This article was first published in New View magazine Winter Issue 94 Winter Jan – March 2020

To form any judgments about a phenomenon in contemporary events we can keep in mind three elements – the context of the event (awareness of how the event relates to the past), wakefulness (awareness of what’s going on now in relation to the event) and insight (understanding how the event relates to what seems to be approaching us from the future).

With these in mind, let us consider two recent contemporary events: NATO’s celebration of its 70th anniversary (3-4 December) and the UN COP 25 conference on climate change in Madrid, Spain (2 – 13 December). Both these two events began in the first week of Advent, a period which belongs to the darkest time of the year in the northern hemisphere – between Michaelmas and Christmas. It is at this time that the forces of opposition to human progress are at their most potent and an inner soul darkness can prevail that reflects the outer darkness in nature. Despite themselves, those forces of opposition actually serve that progress even while trying to obstruct it because it is in the resistance to, and the overcoming of, that obstruction (often called ‘evil’) that individuals and mankind in general actually make progress. We can see the outer darkness at this time of year reflected in society even in trivial ways such as the increasingly macabre quality of Halloween celebrations all around the world. Christmas of course is a celebration of peace yet in recent decades it has often been marred by appalling acts of violence in various countries.

The NATO conference in London at the beginning of December was a special summit arranged to celebrate the organisation’s 70th anniversary year since its founding on 4 April 1949. The first headquarters of NATO was in London and the first Secretary General, General Hastings Ismay,  was British. In May this year, when NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg visited the then British Prime Minister Theresa May in London, it was assumed that Britain would leave the EU on 31 October, so the anniversary summit was arranged for after October, in December, with the message that “Brexit will change the United Kingdom’s relationship to the European Union but it will not change the United Kingdom’s relationship to NATO,” as Stoltenberg had said in February¹. Indeed, the intention is that not only will Brexit not change the United Kingdom’s relationship to NATO, it will not change the ongoing unification of Britain’s military forces with those of EU countries. ‘EU Military unification’ involving Britain after Brexit has been a barely discussed issue in the Brexit debate but it is going on regardless and was merely hinted at in the vagueries of the Political Declaration document in the EU withdrawal deals agreed by both Prime Ministers Theresa May and her immediate successor Boris Johnson in 2018 and 2019 respectively.²

NATO – preserver of peace?

If you visit any official NATO website you will always be assured that the main purpose of NATO is to preserve or safeguard peace. Quite apart from the fact that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)] was involved in bombing operations in European countries, in the Balkans (Bosnia and Serbia) in the 1990s, which killed hundreds of civilians. Article 5 of NATO’s founding Treaty (1949), which stipulates that “an armed attack against one or more of [the Parties to the Treaty] shall be considered an attack against them all”, was invoked on 4 October 2001 following the events of 11 September in the USA to justify military operations against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Not only was this utterly absurd – even if Al Qaeda had been behind the events of 9/11, their enemy would have been solely the USA not countries such as Denmark, Belgium or Canada – it was an entirely bogus invocation of Article 5 by the then Secretary General, the Briton Lord Robertson, who from 1997 to 1999 had been Defence Minister in the socialist government of Tony Blair. On 2 October at a NATO General Assembly meeting in Brussels, Robertson read out a statement that purported to justify the invocation of Article 5, claiming that, in his words, “clear and compelling” evidence had been provided to NATO by a US envoy, the Dept. of State Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism, Frank Taylor. This was said to prove that the 9/11 attacks had been “directed from abroad”, namely Afghanistan. But this “clear and compelling” evidence was no such thing; Robertson was merely quoting from a “talking points paper”, a discussion paper that the US envoy Taylor had brought to Brussels. But Taylor’s briefing of NATO was classified and his briefing paper was not released to the public, who now only had Robertson’s word to go on, until 2008, by which time hundreds of thousands had been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, and billions of dollars spent. The declassification of the document made it obvious that the evidence in October 2001 used to justify NATO’s war on Afghanistan to the world had been very far from “clear and compelling”. It had amounted, in terms that would satisfy a court, to virtually zero.³ Some of the words that Robertson spoke in his fateful statement on 2 October 2001 had been taken verbatim from Taylor’s talking points briefing paper. On 7 October 2001, the US and the UK launched their first attacks on Afghanistan. 16 other NATO countries would soon join them and by mid-2003, 42 countries were involved in military operations in Afghanistan under NATO auspices. Today, 18 years after the beginning of the US/UK invasion of Afghanistan and after the outlay of almost $1 trillion for the war by the United States, the war still goes on and NATO is still involved, albeit at a much reduced level. So much for “preserving peace”.

