all the former lands of the Roman Empire as well as all those in northern Europe that were not in the Roman Empire. It is the Roman Empire reborn and enlarged, presented by an Italian under the banner of the transatlanticist  Frenchman Jean Monnet, and the British neo-imperial federalist Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian. We can here recall the words of Rudolf Steiner on 29 Nov. 1918 in Dornach (GA 186) : “If we investigate in the right way the question as to why the Western image of the human being is a spectre, we shall discover….that the spectre of the ancient Roman Empire lies at the bottom of the instincts that have led to the image of the human being in the Western parts of the world…This is nothing that really possesses life but is something that haunts the present like the ghost of the dead…The spectre of Romanism is haunting the West.”
    But Bosco tells us at the end of his presentation that, in trying to bring about this Pax Romana,  “we shall have a problem with Russia…a clash with Russia, because Russia will not be happy to see the enlargement of this Union”. Just as the Persian Empire, we can recall, was not exactly ‘happy’ to see the Roman Empire expanding ever more in Persia’s own part of the world. Then, significantly, Bosco reminds his audience that the EU became a community and then a Union because of the Cold War: “Without the existence of the Soviet Union”, he says, “we would never become as we did. We had enormous pressure from the US to get united”. In Washington in 1940-43 Jean Monnet, he says, “was persuaded by American intellectuals and civil servants to go back to Europe and work for European unity”. [N.b. that was before the Cold War!]. “The Americans had a fundamental influence on our business because we had a Cold War”. Finally, he now mentions Putin, who he enigmatically describes as “the most formidable factor for European political union” and finishes by saying Europe has to get a political union and a constitution, because only a federal government can provide the Euro, the Eurozone, with the instruments -  not just economic, but political and social instruments -  to survive.” Without spelling it out, Bosco is saying that tension, clash and conflict with Russia – a new Cold War with Russia -  will be necessary to enable the EU to become the kind of political Union and constitutional state system that he and his allies want to see, just as in the original Cold War, the Americans used that conflict with Russia to push the Europeans into creating first a community and then a Union. Rudolf Steiner pointed out on 15 January 1917 (GA 173c)  when explaining how the British devise their global policies that “in order to found a commercial and industrial world dominance, the first thing to do is to divide the main region into two parts…whatever takes place on the physical plane always requires a splitting into two parts.” In order to found their political neo-Roman Empire, the Eurocrats and their collaborators such as Bosco feel they need to make Russia into an enemy. Their centralised, federal United States of Europe can be constructed by means of the conflict between Russia and the West. General Sir Richard Shirreff and his novel 2017: War with Russia are part of the next phase in that process. But the attempt to revive the dead spectre of the Roman Empire will lead ultimately only to another, even greater East-West catastrophe than the two World Wars.

In the ninth century the Moltke individuality, as Pope Nicholas I, had to separate Central from Eastern Europe. In 1914 Moltke found himself bound by that same karma but was already beginning to free himself from it, aided by his wife Eliza, who had been his comrade in the ninth century. After death, he realised his future task was to turn towards the East and help to bring Central and Eastern Europe together for the good of Europe and the world as a whole. People in Central Europe today would do well to heed the words of the Moltke individuality in his message of 23 March 1918: “We must not approach the east with purely economic thinking: we have to think in such a way that the East can reach a spiritual understanding with Middle Europe…in the East, many people are waiting who must be ‘found’, for they would be able to ‘understand’ if one spoke to them in the right way. Any attempt to reach an understanding with those ‘people of the East’ who have become ‘western’ is futile. ‘The West’ corrupts these people since they eradicate their own being when they take into themselves ‘the West’.”
    Those in the West need to wake up to how their elites, driven by their Roman spectre,  have for over a hundred years been stirring up trouble between Central and Eastern Europe.

Notes
1.Light for the new Millennium: Rudolf Steiner, Helmuth von Moltke, Eliza von Moltke – Letters, Documents and After-Death Communications. Ed. T.H.Meyer, 1997 (rep. 2014) p. 107.
2. Ibid., p.90.
3. Ibid.,p. 89.
4. Ibid., p.85.
5. Ibid., p.106.
6. Ibid., p.235.
7.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/17/britain-has-become-semi-pacifist-under-cameron-says-retired-gene/
8. See A.J.A. Morris, The Scaremongers – The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896-1914 (London, 1984)
9 Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, (New York, 1981) p.126.
10. The author is grateful to Dr. Markus Osterrieder for drawing his attention to the existence of the Lothian Foundation and of Andrea Bosco.
11.Bosco’s lecture can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U-BOPN7FRI

Canterbury -  the capital of the English shire of Kent, the shire closest to the European Continent. It was an ancient Celtic and then Roman settlement, where St Augustine arrived from Rome in 597 to convert the Anglo-saxons, beginning with King Aethelbert of Kent, whose Christian wife Bertha was a Frank (another Germanic people). Against the odds perhaps, Augustine succeeded and so Canterbury became not only the part of England most associated with Rome and the Roman church, but the seat of the Archbishops of England and also, after the murder there of Archbishop Thomas Becket (later canonised) in 1170, an important pilgrimage site for pilgrims from all over Europe. Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343-1400), is usually considered to be “the Father of English Literature” and also to have been the writer who settled the vernacular form style of Middle English (1), a language still somewhat removed from the English we speak today. It is thought he most likely wrote his famous “Canterbury Tales” in Kent in the 1380s; the Tales were about a colourful group of pilgrims on the way to the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. After Chaucer, arguably the next great literary name known to most English people is that of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), dramatist, poet and, some would say, England’s greatest philosopher, as the English prefer not to take their philosophy neat but shaken and stirred with the drama of the stage. In succeeding centuries, the English came to regard themselves as the people “who speak the language that Shakespeare spoke” – even if not quite so poetically, and held Chaucer and Shakespeare to be the two great paragons of the language.

The Pilgrims Society

By 1900, in the Social Darwinist and racist atmosphere that was widespread throughout Europe and America in those days, many in the East Coast American elite, as supposed ‘fellow Anglo-saxons’, had come to regard themselves too as the heirs of Chaucer and Shakespeare. And so it was that when, in 1902, under a new King of England, Edward VII (1901-1910) an Anglo-American group of the self-designated “most distinguished people” decided to form a society to “promote good-will, good-fellowship, abiding friendship and an everlasting peace between the United States and Great Britain”, they chose as the central figure for their new Society’s emblem Geoffrey Chaucer as pilgrim, the alleged ancestor of the common language and thus of the common values which they felt they shared across the Atlantic Ocean. For them, these values included not only the English language and literature, but also free market capitalism, Protestantism and individual liberty, which they saw as grounded in the Magna Carta, signed by King John and his barons in 1215, (another of the many commemorations that will occur in 2015).(2) This transatlantic group of “the most distinguished people” called their society, The Pilgrims. Within only a few years, they had become the social crème de la crème and included many of those at the very top of British and American societies, in the nobility, the financial and commercial plutocracy, the military, the upper echelons of Freemasonry, and academia. In those years before the First World War, The Pilgrims were the nest perched at the top of the Anglo-American elite’s tree of power. In their emblem we see Chaucer, elderly, prosperous-looking, rotund – like many of the Pilgrims themselves – with white hair and beard and dressed in reddish mediaeval costume, riding a white horse that looks a bit too small for him. He points the way forward with his left hand. Alongside in the foreground a proud golden male lion heads resolutely in the same direction, slightly ahead of the horse, while on the rump of the horse sits an American eagle, wings folded, also looking in the same direction. Man, horse, lion and eagle are all heading strongly towards the right of the image, as seen by the onlooker. Around them all is green vegetation in florid mediaeval style. The Society’s name, The Pilgrims, is written in red on a white background (redolent of the Templar and St. George colours) immediately before the face of Chaucer. All four figures are heading towards their own Canterbury, the goal of their pilgrimage. We know something of what mediaeval pilgrims were seeking, but what was the goal of The Pilgrims of 1902? Cryptic clues are given in the two scrolls above and below the four figures. Below them we see words; above the four figures we see images. Below are three enigmatic, abstract, Latin words in eleven letters – HIC ET UBIQUE (‘here and everywhere’, which can only mean the English-speaking people are here – at home – and everywhere in the world: a suitable motto for the age of imperialism); above them, we see four energetic images of physical and technological power, of  motive force in the modern age, gazed upon by the now hatless and horseless pilgrim, carrying a staff, his right hand raised, in wonder or in blessing. In the early years of the Society there was a fifth image portrayed – a cigar-shaped airship. This was perhaps later dropped in view of the association of Zeppelin airships with Germany!(3) The emblem thus shows thoughts below, willpower above – a noteworthy arrangement!

