TPA Editorial

Conditions of Peace and Inner Development

More than 700 years after the founding of the Old Swiss Confederacy on the Rütli mountain meadow near Lake Lucerne, from 15 to 16 June 2024, the original idea of a mediating Switzerland was laid to rest, so to speak, at the same lake. We are talking about the peace conference farce on the Bürgenstock mountain. The Ukrainian President Zelensky, who was no longer the legitimate President, was able to dictate to Switzerland and its Foreign Minister Cassis the main condition of an absurd conference: no Russian participation. (See the article by Andreas Flörsheimer on p.29)
On the rt.de podcast, Rainer Rupp provided an analysis of the outcome of the Western peace farce, which is worth watching.1
Even if the Swiss and Western mainstream media were full of praise – Swiss State Secretary Alexander Fasel even blathered on about Switzerland’s entry into the history books of the future as a ‘significant player, recognised on all sides’ (Weltwoche, 26/24).
Rupp’s analysis also reported on the other peace initiative, which the uninvited President Putin launched one day before the Bürgenstock Conference. It forms a striking contrast to Zelensky’s absurd 10-point programme, which treats Russia as if it had lost the war. Putin’s proposals were relatively moderate: no NATO membership (in contrast to possible EU membership), the cession of the four Russian-speaking provinces that have already become de facto Russian, Moscow’s renunciation of Odessa, etc.
Particular emphasis was placed on the sabotage by which, on 9 April 2022, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, at the behest of Washington (see the article by Andreas Bracher on p. 8f.), ruined the peace negotiations in Istanbul, which were already nearing completion.
NATO, once again, immediately rejected Putin’s proposals outright.

A few weeks earlier, the NATO headquarters had been relocated to Wiesbaden, the capital of the US occupation of Germany. With this move, Germany became even more a particular target for the Russian defence forces, which are permanently and systematically threatened by NATO.

Conditions for inner development
The Bürgenstock farce nevertheless provides an opportunity to consider real peace conditions for once. These are rooted in the inner development that every human being can accomplish for himself. In his book on self-development, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? How Is It Achieved? Rudolf Steiner characterises seven stages of such self-development. They encompass the seven aspects of the human being’s full nature and require:
1. physical and spiritual health, 2. a feeling of unity with life as a whole, 3. an awareness of the objective meaning of the life of the soul, 4. the view of the I as the true spiritual core of the human being.
This briefly outlines the first four conditions of inner development.
They are also fundamental for all external conditions of peace. Their non-fulfilment must turn all such external conditions of peace into a theatre of empty and mendacious phrases. This, at any rate, was shown by the Bürgenstock Conference.
“Evil is now the dominant power in the Western world,” Paul Craig Roberts has said.2 This is precisely why inner development is indispensable, everywhere in the world.

  T.H. Meyer

________________________________________

1 https://de.rt.com/meinung/210658-russland-zeigt-instrumente/

2 Uncut-News, 28 June 2024.

Peaceful Settlement of Palestine

The need to remember Laurence Oliphant (1829-1888)1

Many years before Theodor Herzl’s programmatic text Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State)(1896), which ultimately led to the founding of the State of Israel, the non-Jewish Laurence Oliphant set to work on a plan for the settlement of Jews in Palestine.
Oliphant had experienced, especially on his trips to Russia and eastern Europe, the growing oppression of the Jews and wanted to create a liberating safety valve for it. He negotiated with the Turkish Sultan, to whose domains Palestine belonged, and with the British government, which approved his proposal. A region east of Jerusalem and the River Jordan was selected for the settlement. With his wife Alice, he relocated to Haifa and the land of the Druze (Daliat-el-Karmel), where long ago the prophet Elijah had fought the priests of Baal, near Mt. Carmel, to which Pythagoras had once journeyed.
Oliphant learned Hebrew, and his wife Arabic, so that they could work together with the neighbouring residents who they very much esteemed, no less than the Druze, who believed in reincarnation. In addition, Oliphant worked to realise a railway line project from Haifa to Damascus and wrote books.
Oliphant found a helper and friend in the person of the poet Naphtali Herz Imber (1856-1909), the composer of the song which would later become the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah”. As a child, Imber was called “Herzele”, an unconscious allusion to Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), a very different character.
After the first Zionist Congress in Basel (1897), Herzl became the actual trailblazer for the State of Israel, which was founded in 1948. The dualism with the Palestinians had already been preprogrammed into the situation by the “Balfour Declaration” (1917)as well as by the endless attempts at mediation, which were doomed to fail. Herzl became a dazzling new Messiah, like Sabbatai Zevi in the 17th century, whose actions proved to be just as unfruitful.
Oliphant’s vision had much broader, more humanitarian aims, of which Israel today has completely lost sight. They will be able to come alive again when the end of the current destruction becomes conceivable.

An appropriate evaluation of Oliphant’s efforts, which have been regarded by many Jews with enthusiasm, can be found in the introduction to his book Life in the Holy Land (new edition, 1976) written by Rechavam Ze’evi. “With remarkably prophetic prescience”, writes Ze’evi “he foresaw that Jerusalem would become a great apple of discord between nations and religions and that much blood would be shed over it.”
That Laurence Oliphant, out of supranational motives, was the first to become active in the Holy Land on behalf of oppressed Jewish people enables us to hope that insurmountable boundaries will not have been set to his activity as has been the case with the narrow focus of Zionism.

  T.H. Meyer

________________________________________

1 Editorial to Der Europäer Vol. 28/No.5, March 2024

The Present World Situation

We are living in catastrophic times. That in itself is not new in human history. The Lemurian and Atlantean epochs both ended in catastrophes: Lemuria in a fiery catastrophe, and Atlantis in the “Great Flood”.
At the end of the seventh and final Post-Atlantean Epoch the Earth will experience a catastrophe of the air. That will be in about the 8th millennium, which spiritual science speaks of as the American Epoch, and which will be under the sign of Capricorn. The Moon will then reunite with the Earth, which it left long ago, something of which modern astronomy is already aware. Everything will then change radically. The division of the sexes which has prevailed since the exit of the Moon in the Lemurian Epoch will be replaced by a form of procreation related to the larynx, as represented in the first seal in the Apocalypse of St. John (the man with the fiery sword from his mouth).
We now find ourselves in a dramatic prefiguring of that final catastrophe. People sense something of this. Therefore, we have, for example, the gender issues, which are occurring today like summer lightning, a harbinger of future conditions1. Rudolf Steiner speaks of an Earth-spanning spider-like web which will embody all materialistic thoughts that have not been spiritualised by that point. That too is prefigured in our time by the all-encompassing World Wide Web. A prime example of this is the software known as Aladdin (an acronym for Asset, Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network), the main system employed by BlackRock, which is striving to achieve, or already has achieved, global control of all economic data. According to economic journalist Ernst Wolff, it is de facto far more powerful than all governments and central banks.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Superman”, which is discussed in D.N. Dunlop’s article in this issue, presents an ahrimanic counterpart which Nietzsche calls the “ugliest human”. Alongside this, a humanity will develop that has intense spiritual abilities by which the rest of humanity is to be healed in a Manichean way. Today’s “races” will disappear as such and give way to two kinds of human being – spiritual human beings and those bound to matter. This contrast too is also being prefigured today. The “good” and the “bad” are also aware of this; a caricature of “the bad” is associated with Putin’s empire, while the US/NATO empire is supposed to embody “the good”. It is unnecessary at this point to comment further on the absurd, mendacious or even obtuse nature of today’s world situation. Every alert modern human being can see this, but also recognise the acute danger hanging over all humanity.
Does the prelude to the next catastrophe include an even greater present one? Were clairvoyants and soothsayers wrong when they predicted for the present time upheavals such as a coming war between Russia and the West, which would be followed by a three-day eclipse?2
Has the arc of truth been so stretched “by a challenge to truth and reality itself” that there is cause for higher spiritual powers to intervene before the whole of humanity perishes in the ongoing COVID-injection quagmire?
Rudolf thought that such an intervention was possible in view of the terrible lies against the Central Powers [Germany and Austria-Hungary] that were being spread in 1917.3 Is the situation today not actually far worse?
Are we not living through the reappearance of appalling black magical practices such as were practised in the Mexican Mysteries, before the greatest black magician who ever walked the earth was crucified by the even greater white magician Huitzilopochtli at the very time of the Mystery of Golgotha (R. Steiner, 18 September 1916, GA 171)? His soul was then placed under “a spell”, but not his activity for all time. Today unfortunately, it reaches out to the very youngest inhabitants of the Earth.
However today’s catastrophic prelude ends, we should not forget that we have lived through and survived more colossal catastrophes. As D.N. Dunlop once put it:
“Remember that you have looked upon cataclysms many times and have always risen triumphant.”

T.H. Meyer

_______________________________________________________

1 Lecture of 13 May 1921 (GA 204); see also R. Steiner, Die Vorträge über die Inkarnation Ahrimans, Basel, 3rd ed. 2022, p.115 ff.

2 For example, the seer Alois Irlmaier. See also Ruben Stein, Der dritte Weltkrieg. Die Prophezeiungen der Maria S.- pdf.

3 Rudolf Steiner, lecture of 13 January 1917 (GA 173c).

 

Russia, Germany and the Friedman Doctrine

When I attended a seminar in Dresden last autumn, I learned that from 1985 Vladimir Putin – who was at that time a KGB agent – was living in that Florence on the Elbe. And to my great surprise I also learned that his workplace at that time, which was 150m. from his apartment in a prefabricated building, became, after the fall of communism in Europe, a centre of the Anthroposophical Society at 4 Angelikastrasse.
I hope that this factual information will not pour oil on the fire of the hatred against Putin which has flared up everywhere. This hatred is comparable to the cold hatred of Germany and its leaders that was first mainly prevalent in the British elite over a hundred years ago. This elite caused the outbreak of the First World War. Those not yet aware of this fact may read the book Hidden History by Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor and subtitled “The Secret Origins of the First World War”, which was used as the title of the German translation of the book published by Kopp Verlag in 2014. It is the best work that has ever been published on the background to that war and is superbly researched. It was written by independent Scottish researchers who would have been crucified by the Press in Germany. In Scotland it has been met with silence by the media, which is perhaps even worse.
The parallel between then and the present events in Ukraine goes even further. Germany was encircled from East and West and threatened by a series of foreign mobilisations. It only went onto the offensive when those mobilisations, especially the Russian one, were not reversed. Germany fought not for conquests but for its national existence. Russia’s situation today is similar. Successively encircled by and under threat from NATO since the fall of communism, contrary to all western promises, Russia did not strike out until Ukraine threatened to be taken into NATO. The provocative NATO prehistory of this awful war is completely blanked out in the West and replaced by expressions of idiotic indignation and useless sanctions.
Germany’s decision to supply arms to Ukraine is the fulfilment of the hopes of those who for over a hundred years have feared nothing more than collaboration between Germany and Russia. We quote the think-tank operator whose thoughts on the matter can be regarded as representative of US foreign policy, George Friedman, who said a few years ago: “The primordial interest of the United States over which for a century we have fought wars – the First, Second, and Cold War [sic] – has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united, they are the only force that could threaten us, and to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”1
One of the most effective instruments to “ensure” this doesn’t happen is NATO, the task of which was outlined by its first Secretary-General, Lord Ismay, as follows: “To keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”.2
For the sake of long-term Central European and Russian-Slavic development, the complete opposite of this doctrine of Ismay and Friedman must still be striven for – even if the Western elites do not like it. This will perhaps only be possible again after the next great European catastrophe, towards which manoeuvres are currently underway with all possible means.

