This article was first published in New View magazine No.103 April-June 2022

This year, which happens to be the Year of the Tiger in the traditional Chinese calendar, the month of March (in the western calendar) was dominated by the movements of the planet after which the month is named – Mars. When Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on 24 February, Mars (lower aspect: aggression; higher aspect: courage and daring) was conjoined with Venus, and the two fast-moving planets were approaching conjunction with the very slow-moving Pluto (lower aspect: annihilation; higher aspects: spiritual intuition and resurrection) in the (Tropical) sign of Capricorn (the sign of government and authority, amongst other things).  By 27 February, Mars and Venus had conjoined with Pluto, and the Ukrainian airforce had already largely been destroyed. On that same day, Mercury was conjunct Saturn, and the Sun was conjunct Jupiter and Neptune:  a significant group of positions for 8 planets! By the 6 March, Mars and Venus, still together, had moved out of Capricorn into Aquarius and away from Pluto; by 9 March, the Mars-Pluto conjunction effect was definitely over. In the following days, Russian military momentum began to slow. But by mid-March, Venus had pulled away from Mars (both still in Aquarius), while Mars began to approach a stressful square relationship (90°) to Uranus (lower aspect: dramatic, even revolutionary shock; higher aspect: spiritual illumination) in Taurus. This stressful square became exact on 22 March; around this time President Biden began claiming – without offering evidence – that Russia might soon start using chemical weapons, which would mean a major escalation. On 26 March at the end of a speech in Poland, President Biden blurted out “For God’s sake, this man [Putin] must not remain in power”, which many took to mean an intention to force regime change in Russia; the US authorities quickly moved to assure the world that Biden had not meant that. At the time of writing, Mars and Venus have reached conjunction with Saturn (in Aquarius), the limiting, disciplining energies of which might be expected to restrain Mars’ aggression, and negotiations in Istanbul between representatives of the combatants appeared to yield some hope for an agreement. Western media have been much given to (over-optimistic?) reporting that the Russian campaign has stalled due to the Russians’ own errors and unexpectedly stiff and brave Ukrainian resistance, and certainly, the Russian armed forces lack recent experience; they have not fought a war on this scale since 1945.(1) In the first week of April, the Mars-Saturn conjunction will be exact, and then by the middle of April, Mars will have moved away from Saturn and into the sign of Pisces, a ‘watery’ sign in which Mars is not normally ‘comfortable’. The end of the Mars-Uranus square by late March, the Mars-Saturn conjunction in early April, and the Mars entry into Pisces (mid-April) may be indications that the fighting will stop and peace may be achieved. However, those who do not want peace may well be aware of those heavenly energies and may strive to oppose them, perhaps by sensationalist fake news stories, in order to keep the war going as long as possible in their own interests. [This happened: the fake Russian massacre in Bucha stories were concocted in the first week of April - TB] The longer the war goes on, the worse the economic consequences will be, not just for Russia and Ukraine but for all of us – given the scale of the West’s sanctions against Russia, Russian countermeasures, and the importance of Russian and Ukrainian raw materials, including food and fertiliser, in the world economy (Russia will very likely insist on payment for Russian energy in roubles or gold), and there may be a spread of military actions beyond Ukraine and even the danger of a nuclear strike by Russia or NATO.

To judge by the coverage of the Ukraine war in the western mainstream media (MSM) and by the statements of western politicians, who have responded to this conflict with the same kneejerk uniform collective reaction that they showed during the Covid crisis, one might think Vladimir Putin woke up one morning sometime between December and February and thought to himself, out of the blue: “I’ll launch an invasion of Ukraine, because the Ukrainian state doesn’t and shouldn’t really exist and is actually part of Russia and I want to reconstruct the USSR. Oh, and also, Ukraine is full of Nazis who have been mistreating the Russians in the Donbass region.” All of this, say the MSM, is sheer fantasy, and a sign that ‘Putin has lost his mind, an unstable autocrat who is a serious danger to the “rules-based world order” like Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Gadaffi, Assad and of course….Hitler. He, like them, must therefore be ousted, preferably by his own people, whose lives we shall now make miserable by our sanctions against Russia, so that they will overthrow him, which we cannot do because we are afraid that might cause a nuclear war. In the meantime, we shall go on increasing NATO forces on Russia’s other borders to which we have steadily advanced since 1991 and we shall continue to send lethal weapons to Ukraine so that they can fight for their country (and for us) until the last Ukrainian, or Putin, is dead.’ If this sounds cynical, let us recall how many millions of young men the aging politicians of Europe were prepared to send to their deaths in the horrors of the First World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, or let us recall the words of America’s first female Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who as US Ambassador to the UN (!), declared on the prestigious US TV show 60 Minutes in 1996 that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to US sanctions on Iraq was “a price worth paying”.

Countless people in the West have swallowed this MSM version of Putin and the war in Ukraine just as they swallowed the government and MSM line on Covid for the past two years. Or else, if they are anti-Establishment and deride the MSM, they are influenced by social media and alternative websites to believe that ‘Putin, Zelensky, Biden, Xi Jinping and Klaus Schwab are all in it together, as they were with Covid’ and that this Ukraine war is, like Covid, just another step on the path to Schwab’s nightmarish “Great Reset” – the remaking of society worldwide into a totalitarian technocracy ruled over by billionaire globalist elites.