Chaucer’s Middle English still owed a lot to the pronunciation and rhythms of French, spoken by England’s conquering Norman-Viking upper class, whereas the English of Shakespeare’s time, though sometimes still difficult, is far more recognisable and understandable to us today. In 1958 the senior director of The Times newspaper and chairman of The Pilgrims Society told Richard Nixon (the former US president) that The Pilgrims Society is “the most important Anglo-American Society in the whole world”, but given the occupations and power of the members of the Society, he clearly was not thinking only of language and literature. There were two Pilgrims’ Societies, one in Britain, founded in 1902 four months after the death of Cecil Rhodes, and one in the USA, founded in 1903, but they regarded themselves as twins, joined at the hip, so to speak, essentially one organisation. Some saw them as Romulus and Remus, the legendary twins raised by a she-wolf, who founded ancient Rome, and certainly, many members of The Pilgrims saw the English-speaking peoples as the Romans of their day and themselves as the Senators of Britain and America. Indeed, the two Pilgrim Societies were like Twin Towers of the elites of both countries, and like the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre, they were of the highest (social) level. 

Some of the men – and they were all men; no women were allowed to become Pilgrims until 1978 despite Queen Elizabeth II being the patron (!) – who belonged to these two Societies went on to form more well-known organisations such as The Royal Society of International Affairs (Chatham House) in 1919 and, in the USA, the Council On Foreign Relations in 1921, (4) The League of Nations, the United Nations, NATO, the Bilderberg Group, the World Economic Forum (with its annual meetings in Davos, Switzerland) and countless other initiatives and think-tanks for Anglo-American world control both by direct and increasingly, indirect means. This kind of collaboration among the elites of the English-speaking world is what the great and unashamed imperialist, Cecil Rhodes, had called for and worked for before his early death in 1902, the year The Pilgrims’ Society was founded. His collaborator and successor, Sir Alfred Milner (born in 1854, a year after Rhodes), continued Rhodes’ work most powerfully, until his own death in 1925. Neither Rhodes nor Milner were fixated on Britain and its monarchy and political system; it was what they called ‘the English-speaking race’ that they cared about, and its spiritual centre at Oxford University. The spirit of The Pilgrims could be heard in the words of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (her husband, former US President  Bill Clinton, had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford) in a speech at The Council On Foreign Relations 8 Sept, 2010 as the year 2011, the year that would bring the “Arab Spring”, approached:

“Throughout our history, through hot wars and cold, through economic struggles and the long march to a more perfect union(5), Americans have always risen to the challenges we have faced. That is who we are. It is in our DNA. [in Rhodes's time, the words would have been: "it's who we are as a race, it's in our blood" - TB] …let me say it clearly: the US can, must and will lead in this new century…[this is] a new American moment….our global leadership IS essential….our openness, innovation, determination and devotion to core values have never been more needed. This is a moment that must be seized through hard work and bold decisions to lay the foundations for lasting American leadership for decades to come…. For the United States, global leadership is both a responsibility and an unparalleled opportunity.” [emphasis TB]

Britain and Ottoman Turkey: Strategic Concerns

The two Pilgrims Societies played a not insignificant part in preparing Britain and the USA for the First World War, and a key target for the western allies in that war was Ottoman Turkey, which controlled Mesopotamia, the region where a new oil industry was growing up in order to exploit recently discovered oilfields; it was therefore a region in which both British and American companies were interested. Turkish-controlled territory also bordered on British-ruled Egypt and the Suez Canal, the Red Sea bottleneck in Yemen, near Aden, and the Persian Gulf – the overland route to British India. The fate and the decisions of Turkey were therefore of great interest to Britain. For their own selfish reasons, desiring to carve up the Turkish-controlled Middle East between them, and also because they had been urgently asked to do so by their Russian ally whose trade was bottled up in the Black Sea by the Turks, both Britain and France launched the Gallipoli campaign against Turkey that was conducted from February 1915 to January 1916 – the commemoration of which is another of this year’s significant anniversaries. As imperialist Powers with extensive overseas empires, Britain and France both ruled large numbers of Muslims. During and after the First World War, Britain and France destroyed the Ottoman Empire, and with its disappearance went the religious-political office of the Caliphate, abolished on 3 March 1924 by the leader of the new Turkish republic,  Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk). Thus disappeared an essentially mediaeval institution that had combined the religious and the political life, a linkage which had been associated with Islam since its very beginnings in the lifetime of the Prophet Mohammed (570-632). Since the Second World War, many Muslims from former colonies have sought to improve their circumstances by moving to Britain and France. And gradually, amongst them, some became attracted by fundamentalist, literalist and puritanical interpretations of Islam such as those advocated by the Wahhabi sect, which has been closely associated with the House of Saud since their mutual pact of 1744. With British help from 1914 onwards and with a great deal of extremely bloody violence perpetrated by its fierce military religious corps, the Ikhwan (the Brotherhood), who would normally slaughter all male captives, the House of Saud won out over its Arab rivals.

Apart from the pain of the defeat at Gallipoli and the peculiar horrors of the Gallipoli campaign itself, it has not been accorded by the British public the attention it deserves, perhaps because it was fought so far away from what was seen as the main danger – the German Army across the Channel – and was after all a major defeat at the hands of an enemy the British considered to be inferior and ‘finished’ in historical terms. But in fact, the Gallipoli campaign in particular and the war against Turkey in general was of the highest, long-term strategic significance. The Gallipoli campaign was not just another Churchillian bold, dramatic and even romantic effort to strike at the enemy’s underbelly, as it has so often been misrepresented. It had to do with keeping Russia in the Alliance (with Britain and France) – and thus maintaining pressure on the eastern flanks of the Central Powers (the German and Austo-Hungarian Empires, later joined by the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria)  -  by gaining for Russia that which the Russians could not gain for themselves, namely Constantinople and the Ottoman-controlled Dardanelles Straits which connect the Aegean Sea – and hence the Mediterranean – to the Black Sea. More importantly for the British, it meant blocking Germany’s advance into the Near East via the Balkans – a railway-borne advance which would have taken the Germans into the new oilfield regions of Iran and Mesopotamia and also too near to that ‘artery of the British Empire’, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. For reasons of critical economic resources (not least the Royal Navy’s need for the new energy resource of oil) and strategic geopolitics, these two regions were critical for the defence of Britain’s Indian Empire and indeed of the whole arc of control around the Indian Ocean:  from Cape Town and Cairo through Baghdad and Calcutta to Singapore, Perth, Sydney and Wellington.

Political Interests in the Near East

As Rudolf Steiner pointed out on 21 March 1921, the British were prepared “to wage war to the knife”(6) i.e. to do anything to maintain their control of this vast region, and the Germans, by driving their Berlin-Baghdad Railway into it via the territories of their Turkish allies, were poking a stick into the lion’s den, as it were, that is, in the eyes of the British ruling elite they were regarded as offending against  Britain’s supreme geostrategic interest – the control of routes to India. German historian Markus Osterrieder has pointed out in his new book Welt im Umbruch (2014) (7) that both sides resorted to exploiting nationalism and religion in the Near East as a means of waging war. Both sides stirred up the old Muslim yearning for a pan-Islamic Caliphate, the Germans seeking to unite Muslims under the Turkish Sultan-Caliph, and the British seeking to unite them under an Arab Caliph, Sherif Hussein of Mecca, supposedly descended from the family of the Prophet himself.

