TPA Editorial

Fake News, Trump and Steiner in the West

In the last few weeks a new English ‘buzzword’ has been ‘buzzing’ around the world’s media. Unlike older such buzzwords such as “conspiracy theories” this one is not even translated in other languages. People are talking about “fake news”, as if there had never been something so self-evident as to utter this new slogan. With it, the mainstream media are laying into the alternative media with a rare fury. But it strikes back like a boomerang against the mainstream media, as Michel Chossudovsky shows, who has compiled a whole list of deliberate false reports with fake pictures in the official media, from 9/11 and the Libyan war to the assassination attempt at the Brussels airport in March this year. Chossudovsky’s conclusion:
“The mainstream corporate media is desperate. They want to suppress independent and alternative online media, which it categorizes as “fake news”.”1 The most grotesque fake news thus far is the claim that Putin influenced the US election by “hacking”. That would mean that all the US intelligence agencies, which had failed to spot the hacking, would have to quit in shame over their inability.
Donald Trump has formed a Cabinet that includes representatives of the financial institutions of the same Establishment (to which he also, in fact, belongs), which he repeatedly pilloried during the spectacle of the electoral campaign. Is this the transition to his realpolitik after all the election politicking?
Trump recently had a provocative telephone conversation with President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan – the archenemy of China. Was this naivety on the part of the future president or the deliberate prelude to the initiation of a new phase of US foreign policy? This policy has always needed a formidable opponent. During the Cold War this was Russia until 1989.  Anthony Sutton already pointed out years ago that the future opponent would be China. There has been a “Confuciania” in western planning since 1990, in relation to which the conflict over “Islamistan”, which has been acute since 2001, and the current conflict with Russia, started by the West, could prove to be only transitional conflicts.

Two radical, new sources of nourishment for our time
Alongside these gloomy developments two constructive impulses have brought some light to the wider public in the western world.
Catherine Austin Fitts interviewed the editor of TPA 2 (p. 39) recently. The theme: the  contemporary relevance of Rudolf Steiner and his work in today’s world. She also uploaded an audio-document on her website which contains Steiner’s entire Agricultural Course of the summer 1924 (GA 327), read by the Canadian, Anne Watson.3 Mankind needs bio-dynamic methods of cultivating food. According to Steiner, a main reason for spiritual weakness of will is to be found in false nutrition.
In the same year, for positive spiritual nourishment he gave a systematic path of meditative practice for our time. It has been published by Steinerbooks/Perseus Basel under the title The Michael School Meditative Path in 19 Steps. This book, “Rudolf Steiner’s Esoteric Legacy of 1924”, is an effective tool for the right spiritual nourishment in our time.
This path of practice had until recently only been conducted internally within the General Anthroposophical Society. The German-language Perseus publication (2011, 5th Edition 2016) of this meditative practice was reviewed positively in the official organ of publications of the General Anthroposophical Society and has been received positively by most European anthroposophers. Some people in the West, however, consider this English version to be a sacrilege. Such prejudices will doubtless soon melt away like a snowman at the appearance of the first sun in spring.
I regard the simultaneous publication of these two contributions to the question of the the physical and spiritual nourishment of today’s humanity as exceedingly hopeful. A good omen for the beginning of the year 2017.

 

T.H. Meyer

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1     http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-is-behind-fake-news-mainstream-media-use-fake-videos-and-images/5557580

2     https://solari.com/blog/introduction-to-rudolf-steiner-with-t-h-meyer/

3    https://solari.com/blog/the-agriculture-course-by-rudolf-steiner/