But NATO was never about “preserving peace”. As its first Secretary General, Hastings Ismay (pic, right) famously said, its purpose was: “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” In other words, it was a war-fighting alliance, a system of control directed against Russia and Germany in the context of the global Cold War against the Soviet Union. From the perspective of the British governing elite, it was seen as vital that Britain and America remain firm allies that stood apart from, but were nevertheless in military, economic and political control of, the non-communist countries of Europe. The means to exercise that control were military (NATO) and political/economic (the EU project). Since a new Cold War against Russia was engineered in 2014 by the countries that lead NATO, one hundred years on from 1914, it has been argued by pro-NATO propagandists that we need NATO more than ever “because we live in an increasingly dangerous world”.

Such phrases have always been used to justify NATO’s existence. The main excuse has tended to be Russia’s seizure of Crimea, following the Ukraine crisis in the winter and spring of 2013-14. What is invariably overlooked here is the role of Arseniy Yatsenyuk (pic below), who became Prime Minister following the coup d’etat in Ukraine in February 2014 and remained so until July 2016. Yatsenyuk is the founder (in 2007) of the Open

Ukraine Foundation, which is directed by his wife. On its website, Open Ukraine lists its partners as the US State Department, NATO, the British foreign policy think-tank Chatham House, The German Marshall Fund (a leading transatlanticist German think-tank) and the American international lobby group, the National Endowment for Democracy. In 2008 Ukraine’s leaders — President Viktor Yushchenko, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Speaker of the Parliament, Arseniy Yatsenyuk — asked NATO to draw up an action plan for Ukraine to join NATO, but Russia forced Ukraine to back down by threatening to withdraw gas supplies; a new lease of the Sevastopol base to the Russians until 2042 was agreed between the two countries. (Sevastopol is the largest city in the Crimea Peninsula and a major Black Sea port and naval base). It was obvious from statements by US State Department officials Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt that were leaked during the Maidan coup of February 2014 that the US regarded Yatsenyuk – “Yats”, as the American officials called him – as ‘their man’. The Russians suspected that, as the new post-coup Prime Minister, Yatsenyuk would renege on the lease of Sevastopol and would instead lease the base to NATO. NATO encouraged these suspicions when in late February 2014 it declared that joining the organisation was still an option for Ukraine.

On 18 March 2014 President Putin made a speech in which he argued that Russia was forced to annex Crimea to prevent Ukraine joining NATO. He claimed that the West “had lied to us many times. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the East. … NATO remains a military alliance. I do not want to be welcomed in Sevastopol by NATO sailors.”⁴ It was NATO’s expanionist moves eastwards, following the fall of the USSR and culminating in the threatened loss of Russia’s naval base of Sevastopol to NATO, that prompted Putin’s move into the Crimea. The West seemed to ignore the burden of history; it ‘forgot’ what Sevastopol had meant to the Russians since the Crimean War (1853-1856) when the British and the French had besieged the city and eventually seized it, and since World War II when the Russians fought a terrible battle against the Germans for control of the city. It also seemed to forget that the former Soviet leader Khrushchev had simply transferred the Crimea – for reasons which remain unclear – from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954; the Crimea had never previously been part of “Ukraine”. For the Russians, the Crimea has long been a major economic (export/import) and military region and Sevastopol a major naval base. The West, however, insisted on the abstract principles of the UN Charter (which the US and UK had been instrumental in drawing up in 1945) that forbade the redrawing of borders by force; for the West, Sevastopol was part of Ukraine and was therefore Ukraine’s to do with as it wished. For Russia, the Crimea was and is vital to Russian interests and Ukraine cannot be permitted to allow NATO the use of Sevastopol.