T.H. Meyer

1 https://unser-mitteleuropa.com/us-outing-zum-ukraine-krieg-im-chicago-council-for-global-affairs-bereits-2015/

2 https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_137930.htm   Ismay was installed in his position as NATO Secretary-General by Winston Churchill

 

Cowardly and Cruel in the Wilderness

Ubuesk!!! According to the dictionary, as reported in an earlier editorial, this means “cowardly and cruel”. The expression comes from an early play, “Ubu Roi”, by the Frenchman Alfred Jarry (1873-1907). It was the beginning of the theatre of the absurd. It is also a play for our own absurd time of cowardice and cruelty.
The cowardice today refers to the unwillingness to recognise the spiritual dimension of our age; the cruelty is its consequence: not wanting to recognise it makes one cruel.

The following are some episodes experienced recently that show this basic character of our times in miniature.
In Dresden, there was a sign next to the table in the breakfast room: “Please
wear a mask outside the table area.” Below it was the picture of one and: “Thank you for your cooperation”. I had to resist the urge to change the second ‘m’ for an ‘l’ to make it read “Thank you for laughing at this sign”; however, the masked guests didn’t look like they would appreciate humour. Humourlessness – another consequence of ignorance and cruelty.
On the ICE express train, acceptance of mask exemptions was officially guar- anteed. All the conductors respected this. But the female head of the dining car staff refused to serve one unmasked person. In front of an Alnatura [organic food] shop was the inscription: “Distance: the new closeness”. Can anyone still capable of thinking make anything of this expression? Stupidity – another companion of cowardice, ignorance and cruelty.
Back in my own city, I was refused a snack on the terrace of a park restaurant. At first, I had a tough conversation with the cashier, but then he revealed himself to be a doubter about the sense of the government’s measures. Finally, to my amazement, he quoted Confucius, who said that a glass should always be half full and leave room for something new. Otherwise, you would no longer be able to learn anything! I reciprocated by referring to Sucharit Bhakdi and the website Uncutnews. The cashier noted both down and offered his hand in farewell.
The descending hierarchy of mental and spiritual vices sketched above could, of course, be extended and modified ad infinitum. At any rate, at the top comes cowardice in knowledge and narrow-minded ignorance, then social cruelty, stupidity and humourlessness. Nevertheless, in between, there are oases of intelligence and friendliness. In Dresden, for example, at the site of the magnificent Sistine Madonna. A guard asked this unmasked man quite unexpectedly, “Do you have a mask exemption?” I kindly answered in the affirmative, whereupon he let me through and wished me a good day.
Wonderful, and yet: would that there was more than just liberation from masks. The great, very important and therefore, as usual, almost unknown poet Fercher von Steinwand (1828-1902) wrote the poem “In the Wilderness”, and it sounds very contemporary today:

Transplanted by a most bitter fate
Into a time so impoverished in heart,
Your life seems destined for affliction
And your spirit to be torn apart

By no means! – In this wilderness of woe
Lift up your walking stick
And strike the rocky breasts.
Many a spring will gush forth quick!

You can think of brave perseverance,
So long as within you there glow
The purest and highest feelings
From the struggles waged by your soul.

Alfred Jarry was a great diagnostician of our distressed modern age, Fercher von Steinwand one of its great therapists.

T.H. Meyer

Silence in the media forest

Did you hear anything in the European mainstream press about the unusual events in Texas in the spring? Neither did I. Amazing, because on 10 March, Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared all Corona measures lifted. No mandatory masks; schools, shops, restaurants and so on were opened again. Vaccinations became voluntary. All this applies to about 30 million inhabitants. (Incidentally, similar things have happened in Mississippi and Florida).
The protests in the US mainstream media were loud. Some people declared the governor crazy. Biden said he was endangering the health of all Americans. Gates’ friend Anthony Fauci was appalled.
We recommend a look at a video by the well-known Internet presenter Del Bigtree at: https://rumble.com/vedovv-why-did-texas-open-up.html
Alongside all the criticism of the decision to repeal the Corona measures in Texas, however, supporters of it also appeared. In particular, there was applause from the conservative camp. Candace Owens (31), a popular conservative activist, wrote: “God bless Texas and Mississippi.” She also urged all Republicans to follow those states, so as to “lead by example”. She addressed clear words to all critics: “You are welcome to stay home all day and wear your masks there. Because to be as paranoid as you are, there is no need for government regulation.” The European mainstream media apparently prefers to bring up embarrassing cases of the enrichment of some MPs through illegal Corona business and lets the co-incidence roulette roll on incessantly.

Independence of the Swiss Judiciary – and how it can be achieved
Der Europäer turned in a recent issue to a very Swiss topic. It had to do with the judicial initiative presented by Adrian Gasser in 2019 with 130,000 votes behind it, which is usually diligently hushed up by the mainstream media. The initiative seeks a new way of electing judges. Until now, the election of judges in Switzerland has been tied to party politics. Federal judges also regularly have to pay a contribution to their party. The Justice Initiative intends to bring about an amendment to the constitution, which will remedy this damaging state of affairs.
Der Europäer first published some of the arguments in the debates on the Initiative in the National Council and the Council of States. We followed this with a lecture given by Adrian Gasser at the University of Basel at the beginning of March. We would like to stimulate broad interest in this initiative and we shall follow up with an interview with Adrian Gasser in a future issue.
The Zurich lawyer Dr. Mark Livschitz characterises the Initiative as follows: “This Initiative offers Switzerland a chance to establish a new international trend with a genuine political innovation, instead of lagging behind ‘international standards’ defined elsewhere, as it has done until now.”
The Swiss people will decide about this initiative on 28 November, as well as about the Referendum taken against the government’s flawed Covid-19 law.
It’s a blessing that these two unique instruments of direct democracy – Initiative and Referendum – are still in use!

T.H. Meyer

 

Unfalsified History and Lateral Thinking

Mendacity as the Fundamental Characteristic of Public Life
Rudolf Steiner spoke of “mendacity as the fundamental characteristic of the entire public life of our time” already in 1920 (21.8.1920, GA 199).
Courageous and perceptive contemporaries have always fought against this mendacity. For example, the Swiss historian Jakob Ruchti, who had written an important booklet “On the History of the Outbreak of the War”, of which Steiner spoke most highly. It shows the diplomatic mendacities surrounding the outbreak of the war and above all about the ‘war guilt’ attributed to the Central Powers. The text was even awarded a prize by the University of Bern. At the end of it Ruchti wrote: “But history cannot be permanently falsified; the myth cannot stand up to the scrutiny of scientific research; the sinister web will be brought into the light and torn to pieces, however artfully it has been spun.”
Of a similar spirit is our contemporary Elias Davidsson, who works with the greatest meticulousness and a pronounced sense of truth (see the interview with him on p. 9f.).
Last year Davidsson published what is perhaps the best book yet on 9/11 and draws attention to the fact that the mendacity of the official myths surrounding this event has gone a level deeper in the case of Corona: the media myths about 9/11 only attacked healthy human reason, which is bad enough; the grossly restrictive and groundless Corona measures intervene in our daily actions and behaviour.

Courageous voices from Switzerland
Shortly before Christmas, Christian Frei, one of the three co-founders of the Swiss organic restaurant chain Tibits, wrote to the commander-in-chief of the Swiss armed forces, Aldo C. Schellenberg, and urged him to arrest all 7 Federal Councillors for their “crimes against humanity”. He also rightly stated that: “There is not a scientist in the world who has been able to prove the virus exists.”1

Rudolf Steiner as ‘lateral thinker’2
It is a real joy that even in this crazy era a new and impartial light has been cast on Rudolf Steiner by independent journalists: he is, would you believe, described as “the first lateral thinker” in the title of an essay by Jonas Glaser in the magazine Compact.3
At the beginning of the article we read: “Anthroposophers number among the core of activists of the freedom movement”. “They find their inspiration in the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. What can we learn from the master thinker in this Corona crisis?”
Recently, Bodo Schiffmann showed the viewers of his TV broadcast the edition of Der Europäer which carried the important Berlin speech by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And we learn that our Anthroposophical colleague Herbert Ludwig, who has for years been responsible for the worthy website “Der Fassadenkratzer” (The Façade Scraper), appeared on a recent edition of the “Corona-(Extra-Parliamentary Investigative) Committee! In his noteworthy contribution to the session he described the widespread attitude of submission to the authorities versus the true autonomy of the human I. (Broadcast: 15 January 2021. Session 35: Law and Health – The Blind Spot; watch from 2h and 7 mins into the session.)4
The spirit of the truly eye-opening spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner blows and blooms where it wants and where it can, and not necessarily where you would expect it to bloom …
These are strong signs of hope!

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

20Minuten.ch, 22. 1. 2021.

2  The Stuttgart Querdenker (lit. ‘Lateral Thinkers‘) 711 movement has been at the forefront of the anti-lockdown movement in Germany.

Compact Spezial. Magazin für Souveränität, Special Edition No. 28, pp. 72-74.

4 https://youtu.be/5GpjB0YW3uI?t=7657

 

The Power of true World Government

In his article “Strategic Theatre” (p. 27ff.) Arnold Sandhaus presents an issue that deserves our utmost attention: on 1 May of this year the Geneva-based W.H.O. commissioned the Anglo-American public relations agency Hill & Knowlton 1 to work out a strategy for how the W.H.O. could best bring forward its corona policy. The agency suggested three types of influential people (“Influencers”). Those with a wide social ‘reach’, those with a medium effective reach, and those who group themselves around individual “heroes” (probably “exemplary” corona victims).
A 15 year-old girl appeared before a commission set up by the US Congress in October 1990 and testified that Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait had thrown babies out of incubators onto on the ‘cold floor’ and let them die there. Then the US kindled a war against Iraq, the Gulf War. Later, too late, it turned out that the incubator story was all a lie and that the girl had been prepared for her role by a public relations agency. The person in charge, Craig Fuller, was later proud of his success in the whole operation and was promoted to a top job in the company. That company was Hill & Knowlton, the very same one commissioned by the W.H.O. in May 2020 to take charge of producing the publicity for Covid-19.” The young 15 year-old was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the USA.2
So the W.H.O. is not loath to use the services of a company that has been shown to have lied on behalf of the US government with momentous consequences (hundreds of thousands of dead)! The reputation of the World Health Organisation, already shaky, has thus been reduced to rubble.
If one considers the connection of the W.H.O. (World Health Organisation) to Bill Gates, Mr. Drosten and the German Robert Koch Institute and also considers the irreversible damage through Bill Gates’ vaccination experiments in Africa and India in the abused name of ‘health’, one would do better in the future to refer to this organisation as the World Hellth Organisation.
through Bill Gates’ vaccination ethxperiments in Africa a*
On Easter Sunday 2020, Bill Gates appeared on German TV. He proclaimed his monotonous gospel that the “pandemic” would only be defeated when all of mankind has been vaccinated. The nakedly anti-Christian character of the entire advertising campaign had made its appearance. The prospect for Christmas 2020 was no less gloomy. But we would like to remind our readers that the arrogant power of the world’s leaders could be reduced to rubble no less quickly than the reputation of the W.H.O.
The Gospel of Matthew (and only this gospel) records a saying by Christ immediately after the betrayal by Judas and the swipe of Peter’s sword: “Take your sword and put it back in its place. All those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword. Do you think I could not ask my Father for aid? He could immediately place more than twelve armies of angels at my disposal. But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that everything must come to pass in this way?”
This power and superiority of Christ is real, even if it does not show itself. But it is by no means certain that it will never show itself (perhaps in the form of global disasters). The true world government cannot be expected to look on endlessly while the great agenda for the whole of human evolution is increasingly threatened by the madness of a small power-hungry clique.