But neither of these two views does justice to the current situation. This war did not just begin this year, nor is it even really a war between Russia and Ukraine, however much it may seem so. It is but the latest phase in a struggle that began 200 years ago when, in the years after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the British elite first really began to identify Russia as their main enemy that could take India  – and thus their world power and much of their wealth – away from them.(2) The deeper roots go back much further even than that – back beyond British involvement in the assassination of Czar Paul I in 1801….beyond British advisors at the court of Peter the Great a century earlier….beyond James I’s planned expedition to land troops in the frozen wastes of northern Russia in 1613 at a time when both England was beginning to expand across the world’s oceans and Russia was expanding across the solid ‘ocean’ of Siberia, eventually to confront each other in Central Asia and North America over 200 years later….back beyond Ivan the Terrible’s rude letter requesting the hand of Queen Elizabeth I in marriage in 1570….back beyond the Anglo-saxon exiles who settled in the Crimea after the defeat at Hastings in 1066….back to the distant 9th century, when Danish pagan Vikings from Scandinavia began the effort (which ended in 1066) to conquer and settle in England and other pagan Vikings from Sweden also accepted the invitation to become the rulers of the pagan Slavs who lived in northern Russia. It was from pagan Scandinavia that the rulers of the English (Vikings and Normans) and of the Russians (Ruotsi  – old Finnish for ‘rowers’) both came, rowing in their longships. Once established, they both ruled over peoples of a different, though not vastly different, stock from themselves: Anglo-Saxons and Celts, and Slavic tribes.

Ukraine 2022 and 1914-18: bullies and underdogs

Today, all eyes are currently on “brave Ukraine”, as in 1914 they were on what the western MSM called “plucky little Serbia” and “gallant little Belgium”, who were cast as fighting for their lives like David against the imperial Goliaths of Austria-Hungary and Germany respectively, or in September 1939 when “brave Poland” was invaded by the military machines first of Hitlerian Germany and then the Soviet Union 17 days later. The British like to side with the ‘underdog’ and against the ‘bully’. But the fighting in Ukraine, which actually began in 2014, is but a symptom of a much larger, world-spanning conflict that has already lasted, and may well yet last, for centuries. Who is actually the underdog, and who the bully? Do they even exist?

As with so much else in the past century, we can relate the pain of Russia and Ukraine today to the events of that crucible of cruelty, the First World War – when Ukraine as an independent state almost emerged but was soon suppressed by the Bolshevik International Socialists, who also suppressed the Russians themselves  – for 70 years. When the fighting in the First World War began, on 28 July 1914, the real antagonists  – Britain, France and Russia – did not enter the fray for several days, and when they did, it was apparently on the same side!

How did the fighting in the First World War actually begin? With Austro-Hungarian shelling of Belgrade on 28 July 1914, following Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia on 23 July. There had been a month of tension between the rather ramshackle Central European empire and the small, pugnacious and prickly Balkan state after the assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne and his wife on 28 June by a Bosnian Serb nationalist student who was part of a group that had plotted and trained for the deed in Belgrade. The Austro-Hungarians regarded Serbia as a terrorist state that had committed a number of murders and attacks on Austro-Hungarian officials over the years which had increased in the period before 1914, as well the brutal murders of the King of Serbia and his wife in 1903. And indeed, until days before the assassination itself, the murder gang had been aided with weapons and training by the proto-masonic secret society Unification or Death (aka the Black Hand) which was headed by Col. Dragutin Dmitrijevic, the commander of Serbian military intelligence; he had been involved in the killing of the Serbian royal couple in 1903. The Austro-Hungarians also suspected that behind Serbian nationalist aggression against the empire was Russian, British, and French encouragement and support, including weapons supplies. The guns used for the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince were later sourced to Belgium, a country very much under the British wing, and the Serbian officer who had taken them to Serbia had Freemasonic connections with Belgian lodges. The Austro-Hungarians attacked Serbia pre-emptively, expecting that Serbia would soon be the battering ram for the destruction of their empire. The Russians had planned to attack Germany pre-emptively, because Germany’s ally Turkey was about to receive brand new battleships from Britain that could defeat the Russian Black Sea fleet, and the Russians’ main war aim was to take back Istanbul (Constantinople) for the Orthodox faith.(3) Germany too declared war on Russia pre-emptively, thinking that if they did not, then by 1917, Russia would be strong enough to overwhelm them. Germany also declared war on Russia’s ally France pre-emptively, assuming that France would join the war in support of its Russian ally, which France certainly intended to do. The British declared war on Germany pre-emptively, thinking that Germany’s economy would outstrip Britain’s within a few years, even though the Germans had effectively given up the naval race of battleship-building two years earlier. Fear of the future was therefore what drove many of the combatants, just as it has driven Vladimir Putin, who sees Ukraine much as Austria-Hungary regarded Serbia – as a spear that had been aimed at Russia (and Austria-Hungary) for at least two decades by forces in the West.

In lectures in late 1916 Rudolf Steiner pointed out that a “Slav Welfare Committee” organisation “under the protection of the Russian government” had in fact been found to have been sending weapons under cover as far back as the mid-1880s to stir up trouble for the pro-Austro-Hungarian Obrenovich dynasty in Serbia.(4) It was King Alexander Obrenovich and his wife who were murdered in 1903 by Col. Dmitrijevic and his fellow conspirators and replaced by King Peter Karageorgevic, who was more inclined to favour Russia, France and Britain. In 1914, the Triple Entente alliance (Russia, France and Britain) used Serbian nationalism as an instrument to bring about “regime change” in Austria-Hungary and Germany, through the means of a general European war. The British and Americans furthermore, used this same war to force regime change in their ‘ally’, Russia, first by replacing the Czarist regime with a provisional republican government, and then by facilitating the journey of Communist agitator Leon Trotsky to Russia in 1917(5) (via New York and Canada), and by supporting the Bolshevik revolutionaries after their coup in Nov. 1917 and in subsequent years with considerable financial investments in Bolshevik Russia.(6) The so-called “German threat” was but the excuse to get Russia involved in a major war that would lead to the overthrow of the Czarist state.