In the Balkans, in Afghanistan and in relation to Crimea, NATO has been a source of tension, violence and warmongering rather than of peace. During the Cold War, it was the western equivalent of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-controlled military alliance, but when the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991, NATO did not also disband. On the contrary, over the next two decades, it expanded because the three reasons given for its existence by Gen. Hastings Ismay (see above) still apply in the minds of the members of the transatlanticist elite that controls NATO. Furthermore, a fourth reason has been added; in the 1990s China was emerging as a potential threat in the ever paranoid councils of NATO and the myriad western foreign policy think-tanks that service it.⁵ By the mid-2000s, such think-tanks were already speculating on how NATO would fight and win a war against China. Today, with Donald Trump regarded as the bull in the NATO china shop, stoking tensions in the organisation with his demands that NATO members pay their fair share financially, China is increasingly seen by western media and think-tanks as the factor that will make NATO hold together.⁶

Orwell’s 1984 and Goethe’s ‘mixed king’

Historians have long recognised that one of the major factors that pushed Europe into the Great War in 1914 was the deadly binary alliance system that had built up over the previous 20 years: the Triple Entente (France, Russia, Britain) vs the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy). Yet such has been the brilliance of the world’s statesmen and diplomats over the past 100 years that 2020 dawns on a very similar scenario; indeed, we have a scenario rather similar to that envisaged by George Orwell in his famous novel 1984, except that we have two great entities – as in 1914 – instead of the three in his book: where he had Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia in constant conflict over the remaining regions of the world, we today have the NATO Alliance (29 countries in 2019) vs the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)(8 members incl. Russia, China, India; 4 observers incl. Iran, Afghanistan and Mongolia) with the leading members of these two blocs struggling for access to the resources of the rest of the world e.g. lithium for the electric vehicle industry, uranium and thorium for the nuclear industry and various rare earth minerals. At December’s summit in London, NATO leaders for the first time discussed China as a “collective security challenge”.

The main reasons for this extremely dangerous situation are that in the East, we have three nuclear-armed superpowers, Russia, China and India plus one smaller power, Iran. In recalling Goethe’s Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795) one could well imagine that all of these four countries could be described as ‘mixed kings’, similar to the composite king in Goethe’s story who exists alongside the three gold, silver and brass kings. These countries are rather like ‘composite kings’ in that they seek to run modern, technological unitary states guided by decadent spiritual or political philosophies: Russian Orthodoxy, Confucianism plus Marxism, Hindu nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. When Goethe’s story reaches its culmination, the composite king, possessing no real integrity because he is not in tune with the needs of the times, collapses in a heap when he tries to stand up. It may seem at the moment as though Russia, China, India and Iran are functioning states but, in each case, the crunch is likely to come from within in terms of social pressures from citizens who are acting in accord – perhaps unconsciously – with the needs of the times e.g. the need for individual dignity and autonomy in the modern age, and when those pressures become intense enough, the ‘strong men’ at the top will be unable to cope: they and their ‘mixed king’ system will collapse. Meanwhile, in the West, we have modern, technological unitary states that are ruled not by strong men at the head of a political system but by invisible or at most semi-visible elites who act from the economic system and whose powerbases are diversified around the world, for example, in overseas tax havens. The West’s much vaunted democratic systems and political parties have become instruments of these elites, pantomimes controlled by vested interests and steered by the mass media. Many of the citizenry in the West participate in them cynically because there appears to be no alternative, although the dissatisfaction with the party political system is steadily growing.

In both East and West, unitary States prevail in which the three spheres of modern society (culture, politics, economics) interfere with one another or one dominates the others. Goethe’s Fairy Tale was already hinting, in an intuitive way, at a form of society advocated publicly by Rudolf Steiner in 1919 in which the three spheres would each be separate and autonomous but at the same time they would interrelate just as the three physiological spheres of the human body – the nerve sense system, the rhythmic system and the metabolic system – are separate, each with their own functions, but also interrelate. A hundred years ago, on 15 December 1919, Steiner said in a lecture attended by a group of English visitors that “if the Anglo-American economic life which is flowing out into world dominance does not take the trouble to become filled with an independent cultural life and an independent life of the rights and of the State, it will flow into a third abyss of human existence. The first abyss is that of falsehood….the second is the abyss of selfishness…And the third, in the physical realm, is sickness and death, and in the cultural realm the sickness and death of culture. The Anglo-American element may well achieve world dominion, but without the threefold ordering of society this dominion will flood the world with the death of culture and the sickness of culture.”