William Shakespear and Arabia

Most people have heard of Lawrence of Arabia, even if they have only seen the epic film (1962) of the same name by David Lean, starring Peter O’Toole as T.E.  Lawrence, so they will be familiar with Lawrence’s role, from 1917 onwards, as a leader of the Arab revolt and promoter of the cause of Arab nationalism and how Faisal, the man he supported, who was the son of Sherif Hussein, was eventually made King of the new client state of Iraq by the British in 1921. But few will have heard of another Briton, active in Arabia from 1909 until he was killed there in January 1915, who arguably did far more than Lawrence, ultimately, to determine the fate of the Near East and indeed of the world as a whole. This was William Shakespear (1878-1915). Not the playwright William Shakespeare of course, but the William Shakespear who was an army captain and then Britain’s Political Agent in Kuwait. The difference in the surnames of the two Williams is only the ‘e’ at the end! There were two competing strategies for how to deal with what the British saw as the existential challenge posed in the region by Germany and its Turkish ally. On the one hand was that favoured by the Foreign Office and the British authorities in Egypt, based in Cairo. With their interest in defending the Suez Canal, they favoured using Sherif Hussein to stir up an Arab revolt against the Turks and to destroy the Berlin-Baghdad Railway which was also intended eventually to reach past Sinai and down to Mecca. Against them was the India Office in London and the British India authorities in Calcutta. Their focus had always been on the head of the Persian Gulf and its adjoining regions: Kuwait, the new oil-bearing regions of southern Persia (Iran) and Mesopotamia (near Mosul) and the overland route through southern Persia to British India, which of course then included modern Pakistan with its Persian border. Calcutta and the India Office were not convinced that the Sherifs of Mecca were strong enough to function as Arab guardians of the route to British India and so they sent Capt. William Shakespear to the region to look for someone who was. Like other somewhat eccentric, romantic and utterly dauntless British travellers and connoisseurs in the Middle East in those days (such as T.E.Lawrence and the remarkable Gertrude Bell (8))  Shakespear was familiar with and respected the culture of the Arabs. He even knew and could recite their classical poetry. Through the personal relationship that he struck up with the head of the House of Saud, Abdulaziz al-Saud (1876-1953; usually known in the West as Ibn Saud. The two men were of about the same age and respected each other a great deal)(9), in Kuwait Shakespear was  invited to visit Ibn Saud at his capital in Riyadh in the central Arabian Nejd desert region. Not only did Shakespear ‘navigate’ his way there from Kuwait to meet Ibn Saud, carefully calculating and recording the heights of all the key geographical features en route, he met with Ibn Saud and stayed five months with him (Feb-June 1914). As photography was another of his skills, he took a remarkable series of photographs of Ibn Saud’s milieu and the first photographs of Ibn Saud himself. In a detailed report, he wrote to his superiors in London that Ibn Saud was a leader  who “stands head  and  shoulders  above  the  rest  and  in  whose  star  all  have  implicit  faith”. For his part, Ibn Saud once told Shakespear ‘in friendly exuberance “my trust is first in God and then you, O Shakespear.” ‘(10). After his time with Ibn Saud in Riyadh, Shakespear, a consummate camel-rider and with his own falcon, continued on across the ferocious Nafud desert (225 km wide) – he was the first European to map it – on to Aqaba and the Red Sea coast, a total distance of 2900 km. He then went on to Cairo, from where he returned to England. In 1907 he had  driven by car all the way from the Persian Gulf to England, no mean feat in those days of early automobiles, rough roads and brigands.

Shakespear played a key role in creating the British links with the Arab force that he felt would best serve Britain’s imperial interests in the region – the Saudi Arabs and their network of tribal allies. His work eventually led to the Treaty of Darin (December 1915) between Britain and Ibn Saud which made Saudi lands a British Protectorate, and provided the Saudis with £20,000, 1000 rifles, and 200,000 rounds of ammunition.(11) But Shakespear was killed in January 1915 while observing a battle between Saudi forces and those of their traditional, and pro-Turkish rival, Ibn Rashid. He had refused Ibn Saud’s request to withdraw or at least wear Arab dress. He wanted to “see the show”, believing it would not be “unsafe”.  But he was shot in the thigh and trampled by enemy cavalry. After his death, and the Treaty of Darin, further treaties with the British followed in the 1920s. British money and weapons helped Ibn Saud to destroy his rivals, capture Mecca (1925), become King of the Hejaz (1926), suppress the Ikhwan (1929) and eventually establish the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. It was William Shakespear’s personal relationship with Ibn Saud that opened the door to all this, a relationship that was then built on by others. Ibn Saud declared in 1929 that  Shakespear was the greatest Englishman he had ever met, and in May 1932, on the eve of founding the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he sent his son Faisal to London to ask the British to help the Saudis develop prospective oil reserves in their country. Sir Lancelot Oliphant at the Foreign Office in London turned down his request, and so, on the advice of a British Political Agent who had ‘gone native’, as the saying went – Harry St. John Phillby, father of the later infamous Soviet double agent Kim Phillby (12), Ibn Saud turned to the Americans.  After the American company California-Arabian Standard Oil  discovered oil in Saudi Arabia in commercial quantities in 1938, Ibn Saud did a deal with Roosevelt at the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt on 14 February 1945, giving the Americans the prime oil rights in his kingdom, thus effectively cutting out the British; this deal became the basis of the American-Saudi relationship that has continued until today.

But in their deals with and support for Ibn Saud, the British and the Americans had to accept what came along with the House of Saud, which was the intolerant fundamentalist sect of Wahhabism which had inspired and supported the Saudis since 1744. In accordance with that original pact with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, the Saudi ruler Muhammad bin Saud was to be the imam, the political and military leader of the Muslims, and al-Wahhab was to be the religious leader. In return for al-Wahhab’s religious support, Muhammad bin Saud committed the House of Saud to “jihad against the unbelievers”. The Saudis’ colossal oil profits have enabled the Saudi kings to spend billions of dollars financing the spread of their fundamentalist brand of Islam throughout the world wherever there are Sunni Muslim populations, no matter how small, through the building of Islamic schools (madrasas), of mosques and of Islamic departments in universities. A Saudi report for the royal family in 2002 stated that the Kingdom had to that point, built 210 Islamic centres, over 1500 mosques, 202 colleges, and  2000 schools around the world (13), But without the help of the British, and Capt. William Shakespear in particular, the great English friend of the founder of Saudi Arabia, none of this might have  happened. And this is also no doubt why the English-speaking world has heard so little of Capt. William Shakespear and so much of the more romantic  – and more distracting  – ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. For any association  – with or without a final ‘e’ – of the name of the English-speaking world’s greatest poet, dramatist and, arguably, ‘philosopher’ with the success of the most intolerant, fundamentalist and violent sect of Islam and with Islamist terrorism, now so ‘necessary’ as a bogeyman to the aims of western Powers in the region, would not exactly be music to the ears of  the Anglo-American elite, who are ever ready to praise “the greatness of the language that Shakespeare spoke”.