                                                   Historical Map of Ukraine showing how territories were added to produce today’s state: 1654 -2013

And here we gain an important clue to what the current Ukraine war is all about. To understand why this war is about something far larger than just a war between Russia and Ukraine, we have to make something of a detour back to the circumstances of the First World War, the war from which Ukraine almost emerged for the first time as an independent state in 1918-21. “Brave Serbia”, the ally of Britain, France and Russia in 1914 which was much lauded in the western Press during the 1914-1918 war, had lost a quarter (850,000) of its pre-war population by the end of the war, but that was of little consequence to the Allied elites, who by 1918 had achieved their aims as a result of having stirred up and manipulated Serbian nationalism to become the spark that lit the powder keg: by the winter of 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was no more and its Emperor an exile (the German, Russian and Ottoman empires had also gone under). The western Allies’ ‘reward’ for Serbia was the creation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (under Serbian leadership) out of the ruins of Serbia and of the Habsburg empire of Austria-Hungary. The break-up of the Habsburg empire was embraced as a war aim during the war by the Allies, notably Britain. Today, Ukraine is being used, just as Serbia was from the 1880s until 1918, and the target this time, taking the place of Austria-Hungary, is another large multi-ethnic state – Russia, which elite forces in the West have long wanted to break up in order to exploit its natural resources.(7) Rudolf Steiner indicated(8) that the war of 1914-18 was not only fought between Britain, France and Russia against Germany; that was the appearance on the physical plane. In the spiritual world it was fought by British and French souls against Russians, due to fundamental differences in attitudes to life and death between western and eastern peoples. Furthermore, he insisted that the key to the future lay in good relations between the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, between German-speaking culture and Slavic cultures, especially the Russians, while the elites of the West sought to prevent this from happening so that the English-speaking peoples could manipulate the destiny of the Slavic peoples into the future.(9)

Western Goals

It is known that, at least as far back as the early 1890s, esoteric circles in Britain were envisaging a great European war that would come about through Slavic nationalism and impulses of Slavic ‘brotherhood’ and would result in a socialist (Marxist) revolution in Russia and “enable experiments in Socialism, political and economical” to be carried out which would destroy the Russian Empire and realise “the dreams of the Pan-Slavists” whose Slavic race was now “beginning to live its own intellectual life” and was “no longer in its period of infancy”. This was spoken of in a lecture by the ‘High Church’ esotericist, Charles George Harrison (1855-1929), in London in 1893(10) as an example of the first two of the ‘three great axioms’ which Harrison claimed were “the foundation of occult science”:

“1. Seven is the Perfect Number

 2. The Microcosm is a Copy of the Macrocosm

 3. All Phenomena have their Origin in Vortices.”

The goal here for the leaders of the Anglo-saxon cultures, who saw themselves as the rulers of the dominant culture in the world in this modern era (since the 16th century), was, according to Harrison, to ensure that English-speaking culture would be the ‘tutor’ and ‘protector’ of the ‘young’ Slavic cultures, so that in the future, the values of Anglo-saxon culture would also be those of the Slavic cultures, and notably the largest of them – the Russian culture.

Harrison spoke approvingly of, and was allied to, the Lux Mundi movement within the Church of England, a movement that emerged in 1889 and sought to unite the High Church wing of the Church of England with the latest developments in natural science and biblical criticism. An elite family that had regarded itself as faithful members of the High Church since the days of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) was that of the Gascoyne-Cecils, who had provided Queen Elizabeth and her successor King James I (1603-1625) with their Secretaries of State, the most powerful bureaucrats in the land, and performed the same function for both Queen Victoria (1837-1901), whose Prime Minister three times was the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (aka Lord Salisbury), and for her son, King Edward VII (1901-1910), one of whose Prime Minister was for three years (1902-1905) Lord Salisbury’s nephew, Arthur Balfour.

These latter-day Cecils, uncle Robert and nephew Arthur, very different in character but amateur experimental scientists both, carried through a remarkable diplomatic revolution in British foreign policy over a period of 20 years (1887-1907) in deliberately turning Britain’s two former arch-enemies, France and Russia, into her allies, and her two former most friendly countries, Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary, into her enemies.

What was the purpose of this? It was threefold: to ‘bring to heel’ through a great war both Germany and Russia. Germany was Britain’s rising rival in the modern era; the war would reduce Germany’s economic power and its growing navy, and Russia was the potential rival to the British Empire in the more distant future; the Russian Slavs were to be tamed through the carrying out of those “experiments in Socialism [Marxism], political and economic”, of which Harrison had spoken in 1893. Amongst other things, these would reduce the growing economic potential of Russia and expose it to exploitation by Anglo-American capitalism. The third aim was that  a great war against Germany would serve to bind together the English-speaking Dominions of the Empire more tightly, and the constant threat of a “Red menace” in the decades after the war would frighten the elites in the Dominions and in the United States of America into remaining closely allied to Britain.(11)

Arthur Balfour (1848-1930), arguably more farsighted than his uncle, realised that in the 20th century, British global power could only be maintained in alliance with that other rising power, the USA. This view he shared with the mining magnate and arch-imperialist, Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), for whom the loss of the American colonies in the American War of Independence had been an unmitigated disaster. In 1891, Rhodes founded a secret society (The Society of the Elect, nominally modelled on the Jesuit Order), dedicated to maintain and expand British world domination and reunite Britain and the USA.(12) To this end, he founded the Rhodes Scholarships, which were centred on what he regarded as the ‘spiritual home’ of the British Empire – Oxford University, notably its Balliol and All Souls Colleges. His successor, Lord Alfred Milner (1854-1925), took Rhodes’ project a major stage further in establishing the Round Table group (aka the Milner Group) in 1909. This group performed effective work in binding together the elites of the Dominions before and during the Great War, in bringing about the (Royal) Institute of International Relations (aka Chatham House) and the Council on Foreign Relations in the USA (1921), the two premier foreign policy thinktanks of the English-speaking world and thus in laying the foundations of what is today referred to as the alliance of “The Five Eyes”, the five English-speaking countries (USA, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Thus, although not yet fully realised, the dreams and goals of Rhodes, Milner, Balfour and the men of the Milner Group have been maintained for over 130 years.(13)