 

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1  Hill & Knowlton is a US company headquartered in New York but owned by the British company WPP, the world’s largest advertising company.

2  For the incubator story, see the Wikipedia page “Nayirah testimony”.

 

Corona as the Mask of World Government

The traditional autumn fair in Basel has been cancelled. Instead, we have been experiencing the forced roller coaster and ghost train rides of tightened Corona measures with the almost unlimited compulsory mask-wearing. In the spring the Swiss Federal Department of Health was still rejecting it as unnecessary, but it has now decreed it to be an absolute “protective measure”.
More and more people are defending themselves against the excessive measures, and they include a number of doctors, for example, Gianmarco Sala from Uri in central Switzerland.
On 8 October Sala wrote to the health authorities of the Canton of Uri; a summary follows:

1. “The benefit of masks has not been proven in any valid study. Not a single non-pharmacological measure by authorities has had the slightest influence on the course of infection curves. On the contrary, the completely improper use and lack of any quality standards for masks rather tend to cause harm.
2. The work of staff in health care institutions in particular is made considerably more difficult by the wearing of masks and leads to health problems which are unacceptable in the long term.
3. The psychological damage of the cessation of non-verbal communication in regard to the perception of emotions is especially great in children, but also in the elderly and in dementia patients, and can cause persistent behavioural disorders in children.
4. The consequences of lockdown, travel restrictions, etc. have led to catastrophic economic damage worldwide, which has already claimed many times more victims than the virus itself.
5. The PCR tests are not validated and lead to a deliberate misinterpretation of alleged virus activity and a so-called second wave, which does not actually exist. False positive tests correlate 1:1 with the number of tests performed, a fact which is simply being kept from the public.”

Sala works in the same Canton of Uri, in which in 1307 William Tell dared to fire his shot. The same year in France saw the arrest of the Templars by Philip IV (the Fair). In this polarity between deeds of individual freedom and state oppression we are also living today. The latter is using COVID-19 as a mask to conceal a globalist, anti-human program and its implementation. Information about this can be read in a March 2020 edition of the Economist magazine, which was discussed in The Present Age.1
The virus was described in the Economist as “the right medicine for the world economy” (!). It would serve the “healing” of the global economy and not primarily that of human beings; it would have to remain until the economy had been “healed” in the globalists’ sense of the term. This healing amounts to a global economic dictatorship which will gag and strangle all civil rights and spiritual/cultural life. What the power elite, entirely lacking in conscience, regard as a “reset” can be read in “The Great Reset” publications (see WEF web footnote2 for yourself and reviews from ff.p 19).2
What is urgently needed today is the unmasking of the absurdities of the current measures and of the intentions of those who are merely using Corona as a mask. If this unmasking succeeds, then the ridiculous but macabre spectre of fearmongering, State-enforced excessive measures which resemble an unwilling ride on a ghost train, can be ended. If it does not succeed, then mankind “will cede world domination to an occult group within the Anglo-American world”3 – for a very long time.
For a brief period ahead we still have a choice. Gianmarco Sala, Sucharit Bhakdi, Rainer Füllmich and all who speak up for truth of conviction have grasped the urgent need of the hour.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1  In Vol. 5, No. 9/10 (May/June 2020).

2  www.weforum.org/great-reset and https://intelligence.weforum.org/topics/a1G0X000006OLciUAG?tab=publications.

3  Notebook entry by R. Steiner in 1919, first published in Der Europäer, March 1999.

 

The Spirit of Freedom Breaks Through in Berlin

On 1 August, the Swiss national day, which passed tamely without any noticeable ‘fireworks’, something remarkable happened in the capital of Switzerland’s neighbour. Berlin was full of people, more almost than ever before. Insiders spoke of several hundred thousand participants at the demonstration that took place that day. The official media downplayed the number to a maximum of 20,000, which was obviously untrue.
The demonstrators, who were not wearing masks were protesting, amongst other things, against the requirement to wear masks. Currently unthinkable in Germany. Good video recordings give an impression of the event, which went on for many hours.
Daniele Ganser was present, and one of the main speakers was Thorsten Schulte, who had caused a considerable stir a few months ago with his book Fremdbestimmt (Heteronomous). Schulte appealed to Mahatma Gandhi’s mode of peaceful protest – with success, it seems. There were no riots in Berlin on 1 August, and the police behaved in a reasonable manner. They arrested Schulte briefly after his appearance, but released him soon afterwards, as no criminal offence could be proven.
The aim was to reach the hearts of the people, said Schulte, who all were at least feeling that something is rotten in the State. But there should be neither hatred nor violence on the day, he said. On the way to the Chancellery, a team from the broadcaster ARD followed Schulte in the hope of being able to get him to say something that could be used against him. Since that was obviously a failure, they stopped filming.
Schulte appealed to reason and the willingness to wake up from this madness. Several times he referred to the Switzerland’s 1 August national day, although nothing comparable to the Berlin demonstration happened in Switzerland. We would experience ‘an Apocalypse’, he said, which means something like an “exposure” (revelation) of the whole fabric of lies of recent decades. This demonstration should indeed make history. Follow-up demos are being planned in several German cities.

In the evening hours during the first half of July, a comet hung over Berlin (and many other areas in Europe). It was only discovered on 27 March and was an impressive sight. Even its threefold tail was clearly visible. Those who pay attention to the language of comets will prick up their ears when they learn that, according to Rudolf Steiner, they are the freedom heroes in the universe and that every new comet should be celebrated with a poem to freedom. More on this in my next contribution.

T.H. Meyer

 

The Awakening of Souls in the Age of Global Madness

A year ago I was invited again by the Wiesbaden branch to a give a lecture and a seminar this May. The subject: Ahriman’s knowledge, from the point of view of Rudolf Steiner’s fourth mystery drama The Souls’ Awakening.
The closer the time approached, the more the subject seemed to fit the current world situation.
But obstacles were not lacking either. At almost the last moment, the event was cancelled by the authorities. At the very last moment, the federal state of Hesse suddenly allowed meetings of up to a hundred people in rooms, albeit with strict spacing regulations.
But would they let me cross the border? I spoke with German customs in Basel three times. The first official wanted to let me through on the basis of my written invitation, but only on the day I enquired, which was a Tuesday. Yet I wasn’t supposed to travel until Friday. To grant that, however, was beyond his competence. Instead, I was advised to call the customs office in Weil am Rhein. The advice there was to report to the Wiesbaden Health Department. I would to have to reckon on being quarantined for 14 days on arrival.
The next day I got a commuter certificate and had it signed by my hosts. The day after that, I enquired again at the Basel customs. The officer looked at me and said: You don’t look like you would be lying. He would have let me pass too, but it still wasn’t Friday. On Friday I confidently approached the third official, a stern-eyed woman. She checked my new certificate and said that unfortunately it didn’t help at all, since I wasn’t really a regular commuter. In the meantime, another invitation letter had arrived from Wiesbaden, this time with the previously missing telephone number. She was satisfied with this document and let me pass. What Kafkaesque chicanery!
I sat in the express train, very unpleasantly affected by the need to wear a mask, and put one on briefly, only to take it off again as soon as the conductor was out of sight. As the train was approaching Mannheim, where I had to change trains, a doctor asked the conductor which law this mask-wearing requirement was based on. In her helplessness she called the senior conductor and the two discussed what was to be done with the man. A fellow traveller wearing a mask called out loudly: “Throw him off the train”. Unperturbed, the doctor insisted on the law, arguing that each state had different regulations. Baden-Württemberg, which we had just crossed, only required masks to be worn on regional trains, not on inter-city express trains. The train driver was evidently not familiar with such fine details of the legal regulations, abandoned his tight authoritarian attitude and admitted in a low voice that he was not comfortable with the matter himself.
When the doctor said that he was looking forward to moving to Switzerland, I thanked him as I passed him on leaving the train for his little lesson in German law, but said that Switzerland had also long been on the road to becoming a sham democracy. On the way from Mannheim to Mainz, where a car was waiting to take me on to Wiesbaden, I immersed myself in the play The Captain of Köpenick, by Carl Zuckmayer. Weeks before, I had read the drama Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry, the ‘Ur-Drama’ of Theatre of the Absurd. The legendary fake captain, who really did exist, one day decided to put an end to his social misery by buying a captain’s uniform, stopping a squad of soldiers marching past, taking charge of them and putting the Köpenick town hall ‘in order’ by arresting the mayor and finally seizing the municipal treasury. Then he drove off in a cab – and made the headlines, after which he was finally granted a passport, which he had long been denied due to his many years in prison.
But back to current reality: On the escalator at Mainz railway station, a complete stranger, a masked man pointed a finger at your Swiss traveller and barked: “Mask!”
Of course, hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of people have experienced similar and far worse absurdities, official harassment and private attacks. But we still seem to be lacking some determined captains who can put an end to the spook of the State’s masquerades.
Our greatest duty is not to put on a mask, but to unmask the globalist “philanthropic” guild of criminals who have put us all in this mess.

But wait: there is resistance to the excessive measures, as numerous appearances on YouTube by doctors, journalists and scientists have shown. To name just a few examples: a whistle-blower greatly embarrassed the German Ministry of the Interior by exposing its official incompetence and its violation of the law. Catholic bishops and cardinals and even an archbishop protested by issuing an open letter. And recently, a female member of the Italian parliament, in front of the camera, called on the Italian president to arrest Bill Gates. Up until now, Dornach has been content with “extremely politically correct” statements worth no more than wooden Michael swords.
But more and more people are also protesting publicly in Switzerland. A poster recalls the figure of William Tell and encourages people not to kneel in front of the corona hat. Not enough resistance?
Everything big starts with what first appears to be “small”. In relation to the current world situation: with the awakening of souls.