The first abyss he referred to has to do with untruths and falsehood in the realm of knowledge, of science and religion. Because falsehood predominates there in western societies, for example in the philosophies of materialism and atheism, it leads to the ‘second abyss’, selfishness in social and economic relations. The ultimate consequence of this is the ‘third abyss’, physical sickness, and death, even by suicide. A young person, for example, can become convinced, as is happening frequently nowadays with all the climate change paranoia, that the world is doomed and that his parents and teachers have all lied to him and failed him; he falls into despair and then, possibly into drugs as an escape from depression, and finally may even commit suicide. And the increase in suicides amongst young people in western culture is alarming. The falsehoods of much western materialist philosophy and religious rigidity have resulted in a western economic system that is based essentially on personal profit, greed, and self-interest, which are rationalised as ‘common sense’ and ‘natural human behaviour’ which ‘cannot be changed’ and ‘has always been like this’. On the basis of such thoughts rooted in falsehood and selfishness, western leaders attempt to deal with their counterparts in the East, while at the same time waving high the banners of abstract principles of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, or with talk of a UN or previously, a League of Nations, to “preserve peace” and “unite mankind”, as US President Woodrow Wilson did a hundred years ago in Paris. The Easterners, whilst suffering from their own falsehoods and  selfishness, invariably see right through such hypocrisy.

Unless  we can get beyond the unitary State and – in the West – the sham of political parties, and present to the East an alternative and ethical working model of society that does not require states to compete, as corporations currently do, for economic advantage, “Oceania” (USA/EU/NATO) seems fated to come to blows with “Eurasia”/”Eastasia” (SCO) in this century. The steady build-up of anti-Russian propaganda and increasingly, anti-Chinese propaganda in the West is as poisonous as was that of anti-German propaganda in the two decades before 1914. First, a poisonous atmosphere is prepared, and then, when people have got used to breathing that poisonous atmosphere, a pretext is created, a fuse lit and war begins. Week after month after year, we in the West have been conditioned to see Putin and Russia as a threat to Europe. People can use their own discrimination and ask why there are so many negative, anti-Russian stories in the media. Without being naïve, it begs the question as to where is the bridge building towards a whole nation of millions of Russian people?

Chinese and British ‘ethics’

This year, we have also seen a growing trend in anti-Chinese propaganda in the British media: increasing reports on the so-called ‘concentration camps’ for Uighur Muslims in the province of Xinjiang or on the sinister aspects of the Artificial Intelligence (AI)-facilitated Chinese social credit system of surveillance and control, or on the sale of human organs in China or the apparent readiness in China for scientists to conduct unethical genetic research. Certainly, these things are very disturbing, but they are all aspects of the falsehood, selfishness and sickness that result from the lack of a threefold society and, as such, are by no means negative phenomena that are restricted to China. In Britain, for example, the media have not, over the past 50 years, spent much time drawing attention to Britain’s expulsion of the Chagos Islanders from their Indian Ocean home so that the British State could turn the island of Diego Garcia over to the USA for its use as a military base (see pic below). “I cannot recall any other issue, at least in the 35 years that I was in the diplomatic service, which has so let down the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), undermined our ethical standards, been so carelessly and unsympathetically handled and caused so much unnecessary anguish than this one. I still feel ashamed at the way the FCO has treated and tricked a people whom we had a sacred duty to protect” – David Snoxell, deputy commissioner for British Indian Ocean Territory in the 1990s. Foreign Office minister Baroness Joyce Anelay said in 2016: “In an increasingly dangerous world [that phrase again! – TB], the defence facility is used by us and our allies to combat some of the most difficult problems of the 21st century including terrorism, international criminality, instability and piracy. I can today confirm that the UK continues to welcome the US presence, and that the agreements will continue as they stand until 30 December 2036.”⁷

As for a lack of ethics in medical procedures in China, since 1967 when the abortion law was repealed in the UK, 8.7 million abortions have been carried out in the UK. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party leader, to his credit, has always opposed the expulsion of the Chagossians and is presumably opposed to genocide of any sort, but the 2019 Labour Party manifesto provides for scrapping the current 24-week time limit on abortions and proposes to make abortion available on-demand, for any reason, up to birth. This would be the most extreme abortion law anywhere in the world, far more so than in the EU, where the most common upper limit is 12 weeks. Yet this Labour Party proposal has received relatively little attention in the media. Research into developing artificial wombs is also proceeding apace in various western countries.⁸ These will make natural birth – and therefore also women – unnecessary by the end of this century. It is claimed that artificial wombs are justified on the grounds of assisting premature babies and for enabling single men and homosexual couples to have children. As for China’s social credit surveillance system, not only have western tech firms been integrated for some time into China’s system⁹, such things are gradually creeping into the West¹⁰, albeit in a more disguised fashion, such as the ways in which Silicon Valley tech companies (e.g. Facebook, Google) spy on you online and manipulate your data, and how people with so-called undesirable political views (usually libertarian conservative or otherwise anti-Establishment) are increasingly seeing their websites and Youtube channels censored and then banned from the Web. Similar restrictions on free speech are spreading on university campuses throughout the English-speaking world.