Politics and Religion, Principles and a Pact

Chaucer’s pilgrims travelled to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury to seek redemption and remittance of sins as all pilgrims did in those days. Thomas Becket was killed because of the fraught relationship between the political and religious powers in those days, for example, King Henry II of England vs the Pope; the Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire vs the Popes. Thomas Becket, once a youthful companion and friend of King Henry, came to feel he must support the (supranational) Church against the Crown (the ‘national’ State). That was in the time described by Steiner as the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch (747 BC – 1413 AD; also known as the Age of Aries) when the political life was emerging and seeking to emancipate itself from the religious life. The mediaeval Popes could not accept or abide this emancipation and sought to insist that their status was God-given and therefore superior to that of kings. They tried to rein in the kings and assert papal rights to interfere in countries’ affairs. Moreover, the Popes themselves were also secular rulers, possessing large territories in Italy. Steiner pointed out that in various ways, Islam was a revival of the strict monotheism of the ancient Hebrews, and indeed it is important to note that much of the Judaism we know today emerged in the 6th century before Christ, during and after the time of the 2nd, short (Babylonian) ‘Captivity’ of the Jewish people (597-538 BC) while Islam emerged in the 6th century after Christ (the Prophet Mohammed 570-632 AD). However, while both Semitic religions, Judaism and Islam, are strictly monotheistic, iconoclastic ‘religions of The Book’, the Holy Text, and while Islam did indeed emerge and rapidly expand within the second half of the dualistic 4th Post-Atlantean epoch, it differs from Judaism in that Judaism was more in tune with the dualistic nature of that 4th  epoch, as it had a High Priest and a King, whereas the social ethos of Islam inclined more to the unitary nature  of the previous, 3rd Post-Atlantean epoch (2907 BC – 747 BC; the Age of Taurus), when the religious life and the political life were not yet really separated and sometimes not even distinct at all; the Egyptian Pharoahs, for example, were regarded as Gods on Earth. Hence the nature of the Koran, which lays down so many rules and principles for social life in all its forms. Hence too, the concept of the Caliphate – the notion that the Muslim umma (community of the faithful) is to be ruled by one supreme political and religious leader.(14) This unitary notion of the Caliphate was not adhered to, however, by the Wahhabist fundamentalist allies of the House of Saud. In the original pact in 1744 between the puritanical reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) and Muhammad bin Saud (birth unknown – 1765), al-Wahhab said:

“You are the settlement’s chief and wise man. I want you to grant me an oath that you will perform jihad [struggle to spread Islam] against the unbelievers. In return you will be imam, leader of the Muslim community and I will be leader in religious matters.” (Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia: p. 16)

This pact continues to bind the blood descendents of those two men today: the Al Saud family and the Al ash-Sheikh family, the descendents of al-Wahhab. The two families, who are extensively intermarried with each other, dominate Saudi Arabia; the Al ash-Sheikh give religious legitimation to the Al Saud. The pact between them was made in the early 5th Post-Atlantean epoch (dated by Steiner as lasting from 1413-3573) but its governing principle (above) resembles the de facto situation in Israel and Europe during the 4th epoch, when the kings were the leaders of the political community and the Popes (or High Priests in Israel) were the leaders of the religious community.(15)

The murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 by King Henry’s knights was a result of the tensions that inevitably arose in this dualistic political-religious system that was a feature of consciousness in the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch, when politics was trying to emancipate itself from religion. Islam tried to avoid this dualism by returning social affairs to an earlier, more unitary epoch: before the separation of politics and religion. But in the long run, this cannot hold. Human consciousness has to develop. Unity, in which all is ultimately under religious control, has over time given way – across the world, from Japan to Britain – to a political/religious dualism which, in turn, is now encountering the messy but inexorable emergence of a threefold social organism in which economic life is now emancipating itself from politics and religion. Amongst Steiner’s many contributions to help understand human development is his elucidation that human consciousness develops over time through epochs of civilisation and that there are three spheres of activity that have gradually emerged in social life over the millennia, namely, the sphere of Culture (which includes religion), Rights (politics) and Economy: a threefold development. To enable a dynamic threefold society and culture to come about, in which these three spheres (culture, politics, economy) are mutually interacting but none of them dominant over the others – three spheres in one society – is a major social task of our 5th Post-Atlantean epoch which, in 2015, we are not even yet one third of the way through. It is interesting to observe that many Englishmen in the 19th and early 20th centuries – and some women (such as the intrepid Gertude Bell) – disenchanted by what they saw as the spiritual aridity of England’s religious life, frustrated by the abstract arguments of English party political life  and repelled by the early, often ugly and morally repugnant results of capitalism’s effort to break free from political control, were drawn to what they saw as the pure and simple nomadic life of the Arab Bedouin who seemed to these English ‘sophisticates’ as still dwelling in the world, the camps, the tents and oases of Abraham, who was after all the father of Ishmael, the original ancestor of the Arabs (Gen. chs. 16, 17). While in their outer life still doing their duty as servants of the British Empire, there was, to a greater or lesser extent, in the souls and imaginations of the likes of T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and William Henry Irvine Shakespear, something of the nature of pilgrims, seeking redemption though contact with an ancient culture and an ancient land, in the inspiring infinity of the desert, seeking perhaps, as complex and confused modern people, a return to ‘the simplicity of a primordial Oneness’. It seems to have been with something of this spirit or longing that Capt. William Shakespear went on his long ‘pilgrimage’ across the sands of Arabia in 1914 to meet his respected friend, Ibn Saud. Little did he know what enormous historical consequences would follow from their relationship, or that within a year, it would bring his death.

Founded in 1922 to promote the solidarity of the British Empire and to maintain and literally broadcast ‘British values’, which in those days were the values endorsed by The Pilgrims Society among others, the BBC started a short series of radio programmes on Saudi Arabia in March 2015, two months after the death of King Abdullah, one of Ibn Saud’s 45 sons. The first episode dealt with the history of the country from the 1740s to the 1970s. The man whom Ibn Saud called the  “greatest Englishman” he had ever known, Capt. William Shakespear, was not mentioned.

NOTES

(1) A widespread form of English spoken from the mid-12th to the late 15th century
(2) Magna Carta was, however, essentially about asserting the liberties of the few (the barons, the Church, the City of London) against the one – King John.
(3) Zeppelins raids on Britain began in January 1915.
(4) The CFR too chose a man on a white horse and the word UBIQUE as its logo.
(5) The long march refers to the Chinese Communist Party’s trek through China in 1934-5 to escape its Nationalist enemies. “a more perfect union” is a phrase from the preamble to the US Constitution (1787).
(6) Lecture of 21 March 1921, GA 174b.
(7) Welt im Umbruch – Nationalitätenfrage, Ordnungspläne und Rudolf Steiners Haltung im Ersten Weltkrieg [World in Upheaval – The Nationalities Question, World Order Plans and Rudolf Steiner's Stance in the First World War], Freies Geistesleben, 2014.
(8) 1868-1926: English traveller, writer, archaeologist, spy, political officer. Played a major role in establishing the British client state Kingdom of Iraq in 1921. A movie on her life, “Queen of the Desert”, directed by German director Werner Herzog and starring Nicole Kidman as Gertrude Bell, premiered on 6 Feb. 2015.
(9) Ibn Saud, the first King of Saudi Arabia from 1932, was the father of King Abdullah, who died 23 January 2015.
(10) Hassan S. Abedin, Ibn Saud and the Great Game in Arabia 1896-1946,
https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/2925835/397151.pdf    
(11) see n.10.
(12) Harry St. John Bridger Philby (1885-1960), Arabist, political officer, intelligence officer, Muslim convert; advisor to King Ibn Saud;  Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, (1912-1988), British and Soviet intelligence agent,  one of the “Cambridge Five” spy ring; defected to USSR in 1963.
(13) William W. Cooper, Piyu Yue,  Challenges of the Muslim World: Present, Future and Past (2008), p.198  
(14) Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims are divided essentially only on the question of whether the umma must be led by a blood descendent of the Prophet; they are not divided on the issue of the need for a Caliphate itself.
(15) It is of interest that, by making himself Head of the Church of England, and thus claiming to govern both the political and religious spheres, King Henry VIII (1509-1547) was actually, in a sense, returning to the 3rd epoch!

