© Terry Boardman

11th November 2001

> Britain is to be placed  by Home Secretary David Blunkett  under a state of emergency….

 Welcome to the land of the free, the home of the brave…..

“Rule Britannia ! Britannia rules the waves !
Britons never, never, never, shall be slaves….”

 ”One Ring  to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
  In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.”

 And you’d better believe that the name of that One Ring is NOT Al-Qaida.

 I went to the Remembrance Day commemoration service today at the  cenotaph in our local park at 11 am as I do every year. There were about 500 people there. It’s been getting bigger every year recently. There’s always a march past of veterans and other military groups. Before and after the 2 minutes’ silence, a group of army cadets always fire a volley of shots. This year they did not, and I wondered why. Was it because it was considered somehow inappropriate to fire shots after Sept 11th or with a “war” going on, although the British navy has been firing cruise missiles at Afghanistan, and it was confirmed for the first time today (11.11. – the timing, the timing) by the government that British soldiers ARE already engaged in Afghanistan ? The vicar spoke more of the events of Sept 11th than he did about the two world wars, but then the Head of the Church of England  declared last week that this is a “just war” (it took him long enough to make up his mind; again the timing – just a few days before Remembrance Day. So we don’t fire shots because it might upset people under the present circumstances, but meanwhile we bomb and blast another miserable country as we British have been doing throughout the centuries, declaring that this is “a war for civilisation”. What better example of the culture of empty phrases [and empty gestures] in the age of economic imperialism could there be ?

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 11th November 2001
I watched the film “Platoon” again recently, not having seen it for many years. At one point the character Elias, a long-serving US soldier in Vietnam, played by Willem Dafoe, says: “We’ve been kicking other people’s asses for so long, I figure it’s time we got ours kicked.”
Inelegant, but to the point: what goes round, comes around.

 I feel that the more one puts Bin Laden and Islamism in the same box as Hitler and Nazism, then not only is one in danger of missing the essentially individual characteristics of historical circumstances, not to mention those of personal karma, but also the more one is justifying ANY means to deal with the situation. The more one sees things in terms of a simplistic good-evil dualism as Bush the Leader and Blair the Cheerleader are doing tends in the direction of the argument that  evil must just be eradicated – like a bacillus, which was just how Hitler viewed the Jews; just wipe them out and then we’ll be OK. But evil is to be transformed, not eradicated; indeed, it can never be eradicated, as Bush seems to think. There are plenty in the English-speaking world, who, making no essential distinction between Germany in WW1 and WW2, argue that the poison in German culture that was not burned out in 1918 was only utterly destroyed in 1945 by superviolence, and that that is what “we” need to do now with Bin Laden, Al-Qaida, and with Muslim fundamentalism.

‘Liberals’ in the West, wringing their hands, say: “we don’t like the bombing, but what else can we do? We’ll make it better once the Taliban have been defeated, but we must smash them first, Ramadan or no Ramadan. We’ll give the Afghans a moderate regime and set them on the path to the righteousness of our own civilisation….sorry, what was that you said about oil, Jerusalem and Palestine ? Can we talk about that later ?”

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16th November 2001

 Breathe again friends ! The global forces of law and order aka The Royal Marines (the red berets) have landed in Afghanistan to sort things out and do what the Redcoats so signally failed to do in 1879 – pacify and conquer the Afghans. (the military disaster of that year by the way was the consequence of the forward policy of Lord Lytton, first Viceroy of India, son of politician and occultist Bulwer Lytton and appointed in 1876 by his father’s friend Disraeli, then Prime Minister).

Following on from Oxford historian Niall Ferguson calling a spade a spade about imperialism – he urged America to go for a policy of formal empire instead of “informal empire”, in order to protect the world economy, I have just heard Charles Hayman of “Jane’s World Armies” on BBC radio news saying words to the effect: “although it’s not PC to say this but with regard to failed states notably the failed states in Africa, we need the western powers to set up what might be called neo-colonialist or post-imperial arrangements”. I can’t quote all his words, but he did say the words in italics. Watch out for more utterances of this type surfacing in Anglo-American and western media.

 Blair has just made another world order speech in which he said that
after the end of the Cold War, there was a chance to build a New World Order but that it was only words; now we have a second chance really to do it,

and that

the international community (aka US-UK) must take a lead in this to rebuild and reform the institutions set up after 1945

(UN, World Bank, IMF, GATT=WTO etc).

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17th November 2001

One can see Gautama Buddha as a reformer of Indian spirituality; he emerged out of that religious and cultural context. In the Middle
Ages, Islamic armies – out of the Eurasian religious “centre”, so to speak, thus attacked, and created not a little havoc in, both the lands to the West (Europe) and East (India) of it. This year, out of the “Islamic” world, come twin attacks on two “twin” symbols which stand in polar relationship to each other: the Bamiyan Buddhas, symbol of release from this world, and the Twin Towers, symbol of attachment to the material goods of this world. Furthermore, trade was always something that linked East and West, while Mani and his religion passed betwen East and West along the trade routes.