T.H. Meyer, Wiesbaden, 17 May 2020

 

World Dictatorship, Prophecies and the Jolt towards the Spirit

No world dictator would have been able to achieve in a few weeks what the “virus”, against which no remedy has allegedly yet been found, has been able to achieve in such a short time: school closures, the banning of public gatherings, theatre, concert and cinema performances, and visits to restaurants. Closed frontiers, closed bars, and at the few open shops and pharmacies the notice that payment will only be accepted with contactless cards. Economies shut down. No international decision could have had so much psychological propaganda for the long-planned global abolition of cash. This is a corona dictatorship still just short of forced vaccination. Overnight everything else, such as climate change and 5G, has become an unimportant secondary question. But there are also good things to report: NATO’s gigantic NATO “Defender 2020” manoeuvres have been cancelled!
And sober explanations of the medical exaggerations have been provided by Profs. Sucharit Bhakdi, Knut Wittkowski, John Ioannidis and Dr Shiva Ayyadurai1.
The deeper background to the crisis is obviously many-sided and hidden. Why was a scenario gamed in October 2019 in New York, which corresponds to the actual coronavirus crisis? (https://www.voltairenet.org/article209128.html)

We shall leave the explanation of this background to others. Instead, we shall just point out that in his sci-fi novel The Eyes of Darkness, American author Dean Koontz wrote already in 1981 about a virus that would break out first in the Russian city of Gorki, but in the 1989 edition this was changed to Wuhan.
When the coronavirus began to spread in the West, it was claimed by some that this book The Eyes of Darkness also seemed to prophesy that a dangerous bioweapon would unleash a fatal illness attacking the lungs in the year 2020, but we soon learned that in reality this claim resulted from a conflation of Koontz’s novel with another book – End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies About the End of the World, which was published in 2008 by an American clairvoyant, Sylvia Browne, who collected many ‘end-times’ prophecies, to which at the end she added some of her own, among them that around the year 2020 a lethal epidemic involving inflammation of the lungs would spread around the whole world.
It is noteworthy at this juncture not only to point out that this is the year in which we are living but also that to recall that over a hundred years ago Rudolf Steiner indicated that “not long after people have been writing the date 2000, a kind of prohibition of thinking around the world will be declared from the West”, the beginnings of which he saw in materialistic medicine. In this context Steiner seemed to have pointed to the year 20202. His prophecy provides the concrete spiritual background to that of Sylvia Browne.

*

An awful symbol for the killing out of all spiritual impulses is accompanying the ban on thinking: in various countries, most recently in Switzerland, starlings have been falling in droves from the sky in a matter of seconds, regularly in areas where 4G or 5G is increasing. There is a video on this that is very worth seeing.3
The last case in this documentary occurred in the Mormons’ Salt Lake City, which was declared the second US test region for 5G after New York.
Swiss President Sommaruga tried to shake up the population after the latest emergency measures: “Now a jolt must go through the country.” The jolt to maintain solidarity in keeping away from other people (“social distancing”). The real jolt in our life, however, is the step towards the threshold of the spiritual world. This leads to waking up from the materialistic illusions of life. Without this jolt, the Corona crisis can be overcome in appearance only.

T.H. Meyer, March 2020

_________________________

1  Bhakdi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBB9bA-gXL4

Wittkowski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGC5sGdz4kg, Ioannidis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw

Ayyadurai: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw

2 In the print version of the lecture of April 4 1916 (GA 167) at this point the date 2200 appears, but this does not fit with “not long after people have been writing the date 2000”. Martin Barkhoff expressed the view years ago that this must have been misheard or wrongly written down and that in fact Steiner must have meant 2020.

3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZuPeymQjuM&feature=youtu.be

The 9/11 Truth Movement and its Cognitive Deficit

Just in time for 11 September, Catherine Austin Fitts published an interview with her and the editor of this magazine in Copenhagen in March 2019.1    
The focus of the conversation was Niels Harrit, a Danish emeritus chemistry professor. Harrit investigated the nano-thermite residues in the towers of the World Trade Centre. The results strongly contradicted the official version with its windy explanations of the causes of collapse (aircraft fuel, etc.). He also reveals the key role that NATO and its Secretary General played in the days following the attacks in Brussels.
Just as timely was a major event in commemoration of the 18th anniversary of the disaster in New York which was held in Zurich, in which Niels Harrit also participated alongside Richard Gage and Daniele Ganser and others. No local press were present, of course; at any rate there was no subsequent reporting of the event.
Ganser is well-known to readers of Der Europäer and The Present Age, not least because of the event held at the Scala in Basel in March 2018, which kicked up a lot of dust: a whole group of “Anthroposophists” who wanted to be influential, then met to brand the organisers and speakers “conspiracy theorists”, but only revealed their own collective glaring ignorance of, and aversion to, the facts.
This did not in the slightest hold up stalwart seekers of truth, as was evident at the recent Zurich event with Daniele Ganser, a former Waldorf student.
The appearance in Zurich of Richard Gage represented the persistent demand over many years for new investigations of 9/11 – a demand that uses the collapse of Building 7 (controlled demolition) as the lever for such new investigations. We will report on this Zurich event in the next issue.
The US writer and commentator Paul Craig Roberts – a former finance minister under ex-President Reagan – wrote on 4 September 2019: “A research team at the University of Alaska’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering” [concluded that] “fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11” [and that] “the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building”. Finally – the first academic critical investigation2! The mainstream press has until now maintained silence about this.Roberts suspects that the findings were immediately swallowed up by the “memory hole” …

The demand for spiritual knowledge
Why is engaging with 9/11 still so important? Because what may well turn out to be the worst of events occurring at the very beginning of the third millennium is such a devilish piece of work that it urgently calls for a much more fundamental confrontation with evil and its role in the world. Part of this demand is that supersensory realities that have long been researched by spiritual science are taken seriously: for example, the world of phantoms, spectres and demons, which have been referred to in this magazine several times3.
The 9/11 truth movement has until today avoided this confrontation despite all the services it has rendered to the exposure of the lies. But the necessary knowledge of evil is the most important consequence of those terrible events. Unfortunately, the 9/11 movement is also infected by the contemporary fear of the spirit that has now reached epidemic proportions. If the movement understands its educative impulse aright, it will have to learn to face anti-spiritual terror within the mind just as courageously as it does external terror and its manifold disguises.
Incidentally, Switzerland, which is, unfortunately, very much in the vanguard in spreading the new 5G technology, is experiencing increasing protests against it. A public demand for a referendum took place in Bern on 21 September4, which is more worthy of Switzerland than unconscionable business dealings in the new technology.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1  https://home.solari.com/solari-report-special-truth-telling-9-11-with-dr-niels-harrit-thomas-meyer

2 https://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7

3 See Rudolf Steiners lecture of 9 June 1908 (from GA 101)

4 https://news.yahoo.com/health-fears-prompt-swiss-5g-revolt-031507130.html

 

Impressions from a trip to the North

On this trip I was fortunately able to escape the gaudy Swiss national day celebrations. The confederative cantons (Eidgenossen) – once named conspirati, oath-takers in the old spiritual league –were beginning to disappear into the far distance. New horizons were opening up. Finland welcomed this traveller. First the good news: Finland is not in NATO, unlike Norway and Denmark. 70% of Finns are against it, even though the Finnish government continually makes efforts to join NATO.
North of the 60th degree of latitude a different climate prevails, and also a different mental climate. From various sides I was referred to the Kalevala, the great epic of the Finns. It spans a greater period of time than all other European myths. It reaches back to the Hyperborean period, when the sun was still united with the earth, when there was yet no separation of the genders and a pure solar impulse prevailed. The Greeks knew that their sun god Apollo visited the Hyperborean regions in winter, which could not be reached either by ship or by land. Delphi was an offshoot of the original Norse mysteries.
It is easier to breathe in the breadth of this spirit. It is no coincidence that the Finn Pekka Ervast invited Rudolf Steiner to Helsinki where he gave the course on the spiritual hierarchies (GA 136). Ervast later wrote the book “The Key to the Kalevala” and wrote a play about H.P. Blavatsky for the 100th anniversary of the birth of H.P.B., which was performed in Helsinki in 1931. Blavatsky is, spiritually, undoubtedly the most important personality in the period prior to Steiner’s work.
A seminar lasting several days with the most attentive participants – including a large number of teachers – devoted itself in the Waldorf School in Helsinki to the many aspects of the impulse and to the world of The Philosophy of Freedom. After all, this was the work that Steiner said would last for millennia.
In parting, I received a magical gift of coloured felt figures from the Mariatta episode in the Kalevala. Heart-warming, like everything beyond the cold Boreas wind in that Hyperborean land …
On the Sunday of our departure, I was able to speak in the Helsinki branch about the second lecture cycle that Steiner gave in that city. I confined myself to speaking about the “Pearl of Clairvoyance” which was described in it in a unique way, and which represents the end of the ancient clairvoyance as well as the beginning of the new, modern clairvoyance (GA 146).
Finland has a great past, but also a great future. May it withstand all forces that seek to suffocate, freeze and dull its spirit!

At the border with Russia no luggage was examined – except for the gift package with the Mariatta figures. And the face of the customs officer, who had perhaps suspected foreign exchange or cocaine, broke into a gentle smile.
I asked my first question to the taxi driver on the way to the hotel: “What do you think of Putin?” The Solomonic reply was: “Better than Yeltsin.”
St. Petersburg was full of tourists. I took refuge in the little-visited Dostoyevsky Museum, which is superbly and carefully equipped. The only large painting was by Holbein’s work The Corpse of Christ, which he painted in Basel. The novel The Idiot is strongly rooted in it, and the exceptionally ugly painting plays a major role in the novel; even Lenin was fascinated by the painting when he visited Basel in 1916.
The Yussupov Palace was a surprise, full of treasures, with a two-story theatre inside the palace, a concert hall and art galleries. The extensive basement floor was once the bachelor apartment of the very wealthy prince, who prince who, in December 1916, invited Rasputin to a supper there. Shakespearean scenes followed. The cyanide did not work. Yussupov then shot him – in vain. Finally, a British intelligence officer, Oswald Rayner, fired the coup de grace. All of this is openly noted in the text that accompanies the exhibition. Rasputin was the major obstacle to the British intentions to carry out the socialist experiment and to liquidate the Tsar’s family. Rasputin’s words were prophetic: “I fear nothing for myself, but I fear for the people and the royal family, for if I am killed, the people will suffer and the Tsar will disappear.”

The liquidation of Rasputin was as base as the ethos of the Kalevala is noble.
A note of reconciliation suddenly sounded in the Eremitage, in the gallery of works by Rembrandt. I stood there as though spellbound, not because of the numbers of people but because of what radiated from the painting “The Prodigal Son”. Is not every person a prodigal son, who can find his way through all his errors and is therefore especially beloved by the “Father”?
In Tsarskoye Selo finally, I had a conversation with a Russian married couple who were publishers, of whom I shall speak further, in front of a statue that was named Perseus. Stars once again arched over the horizon.