One can see the way in which China is gradually being represented to westerners as an evil authoritarian State, rather as Germany was represented as an evil autocratic militarist State before 1914. The real problem, however, is in the nature of the State itself, in both East and West, and until the State is threefolded and its three spheres separated out and made autonomous so that the political State does not control the cultural or economic spheres and vice-versa, the worsening problems we are currently seeing in both East and West will prove unsolvable. Meanwhile, as in the decade before 1914, military ties between Britain and other European countries will continue to be fostered on an “informal” basis to the point where, as in August 1914, when the crunch comes, those ties will have become so tight that they are likely to draw all the countries involved into conflict with the designated enemy.

NATO and genocide

One final point about NATO: it contains three nuclear Powers: USA, Britain and France. Britain has four nuclear submarines, only two of which are constantly on duty, the other two are usually docked for repairs or supplies. If nuclear war were to occur and Russia were to wipe out the population of Britain in a first strike, which would presumably include the two submarines in dock, what would then be the point of the two British nuclear submarines at sea launching their own missiles? It would be nothing but a genocidal revenge attack against the Russians: they have wiped out almost all Britons; we shall therefore, along with our US allies (NATO Treaty Article 5) try and wipe out all the Russians. Is this eye-for-an-eye, genocide-for-a-genocide Old Testament “morality” where we have arrived at, after some 1500 years of Christianity in Britain? Such questions are rarely considered when it comes to politicians and voters debating defence spending. If the Russian government, as a result of some stupid decision it made, were actually to succeed in exterminating the population of Britain in a nuclear attack, would you, dear reader, want to get even from beyond the grave by exterminating all the people of Russia? When we ask such questions, we surely cannot but realise that NATO is an absurdity and a threat to world peace that should be dismantled as soon as possible before we repeat the catastrophic error of 1914, only this time, with nuclear weapons.

Steiner and the League of Nations

Fighting between the Allies and Germany ceased on 11 November 1918 but methods of war such as the British naval blockade against Germany continued until 28 June 1919, when the conflict between Germany and the Allies formally came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, five years to the day since the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Czech wife Sophie Chotek. Some 100,000 Germans died of starvation due to the blockade in 191911, but that fact is not widely known in Britain. 100 years ago this year, the war that had ruined European civilisation, more in its ethics and social values than in its buildings (the latter destruction would come in 1939-1945) formally came to an end. In place of the war, a structure of peace was supposed to be erected which would end wars for all time – the League of Nations, the cherished project of two men in particular: Lord Robert Cecil, third son of the late Lord Salisbury, and President Woodrow Wilson of the USA. What was Steiner’s view of the League of Nations? Here are three examples of his views of such supranational institutions:

“With the Wilsonian League of Nations, institutions are created which are bound to lead to mischief and constant suffering, when abstract human desires are imposed on facts; with regard to what touches the whole being of Central and Eastern European peoples, one does not create such institutions, but rather, when one releases something that is already free, it must lead to peaceful development; if it is unfree, it must lead to warlike conflicts. One cannot create the future condition of humanity through institutions, as Wilson and the Entente want to do [and as Jean Monnet also wanted to do - TB]; it will arise when one frees up the facts through which it can emerge.” (emphasis TB) (2nd Memorandum on Threefolding, 22.7.1919).

“The League of Nations is to become a unity of peoples who are closed off in themselves. The image of the Tower of Babel is one that would precisely oppose a [real] League of Nations in that the peoples have been separated off into their different cultures. And that [separation] is supposed to be the means to unite peoples [Steiner is being sarcastic here – TB]. The 14 Points, Woodrow Wilson’s Utopia, wants to accomplish the task through conserving what was indicated by the Tower of Babel, the unity of the peoples. It will only promote what drives peoples further apart. It will only make the confusion of the Tower of Babel even greater.  (lecture of 20.7.1919 GA 192)