 Is there a parallelism between the Bamiyan Buddhas and the Twin Towers ? What is one to make of these gestures ? Alexander passed through most of the now Muslim lands affected today. His spirit or impulse, questions of imperialism, East and West, seems somehow bound up with events today.

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 17th November 2001

 hatever the unpopularities of his first 9 months in office, G.W. Bush was a President that had the clout of almost the entire oil industry behind him, not to mention the constellation of other economic forces connected to his father. Then he was surrounded, indeed handled, by a very tough team, including a number of his father’s key advisers. During those first 9 months, he and they showed very little sign at all of heeding either American or global opinion on major issues such as Kyoto, Star Wars II etc, and once the election result was confirmed and Bush sworn in, Gore has been nowhere in sight. The perhaps  most oligarchical and plutocratic elitist US administration since           McKinley’s a hundred years ago was in the saddle, ready to ride roughshod over all and sundry. The “opinion” or “will” of the American
 people would have counted for nothing. Indeed, I’m not sure that it ever has counted for anything when it comes to serious foreign policy  issues vital to the elite’s interests – with the possible exception of Vietnam in 1967-73, where large numbers of American voters were personally affected, and so many American lives directly impacted, and also, I believe, that that period of resistance to the Vietnam War happened after the beginning of the second wave of the Etheric Christ’s activity which commenced in  1966. Thirdly, that resistance was fired by the idealism of a generation that had descended from the spiritual world during WW2 and in the years of its aftermath – those were special circumstances. They were circumstances that were something other than what can be called “the will of the American people”, which, arguably, is something that has been present since 1776.

This war has been their way of closing what I believe to have been the the three year window of opportunity that opened c.1999 – the third wave of the Etheric Christ impulse. They closed the second window – 1966-69 – by, amongst other things, drenching the young via big business with the unholy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock’n'roll and seeding student politics with agents provocateurs. I note that Ken Kesey has just died. 33 years ago he and Leary also played their part in the closing of that window with their gospel of hedonism and the acid-trip.

 I appreciate that local democracy traditions are probably much stronger in the US than in Britain, where we have a tradition of deferring to the local bigwig, the nob up at the big house, and that to say that “the will of the American people counts for little” goes against the grain of the “can-do”  optimistic American spirit. It smacks of a cynical, pessimistic, Old World view of life and politics. But  from de Tocqueville onwards (and maybe before), there have been many observers of the American political scene (including of course Col. House) who have despaired of the degree to which American elites have  overpowered the wishes of the people. (House, of course was a member of the elite who simply wished to overpower the wishes of the people in a different sort of way, namely through crypto-fascist dictatorship as detailed in his novel Philip Dru – Adminstrator of 1912). Regrettably, the spirit of European aristocracy and oligarchy is – along with the democratic can-do spirit – also  alive and well in the US, having crossed the Atlantic a long time ago. Indeed one might argue it’s been there since the very first colony at Jamestown and has been battling it out with the rising tide of democracy ever since. The can-do, optimistic, democratic spirit is the “true” America, and indeed, the true modern world (in fact the anti-oligarchical spirit BEGAN in Europe with the Reformation), but to believe that it actually has power over the spirit of oligarchy when it comes to MAJOR issues of foreign policy is not to my mind realistic. We all have a LONG way to go there before oligarchy is dethroned in the realm of foreign policy

The same is true for that other “beacon of democracy” – the UK. When the proverbial hits the fan, public opinion counts for nothing; the oligarchs just go ahead and do what they want, usually disguising it with some fine-sounding words to smokescreen Joe Public. ‘Twas true in 1898/9, 1914 and 1941; ’tis still true today.
How fast things turn around in Medialand ! I watched the mid-90s movie “Seven” last night.  It painted a picture of New York as
pretty close to hell on earth, obsessed with the 7 deadly sins, and suggested that many non-New Yorkers agreed, yet now we’re told that New York is the bravest, most heroic, most virtuous  and laudable city on the planet. Let’s hope it stays that way and returneth not to perdition.

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29th May 2002

Some quotes from “The Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives” by Zbigniew Brzezinski ( Basic Books, 1997)

“The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world’s paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power…”

“Two basic steps are thus required: first, to identify the geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause a potentially important shift in the international distribution of power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them;… second, to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above…” (p. 40)

 Note the first two lines of the next section. :

 ”…To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand
imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the
vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” (p.40)

 - “Henceforth, the United States may have to determine how to cope with regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America’s status as a global power.” (p.55)

    - “America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe’s central arena. Hence, what happens to the    distribution of power on the Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and to America’s historical legacy.” (p.194)

 - “That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile
coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s primacy…” (p. 198)

 - “The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to
  expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role.” (p. 198)

 And now two quotes that seem particularly relevant in view  of 11th September 2001:

 ”The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” (pp 24-5)

“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” (p. 211)

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  First uploaded  Nov. 2001 Last updated 18.7.2012