And so we came to the end of 2014, the centenary  year since the outbreak of the First World War, the catastrophic conflict  which can be said to have opened the actual 20th century, which was a very short century and ended in 1989/90 with the termination of ‘the Soviet experiment’ and the Cold War, and with the reunification of Germany. In the first months of the year, the British Establishment quickly got off the mark and sought to fix a certain view of the war in the public mind, a view no different essentially from that presented by the Establishment to the British public in 1914 and again in 1919 around the time of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. According to this view, presented in early 2014 by politicians such as the Prime Minister David Cameron, Mayor of London Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, the then Education Secretary (since resigned), and ex-politicians and media personalities such as Michael Portillo and such as Jeremy Paxman, as well as by pro-Establishment historians such as Max Hastings, Prof. Huw Strachen, Prof. Annika Mombauer and Dr. Gary Sheffield, Britain was right to fight in 1914 and went to war to defend ‘gallant little Belgium’ from the militaristic, autocratic German bully that was planning the domination of Europe and the downfall of Britain and its Empire. This view was wrong in 1914/1919 and remains wrong today, as every new major work of historical substance bears out. Two such works were published in 2014, in April the enormously comprehensive and thorough Welt im Umbruch by Dr. Markus Osterrieder which looks in depth at the causes of the war, exoteric and esoteric, from the time of Napoleon (translation of the full title: World in Upheaval – The Nationalities Question, World Order Plans and Rudolf Steiner’s Stance in the First World War; an English translation of this book is currently underway) and in June  The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 by Prof. Douglas Newton, the most detailed examination of the motives and actions of the British government in July and early August 1914. These two works alone, in their breadth and detail, thoroughly demolish the arguments about 1914 presented by historians such as Hastings, Strachan and Sheffield. However, neither of these two books will be given much shrift in the mainstream media or in high street bookshops, where since Christmas 2013 Max Hastings’ book Catastrophe – Europe Goes To War 1914, was weighing down the shelves. After the academics’ arguments, which were laid out in the first three months of the year, the Establishment moved to direct its attentions to the public’s emotions. The grossly inaccurate BBC TV drama “37 Days”, broadcast 6-8 March, described in the form of  a drama the process from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on 28 June 1914 to Britain’s declaration of war against Germany on 4 August and presented on the whole a very positive view of the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey that is not borne out by the historical facts. And that was it, as far as explanations of the causes of the catastrophe went. (see http://threeman.org/?p=1825 on this website for a critical analysis of “37 Days”) From the beginning of the year, the government (outlay £50 million) and the BBC (largest single theme project in its history) has been rolling out a vast ongoing programme of events, which will continue until November 1918. Much of this programme is very interesting indeed, looking into many aspects of the war and appearing to leave few stones unturned, although there has been comparatively little about the opponents that Britain fought during the war. The emphasis has been on British pain and suffering and on British victories and achievements, in other words, a nationalist interpretation of events, albeit one that tries not to crow too loudly. In some cases, the commemorations have crossed the line into overt sentimentality, and that became ever clearer as the anniversary of the actual declaration of war came closer. One particular event deserves mention here, as it is of considerable interest as an historical symptom.

Blood-swept Lands and Seas of Red
Blood red poppies, not real but ceramic, a veritable river of them pouring from a bastion window in the Tower of London down into the Tower’s moat and filling it like the sea – this was an installation called Blood-swept Lands and Seas of Red by the British artist Paul Cummins and designer Tom Piper to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. Between 17 July and 11 November this year 888,246 ceramic poppies were ‘planted’ at the Tower by about 17,500 volunteers, one poppy for each member of the British Empire’s armed forces killed during what was already then called “The Great War”. This is a common aspect of public events and entertainment today – sheer quantity in the striving to make an effect on people’s feelings and, at the same time, the nod in the direction of individualism, the idea that each single person is important and deserves to be recognised. The installation was embraced by the Establishment and promoted to the nation as part of the official commemorations of the war. Frequently splashed across newspapers and TV news broadcasts, the sea of red was opened on 5 August, one day after the 100th anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, and on that first day the installation was visited by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry, the two sons of the late, much lamented Princess Diana whose sad demise had prompted another ocean of flowers, albeit more multi-coloured. It was visited by their grandparents, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, on 16 October.

Paul Cummins apparently paid his own blood price for his art, as in the making of it, he crushed his hand in a roller and lost a finger. Interestingly, Blood-swept Lands and Seas of Red came out of the London Olympics and Paralympics 2012 which Cummins was involved with. Those events too involved huge spectacular displays which played in various ways on the subconscious, especially of young people. One notable aspect of the extravaganzas was the many ways in which internationalist and nationalist elements were intertwined. On the surface there was much appeal to global ethics and international values – ‘freedom’, ‘creativity’, ‘racial harmony’ and the like, but at the same time, meshed into this was a great deal of patriotic and nationalist breast-beating that sought to bang the drum for Britain. The Prime Minister David Cameron made unashamed use of this nationalist element in speeches during and after the event. In the opening ceremony of the London Olympics we were presented with a spectacular and imaginative but a fanciful and historically unsound picture of British history in which a rural idyll was magically transformed into a Blakean nightmare vision of dark Satanic mills which was then affirmed by the actor Kenneth Branagh, in the role of the famous mid-Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, speaking lines about an ‘Isle of Wonders’ from Caliban’s Dream in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. With this we were placed in the period 1840-60, the high point of Britain’s world power and industrial and scientific achievement. It was also the time of the two Opium Wars against China (1839-42, 1858-60) and the Crimean War against Russia (1853-56). 

The 1840s and the War in Heaven

Rudolf Steiner frequently referred to the 1840s as the acme of philosophical materialism. It was the time when in Germany, for example, there was a hard reaction in philosophy against the Hegelian Idealism that had been dominant since the fall of Napoleon. The materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) launched a strident attack on Hegelianism in 1841 and published his critical book The Essence of Christianity; it was celebrated by Friedrich Engels (“it placed materialism on the throne again…the spell was broken….Enthusiasm was general. We all became at once Feuerbachians.”) (1) “December 1841 marks a discontinuity of spectacular sharpness in German philosophy…the rupture of 1841 is manifested in an array of changes, reflecting a common underlying process of transformation, which in turn has its social spectacle in the Revolutions of 1848″.(2) In that year 1848, of course, the Communist Manifesto was written in Brussels and proclaimed to the world. It turned out to be a great mental opiate for millions of people across the world for the next one and half centuries. The decade that thus began with the First Opium War, the product of international capitalist greed, the decade that saw the discovery of Neptune, the development of the chemical industry, the elaboration of electromagnetism, the extension of railway networks across Europe and the victory of the doctrine of Free Trade in England, ended with the failure of liberal bourgeois revolutions across the Continent and the proclamation of Communism as the grand panacea, while from America a very different opiate announced itself in the form of the Spiritualist movement with its table-rapping and communications with the dead. Steiner also spoke of the year 1841 as the beginning of a struggle in the spiritual world that he called ‘the War in Heaven’.  This struggle, he said,  took place in the spiritual sphere of the Moon  – the region between Earth and Moon -  between the Archangel Michael and those beings associated with him and ‘fallen angels’ in the service of the being Ahriman, the inspirer of a one-sided materialism. Michael was preparing for his ‘promotion’ to the next superior rank, that of the Archai (or Spirits of Personality, as Steiner also calls them), the onset of which would come in 1879, a year which would also see the beginning of his ‘regency’  or period as ruling Time Spirit (approx. 350/400 years from 1879) in which his particular impulses of cosmopolitanism and spirituality in thinking would become increasingly prevalent. The result of the victory of the Michaelic forces in this struggle 1841-1879 was that the Ahrimanic angels, or demons, were ‘cast out’ of the Moon sphere down into the spiritual sphere of the Earth, where from the 1880s onwards they poured into the consciousnesses of many human beings and began to inspire them with thoughts which led to a great acceleration in technical developments of all kinds, as well as giving a great intellectual boost to all forms of materialist thinking, including nationalism, even though the Age of Gabriel, in which such thinking would otherwise have been naturally ‘at home’ (as it was from c.1600-1879), had come to an end in 1879 and been superseded by the Age of Michael. The ‘fall of these Spirits of Darkness’ from the 1880s, as Steiner also referred to it, was a major factor contributing to the First World War.