T.H. Meyer

 

Beings of Lies and Truth

Nothing happens in the world one-sidedly.
R. Steiner

 

Rudolf Steiner once referred to “mendacity as the basic trait of public life in our time”. That was in August 1920. Today, almost a hundred years later, the truth of this statement cannot be moderated; on the contrary, this basic trait has in the meantime permeated everything – science, politics, spiritual strivings, etc., in short, our entire public life.
We do not need to say much about lying in politics. It pursues its aims mostly with power and pressure, and through the mainstream media. This is why especially countries with a vestige of freedom are being targeted. Like Switzerland. Are there still any Swiss in Switzerland? This is no chauvinist, patriotic question about being overwhelmed by foreigners.
It’s aimed at the weakening roots of the original notion of freedom in the former Swiss Confederation (Eidgenossenschaft). Are the so-called “framework conditions” advantageous for the EU or for Switzerland? See the analysis by Andreas Flörsheimer on p. 22.
In the EU mendacity may be becoming ever more apparent. Recently, on the basis of the latest research, a courageous Frenchman clearly demonstrated the un-European manner in which today’s EU emerged, namely, via the forces of the CIA and the Vatican, which could already be read in the final part of my biography of Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz, who inspired this present journal.1
Philippe de Villiers reveals some new connecting threads. Robert Schuman, who is revered – delusionally – as the ‘founding father’ of the EU, cultivated relations with the Pétain regime [Vichy], and his ‘founding brother’ Jean Monnet did the same with the CIA. The latter, according to Villiers, was not even the author of his own “Memoirs”, apart from their final passages. On 23 April, the birthday of Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz, the Swiss newspaper Zeit-Fragen [Zurich] “coincidentally” carried an interview with de Villiers which is worth reading.
Andreas Bracher, our colleague here at Der Europäer and The Present Age, who edited Polzer-Hoditz’s book Das Mysterium der europäischen Mitte [The Mystery of Middle Europe], is mentioned in Zeit-Fragen as someone “who has questioned the sacrosanct European ideology”.2 It is good that such connections have become visible in the uncovering of the most blatant lies!
But what do today’s mainstream “Anthroposophers” say about today’s EU construct? They want to incorporate the pentagon-dodecahedron of the Foundation Stone into the EU’s 12-star symbol, which is demonstrably traceable to Catholic sources! This is the expression of their much hoped-for “Anthroposophical” spiritualisation of this political monstrosity, which from its very beginnings was doomed to failure – and to this end they are organising in August the 10th “Soul of Europe Conference”, this time in Brussels.3
To the darkening mendacity of our times belongs everything that has to do with the case of Julian Assange. If, after his arrest in London on 11 April, it comes to him being extradited to the United States through a prior agreement with the UK Home Office, we can expect one of the worst public show trials in modern history. The US dictators are likely to set an example with Assange that is directed against all liberal tendencies.

With regard to Der Europäer: Helmuth Zander, who cannot refrain from poking around in what he considers to be Anthroposophy, refers in a new publication to “insiders”, according to whom the monthly edition of our German language magazine, Der Europäer, supposedly does not exceed two to three hundred copies. They cheer too soon. In reality, the number is many times more than that: Zander’s insiders evidently are not to be found standing inside the truth.

From a spiritual perspective, the lord of lies is Ahriman. In his current incarnation he is drawing the forces of his subterranean lair (the sixth layer of the earth) up to the surface. This explains the ahrimanisation of all current earthly affairs.
Parallel to this, souls who are filled with the spirit of Michael bring a piece of heaven down to earth. These are the souls who know that the uncovering of lies is a powerful service to the truth. They know that in the end. ‘all lies have short legs’ [i.e. come to grief]. They also know that through the Mystery of Golgotha “the sting was already taken” from Ahriman’s activity once and for all, as Rudolf Steiner once said. With farsightedness then, no-one need to lose his balance because of ‘short-legged’ lies and fall into fear and terror.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1   Thomas Meyer, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz – A European, Basel 2nd. ed. (Eng. transl.) 2014.

2   Andreas Bracher, Europa im amerikanischen Weltsystem, Basel, 5th ed.

3  http://soulofeurope2019.eu/

4   On 2 April 1922, GA 223.

 

“The Passage from Good to Evil”

“No more and no less than the passage from good to evil” – This is the answer given by the spirit summoned by Lessing’s Faust when Faust asks him how fast he is.
Evil and speed – an insightful thought on Lessing’s part!

The world is in fact in a state of feverish acceleration, if not to say acceleration madness. On all the billboards across Switzerland, against a background of large construction sites, cities or beautiful lakeland landscapes, is emblazoned the new ultimate buzzword known as 5G. It comes as a Christmas present yet to be opened, accompanied by the happy message trumpeted from the rooftops that it is good news for everyone. What is its merit? To be faster than anything before it. A DVD can now be downloaded in seconds, to say nothing of its other much-vaunted advantages. Health concerns are dismissed as “unscientific”. And behind such concerns, as William J. Broad informed us on 14 May in the renowned New York Times, astonishingly, – are the Russians! In all seriousness, the news channel RT America was held responsible for the resistance against the ultra-fast introduction of the super-fast 5G after the broadcaster, indeed all of Putin’s Russia, had already been blamed for Hillary Clinton’s electoral defeat. Or maybe the NYT was not so serious? After all, it is in business with Verizon, the US I.T. giant, all under one roof. All clear? Thus has one of the most prestigious US newspapers mutated in the shortest time into an advertising sheet for economic and surveillance interests.
That Broad’s article was treated with respect in the Swiss press was no less grotesque. The headline of the free newspaper 20 Minutes was:
“This is why Russia wants us to be afraid of 5G.” Fear is the reverse side of the excessive addiction to speed. Fear of missing the connection, fear that Switzerland will lose out as a place to do business. But what is this crazy whirling dance actually?
On 13 May RT America featured a perceptive, sometimes amusing analysis of this farce, presented by Rick Sanchez. Following the irresponsibly forced introduction of 5G technology, the international situation could become so acute – for example, in view of the narrow-minded warmongering stance by NATO and the USA towards Iran – that something might have to happen that Rudolf Steiner referred to after the rejection of the German peace offer during the First World War: an intervention by the spiritual world and its powers through natural or other disasters. Or in the words of the Spirit of the Elements in the fourth scene of Steiner’s First Mystery Drama:

“Spirits would have to break worlds
Before your actions within the course of time
Bring devastation and death to the eternities.”

What a contrast: evil occurs daily at a hellish speed.
What is spiritual and good advances only at a snail’s pace. But it goes on for millennia!

 

T.H. Meyer

The Most Dangerous Extremism

There’s currently much talk about extremism. Even the mere word is enough to send a shiver down the spine of many people. Right-wing extremism is held to be particularly bad, but left-wing extremism is not much better. The issue is by no means as static and definitive as one might think, because experience shows that a political radical left-wing position can easily turn into its opposite. Haven’t former leftists like Joschka Fischer sometimes suddenly turned to the right, in his case, a former opponent of the Vietnam War suddenly approving of the bombing of Serbia? Extraordinarily reprehensible, of course is everything that heads in a ‘brown’ (Far Right) direction. In Germany, some people might point to the AfD as an example and say, “Resist the beginnings” (of fascism). But how can they make that claim when the AfD is the only party that openly criticises Merkel’s current senseless policies – on opening the door to mass immigration or on ratifying the UN migration pact? Or her straitjacket-like adherence to the Schengen Agreement? Why don’t the “respectable” governing parties make such criticisms on a grand scale?
It is certainly unfortunate when a basically reasonable position is represented by people who can summon up memories of bad times in Germany But was the criticism of the Versailles Treaty 100 years ago unreasonable, just because it was made primarily by the one who “was led” (J. Tautz) by dubious forces? Certainly not. But that the wrong people represent a right cause is not only a misfortune, it’s also a consequence of the failure of those who should know better but are afraid to stand against “political correctness” and who prefer to leave the necessary criticism to those who can be easily and rightly criticised for other reasons.

Political extremism can only flourish when a healthy middle is unable to gain a hearing between the extremes in the social organism. And what would be a healthy middle, especially in Europe? It is the barely visible community of people who, since the beginning of the Age of Michael (i.e. since 1879) and of the Age of Light (since 1899), have been seeking to understand the spiritual foundations of world development – right down as far as political events. The “enlightened” moderates, on the other hand, who pride themselves on being free of any extremism, sleep through the real signs of the times and think they can get along without “spirit”.

In reality, they form the breeding ground for the most devious of all extremisms. This is the narrow-minded, rigid and chronic denial of the spirit. Of all extremisms, it is really the most dangerous, because it usually prowls around completely unrecognised, paralysing all spiritual awakenings and stamping its mark on all external events. The extremism of the denial of the spirit, which encompasses the entire political spectrum, makes all the solemn speeches at Easter – the Festival of Resurrection of the cosmic Spirit of Christ – into outright, phrasemongering lies.
And where this extremism flourishes, the situation cannot be much better at Whitsuntide (Pentecost). But the true mediators, those with a spiritual will, work and speak on, unceasingly, in silence. That is reason for hope.
May not all ears remain deaf to their voices.

T.H. Meyer

Cut Off From the Spiritual World?

Thoughts on the Coming 5G Mobile Phone Standard

The new superfast, more efficient and wireless technology is supposed to be about to revolutionise mobile phone communication and the Internet – at the latest by 2020. China is currently in the vanguard. A hundred times more efficient than the fourth generation technology (4G) now in use, 5G will enable users to download entire movies in seconds, in addition to its many other much-vaunted uses. Such is the hype, and many users are enthralled at the prospect. All reality threatens to become a “virtual reality“. In order for this technology to function, it will need a virtually seamless forest of masts, much thicker than before, a forest of small but powerful radio towers. Tiny microwaves will be used, but these waves cannot penetrate buildings, hence the need for the forest of small new masts. Previously, masts between 50 and 70 km apart were sufficient. For 5G, mini-masts every 300 metres will need to be installed. The net will therefore become practically gapless throughout the world. But the amount of electromagnetic radiation will grow enormously.

From a spiritual perspective
Electro-magnetic technologies work from the subnatural realm of forces. From a spiritual scientific perspective, this is the domain of Ahriman and his hosts. Ahriman is the spirit of intellect, which offers a captivating picture of the world, in which there is only what is sensory and physical. Everything is merely of a material nature. The supersensory has no place in it. We have therefore already called this spirit a narrow-minded intelligence, which is the complete opposite to that of Michael, who helps mankind to come to a spiritual picture of the world. The most lauded new technology will give ahrimanic beings a further powerful impetus.

An admonitory imagination
These beings can be imaginatively experienced as black crows of misfortune, which belong underground, but which have in the course of the last hundred years forced their way powerfully to the surface and seek to cut off human beings “from Michael’s spiritual radiance”. “The black crows of misfortune intend to entrap the human race in materialism and then bring about the cosmic materialisation of human thoughts and feelings themselves (…) This would mean that the ‘greatest illusion’ that there has ever been would take on a cosmically real form.”
The seamless electro-magnetic net threatens to imprison human beings in a complete world of illusion and make them totally forget the spirit which, along with their own spiritual individualities, also includes beings such as Ahriman and Lucifer. This should be kept in mind in view of these new technologies. It will carry us in giant steps straight toward this danger. The danger mentioned in the passage quoted above can still be avoided, “if the yearning for what is merely material takes up the other yearning for what is spiritual.” On this – but only on this condition. The cardinal question here then is: how can the yearning for the spiritual be awakened and fostered through reason? Then a liberating spiritual reason can be set against the narrow-minded ‘reason’ of the technologies mentioned above, which can check or even neutralise their evil consequences.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1   Helmuth von Moltke, Post-mortem communication of 13 January 1924, in: Helmuth von Moltke (1848–1916), Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Wirken, Band II.

Some helpful information about 5G technology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEx_d0SjvS0 (how it works)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DG3pMcNNlw (a positive view of 5G)
https://youtu.be/4HJmF0awfvQ (a critical view of 5G)
International Appeal to Stop 5G: www.5gspaceappeal.org

The Supersensible Michael School – and how we were able to forget it

In her book Der Brief der Lehrerin (The Teacher’s Letter), written in her youth, Barbro Karlén says that at the age of 12 she had written that the human being goes through a schooling in an actual school in the spiritual world before birth. She describes life on earth as a great summer holiday from this supersensible school.