In order to secure their goals, it was essential, thought the Cecils and Milner, that any alliance or cooperation between Germany and Russia had to be prevented at all costs, for such an alliance could endanger Britain’s world dominance. This idea was most comprehensively first put forward during the premiership of Arthur Balfour in 1904 by Halford Mackinder, imperial geographer, co-founder (in 1895) and Director (1903-1908) of the London School of Economics. Mackinder’s main idea was that the key to world power was the region he called ‘the Heartland’, the vast region bounded by the Ural mountains in the West, the Himalayas to the South and the mountains of eastern Siberia in the East. This region, then and now so rich in material resources and human populations, could, said Mackinder, if spanned by a comprehensive rail network – (such as China is building across Eurasia today!) – pose an effective challenge to Anglo-American global naval power, as troops and resources could easily be transported to wherever Russia’s enemies sought to put pressure on the country. Furthermore, an alliance between Russia, which controlled almost all of the Heartland, and a more energetic culture such as Germany or Japan, might also be able to bring about the construction of a naval fleet that could defeat the Royal Navy, thus ending the Age of the British Empire.

That this must not be allowed to happen was the fixed intention of those steering the ship of British foreign policy. During Balfour’s premiership, they therefore brought about Britain’s first formal alliance, with Japan in 1902, and just two years later, a war between Russia and Japan, in which Japan was supplied and part financed by Britain (and especially by US banks). The Russo-Japanese War (1904-05, in which the Japanese acted, in effect, as Britain’s mercenaries) blocked Russia’s advance in East Asia, weakened the Czarist regime considerably and laid the basis for the revolutionary upheavals of 1917.  A month after that war began, Mackinder gave the lecture that marked the founding of Anglo-American geopolitics. It was the lecture and article titled “The Geographical Pivot of History” for the Royal Geographical Society and it put forward Mackinder’s Heartland Theory. In 1919, in his book Democratic Ideals and Reality (p. 150), Mackinder summarised his key geopolitical insight in a pithy three-line epithet:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;

who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; [i.e. Eurasia]

who rules the World Island commands the world.

This epithet is a major key to understanding events in the Ukraine today, in the age of China’s Belt and Road transport infrastructure that has been gradually extended since 2013 across Eurasia and into Europe. Mackinder saw that rail networks could both facilitate Russian advances within and beyond Siberia and Central Asia and also facilitate attacks on Russia from its periphery.

Ukraine on The Grand Chessboard

Anglo-American geopoliticians since Mackinder, most notably the Polish-American Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928-2017, National Security Adviser 1977-1981 under President Jimmy Carter) in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, followed Mackinder’s indications and identified the great importance of Ukraine as the eastern European springboard from which to project power against Russia, and beyond into central Asia. As Brzezinski put it in the book that is one of the most significant texts for understanding the present crisis, “America’s central geostrategic goal in Europe can be summed up quite simply: it is to consolidate through a more genuine transatlantic partnership the US bridgehead on the Eurasian continent so that an enlarging Europe can become a more viable springboard for projecting into Eurasia the international democratic and cooperative order.”(14) We have seen in the wars fought by the US and its allies and proxies in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and now Ukraine the consequences of this ‘projection’ “into Eurasia [of] the international democratic and cooperative order”!  Because America, through its actions in the 20 year (!) Afghan war, ultimately failed, despite much effort, to establish any permanent military presence in the post-Soviet states in Central Asia, and because India has long maintained good relations with Russia and continues to do so, Ukraine became all the more important to the US as the potential ‘springboard’ into Eurasia: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland….” Ukraine certainly occupied much of Brzezinski’s attention in his Grand Chessboard book.(15) It was a crucial ‘chess piece’ for him, and events since 2004 (the Orange revolution) and 2014 (the Maidan coup) have shown that it remains so for the US foreign policy elite today, so much so that the US has shown itself prepared to restart the Cold War in a major way, after Russia’s pre-emptive attack on Ukraine in February this year, although Russia took no similar action with regard to US aggression in the Balkans in the 1990s, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria. Only in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, did Vladimir Putin’s tone towards the USA begin to become more confrontational.

Brzezinski (pic. left) wrote in his 1997 book that sometime between 2005 and 2015 “Ukraine….should become ready for serious negotiations with both the EU and NATO.”(16) It was clear to the Russians that the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Kiev in 2004, in which an election result in favour of President Yanukovych was reversed in favour of the US choice, Viktor Yushchenko, signalled American interference. For Brzezinski, Ukraine was crucial to determining which way Russia would go: “The loss of Ukraine was geopolitically pivotal….[and] geopolitically catalytic” (p. 92) “for it drastically limited Russia’s geostrategic options.”(17) The Grand Chessboard, by this scion of a Polish Catholic aristocratic family, is full of a barely suppressed contempt and antipathy for Russia. In the Chapter titled ‘The Black Hole’ (i.e. Eurasia) and the subsection ‘The Dilemma of the One Alternative’, Brzezinski insists that Russia has only one geopolitical alternative: to become part, along with a separate Ukrainian state, of a “transatlantic Europe” in the structures of the EU and NATO: “That is the Europe to which Russia will have to relate, if it is to avoid dangerous geopolitical isolation”.(18) “No Russian Ataturk is now in sight”, wrote Brzezinski in 1997(19), failing to spot one Vladimir Putin.