Alongside Communism and proto-fascism, such impulses as nationalism, chauvinism, Social Darwinism, and imperialism grew by leaps and bounds in the period 1880-1914. These various –isms were all ideological offspring of the same matrix: materialism. One of these –isms was ‘collectivism’, as it was sometimes known in the 19th century, and many intellectuals were convinced in the last decades of that century, impressed by the march of Industrial society and by the claims of Social Darwinism that the age of individualism was coming to an end and that collectivism was the future. One of them was a protegé and friend of Lord Alfred Milner, the British sociologist Benjamin Kidd (1858-1916) (picture). Like Milner, Kidd believed in the innate superiority of the English-speaking people, and was a severe critic of Germany. Unlike Milner, however, Kidd felt that the age of males was over and that the future belonged to women, who would become what he called “the psychic centre of power in the social integration” because they were long-termist, caring and nurturing in their attitudes; they cared for the future safety and security of the tribe, the collective, and were prepared to make the necessary sacrifices for that (sacrifice and renunciation Kidd saw as higher moral traits), while males, he felt, were concerned only for their short-term profit in the here and now which they calculated on the basis of their rational thinking so as to defeat other calculating males. Furthermore, males had little emotional intelligence, which Kidd was convinced was the way of the future (“the great secret of the coming age of the world is that civilisation rests not on Reason but on Emotion” – Science of Power p.118). In the collectivist societies of the future that were dominated by the female principle, knowledgeable elites would be able, he believed, to control mass populations though their emotions and call upon the female sense for order and sacrifice – what he called “the Emotion of the Ideal”. Kidd’s key writings, his essay Social Evolution (1894) and his book The Science of Power (1918), were very successful and translated into many languages. (3) Yet this man, who believed so ardently in the female future, also held to the two principles: “Truth is the Science of Power” and “Evolution in all the phenomena of life follows the line of maximum Power” and argued that “The Emotion of the Ideal is the highest form of the sum of the Other-Regarding Emotions….It is the chief human organ of the science of Power….in Woman we have the future centre of Power in civilisation (Science of Power p.195)…she is the creature to whom the Race is more than the individual, the being to whom the Future is greater than the Present” (Science of Power p.211) …the people who first grasp this lesson …will have the world at their feet”. (Science of Power p.254) It could be argued that the elites who rule our society today in 2014 have internalised much of Kidd’s ideas, for reasoned argument has been ousted to a great extent from public life in our democratic societies and replaced by the politics of the phrase, the sound-bite, the image and the spectacle, in all of which emotion is emphasised, while, political correctness is to be maintained at all costs so no-one is to be upset or offended.

Olympics, Opium, Poppies…
Against the background of esoteric history and of the emergence of the emotional spectacle, it is highly noteworthy that in the London Olympics 2012 opening ceremony the historical scene was suddenly shifted from Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the England of the 1840s and 50s to the First World War, symbolised only by red poppies and a few scenes of marching soldiers, no horror, no trenches. The scene was thus abruptly moved from the 1840s to 1914, missing out the high point of Victorian imperial expansion, the grand imperial jubilees and durbars (1887, 1897, 1911) and the background to the First War. We were suddenly transferred from the era of Bengal poppies, opium and philosophical materialism to the era of poppies in Flanders fields and the horrific physical consequences of that philosophical materialism in the slaughterhouse of the Great War. The connection between these two periods, the 1840s and the war years 1914-1919, was a point made repeatedly by Steiner during the war – that the war was largely the result of a deep-rooted materialism in European culture, and the fears, vanities and desires stimulated by that materialism, which had taken off in the natural scientific thinking of the early seventeenth century and had become prevalent throughout culture in the nineteenth century. For this reason, Steiner argued, one could not point the finger of blame for the Great War at any one European culture. Certainly, however, after the Industrial Revolution, Britain had played a signal role in the development of European materialist culture, and its elite arguably had more far-reaching, more globally comprehensive and self-centred national goals than other cultures.(4) Many Germans, for example, from the half-English Kaiser Wilhelm II downwards, were keen to emulate British colonial and imperial practice as well as the habits and customs of the English upper class. After the 1880s, with the fall of the Spirits of Darkness,  materialism in European culture had become a disease that had metastasised, which is why in lectures in the Spring of 1914 Steiner referred to “the social carcinoma” in European civilisation. Europe had proved itself incapable of dealing with its social problems and its class-ridden prejudices. The dramatic changes that were attempting to break through in consciousness in the arts and sciences, in psychology and spiritual science in the two decades before 1914, in everything from atomic physics to psychiatry, from Cubism to Anthroposophy, were simply insufficient to counter the overwhelming weight of personal, social and national fears, loathing, resentment and unspecified anomie that permeated and dominated all western societies. The awful result was millions of dead across “blood swept lands and seas of red” from the mud of Flanders to the frozen plains of Ukraine, the high snowy mountains of northern Italy and Serbia,  the Gallipoli coast, the deserts of Arabia, the jungles of Cameroon and the swamps of East Africa.

Red and White

As they wandered through the red sea around the Tower of London, caught in poignant reflective poses by the Press cameras, the two Princes William and Harry might have recalled their friends in the military who had served in Britain’s more recent wars in the ‘blood swept lands’ of Iraq and Afghanistan and may have wondered if our modern politicians were any more adept than those in 1914. Harry might have been recalling his weeks as a machine gunner and computer-based artillery spotter, two activities during his supposedly secret stint serving with British forces in Afghanistan that the tabloid Press eventually reported on in a state of near-ecstasy over ‘the manly exploits’ of our latter-day ‘Prince Hal’; even in the two world wars no son of the monarch or of the future monarch had actually fired weapons at the enemy. It is perhaps unlikely that the Princes reflected on the fact that the name of the Tower of London has at least since the 13th century been ‘the White Tower’ due to its regular whitewashing, and so this supposed symbol of pathos over the war dead  – the river of poppies at the Tower – actually reflected in its red and white colours the flag of St. George and thus England’s militant traditions since the middle ages. A ‘white’ cube (118′ x 105′) edged by four elongated cuboid towers, the central keep, later known as the White Tower, was the original new royal palace built by the Norman Duke William in 1078 to dominate and “overawe” London (as his biographer William of Poitiers put it) and secure his position as king and conqueror of England after his victory at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066 and his subsequent coronation at Christmas that year. As supposed direct descendents (5) of William the Conqueror, Princes William and Harry might have reflected that since the reign of the Conqueror, a vast tide of red blood has indeed flowed for almost a thousand years from that white tower, which was the first, very physical symbol of the Norman conquest and the oppression of England, and that red tide then spread onwards in the Norman conquests of the Celtic periphery of these British Isles, then across to France in the 100 Years’ War and then around the entire globe in the conquests and establishment of the British Empire.

In 2012 Stuart Laycock published a book with the humorous title All The Countries We’ve Ever Invaded  – And the Few We Never Got Round To. It detailed all the countries around the world Britain had ever attacked, occupied, appropriated or invaded; the mere  22 (many of them small or landlocked) which had never witnessed any British aggression were shown on this map (in white); the rest – in pink – the British have attacked in some way. Quite a record! One finds oneself asking: why so much violence from such a small place?

The ‘Great War’ of 1914-1919 itself was fought by the British elite to ensure that their hold on that Empire would not be challenged by either Germany or Russia; it was not a war for ‘democracy’ or for ‘the rights of small nations’; it was a war to keep what the British elite had acquired over nearly nine hundred years. During the four years of commemoration of the Great War, we in Britain surely need to understand this as a people, for in our subordinate relations with the USA, relations the British elite are all too eager to maintain, and our increasingly fraught relations with the rest of Europe, we still show signs of being hooked as a nation to that addiction which is so hard to overcome – the addiction to world power. After 300 years, it is a hard habit to kick. Instead, we seem to prefer to wallow in sentiment and pathos and in emotional spectacles like Blood-swept Lands and Seas of Red, which seem set to go on for the next four years, rather than asking the tough questions from which we can learn: why did it come to this? How was it possible? And because of our addiction to world power and its symbols, we seem content to allow our government to spend £30 billion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and then another £30 billion on repurchasing an updated Trident missile system from the USA. £60 billion of the British people’s money – what could that have been spent on here at home?