And as the principals of schools on earth give the students summer holidays to relax and do better in the next school year, “the highest teacher in the universe treats his children to summer holidays so that they can gather their strength before the final test! Summer holidays in which all feel free, in which all find time to think about their task. And if they did it well, should not they try to do it even better next time?”1

What the child Karlén, who at this early age had already had experiences of reincarnation, relates in this simple way, is profound and true. Not only has there been an actual supersensible school in the supersensible world since the beginning of the 15th century, the earthly vacation time is also rightly characterised by Karlén as the time “in which all feel free”. For freedom can only be gained and practised on earth! In this sense the “summer holidays” are the earthly school of freedom.

Rudolf Steiner’s modern spiritual research has cast a profound light on this supersensible school. Especially pregnant is what he says about it in the karma lectures of 1924, notably in Arnheim (GA 240). This school too has a great cosmic teacher – Michael, who of all the archangels stands the closest to Christ. The most important teaching content of the school is a far-reaching survey of the great Mystery Schools in human history, an imagination of the great “initiation teachings” (R. Steiner) of all ages.

Out of this review came a preview of the time in the future which was to bring about a new mystery wisdom. This time was the 20th century, and the initiate of the new mystery teachings was Rudolf Steiner.

All those who are drawn to the revelations of spiritual science thereby recognise that in their souls a mostly unconscious memory of their time in the Michael School can light up. Karlén became aware of this already in her youth.

But the present ahrimanic spirit in our time does not care for any such great and comprehensive survey of the past and the future. Ahriman is the inspirer of a narrow-minded intelligence, which does indeed achieve great things in very restricted fields but remains uncomprehending of anything beyond the limits set by academic sciences or falls into a vague mysticism.

Not so Michael. He calls for a comprehensive, wide-ranging thinking that includes both sensory and supersensible realities. The new mystery teachings can only be grasped through such a spiritualised thinking.

Just as in the summer holidays much that was learned and experienced at school is forgotten and must be forgotten, so most people completely forget what they have experienced in the supersensible school. Many have drunk so deeply from Lethe’s draught of forgetfulness that everything of a supersensible nature that they have received appears to be extinguished in them. The most effective means of refreshing the memory of our pre-birth experiences is the earnest study of spiritual science

T.H. Meyer

 

The new Age of Michael began 140 years ago in the year 1879.
On 19 February 2019 we will be exactly 120 years after the end of Kali Yuga, which called for the acquisition of knowledge of the world of the senses and which ended on 19 February 1899, to be followed by an Age of Light.

 

_________________________

1    Barbro Karlén, Der Brief der Lehrerin, Perseus Verlag, Basel, 2nd. ed. 1995, p. 35

2   From: Ch. Kovacs, The Mission of Michael (Die Sendung Michaels), Perseus Verlag, Basel 2011.

Celebrating Christmas – on the Meditative Path of the Michael School

Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on the great annual festivals were not for edification, intended to caress the soul. In the course of his activities they increasingly took on the character of actual awakening lectures – awakening listeners from a sleep from which probably not all of them wanted to be so rudely awoken.
Thus the Christmas lecture, which Steiner held nearly 100 years ago, on 25 December 1919, begins with the sobering words: “When in recent years I have had to speak at one of the annual festivals, Christmas or Easter or Whitsun, I had to draw attention to the fact that especially on such occasions, these days we have no right to conduct such celebrations in the old customary way, forgetting all the pain, all the suffering of our times and only remembering at such times the greatest event that has occurred in earth evolution (…) We have the obligation to allow all the phenomena of decline in modern culture which grip humanity to stream into the event, even as far as the Christmas Tree. Today we are obliged to take even the birth of Christ Jesus into our hearts, into our souls in such a way that we do not leave out of consideration the frightful decline by which so-called cultured humanity has been gripped.” (GA 195) Today, this cultured humanity really seems to have been dragged down into this fearful decline.

Three challenges on the path of the Michael School
Today, we have to look up to “the greatest event that has occurred in earth evolution” while cognitively witnessing the misery of the present all the more intensively.
This is a leading goal and motif of a mantra which Steiner gave on 21 March 1924 for the Meditative Path of the Michael School1, namely, in the sixth lesson, the first mantra of which is:

“(…) But mindfulness of earthly needs
Maintains you as a human being.”

Without such contemplation, the Christmas festival threatens to become more of a numbing, luciferic-ahrimanic orgy of sentimentality and consumption.

The second mantra of this lesson ends with these words, as though pointing the way forward:

“(…) But love of values of the Earth
Will save your human soul.”

This by no means refers only to material values, but primarily the value of “the greatest event that has occurred in earth evolution”.

The third mantra of this lesson also ends with the inspiring words:

“(…) But earthly will, to spirit devoted,
Lets the divine in us hold sway.”

Who can honestly say that his will is devoted to the spirit? That he is on the point of grasping the divine in man and of letting it prevail? Yet this is precisely what is to be striven for in looking towards the festival before us. Mindful, in all modesty, of Christ’s words which are to be fulfilled: “You are gods” (John: 10:34).

We therefore stand before elemental challenges for a contemplative celebration of the Christmas Festival.
In the sense of these three challenges which appear on the path of knowledge of the School of Michael, we wish all our readers a true, beautiful and good Christmas Festival and a happy transition into the year 2019.

your T.H. Meyer

 

_________________________

1    Der Meditationsweg der Michaelschule, edited by T.H. Meyer, published by Perseus Verlag, Basel, 5th ed. 2017. In English: The First Class Lessons and Mantras: The Michael School Meditative Path in Nineteen Steps, 2017.

The War on Terror and the Fear of the Spirit

Some thoughts about the present world situation

Humanity is steeped in a permanent war – the “global war on terror”. It terrorises in fact a great number of souls trying to make their living in peace and to find a purpose in life. Living has become a daily danger. Over the present situation a dark cloud seems to hang, stretching from West to East, enveloping and overshadowing everything below it and threatening to cast down storms, lightning and thunderbolts. This cloud makes the stars beyond the clouds invisible and fills all souls with fear. This fear is nourished daily and kept alive by the continuous onrush of ever new terrible events.

For a few weeks the world was in shock because of the atrocious murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. Others have been shocked by the fact that President Trump recently announced the cancellation of an atomic treaty with Russia which has limited the danger of nuclear war for over thirty years. On 25 October NATO embarked on the largest military manoeuvres in its history – in Norway, which has a northern border with Russia. This no doubt will strengthen the fear of “aggressive” Russia in many people. Many Europeans fear the social effects of uncontrolled immigration in their countries. Others fear the sudden crash of the economy and the loss of their money and pensions. Addicted users of the Internet fear the sudden global blackout of this tool of information and communication. The list could be continued almost without end.
Apart from natural disasters like earthquakes, volcano eruptions or tsunamis, most of these fears seem to be connected in one way or another to global terrorism, and global terrorism has a standard origin: the media tell us that we have to be afraid of something dark and terrible out there, in some “terrorist” people, mainly of an Islamic background. This fear of Islamic terrorism is the red thread within all the other particular fears pressuring the present age.

Americanism and the fear of the spirit
But there is one fear which is usually completely overlooked, though it is of a more fundamental nature than the ones mentioned: this is the fear of the spirit. This fear is not somewhere “out there”. It sits in the depths of every single human soul in our age. It is high time to find and paralyse this root fear within us. Otherwise we are doomed to continue to be terrorised by this very root fear.

Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the modern science of the spirit, once characterized three movements full of destructive forces for our time: Bolshevism, Jesuitism and Americanism (GA 181, July 30 1918). About the latter he says: “Everything which may be called Americanism has the ever-increasing tendency to produce a fear of the spirit and to make the world merely an opportunity to live in it physically – a world in which you can live in comfort and wealth. Under the influence of this stream, the connection with the spiritual world is bound to be destroyed.” This deeper layer within modern Americanism – not meaning by this term what was and is in America of high value in Western civilisation – is behind what since 9/11 has been imposed on the whole of mankind as the “war on terror”. It is in its deepest roots born out of the fear of the spirit.

A proxy war and the courage of cognition
In this sense the whole “war on terror” is the real proxy war of our time – and this war is in reality directed against the spirit and the awakening of the soul to it. The “war on terror” is designed to keep mankind in the state of sleeping, drugged prisoners who are paralysed by the fear of the spirit. The war on terror strengthens this weakness in every present soul – instead of helping it to overcome it and to wake up to the spirit, and thereby to find the real purpose of life.
To achieve such an awakening, we need the courage of cognition. This courage is a real jewel within the human soul potential. But it is covered by thick layers of fear, of hate and doubts. To polish this jewel and make it shine is to wage the real war on terror and to stop being terrorised by the fear of the spirit. We start to actively engage in a battle between Michael, the true spirit of our time, and Ahriman, the spirit of darkness and of hyper-materialism of all sorts. Then the stars beyond the black cloud can once more begin to become visible – under any circumstances.

T.H. Meyer

China and the Waldorf Movement

In September I had a unique opportunity to visit China. First I visited Guangzhou, then the Waldorf teacher seminar in Beijing. Here are a few impressions from what I lectured on and experienced on this China visit.

From the Opium Wars to the most modern form of Taoism
In Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton, I spoke at first about the fatal Opium Wars, which broke out in this city. I had brought sketches with me which Laurence Oliphant had made at the location. It was fortunate that a European lecturer could connect to the history of the city which became a part of world history, although tragically. I spoke before an audience of parents and teachers at the Waldorf School then about the Tao and its original connection to the Anthroposophy of R. Steiner, which is, as it were, the ripest fruit on the tree of Taoism, as I wrote in my little book about the Tao thirty years ago now.1
The 4-day conference was very well-organised, and the lecturers – the doctor Dr. Daphné von Boch spoke after me; she had prompted my own visit – were looked after in a most conscientious and friendly manner by two ladies, Vicky and Yejia.
This was followed by an ‘intermezzo’ in Hongkong, which was taken from the Chinese after the First Opium War. The city was being battered by the giant typhoon “Mangkhut” which had already devastated the Philippines, so I left for Beijing a day earlier than planned.

Cosmological character of the temples in Beijing
I made use of the day gained to visit the great temple sites in the city, first the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of the Earth, both strictly aligned to the spring and autumn equinoxes. The essential commentaries by my guide Martin Barkhoff, a former chief editor of the weekly, “Das Goetheanum”, were a kind of intensive course in Chinese cultural history. I learned especially about the cosmological background of the sites, which was entirely in harmony with the impulse of the Tao.
The next four days at the Waldorf Teachers’ Seminar in Beijing passed very fruitfully and were expertly organised by Martin Barkhoff, one of the leaders of this one-year seminar training. Here I spoke again about the theme of the Tao and its further ramifications. Once again, the audience was most attentive.

The dramatic expansion of the Waldorf movement
The Waldorf movement in China has boomed these last ten years – with more than 80 schools and 400 kindergartens across the country – but it is faced with enormous challenges: in Beijing I learned for the first time how sensitive the issue of the spread of the Waldorf and the Anthroposophical movement actually is in China at the moment. For it has to be firmly avoided that the schools and spiritual science have about them the whiff of a religious movement or a sect. Otherwise, a similar fate to that of the Falun Gong sect might befall them.