But Brzezinski was disingenuous in holding out the carrots of EU and NATO membership to Russia; they were carrots which the West was never actually prepared to proffer: “And if Russia consolidates its internal democratic institutions and makes tangible progress in free-market-based economic development, its ever closer association with NATO and the EU should not be ruled out.”(20) “Ever closer association” with the EU is not membership, as Turkey, waiting for many decades despite being a member of NATO since 1952, has been forced to experience, and in 2000, US President Clinton responded to Russian President Putin’s suggestion that Russia might join NATO by declining with the words “you’re too big”. In any case, in an article for Foreign Affairs magazine in autumn 1997,(21) Brzezinski proposed that in the 21st century, Russia’s future should be as merely a loose confederation consisting of three states: European Russia, Siberia and a Far Eastern Republic; these states, he claimed, “would find it easier to cultivate closer economic ties with their neighbours”. His geostrategic allies at The Economist had already forecast in late 1992 that China and a mysterious “Muslim entity” would be likely, sometime before 2050, to pounce from the south and east and seize Siberia and any such ‘Far Eastern Republic’. Russia’s refusal to accommodate western, transatlanticist wishes, Brzezinski wrote, “would be tantamount to the rejection of Europe in favour of a solitary Eurasian identity and existence”: “the defining moment for Russia’s relationship to Europe [that is, a US-controlled Europe! – TB] is still some time off [that was 1997; in 2022, the ‘moment’ appears to have arrived – TB] – ‘defining’ in the sense that Ukraine’s choice in favour of Europe will bring to a head Russia’s decision regarding the next phase of its [Russia’s] history: either to be a part of Europe as well or to become a Eurasian outcast, neither truly of Europe nor Asia and mired in its [US-UK-fostered] ‘near aboard’ conflicts”….for Russia the dilemma of the one alternative is no longer a matter of making a geopolitical choice but of facing up to the imperatives of survival.”(22)

Brzezinski’s American rival in geopolitics but ally in American imperialism, geopolitician Samuel P. Huntington (see pic, below left), the author of the controversial book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), another American who was close to The Economist, saw little hope of agreement with post-Soviet Russia and wrote that:

“The conflict between liberal democracy and Marxism-Leninism was between ideologies which, despite their major differences, ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equality, and prosperity. [!!!] A traditional, authoritarian, nationalist Russia could have quite different goals. A western democrat could carry on an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would be virtually impossible for him to do that with a Russian traditionalist. If, as the Russians stop behaving like Marxists, they reject liberal democracy and start behaving like Russians but not like westerners, the relations between Russia and the West could again become distant and conflictual.”(23) [emphasis TB]

When it had suited them of course, the British elite had been very content to have a “traditional, authoritarian, nationalist Russia” as their ally during the First World War just as they were very content to have “Soviet Marxist” Russia as their ally in the Second World War, although it is true that the first period of allyship lasted only 10 years (1907-1917) and the second only 5 years (1941-1946).(24)

For Brzezinski, there was no sense in which Russia could be a ‘bridge culture’ between East and West; it either had to be in the US-controlled ‘transatlanticist Europe’, as he called it – and by ‘Russia’, he meant essentially European Russia west of the Urals – or it had to be in Asia i.e., with China. The goal set out by Brzezinski and The Economist’s Brian Beedham in the 1990s  – of forcing Russia away from Europe, and towards China, and using Ukraine to do so, with the eventual aim of getting China to attack Russia and amputate much of it, has been a long-term aim of western geostrategy for about three decades now. The appearance on the scene of Xi Jinping and his pan-Eurasian “Belt and Road” plans (2013) might seem to go against this goal, because Russia and China are closer today than they’ve ever been, but we should recall that something like this situation has occurred before – when Britain chose to make its 100 year old enemy (Russia) into its ally – in order to destroy it in a war. By pushing Russia and China together, as they have done since 2004, the western elites can set up yet another global dualism – a struggle between what they like to call ‘democracy vs autocracy’, the ‘liberal, rules-based order’ vs the ‘system of anarchy and barbarism’.

Unless the Taiwan issue causes a major war in the near future between China and the West, eventually, the western elites will seek to persuade China to betray Russia and turn on it. In the early 70s the West did something similar, when Nixon and Kissinger chose to mend fences with Communist China, which had fallen out with its former Communist ally, the USSR, even to the point of armed conflict in 1969. Today, with the current war in Ukraine, the West has begun to suggest to China that it will suffer sanctions if it remains linked to Russia. The hope here in London and Washington is that China will be ‘encouraged’ to turn against Russia, and then, as The Economist predicted in 1992, Russia might well lose its vast Siberian territories with all their precious minerals, rare earths, oil and gas, and European Russia, reduced back to the size of the Muscovy rump state of the first Czar, Ivan IV (the Terrible) in the 16th century, can then be captured by ‘transatlanticist Europe’.(25) In terms of George Orwell’s world picture in his novel 1984 of three competing power blocs and their respective allies: ‘Eurasia’ (Russia) will be overwhelmed by Eastasia (China), which will then face off against Oceania (US-UK-Europe). Just as in the two world wars of the 20th century, the middle term (Central Europe: Germany and Austria-Hungary) is destroyed, leaving the two poles of East and West to face each other in a divided world. It is this grim dualist scenario that the elites of the West are evidently seeking to bring about by undermining and destroying Russia, and since at least 2004 (the Orange Revolution) they have been preparing Ukraine as a battering ram to do it. First, they will seek to compass the destruction of Russia and then, if that is successful, and no doubt with the eventual assistance of India, Japan, S. Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and the AUKUS countries,(26) they will move on China and, like Russia, aim to break it up too.(27)