 ’ Tommy’, Flanders & poppies 1917      ‘Jenny’, Afghanistan & poppies 2009

To keep the Germans and Russians apart…

What the British elite feared above all in the years 1900-1914 was what could conceivably take Britain’s imperial acquisitions from them, namely, an accommodation between Germany and Russia. The fear in the Foreign Office, the fear of Sir Edward Grey and his Permanent Under-Secretary Sir Arthur Nicolson, was that if Britain did not do what Russia wanted, then Russia would turn towards Germany, as she seemed almost to do in 1905 when the German Kaiser Wilhelm II nearly succeeded in getting Czar Nicholas II to sign a treaty with Germany. After all, the two countries had been allies from 1879-1890 and had maintained friendly relations before that. The combination of modern German technology and know-how with Russian manpower and natural resources could have led to the building of a globally active mega-fleet and eventually, even to the loss of India, Britain’s ‘jewel in the imperial Crown’ – this was the ultimate nightmare for the British elite. For members of the British elite such as Lords Milner and Esher, and Sir Arthur Balfour (6), it was therefore imperative that Britain should strive a) to keep as close as possible to the USA and even to unite with her in some kind of ‘Anglo-saxon confederation’ and b) to keep Russia and Germany apart and indeed, to keep them involved in mutual tension, strife and eventually, warfare. France’s desire for revanche over Alsace-Lorraine (7) and Russia’s clash of interests with Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary in the Balkans were the two instruments the British used to stir this Russo-German antipathy. The strategy – first conceived by Lord Salisbury in the 1880s (8) and formalised between 1904 and 1919 by the geopolitician Halford J. Mackinder, a protegé of Lord Milner,  worked brilliantly. It remained the keystone of British strategy throughout the 20th century; its second phase resulted in the Russo-German conflict 1941-45, when in effect, the British stood back and waited while the German Nazis and the Russian Communists fought each other (9), and it was passed on to the Americans after the Second World War in the Cold War phase of the strategy, in which Germany was divided between Russia and the English-speaking world (US-UK). We have seen a fourth phase of the strategy emerge this year (2014) in what the western media are already calling “Cold War II” – the isolation, ostracism or ‘excommunication’ of Russia and the attempt to sever its economic links with the West, especially with Germany. Above all, the effort is being made to reduce the West’s need for Russian energy supplies, hence the rapid decline in oil prices, which undermines Russia’s energy-based economy; this has been another feature of the economic scene in 2014.

Russia’s President, the judo exponent Vladimir Putin, rolled with the punches in Ukraine and Volgograd (10), and then responded, first by appropriating Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, thus keeping a potential threat from a Ukraine-in-NATO-and-the-EU away from Russia’s southern flank in the Black Sea region, and then, in May, by finally persuading the Chinese to sign the long-planned,  $400 billion pipeline deal between Gazprom and the China National Petroleum Corporation to supply Russian gas to China. According to this 30 year-long  deal, the pipeline is intended to be complete by 2018 when 38 billion cubic metres of gas p.a. will start flowing south and east from Siberia. This is another reason why, in his epoch-making lecture in 1904, “The Geographical Pivot of History”, delivered before the Royal Geographical Society, British geopolitician Halford Mackinder identified Siberia and Central Asia as “the Pivot Area” (in 1919 he called it “the Heartland”), control of which was vital to ensure world domination; the peoples and vast resources of this region he saw as a critical determinant of any geostrategic policy. It was essential, Mackinder believed, that Britain and America should somehow seize control of this region from whoever dominated it which, then as now, was Russia. Mackinder was just as keen to keep the Russians and Japanese apart as he was to separate the Russians and Germans. Today, his ideas are still heeded by American strategic planners, and he would be looking to separate the Russians and the Chinese; this is surely what the British and American elites will look to do in any way they can over the coming years and decades.

800 Years Ago….

800 years on from the rise of the Mongol Empire, which was ruled from Beijing, a city which the Mongols made the capital of their empire after they conquered much of Eurasia and subjugated Russia,  this mega-energy deal is part of a hugely ambitious Russo-Chinese design to extend an economic and transportation network by rail and road across Eurasia from Shanghai to Hamburg (it has been dubbed, inevitably, “the New Silk Road”). The rail link between Zhengzhou in central China and Hamburg already takes only 18 days, half the time of the sea voyage and saves 80% of the cost compared to air transport (11). It will be a key geostrategic aim of the English-speaking Powers in the coming decade to frustrate this grand design, to block friendly relations between Russia and the EU and ultimately to split up the Russo-Chinese relationship and turn the two countries against each other. Having already encircled Russia and China to a considerable extent with compliant states and military bases in those states, and with its navies constantly patrolling Russian and Chinese waters above and below the surface, and its satellites watching from space, “the West” has many instruments available to it to cause serious trouble for Russia and China. The current economic sanctions against Russia – a modern form of the economic blockades often practised by imperial Britain – and the increasingly recurrent ‘incidents’ in China’s western province of Xinjiang with its restive Muslim majority Uyghur population (12), and in Hong Kong and Taiwan, not to mention repeatedly flaring tensions between China’s neighbours and US allies S.Korea and Japan, are all examples of these ‘instruments’; such means were referred to by Mackinder already in 1904 as a way in which what he called the ‘sea wolves’ (Britain and America) could put pressure on  the otherwise inaccessible ‘land wolves’, such as Russia. Needless to say, there is a terrible possibility that these geostrategic power plays might result, as in 1914, in a major conflagration, which, given the size of the states involved and their nuclear arsenals, is a dreadful prospect.

The Key

The key to averting this very possible catastrophe also happens to be the same key that will avert the prospect of ecological and environmental devastation in this century. It is a fundamental change in our economic system, a system that both the Chinese and the Russians have been busy copying from the West since 1979 and 1991 respectively. Our current system requires economic competition as the basis of both domestic and international trade. Since the days of British economist David Ricardo (1772-1823) it has talked about the “comparative economic advantage of nations”; since the 17th century, first in Holland then in Britain and France, it has operated central banks, usually privately owned, that have had a major determinant influence, sometimes highly negative, on a nation’s economic activity. It is now widely recognised, for example, that the actions of the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England played a major, if not the major role in bringing about the Great Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression of the 1930s which preceded the Second World War.(13) The West’s economic system has also been driven since the 1920s by a PR and advertising industry dedicated to getting people, by various devious psychological means,  to buy things and services that they do not actually need and thus to fuelling the excessive  consumption and excess production that is at the root of our environmental problems. This western economic system, driven by unscrupulous financial manoeuvrings and deceptions, hit the buffers in a big way in the Crash of 2007-2008, but since then, there has been no fundamental change. Apart from tinkering with a few banking regulations here and there, it has been a case of tightening the people’s belts through enforced ‘austerity programmes’, but the banks have tended to move back to business as usual; even the much-criticised bankers’ bonuses have failed to disappear. The reason for all this is that the West’s economic system is run according to a basic programme of political economy that was largely consolidated in the late 18th century to suit the circumstances and mentality of that era and it has remained unchanged in its fundamentals. It consisted of shareholder trading, central banking, the notion that labour could be paid for, the private ownership of land, Free Trade, and above all, the enforcement of national or private economic advantage by the State through wars and other military operations. All of this in turn was predicated on the economic liberty of the individual and his self-interest, seen as natural and necessary for the growth of profit and thus of inevitable, incidental benefit to society. The English-speaking world in particular grew extremely rich through the application of these ideas in the 19th century, but it led inexorably to “blood-swept lands and seas of red”, as it was based on self-assertion and personal and national greed. However, since then, there has been little incentive in English-speaking countries to alter it. There has been no understanding, for example, of how the principle of liberty actually relates to equality and fraternity in the life of the individual and society and how in particular, fraternity, or cooperation in the economic use of the natural world is the actual basis for economic life –people in a modern economy need to cooperate in order to produce anything; that basis cannot be individual liberty (seen as ‘absence of external restraint’ in the English-speaking world) which, without a moral or ethical underpinning willing upheld by the individual, leads inevitably to greed, corruption and exploitation both of the natural environment and of human beings.