The Falun Gong sect as a warning
Founded in the 1980s, the Falun Gong movement, with its physical and meditative practices, and also its Taoist character, grew rapidly over a short period. By the end of the 1990s, its membership had reached almost 100 million. When it came to demonstrations with political demands, the Communist Party literally saw red: in April 1999 10,000 Falun Gong supporters demonstrated in front of the central government area in Beijing. A severe wave of arrests followed. In October of that year Falun Gong was branded a “heretical organisation” by the government and the movement was banned. Persecutions followed. Numerous members are supposed to have been killed, others tortured.
The rapid growth of the Waldorf movement in the last ten years is therefore not only extremely welcome; it also calls for the utmost caution if it is to be spared a fate similar to that of the Falun Gong sect. It must not come under suspicion of being a religious movement, for the Party’s view is that such movements can easily become political.
In reality Anthroposophy is, of course, neither a religion nor a political movement but a spiritual scientific path to develop insight into spiritual realities, just as natural science has researched the natural realities of the sense world.

 In the spiritual field of tension
The population are under strict surveillance with the most advanced technology. The ahrimanic character of the great cities, but also that of Chinese military might is not to be underestimated – next to the Beijing Waldorf School I visited is a military barracks; shots can be heard periodically from the shooting range.
As China was once the stage for the incarnation of Lucifer, this traveller always had the question how Ahriman, in this time of his present incarnation, will seek to connect to the effects of the incarnation of his brother Lucifer precisely here in China – not least also through the promotion of escapist spiritual movements like Falun Gong, movements which, like that of the Dalai Lama, have a certain spiritual power precisely because they are forbidden.
In view of this spiritual double constellation, the spread of the Waldorf movement and of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science plays a very decisive role that can heal this polarity.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1    German ed. 1988. English ed.: Clairvoyance and Consciousness – The Tao Impulse in Evolution, London, 1991.

A Modern Public Pathway to the Spirit

The First Class Lessons and Mantras: The Michael School Meditative Path in Nineteen Steps – Under this title in Dec. 2015 Steinerbooks published the spiritual legacy of Rudolf Steiner from 1924. The editor T.H. Meyer added comments and an afterword about the history of the so called “Class”. It was the first time ever that the 19 Class lessons had been printed in English for the public at large. Before they had only been known and studied within an inner circle of the Anthroposophical Society. The decision for an unrestricted publication was taken after serious consideration of the needs of our time.

What are the lessons about? They outline a modern path of crossing the threshold to the spiritual world. Such a conscious crossing is indispensable if the hyper-materialism of our time is to be transcended and overcome. For fruitful work with these unique texts and mantras, however, some knowledge of and experience with some of Steiner’s basic writings such as The Way of Initiation, as well as some acquaintance with his book Occult Science, is indispensable.
The publication was in a certain sense a risk. Would it not “vulgarise” the highly esoteric contents of the lessons? But we remember the answer Aristotle once gave when his pupil Alexander thought that his teacher had given away too many esoteric truths and that he should not have made them exoteric. “For those who do not understand them,” Aristotle replied, “they still remain esoteric.”This truth was in a certain sense verified by the first public reactions to the publication.

First public echoes
Since the first moment the book was available from Amazon.com there have appeared nine reviews of it there which seem to come from the general public and not from anthroposophical circles. They represent without exception positive appraisals of this publication.
The first review states:
Finally a book on the Esoteric school of Rudolf Steiner. Previously you had to be a member of the national anthroposophical society and then get a mentor and take these classes. Here with this book is provided a good way to study the lessons. It was needed as there are lots of unclear ‘’bootleg’’ lessons out there. The book contains color prints of Steiner’s drawings that accompany the lessons, it is a complete presentation of Steiner’s lessons. This is the path laid out by Rudolf Steiner and like nearly all of Steiner’s material it’s not an easy read or an easy path, but this book makes that path much more accessible and brings Steiner’s teachings to those not near an anthroposophical center. This brings an aspect of Steiner’s teaching to those outside Anthroposophical circles. Although Steiner’s path is difficult to learn it is probably the most accessible of the Western Esoteric paths by a bona fide teacher. This book is a must, albeit difficult, for all serious Steiner’s students and Western esotericists.
Or:
This book won’t be of value to many people who are not somewhat familiar with Rudolf Steiner’s work. That being said, there is a very good reason for this book to be in the public domain, as it is now necessary. There are no First Class Readers near us, and the books from the Goetheanum were hundreds of dollars. (…) Beautiful, worth it for sure, but times necessitate affordability (…) something the Society hasn’t caught on to in many instances. This is a serious book to be taken and worked with respectably and with humility and gratitude. This is a wonderful opportunity for those who are drawn to it to join others in the School of Michael.
Or finally:
For years the German speaking world has had public access to this remarkable body of work. The path of the Michael School is a personal one which comes to life in a social, worldly context. At long last, it is available to all people in the English-speaking world having an interest in this subject at a cost that is affordable for most. The form of the book and the way it is laid out makes good sense, while giving the reader reasonable entry into the material. Historical commentary and great color drawings of blackboard exhibits enhance the value of this book. I look forward to a deepening of my experiences with this book over time.
I refer the reader to the Amazon website to see the other six reviews.

Two newly-discovered recapitulation lessons now published for the first time
This positive echo from the “normal” world is encouraging. In fact, in a few months there will be Volume 2 with a number of so-called “recapitulation lessons”, in which Steiner repeated the contents of the first basic lessons for people who were not able to attend them.1
There are no new mantras, but quite different comments on them than in Vol. 1. Furthermore, this second English-language volume will contain two recapitulation lessons never known or published before. They were given in Breslau (Silesia) on 12 and 13 June 1924.
The editor discovered them a few years ago in the Kolisko Archive in England in a stenogram by Lily Kolisko. The grandson of Eugen and Lily Kolisko, Andrew Clunies-Ross, gave us permission to publish them. The editor had them transcribed into German and is happy that they are now included in Vol. 2 of the English edition. There will be a separate bi-lingual English-German edition of these newly- found lessons in the near future.

An “official” publication
Apart from this well-received publication of the “esoteric” class lessons, the headquarters of the Anthroposophical Society, located in Dornach, Switzerland, is preparing a bilingual edition of the 19 lessons, based on the edited versions of earlier translations.
This edition will only be available, as announced, for members of the “Class”. This is in striking contrast with the wish of the officials to be in tune with the demands of the times, and raises the question: is the headquarters aware of the general public’s gratitude for the availability of these texts, as reflected in the above reviews? And how does it relate to Steiner’s own words: “when the Class lessons lead to sectarian behavior and pretensions of power, they will have to be published like all my other lectures.”2

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1    The First Class of the Michael School, Recapitulation Lessons and Mantras, Great Barrington 2018.

2    The First Class Lessons and Mantras: The Michael School Meditative Path in Nineteen Steps, Preface to the First English edition, p. VII. – Original quote from Wege, ed. A. Kimpfler, No. 3, 2011, p. 26..

Opponents of Which “Anthroposophy”?

An Open Statement by the Chief Editor of Der Europäer and The Present Age

Recently, several anthro-media put out an article “Open Anthroposophy and its Opponents”, consisting of short texts by eight authors. The article represents a collective declaration of intent (see the article by Arnold Sandhaus on page 25).
The authors take the field like heroic warriors against the poison of “conspiracy theories”. Except for well-known slogans and all sorts of insinuations, they have nothing substantial to offer. The editor-in-chief of Info3, Jens Heisterkamp, even has the audacity to label two apparently awkward competitors to his Frankfurt magazine as opponents of his “Open Anthroposophy”: Ein Nachrichtenblatt, (A Newsletter) published by Roland Tüscher and Der Europäer. The latter he also imputes to be “neo-nationalist”.
Since we are now – even by the editorial board of the Dornach weekly Wochenschrift für “Anthroposophie” – openly denounced as opponents of “open” Anthroposophy, we do not want to miss this opportunity to state openly that we consider this an – albeit unwanted – compliment. Let me explain myself briefly: since its birth in Frankfurt many years ago, this “open Anthroposophy” has demanded in a dictatorial manner openness towards almost everything that blows around one’s ears from the “zeitgeist” – yes, but which one? Names such as Ken Wilber, Andrew Cohen or info-standard bearers like Felix Hau and Sebastian Gronbach may suffice to indicate the openness of this Anthroposophy. But in a spiritual movement, someone who throws open all the windows simply creates a spiritual draught. We actually wish to have nothing to do with such a draughty Anthroposophy. It can only lead to catching spiritual colds with simultaneous or subsequent fevers. We are proud to be opponents of such an Anthroposophy. Certainly, we love Frankfurter sausages, but the draughty Anthroposophy prepared in the city of Goethe (!), an Anthroposophy that is greedy for worldwide export via the intermediate station of Dornach, we consider – based on true Anthroposophy – to be simply a labelling swindle that consists of fine, high-sounding, but mostly completely empty words.
Is that open enough?
If all this seems exaggerated or even unjustified to anyone, let them read the best self-portrayal Info3 has ever provided. The paper and its circle see its task in conveying to humanity an “Anthroposophy” that is comprehensible and contemporary, which it simply denies to the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. Under the headline “Simply let in some air”, a preview of a hitherto unpublished article by Mathias Wais appeared in the June issue; the preview included some of his words; one can read it and be amazed: “Rudolf Steiner overwhelmed us. The colossal nature of his remarks is far from comprehensible. So we are called on to go our own contemporary ways. Mathias Wais with thoughts on Anthroposophy between yesterday and tomorrow.” First it is trumpeted that, objectively, Anthroposophy is scarcely comprehensible and contemporary, then one puts oneself up as its appointed reformer, so that it can finally become what it in fact always was for people who seek to exercise a certain willed thinking: understandable and contemporary. We can well believe that some people feel overwhelmed when studying Anthroposophy, but this does not entitle them to raise their own subjective incomprehension to a general norm.

Finally, one of the ‘Glorious Eight’, Henning Kullak-Ublick, board member of the Federation of Free Waldorf Schools, speaks in his statement of the conspiratorial tendency to laud the irrational principle “Nothing is what it seems”. It is well-known that Kullak-Ublick has for years sought to prevent, on principle, people like the former Waldorf student Ken Jebsen from giving talks to upper school pupils at Waldorf schools. This year, a book by the Tübingen academic Michael Butter has appeared, which could become the Bible of the ‘Glorious Eight’ and all those who are impressed by them; the title is Nichts ist, wie es scheint – Über Verschwörungstheorien. (Nothing Is As It Seems – On Conspiracy Theories.) In it there is a very pregnant “case study”: Daniele Ganser, who was also once a Waldorf student and a friend and colleague of Ken Jebsen, both of whom appeared at an event in Basel on 3 March 2018, is presented in the book as a typical conspiracy theorist. One asks oneself where the anti-Ganser fury comes from. Is he envied because no less a person than Noam Chomsky has praised his book on NATO?