“…founding “supra-states,” “supra-parliaments,” is really a sign that people do not want to slip out of the old nets of thinking, that they want to stay inside those old nets of thought. When what should be done is to separate the individual state into its three members [political/rights, economics and spiritual/cultural], people want to do the opposite. With the exception of those states that are now excluded [e.g. the USSR] they want to weld the whole earth into one big state. They want the opposite of what is rooted in the developmental forces of the time. Therefore, someone who stands within spiritual science should really have the insight to realise that it is necessary to mount a strong assault [Anstürmen] against what is still moving in the opposite direction today and he should translate that insight into action. This assault is necessary. One has to say this to oneself again and again. And since we have to get used to seeing right into things, it will be good to try quite often to experience the social element in one’s inner contemplation from this point of view… because that is what can fire our will.” (lecture of 22.3.1919)

The League of Nations was the first attempt by the Anglo-American elite to create a global organisation through which they could steer world events. It failed but in 1945 its successor, the UN, founded by much the same people, put down firmer roots because the USA was on board this time, and the UN was buttressed by a series of other global institutions created again by the same people, most of which institutions are still with us. NATO, founded in 1949, was one of these.

UN COP 25

The other event that took place in early December this year was the UN COP 25 Climate Change Conference in Madrid which was attended by, amongst many others, the Swedish teenage Climate Change campaigner Greta Thunberg (pics, above), who had sailed to Portugal from the USA on board a wealthy Australian couple’s catamaran in order to reduce her ‘carbon footprint’. Thunberg has travelled by sea across the Atlantic twice this year to attend UN conferences and proclaim her messages of “climate emergency” and “unite behind the science”. She is regarded by millions as a heroine and saviour. So was US President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) who also crossed the Atlantic by sea, twice, 100 years earlier in 1919, to attend the Paris “Peace Conference”. As Thunberg has been, arguably, ‘the face of 2019’, Wilson was the face of 1919. He too was hailed as a saviour in Europe, bringing his 14 Points Programme, with its dogma of national self-determination which he was determined Europe and the Conference should accept, and bringing too his fervour for the idea of the League of Nations. As the League of Nations was at the centre of Wilson’s hopes for the world, the UN is at the centre of Thunberg’s message in that it is the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which, since its founding in 1988, has been, in effect, coordinating the global climate change movement. The UN’s IPCC, which is actually a political rather than a scientific research body,  is the focus of her message to “unite behind the science” on climate change. The UN Secretary General António Guterres, a former Portuguese socialist politician, opened the COP¹²25 Summit in Madrid by giving the usual apocalyptic speech on the subject of climate change that climate alarmists  – global coolers as well as global warmers – have been giving since the 1970s. He said that by the end of the 2020s the world will be at the crossroads, either on the way to catastrophe or recovery, and he lauded the youthful climate activists who are demanding drastic action now. Guterres’ speech was picked up and given maximum attention by the mainstream media, during two weeks of protest actions by the climate change group Extinction Rebellion. What was not so highlighted by the media was Guterres’ announcement ahead of the conference, on 1 December, that Canadian Mark Carney, who will step down as Governor of the Bank of England in January 2020, will become the United Nations’ special envoy on climate action and climate finance. Guterres described Carney as “a remarkable pioneer in pushing the financial sector to work on climate”. This, of course, is the same Mark Carney who on 23 August this year presented a radical proposal for a new global financial system that would eventually replace the dollar as a reserve currency with a virtual currency similar to Libra, the crypto-currency to be launched by Facebook next year. It was soon revealed that Carney had recently flown to the USA for a secret meeting with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.¹³ Libra will be a digital currency with which customers can pay for goods, send money to friends without using banks, and buy virtual coins, all via Facebook-owned websites (e.g. Instagram, Whatsapp), as well as other sites. Traditional bankers are exercised by this development, to say the least. This new global currency, prophesied by the influential British weekly magazine  The Economist back in 1988 (“Get Ready For A World Currency By 2018”)¹⁴ (see pic below), is all part of the massive restructuring of the capitalist economy which is about to take place and which involves the so-called ‘Green New Deal’, “sustainable technologies” that will soak up trillions of dollars in investment from governments and pension funds and the new financial instruments that will be – are being  – created to fund all of this without, however, any real change in the fundamentals of the capitalist economy.¹⁵