For a detailed discussion of how the West has systematically sought to use Ukraine, in line with Brzezinski’s thinking, to bring down Russia, see Iain Davis’ excellent four-part article series: Ukraine War! What Is It Good For?(28) which studies the historical background, the nationalist background, the Nazi background and the globalist background, and see also the two films about Russia and Ukraine made by US film director Oliver Stone, both available online: Ukraine on Fire and Ukraine Revealed.(29)

In January this year came the failure of an attempted coup in Kazakhstan on Russia’s south Central Asian border,  which was put down with the help of troops from Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, which, with Kazakhstan, are fellow members of the Eurasian Economic Union (2015) and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (1992). Perhaps we shall discover in a few years’ time that the January coup attempt was made with support from the West, another failed American attempt to open a bridgehead in ‘the Heartland’ against Russia. Certainly, in early 2019 the RAND think tank (which is financed by the Pentagon) published a plan for a series of offensives against Russia; it was titled Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground :

“We examine a range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad. The steps we examine would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose, although they might contribute to both. Rather, these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, leading Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, and causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically or causing the regime to lose domestic and/or international prestige and influence.”

The RAND report went on to list 6 “geopolitical measures” that the US could take to weaken Russia; 4 of them have already been implemented in the last two years: 1. Provide lethal aid to Ukraine 2. Increase support to the Syrian rebels 3. Promote regime change in Belarus 4. Exploit tensions in the south Caucasus 5. Reduce Russian influence in Central Asia 6. Challenge Russian presence in Moldova.(30)

Zelensky and Arestovych

With the election of the comic actor Volodymyr Zelensky (73% of the vote, pic below) as Ukraine President in 2019, a man backed by the billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who has also funded Far Right ultranationalist groups such as Right Sector, Aidar Battalion and also, allegedly, the notorious  neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, the tense situation in Donbass and between Russia and Ukraine only got worse.(31) Zelensky had promised the electorate he would ease the situation in the Donbass, but he was soon forced to realise that the ultranationalist forces that were part of the Ukrainian armed forces and security State would not allow him to do that, and he had to back down and cooperate with them. Nor did he improve the language rights situation for Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine.

One of Zelensky’s very close advisors in the Ukrainian government, Oleksiy Arestovych (see pic. below), a man who is on record as expressing (in 2019) as saying that he was ready for “havoc” in Ukraine if the eventual result would be NATO membership, was asked in 2019 if the war then going on in the Donbass would soon end if Ukraine made a formal application to join NATO, and he replied: “No, we can’t talk about….ending the war here; on the contrary, it will most likely push Russia to [launch] a large-scale military operation against Ukraine, because they’ll have to degrade us in terms of infrastructure and turn everything here into ruined territory so that NATO would be reluctant to accept us.” Interviewer: “You mean that Russia will confront NATO directly?” Arestovych: “No, not NATO. They will have to do this before we join NATO, so that NATO are not interested in us as a ruined territory. With a probability of 99.9% our price for joining NATO is a full-scale war with Russia. And if we do not join NATO, then absorption by Russia within 10-12 years. That’s the whole dilemma in which we find ourselves.” Interviewer: “If you weigh up the options, which is better in this case?” Arestovych: “Of course, a major war with Russia and a transition to NATO as a result of the victory over Russia.” Interviewer: “And what is a “major war” with Russia?” Arestovych then describes (in 2019!) almost all the major moves that have been happening in the conflict that began on 24 February 2022 and then says: “That is what a major war is [i.e. would look like] and the probability of it is 99.9%.” Interviewer: “When?” Arestovych: “After 2020, the most critical years are 2021 and 2022, then 2024-2026 and 2028-2030 will be critical. Maybe even three wars with Russia.” Interviewer: “How can Ukraine get a MAP [membership application plan] with NATO, and not get stuck in a full-scale war with Russia?” Arestovych: “No way, well, except that they [the West] will hit Russia with means that will make it clear that they are not welcome here….sanctions, embargoes….They can make it so that power in Russia will change…..Liberals can come and Russia will again be a good country [i.e. as in the Yeltsin years ! – TB]… Interviewer: Is the option of a peaceful settlement being considered? Arestovych: “No, it won’t happen.” However, Arestovych didn’t think that sanctions would be effective against Russia and pointed to their failure against Iran over 40 years. The only way forward for Ukraine, he said, was war with Russia, and after it would come the reward: NATO membership. He goes on to say: “There is no chance of neutrality in Ukraine. One way or another, we will drift into one or another supranational military alliance. Only, it will be either the “Taiga Union” [Eurasian Union] or NATO. We were in “Taiga” [the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States] and I personally don’t want to. We haven’t been in NATO [so] let’s try [it]. We will definitely not maintain neutrality. This means that the main task is to join NATO, and no social and economic sacrifices are such in the face of this task [emphasis – TB], even if the US dollar goes to 250….the price of joining NATO is likely to be a war with Russia or a sequence of such conflicts. In this conflict we will be very actively supported by the West, – with weapons, assistance, equipment, new sanctions against Russia and the quite possible introduction of a NATO contingent, a no-fly zone. We won’t lose, and that’s good.”(32)

Arestovych comes across as a thoroughly cynical and Machiavellian character who was and is prepared to see his country and people devastated in order to achieve the one goal he thinks necessary to secure its future – NATO membership – even though other goals would be possible for Ukraine, such as what has been called ‘the Finnish solution’. Finland has a very long border with Russia, as does Ukraine, and it has never been a member of NATO. As such, even though it joined the EU, it has enjoyed good, if wary, relations both with the USSR and with the Russian Federation; like Switzerland, Finland maintains a very capable armed neutrality. It has long been, even before joining the EU, a prosperous, democratic country.

