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Brexit as a Spiritual Question (3) A Personal View
This article was first published in New View magazine Issue 92 July-Sept. 2019 Chester, a city in the northwest of England on the border with Wales and some 17 miles from Liverpool, was the largest base of the Roman army in Britannia during the Roman occupation. The name Chester comes from the Latin castrum, which means fortified military base, camp or fortress. The city, which the Romans called Deva Victrix, was founded by the Roman Army in 79 AD, 46 years after the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. That was also the year of the...
read moreBrexit as a Spiritual Question (2): The Continental/Catholic Dimension
This article was first published in New View magazine, Issue 91 April-June 2019 My previous article for New View: “Brexit as a Spiritual Question: Why the EU is the Wrong Direction for Europe and the Modern Age”, was intended as the first of a series of three articles looking at the origins of the EU. It considered those origins in terms of one of the two elitist streams mentioned that have been active in guiding the EU project into existence and maintaining and developing it since the 1950s, namely, the Anglo-American stream. This...
read moreBrexit as a Spiritual Question (1) – Why the EU Is Wrong for Europe
This article was first published in New View magazine (Issue 90, Jan-Mar 2019) Brexit is not only an economic and political issue; it is also a spiritual issue, a cultural issue of our time, because the EU is a construct that contradicts the essential spiritual impulses of the modern age, which began in the 15th century. Britain, for good and ill, has played a major role in shaping this modern age, in which, according to Rudolf Steiner, the British people and the other English-speaking peoples who proceeded from them play a vanguard...
read more“Globalism”, “Nationalism”, and “Identity Politics”
This article was first published in The Present Age magazine Nov. 2018 Vol.4 No.8 This month we commemorate the Armistice of 11 November 1918 and the end of the First World War, although fighting of various kinds went on in numerous countries for the next few years, and although the 1914-1918 conflict would soon be seen by more far-sighted observers as the ‘first round’ of a conflict that would sooner or later begin again. Anthroposophers are familiar with Rudolf Steiner’s statements about nationalism1 being a...
read moreMusical Healing (Heilung) for European Culture?
This article was first published in the monthly magazine The Present Age Vol. 4 No. 6 Sept 2018 The events in the eastern German city of Chemnitz (Karl-Marx-Stadt during the Communist era) in late August this year, the brutal murder and assaults, the angry reaction of the citizens, the paranoid, exaggerated response of the mainstream media and the cynical attempts of political parties and factions of the Far Right and Far Left to exploit the situation to their own advantage were a symptom of the social sickness that prevails in Europe today:...
read more‘Narratives’: 1914-2018: The War on Russia, Germany and ‘Hate’
This article was first published in New View magazine #89 Oct.-Dec. 2018 On 5 September the British government revealed, on the basis of what it called “exhaustive CCTV analysis”, the identities of the two men it claimed had arrived in Britain on 2 March and had been responsible for deliberate nerve agent poisonings in and near the city of Salisbury. It said that these men were Russian agents working for the Main Intelligence Directorate (GU, formerly GRU), the military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the...
read moreWarum der Engländer Lord Stanhope?
Vortrag bei der Kaspar Hauser Festspiele, Ansbach, Deutschland, 4.8.2018 Ich möchte Eckart Böhmer danken, mir die Gelegenheit zu geben, nochmals hier bei den Kaspar Hauser Festspielen zu diesem Thema zu sprechen, das nicht nur für unser Verständnis der Vergangenheit so wichtig ist, sondern auch für die Zukunft Europas.„Warum der Engländer Stanhope?“ Diese Frage kann auf zweierlei Art beantwortet werden. Die eine eher konventionell, die andere tiefer, aber auch spekulativer. Ich möchte zunächst kurz von einem...
read more‘A’ Customs Union? ‘The’ Customs Union? British EU Delusions
This article was first published in The Present Age magazine Vol. 3 No. 12, March 2018 When I was teaching English in Japan many years ago, one of the many difficulties my students had with the English language was the difference between ‘a’ and ‘the’, which language teachers and linguists call the indefinite and definite article respectively. It was not surprising that the students had those difficulties, as there is no article at all in Japanese: in their own language the Japanese get by quite contentedly without...
read moreThe Round Table and the Fall of the Second British Empire
This article was first published in The Present Age magazine Vol. 3 No. 11 Feb. 2018 In the January 2018 issue of TPA, (‘The Anglo-Saxons’ and the European Union Project) I wrote, amongst other things, about a book published by Cambridge Scholars Press in the run-up to the 2016 EU Referendum in Britain titled June 1940, Great Britain and the First Attempt to Build a European Union. The 393-page book was written by an Italian professor of political science who specialises in “the history and theory of European integration”,...
read moreThe Cecils and the End of the British Empire
This article was first published in the monthly magazine The Present Age Vol. 3 No. 7 in October 2017 This is the fourth in a short series of articles about the historical consequences of the rivalry between Philip IV (the Fair) of France (r.1285-1314), who destroyed the Order of the Knights Templar, and his rival Edward I of England (r. 1272-1307) who sought to conquer Wales and Scotland. Philip married his daughter to Edward’s son, and out of this fateful marriage later came the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) between France and England,...
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