With the publication of his book Riddles of the Soul during the First World War (1917), Steiner related the three activities of the human inner life – thinking, feeling and willing to the three systems of human physiology (nerve-sense system, the circulatory system of heart and lungs, the metabolic and limb system). Over the next two years, in his work with the movement for a threefold social organism, he extended this correlation to the three spheres of social life, which he described in his book Die Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage (mostly recently published in English as Towards Social Renewal, 1999). He completed his description of the threefold nature of the human being and of human society by showing how individual liberty properly belongs in the cultural/spiritual sphere of society, equality in the political/legal sphere and fraternity in the economic sphere. And just as our three physiological systems have to be kept separate so as not to disturb each other’s effective activity and yet are interrelated, so it is with society: the cultural, political/legal and economic spheres ought not to be allowed to interfere with each other, though they should yet ‘inform’ and support each other by their activities.(14) This was not an abstract idea that Steiner just dreamed up in his study; he insisted that this threefold separation was something that had been seeking to come about in human social for many centuries, first in the emancipation of the political/legal life from the cultural/spiritual life (this took place in the Greco-Roman period 8th cent. BC to 15th cent. AD) and now (since the 15th cent.) in the emancipation of the economic life from the political/legal life. The State ought not therefore to seek to control the economic life, as it has no competence or experience in that area. But this emancipation of the economic life from political control by the State is by no means complete yet so we still see this principle contravened; we see our politicians pretending to be captains on the bridge of the good ship Economy.  Similarly, businessmen ought not to interfere with affairs of State by lobbying or buying influence in Parliament or seeking to borrow the State’s military arm to advance their interests; lawyers ought not to be private businessmen and instead should make their services equally available to all, irrespective of their clients’ ability to pay – but these principles too are all too frequently contravened, again because too few people have internalised a picture of themselves as threefold beings in spirit, soul and body. Too many lawyers, for example, do not realise that the actual nature of the political and legal organism of society is bound up intrinsically with equality and therefore should have nothing to do with payment by clients. Access to quality legal representation ought to be a legal right. One talks of equal rights but does not practise them in law when only the rich get the best legal representation. The State ought not to interfere with the free cultural life in scientific research, or in the arts, education or religion, but does so all the time. In Britain we even have an Established Church which has its own ‘Pope’ in the Head of State! In a rational economy, unlike our ever-expanding, cancerous present arrangements, consumption would be driven by the actual needs of consumers, scientifically assessed by local, regional, national and international consumers’ groups, and not by a manipulative advertising industry (a debauched form of artistic activity) spending billions on persuading us to buy what we don’t need and billions more on electric light to make its deceptions known at night or even during the day. Our ‘modern’ western societies are in short a confused inheritance from previous centuries, in which the three organisms are continually interfering with each other and preventing healthy functioning. Above all, the State is regarded, even in so-called capitalist democratic societies as the captain on the bridge in all things. This has especially been the case since the First World War when for the first time, western societies experienced a level of centralised organisation in almost all aspects of society – for the sake of the war effort – that they had never before witnessed.

Today, for the Indians and Chinese (the two states account for over 2 billion people!), a modern PR and advertising industry is an indispensable part of a ‘modern’ economy – they have ‘learned’ that from us in the West, and are replicating it, along with the peoples of other developing countries. The cancer will thus spread, over-production will spread, environmental degradation will spread, and the result will eventually be – as it always has been – war, because the basis of this confused global economy is national and personal greed and selfishness, the values of the competing egos of 18th and 19th century nation states, instead of global economic cooperation in the 21st. The problem is not population growth per se; the problem is our form of economic life and specifically the cultural and social ideas and habits that drive it. Some would say the Cold War was the Third World War. If we wish to avoid a Fourth World War, which would be a very ‘hot’ world war, if we wish to see no more, or at least fewer, “blood swept lands and seas of red”, then the West needs to offer to the world ‘a Christmas present’, that is, something that brings light into the current midwinter darkness of our economic practice. That something is a baby idea which is also a very Big Idea in that out of it a great tree can grow. It is in fact the ‘Big Idea’ of the 21st century, based on the threefold understanding of the human being as a being of spirit, soul and body and of society as a threefold social organism. Rudolf Steiner explained this almost 100 years ago, but that does not make it out of date because it has to do with the fundamental nature of the human being and of the need for our social arrangements to be based on that fundamental nature. Steiner’s threefold social initiative could not succeed in 1917-1922; there was too little understanding of it and too much fear and chaos in the confusion of the post-war years. Steiner apparently said then that the time for it would have to wait until the beginning of the coming century (2000)  when “a window in the spiritual world would again open to make it possible”. (15)

In this new century we have now suffered our way as a culture to the present parlous situation in which mainstream society knows from experience that, despite all its technological wonders, it has no new creative macro-social ideas. Post-2008, it has been vainly seeking to do what was done in the 1920s – return to the status quo ante – the conditions before the crisis, while hoping forlornly that technology might somehow save us. A technological panacea was the hope too, at the end of the last century in the late 1990s, when the much-hyped “turbo-capitalism” – an ever-expanding global capitalism driven by the Internet which, it was believed by the pundits, would break the boom-bust cycle – was seen in the English-speaking world as the great solution. Then came two more wars (Afghanistan and Iraq), literally trillions of dollars wasted (16) and trillions more spent in consumption and then -  the Crash of ’08. This will be the future – ever worse wars and economic crashes – until we in the West, who initiated the present cancerous form of social and economic life, grasp the key which is the Threefold Idea of Man and Society, seek to realise it and present it to mankind. The time for us to grasp it will soon be here again.

NOTES
(1) F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy at:
http:www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1886ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm#013
(2) http:www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/index.htm
(3) The full text of Kidd’s Science of Power can be read here:
https://archive.org/stream/scienceofpower00kidduoft#page/n5/mode/2up
(4) See my articles in  New View, 71 April-June 2014, New View 72,  July-September 2014, New View 73, October-December 2014
(5) It was argued  by Dr. Michael K. Jones (Channel 4 TV documentary, 3 Jan. 2004)  that King Edward IV (1461-83) was born illegitimate, and if this were so, it would disqualify all monarchs descended from him from the rightful succession.
 (6) Sir Alfred, Lord Milner  (1854-1925), High Commissioner in South Africa 1897-1901, Minister without Portfolio 1916-1918, Secretary of State for War 1918-1919, Secretary of State for the Colonies 1919-1921; Reginald Brett, Lord Esher (1852-1930), Permanent Secretary to the Office of Works, Deputy Governor and Constable of Windsor Castle, close personal advisor to King Edward VII; Sir Arthur (later Earl) Balfour (1848-1930), Prime MInister 1902-1905, Foreign Secretary 1916-1919.
(7) France lost Alsace and Lorraine to Germany in 1871 following her declaration of war on Prussia which started the Franco-Prussian War 1870-71. The largely German-speaking Alsace had been taken by Louis XIV in 1648 and Strasbourg was seized by Louis in 1681.
(8) See New View 71 and 73, n.3 above.
(9) See Prof. G.G. Preparata, The Incubation of Nazism http://www.guidopreparata.com/chpg/Incubation-Russia.pdf
and his book Conjuring Hitler – How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (2005)
(10) The illegal coup in Kiev, 23 Feb.2014 which ousted the democratically elected President Yanukovych and the Islamist terrorist attacks on the central railway station in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad and thus a powerful symbol of the defence of “Mother Russia”) on 29-30 Dec. 2013.
(11) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2013-07/19/content_16797293.htm
(12) The Chinese authorities have resettled ever more Han Chinese into the region, causing growing resentment among the Muslim Uyghurs; the ethnic balance is now about 40% Han Chinese and 45% Uyghurs.
(13) See Preparata, Conjuring Hitler (2005)
(14) For a more detailed exposition, see Ilya Ehrenburg, The Genesis and Understanding of the Threefold Social Order in New View 73, Oct.-Dec. 2014, and Johannes Rohen, Functional Threefoldness in the Human Organism and Human Society (2011)
(15) Reported by Waldorf teacher Clara Michels in the 1930s, in Heinz Herbert Schöffler, Rudolf Steiner’s Millennium Prophecies, (1999)
(16) On 10 Sept. 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon was unable to account for US $2.3 trillion. This news disappeared in the uproar that followed the devastating attacks of the following day. The costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars to the USA alone is estimated at US $4 – 6 trillion:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-iraq-afghan-war-costs-to-top-4-trillion/2013/03/28/b82a5dce-97ed-11e2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html