But Volodymyr Zelensky and Oleksiy Arestovych have shown no sign of wanting to adopt the Finnish solution for Ukraine. The actions and numerous staged video appearances of comic actor President Zelensky outside at night in Kiev (all too obviously in front of a green screen)  and on video screens in numerous foreign parliaments have so far seemed to go along with the line advanced in Arestovych’s 2019 interview. In 2019 and still today, Arestovych has felt so confident because he knew Ukraine would have the will of western power circles behind it, and so it has turned out. The elites of the West have, on the whole, rallied behind Zelensky and Ukraine as they did behind COVID-19 lockdowns, restrictions and anti-COVID-19 injections – with almost total uniformity. And the response of the western media controlled by those same elites has been as uniform and conformist as it has been over COVID-19.

The Motive of National Survival

Vladimir Putin, for his part, seems prepared to devastate parts of eastern Ukraine (while western Ukraine – a very large region – has so far been mostly untouched by the war) in order to achieve his aims, which he sees ultimately as the survival of the Russian people and the Russian state. It is not so much the Soviet Empire that Putin wants to resurrect as the greatness of the Russian State, which he feels reflects the greatness of the Russian people, and he wants that greatness to be recognised in the world. The Russians are a great people with a great culture, but they, like the Ukrainians, have very little political, and close to zero democratic  experience: only some 30 years, since the end of the USSR.  When faced with the question of national survival, however, most countries have been prepared to flout international law. The USA, for example, did so, in 2003 in invading Iraq, which it spuriously claimed had weapons of mass destruction, and arguably, in 2001, in invading Afghanistan, where, on the basis of all-too fallible evidence, that unhappy country was invaded by the US-led NATO and subjected to 20 years of war and occupation. Afghanistan is thousands of miles away from the USA, whereas Ukraine shares with Russia a border 1,282 miles long. If NATO bases and missiles were installed in Ukraine, they would indeed pose an existential threat to Russia in the event of a war, which is how the USSR saw American missiles in Turkey before the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. With Ukraine in NATO, the distance to Moscow from a NATO missile base in northern Ukraine would be less than the distance from London to Edinburgh, and the missile, if not shot down, would arrive in Moscow in five minutes or less. To preclude a similar such scenario in the western hemisphere, President Kennedy in 1962 threatened the Soviets with nuclear war. They backed down and withdrew their missiles from Cuba, having obtained secret American guarantees that US missiles in Turkey would also be removed. On that occasion, Kennedy was prepared to risk world annihilation; the Russians saved the world from that fate by backing down and doing a deal.

The Struggle for the Seed of Russian Culture

The war in Ukraine is not a simple story of a bully and an underdog, ‘the Dragon Putin and his barbaric Russian hordes vs St. George Zelensky and his noble suffering Ukrainians’ as those under the spell of the mainstream media might be led to think – as they were in 1914 (Serbia/Belgium) and 1939 (Poland) – nor is it a mere distraction from Covid or just the next phase en route to Klaus Schwab’s ‘Great Reset’ dystopia, as many in the anti-Establishment scene think. Some of them see the war in Ukraine as a symptom of a major historical shift in the world order, as the declining American empire seeks to fend off a Russian and Chinese effort to overturn the US-led ‘New World Order’; others see Russia and China as just as bad and as technocratically tyrannical as the West, as we saw during the COVID pandemic. The real war is waged by technocratic elites against all of humanity, they argue, and the Russia-Ukraine War is merely being used by those elites to further their agenda:

“….it is a war between Technocracy and the rest of the world. As the nation state model of government dissolves, it will be replaced by leaders of the corporate world, central bank oligarchs and private financial institutions. During the breakdown of the global supply chain, the financial and currency systems will also break down, allowing central banks emergency powers to replace currencies with a system of digital currencies. Digital currencies require digital identity. Digital identity will enable Universal Basic Income and rationing of all necessities of life. Governments will bow, Technocracy will take over and the Great Reset will be complete.”(33)

However, this war has its own genesis, context and background, and it happens to coincide with the larger global crisis of the 21st century, through which Messrs Schwab, Gates, Musk, Fink & Co. are seeking to take us all into their technocratic, AI-driven One World Order of the “4th Post-Industrial Revolution”. If there is an underdog in this fight, with its back against the wall, it is actually Russia, or rather, Russia is the bear being baited by the dogs of the West who are determined to force the Russian bear to comply with the dictates of  the elites of the Anglosphere and with the intended world government, led by them, which they regard as desirable and inevitable. Ukraine has been used by the West over the past 20 years as the stick to poke the Russian bear, and in his desperate fury, the bear has now lashed out at his brother and sister Slavic nation which he recognises – too late? – has been prepared by the West for aggressive use against him, rather like Japan was used against Russia by the West in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Without the support of the West, it is very likely that Japan would not have triumphed against Russia. On that occasion, Russia was also partly to blame for having expanded imperialistically into northeastern China, where it ran into the ambitions of the equally greedy and imperialistic Japanese. In this early 21st century, however, before 2004 Russia was not seeking to expand its territory. It was the West, in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, that sought to prepare Ukraine as its weapon against Russia. The hapless Ukrainian people, with little experience of democracy, have been manoeuvred by unscrupulous forces at home and abroad into electing a series of corrupt, oligarch-driven governments who have been subject to western pressure and bribes (not least from Joe Biden and his son Hunter) and who have placed their population at great risk, ready to sacrifice many of them to win NATO membership, the goal of all the pro-western Presidents since 2004: Yushchenko (2005-2010), Turchynov (2014), Poroshenko (2014-2019), and Zelensky (2019 -)