So what is the connection between the NATO summit in London and COP 25 in Madrid? As two more anti-Russian stories surfaced in the British media in the first two weeks of December, the latest instalments in the ongoing western propaganda war against Russia¹⁶, in the same period the massive Russia-China ‘Power of Siberia’ natural gas pipeline finally went on stream – a $400 billion, 30-year deal signed by the two countries in 2014. The transformation of the West’s capitalist economy via the Green New Deal based on the bogus “science” of global warming¹⁷, and ‘fronted’ in the public consciousness by Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, is intended not least to undermine the economies of Russia and China, which are dependent to such a large part on so-called ‘fossil fuels’. In this 21st century we are witnessing a gigantic struggle between the elites of the East and the West for geopolitical status. In the East we have decadent politics and a lack of social imagination at the upper levels of society, a dependence on the gifts of nature and the heritage of tradition; in the West we have current events (e.g. 9/11),‘science’, ‘philosophy’, and ‘history’ (e.g. 1914, 1939, 1941, Vietnam, Gulf Wars to name but a few) that are often based on falsehoods, lies and deception and an economic life based on the same and on a consequent immoral ethics.

The way through this Scylla and Charybdis situation is, as Steiner argued a hundred years ago, to get into as many minds as possible the real alternative that lies in front of us: the ideas of social threefolding¹⁸, which can cut the connection between the State and the spheres of culture and economics. When politics and the law are freed from the influence of an egoistical business life and when cultural life and education are freed from State control, they can inform our economic life with a new ethics and sense of responsibility towards consumers, workers and the natural environment. If this does not happen, then the unitary States in East and West, in which the three spheres are all in confusion, will inevitably come into conflict.

Notes

1 https://www.euractiv.com/section/defence-and-security/news/london-to-host-70th-anniversary-nato-summit/
2 See sections 90-107 of the Political Declaration 2019
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/revised_political_declaration.pdf
See also: https://www.ukcolumn.org/series/eu-military-unification
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irT8FKclUoc
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/05/europe-is-ready-for-its-own-army/
3 See The Corbett Report Episode 345 – The Secret Lie That Started the Afghan War https://www.corbettreport.com/afghanwar/
4 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-nato-commentary-idUSKCN0XW0V3
5 e.g. Chatham House (UK), The Council On Foreign Relations (USA), Die Atlantik Brücke (Ger.) et al.
6 “A challenge from China could be just the thing to pull NATO together” – https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/03/asia/nato-china-russia-intl-hnk/index.html
7 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/16/chagos-islanders-cannot-return-home-uk-foreign-office-confirms
8 https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2019/11/26/why-growing-babies-outside-the-womb-raises-ethical-concerns/
9 https://www.technocracy.news/western-tech-giants-propping-up-chinas-surveillance-state/
10 https://www.fastcompany.com/90394048/uh-oh-silicon-valley-is-building-a-chinese-style-social-credit-system
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7396975/Is-social-credit-coming-Report-claims-systems-like-Chinas-used-Silicon-Valley.html
11 S.L. Bane, The Blockade of Germany after the Armistice 1918–1919, Stanford University Press 1942, p. 791
12 COP = Conference of the Parties; the COP 1 conference was in Berlin in 1995. COP 3 was in Kyoto, Japan in 1997.
13 https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-7396207/Bank-England-finally-admits-Carney-held-talks-Zuckerberg-row-rages-new-currency.html
14 https://www.goldbroker.com/news/the-economist-get-ready-for-a-world-currency-by-2018-1179
15 See my article “’Unite Behind the Science’? Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and Technocracy” in New View Issue 93, Oct–Dec 2019 http://threeman.org/?p=2846.  See also: Cory Morningstar: http://www.theartofannihilation.com/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-a-design-to-win-a-multi-billion-dollar-investment-volume-ii-act-i/
16 The first related to relating to an revelation by the Internet discussion site Reddit that documents presented by Jeremy Corbyn (only a week before the UK general election), which he claimed were about US and UK government talks on the UK National Health Service, had in fact been leaked by Russian sources allegedly seeking to “manipulate the election” and “cause mischief”; the second was news that Russia had been banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) from all major international sports competitions (including the Olympics) for four years following accusations of the manipulation of laboratory data.
17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2ldNuKZgoA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvHMhZ1T964
18 R. Steiner, Towards Social Renewal (Collected Works GA 23) Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999. For more books on threefolding, see also Rudolf Steiner Press https://www.rudolfsteinerpress.com/   Temple Lodge Publishing https://www.templelodge.com/ and Steinerbooks https://steinerbooks.org/