The esoteric aspect of this conflict is that it is the next phase in what Rudolf Steiner called “the struggle for the kernel of Russian culture between the Anglo-American plutocrats and the people of Central Europe”. “The war”, he said, “will… go on in some form or other until the German and Slavic cultures have together united in the common goal of freeing people from the yoke of the West.” This will require us, he said, “to see through and reveal the lies with which the West has to operate if it is to succeed,” one of which is the pretence to champion revolutionary impulses of ‘freedom’ while actually seeking to impose world domination through capitalist methods. Otherwise, he said, if people fail to resist and do not reveal those lies, “they will yield control of the world to an occult group within the Anglo-American world until, through the shedding of blood in the future, the true spiritual goal of the earth will be saved by those in the subjugated German-Slavic region.”(34)[emphasis – RS]

Today, a prime symptom of this ongoing struggle has been the Nordstream II gas pipeline from Russia across the Baltic Sea directly to Germany. Through this pipeline, the relationship between Germany and Russia would have been expanded and developed, and not only in economic terms. But through the West’s response to the war in Ukraine, the German leadership have been prevailed upon to shelve the controversial pipeline, which several US Presidents have been determined to see cancelled. Instead of cheap Russian gas for Germany and the EU, more expansive American gas will now be transported all the way across the Atlantic Ocean by an endless stream of tankers.  This kind of thing has long been the Anglo-American goal: to minimise and terminate as far as possible connections between Russia and Central Europe, in order that the Anglo-American West can take control of Russia and the Slavic East.

The nightmare of a global Technocracy or nuclear annihilation will become true unless a different model of a future society is advanced and becomes widely understood, one that was rejected in Central Europe a hundred years ago because too many people were mesmerised by the power of the state at that time. Even Rudolf Steiner, the proclaimer of that model, known as social threefolding, said a hundred years ago in 1922 that the historical moment for the social threefolding movement, which he had initiated in 1917 and had been publicly proclaiming since 1919, had passed and that it would have to wait another hundred years for another opportunity until the time was again propitious for it. The time for it is now not only propitious but critical.(35)

Notes  
1. They committed some 190,000 troops to the invasion and were supported by 34,000 troops from the People’s Republics of Lugansk and Donetsk. Ukraine’s armed forces numbered 209,000 regular troops and 600,000 reservists, 102,000 paramilitary troops and 20,000 foreign volunteers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine#Foreign_military_involvement
2. See Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac, Tournament of Shadows – The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Asia (2001), chapter 5.
3. See Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War, (2011) chaps. 1 and 4.
4. Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Untruthfulness Vol. 1, Collected Works GA 173, lecture of 4 Dec. 1916.
5. See J. Macgregor and Gerry Docherty, Prolonging the Agony (2017) chaps. 30 and 31.
6. See Antony. C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974).
7. See Z. Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard  (1997). He envisaged Russia split into three parts: European Russia, Siberia and a Far Eastern Republic. Ukrainian ultranationalist leaders such as Yehven Karas of the C14 group fantasise about Russia being broken into 5 parts. The whole book can be read here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210812092815/https:/www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/36/36669B7894E857AC4F3445EA646BFFE1_Zbigniew_Brzezinski_-_The_Grand_ChessBoard.doc.pdf
8. See R. Steiner lecture of 28.11.1914 GA 157.
9. Andreas Bracher (ed.) Kampf um den Russischen Kulturkeim [The Struggle for the Seed of Russian Culture] (2014).
10. As in the Anglican ‘High Church’ stream of the Church of England. Harrison’s lectures were republished with a lengthy and very helpful introduction by Christopher Bamford in 1993 by Lindisfarne Press under the title : The Transcendental Universe.
11. Today, the alleged ‘threat’ of the Russia-China axis is being used to justify ever tighter relations between the “Five Eyes” English-speaking countries: US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
12. See Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (1949) p. 33f.
13. See John E. Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (1974) and W.T. Stead (ed.) The Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes (1902).
14. The Grand Chessboard, p.86.
15. See, for example, Brzezinski on Ukraine: The Grand Chessboard, pp. 84-85, 92, 104, 113-114,121-122.
16. See The Grand Chessboard, pp 84, 121.
17. The Grand Chessboard, p.92.
18. The Grand Chessboard, p.118.
19. The Grand Chessboard, p.120.
20. The Grand Chessboard, p.120.
21. Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 1997, Vol. 76, No. 5.
22. The Grand Chessboard, p.122.
23. Quoted in T. Boardman, Mapping the Millennium – Behind the Plans of the New World Order (1998 and 2013), pp. 139-140.
24. 1907: Anglo-Russia Entente signed; 1917 overthrow of the Czar. 1941 Hitler invaded the USSR; 1946 Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in the USA.
25. The Economist, double issue 26 Dec. 1992 – 8 Jan 1993.
26. AUKUS defence treaty August 2021: Australia, UK and US.  New Zealand and Canada will no doubt join at a later date, thus completing and formalising the defence and intelligence structure of the “5 Eyes” – Orwell’s “Oceania”.
27. A detailed, June 2005 article “How we would fight China” in leading American East Coast Establishment monthly ‘The Atlantic’ by Neocon foreign policy specialist Robert Kaplan: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/06/how-we-would-fight-china/303959/
28. https://in-this-together.com/ukraine-war-part-1/
29. E.g.: https://www.bitchute.com/video/vLjA2LucDkuI/  and:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7uquXmOMIg
30.https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR3000/RR3063/RAND_RR3063.pdf
31. https://pete843.substack.com/p/zelensky-and-kolomoisky?s=r   and:
https://festival-fumetti.com/host-https-www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/1/who-are-the-azov-regiment
32. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8
33. https://www.technocracy.news/war-in-ukraine-is-the-wefs-doorway-to-global-technocracy/
34. Andreas Bracher (ed.), Kampf um den russischen Kulturkeim (2014) p. 344.
35. See R. Steiner, Towards Social Renewal (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999), R. Steiner, The Social Future (Anthroposophic Press 1972) and Johannes Rohen, Functional Threefoldness: In the Human Organism and Human Society (2011)