Yes, nothing is what it seems. This phrase must also be applied to the declaration of intent by the ‘Glorious Eight’. They seem to be concerned about Anthroposophy – and have their opponents. Really?
No, not even us. We have, strictly speaking, no opponents, not even these people. We are simply not concerned about them. We respect their freedom to find Anthroposophy incomprehensible, outmoded and in need of reform, and we continue to dedicate ourselves to the effort to understand and realise it more and more.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1    See his striking essay “Besinnung in Brüssel”, in Die Christengemeinschaft 5/2018.

2    See also the Brussels chapter in my novel Der unverbrüchliche Vertrag.

 

Marx, Steiner and the Euro-Statue in Brussels

Karl Marx (1812–1883) wrote his “Communist Manifesto” in a café on the Great Square (la Grand Place) in Brussels in 1847. We pointed out the karmic background of Marx in the June issue of TPA. Marx had developed his basic ideas out of his past life experiences.
How different it was with Rudolf Steiner! His Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage (published in English as: Towards Social Renewal) which calls for social threefolding was derived from the path of destiny of the whole of modern western humanity and merely states that which is seeking to forge a new social path.
The book was intended for everyone who had an unprejudiced view of the contemporary situation. Even a man like Mussolini recognised its value, even if too late (see the article on p. 9). Countess Johanna Keyserlingk shows in a previously unpublished fragment how far understanding for the essential ideas contained in Steiner’s book and for threefolding was also growing in the USA.
Near the entrance to the EU Parliament building in Brussels stands a Euro-statue with a telling message: a hard-looking, lean woman holds up the symbol of the Euro, and below her is a man who, according to an eye-witness view by the Christian Community priest Mathijs van Alstein, has the features of Rudolf Steiner!1 Is this the expression of a spiritual struggle in the 20th and 21st centuries? Mammon versus a really new social order?
Whether the face of the male in the statue resembles Steiner or not, he too spent some time in Brussels and there discovered the work of the very significant visionary painter Antoine Wiertz (1806–1865). The Euro-goddess could have alighted from Wiertz’s “La révolte des Enfers contre le Ciel [The Revolt of Hell against Heaven]. The plaque of “rue Wiertz” right behind her on the wall, the Wiertz Museum opposite the EU Parliament building! What a language of contrasts!2
It is time the Euro-goddess returned to the same underworld from which she arose and left the prospect free for Steiner’s practical Utopia, which will outlast both Marx and the dreams of the Brussels globalists.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1    See his striking essay “Besinnung in Brüssel”, in Die Christengemeinschaft 5/2018.

2    See also the Brussels chapter in my novel Der unverbrüchliche Vertrag.

 

Human Indignity, Karl Marx and the Spiritual Challenge of Getting Beyond the Dollar

There was a shocking scene during the public senate hearing in the USA in early May on the nomination of Gina Haspel as the new Director of the CIA. It is known that Haspel was involved in the waterboarding torture of terrorist suspects in a prison in Thailand, but she herself classified documents about her own part in this. When Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who has become a whistle blower, and also appears regularly on Russia Today, asked about her activities in Thailand, he was brutally interrupted, dragged to the floor and pulled out of the room. A pitiful scene, demonstrating that “democracy” may immediately be abrogated the minute the ‘wrong questions’ are asked…

 

On 5 May we remembered the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, the most influential father of modern thought on the subjects of labour, property, capital etc.
What is less known, is the karmic background of this pioneer of economic and social theories. From his spiritual research, Rudolf Steiner revealed that Marx was a landowner in Northern France in the early 9th century, and that one day his property was seized by a rival. Marx was then forced to work under the new owner of his former property. The new owner reincarnated as Friedrich Engels, who embarked on a compensatory cooperation with his former rival.
Thus old impulses of destiny may work on in a new incarnation. No wonder that Marx became a fierce enemy of all private property, having himself experienced in a previous life how insecure the private ownership of property can become. Those seeking deeper insight into this historic-karmic background of Marx and Engels and their activities are referred to Steiner’s lecture of 6 April 1924. [GA 236].

 

Beijing launched its yuan-denominated crude oil futures in Shanghai on 26 March, with the aim of challenging the US dollar, the predominant settlement currency for oil contracts. This challenge is healthy but should be accompanied by a more spiritual understanding of the basic concepts of Marxism. TPA has published leading articles in this direction, mainly by the Swiss banker Alexander Caspar. Thinking has to be developed into three higher modes of cognition. Abstract thought alone cannot even understand the fluid nature (within the spectrum of production, distribution and consumption) of economic goods. Here the faculty of real imagination is required. Even more difficult for modern abstract and materialistic thinking is to grasp the essence of what work or labour really is; this requires inspiration. And capital, the most spiritual of all, can only be adequately comprehended by real intuition.2
Without such a widening of the horizon of understanding, materialism and world domination by the power of capital will remain – even after the challenge and overthrow of the dollar.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1    ‘The Veiled Power of Money’ appeared in TPA Vol. 4 No.1, April 2018, amongst a number of other articles by the same author in earlier volumes of TPA.

2    ‘T See the appendix to Karl Heyer, Wer ist der deutsche Volksgeist?, Perseus Verlag, 1990 (untransl.)

 

Absurdities in Great and Small Worlds

If in the greater world a government doesn’t like the result of a referendum, it simply has it carried out again. That happened in June 2008 in Ireland. At the first referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, the treaty was rejected by the people. A (dis)-information campaign then began. Leading circles were satisfied with the result of the second referendum in October 2009.
It’s simpler and less expensive in little Dornach in Switzerland. The members of the Anthroposophical Society voted at this year’s AGM on 24 March by a clear majority not to reaffirm the two Vorstand members Bodo von Plato und Paul Mackay. By 26 March already, the remaining Vorstand members Wittich, Sleigh, Kalkis and Girke had written to “Dear Co-workers at the Goetheanum”:

“As you have experienced and heard unfortunately, the majority of the members of the Anthroposophical Society present [at the AGM] rejected the proposal of the Vorstand and of the leadership of the Goetheanum for a further term in office for Paul Mackay and Bodo von Plato. (…) We very much regret this after their 22 years and 17 years of activity on the Vorstand.” Then they stated: “In their co-responsibility for the General Anthroposophical Section, Paul Mackay and Bodo von Plato will continue to belong to the leadership of the Goetheanum. In that regard nothing will change. The two will, with immediate effect, merely no longer be signatories for the Vorstand.”
The General Section is responsible for conducting the “Class”, which has been thoroughly ‘misconducted’ for decades due to spiritual pretensions of leadership. In this disastrous Section, those who have been deselected in unobjectionable proceedings are now to be allowed to continue to have their say! Incidentally, how little it’s a matter of signatures, those in banana republics know just as well as in the small Dornach version.
With this letter, the remainder of the board have given the majority of voters – and also the Swiss law of association – a kicking. In Dornach a “higher” law apparently still applies, to which Albert Steffen already used to appeal, namely, the “law of the Mysteries” …
In the last issue, we reported on karma illusions related to Steiner’s Michael prophecy. It should be added here that at the aforesaid AGM a defender of Paul Mackay was allowed to appear who considers herself to be Ita Wegman. She also told me many years ago in a personal conversation that she regards Paul Mackay as the reincarnated D.N. Dunlop! You may rub your eyes. It’s no dream! Delusion as reality at the Dornach March AGM. Let’s remember that Mackay was responsible for the Dutch advertisements with which the Dutch Society wanted to distance themselves from a possible charge of “racism” in Anthroposophy (“Insofar as there are racial teachings in Steiner, we distance ourselves from them.”). Von Plato already recommended in 2002: “No referring to Rudolf Steiner” so as not to stir up too much trouble with “Anthroposophy”. We reported on it in Der Europäer. – See the cartoon above for further comment.

Back to a major banana republic. The Skripal poisoning case in Salisbury could have unfolded like a script by Alfred Jarry or Eugène Ionesco; it was no less absurd than the events in Dornach. Chemical analysis in a Swiss laboratory in Spiez finally revealed that the poison could not only have been produced in Russia but practically anywhere in the word in a reasonably equipped lab. Was it revenge for British soldiers killed by the Russians? Was the intention just to raise the NATO budget? Or was it an excuse fabricated to bombard Syria on the fatal 14 April? If the latter, then the brazen assumptions and allegations of Russian “guilt” would rather resemble a scheme of Machiavelli’

T.H. Meyer

Terror, Lies and Truth Conference – Reactions to the Conference

The Basel event of 3 March at the Scala in Basel has proved to be something of a barometer of the climate of public opinion in relation to key events of the last few years and decades. We have already reported on the fact that in the run-up to the sold-out conference a journalistic ‘execution’ of the event was attempted in some regional tabloids in northern Switzerland.
Following the conference, on 11 March, the Swiss Sonntags-Zeitung presented a pièce de résistance of unfactual reporting about it that teemed with untruths. The title of this double-sided onslaught was: “When everything has to do with everything else – Daniele Ganser, Ken Jebsen and other conspiracy theorists meet in Basel – at the invitation of Anthroposophers. The background”.
This is exactly what the Sonntags scribblers practise: they mix everything up with everything else by throwing all kinds of theories together in a double page box spread, as if, at the conference, only one of them had been: according to David Icke, Obama is actually supposed to be a lizard – Pizzagate, anti-vaccination campaigners, Chemtrails, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion etc. etc. But wait: 9/11 can’t be left out of course – “it wasn’t done by Al Qaida (…) a nearby building (…) collapsed so rapidly that it must have been blown up. Videos of Osama bin Laden were faked.” Instead of posing questions about this event to the Scala Conference even from a distance, which would have been a journalist’s duty, a few sentences about 9/11 were thrown into a jumble of things which had not the slightest to do with the conference and were immediately scorned and dismissed as “conspiracy theories.”
The most grotesque thing was a photo that covered nearly two pages, a third of the whole two-page spread: the Twin Towers after the attack, with gigantic pillars of smoke, the like of which previously one had only known from atomic explosions or volcanic eruptions. The cause of this was two aeroplane attacks? What we see in the photograph speaks loudly of very different explanations… But the blind and the deaf see and hear nothing.

Worse, if no less predictable than such pitiable reporting, is the attitude of a section of the anthroposophical Press. In his disinformation paper, Herr Heisterkamp [editor of Info3Ed.] called the Basel event “a summit of authors well-known on the scene, who share the view that the Islamist attacks were deliberate acts of terror by the State”. Not a scintilla of an idea about how far this view might actually be justified.
Against Ken Jebsen he makes the same “reasoned” attack, only with slogans and distortions, that the spokesperson of the Federation of German Waldorf Schools, Henning Kullak-Ublick, made against him in July 2015, when he warned against the appearance of the former Waldorf pupil Jebsen (and later also of Ganser and other “conspiracy theorists”) at Waldorf Schools – a shameful blot on the free spiritual life, which these very schools were supposed to serve!1
Since the Basel conference the internal opposition to a free spiritual life within the anthroposophical movement, an opposition which is held in fearful check by the mainstream media, has again gained the upper hand: a follow-up event to the packed Basel conference was planned and already announced as due to take place at the Schopfheim Waldorf School but it has been called off – with reference to the same statement by Kullak-Ublick on behalf of the Federation of Waldorf Schools! Our anthroposophical barometer is showing a “deep depression”, i.e. a “storm” in the free spiritual life!

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1    See the newsletter from H. Kullak-Ublick https://www.erziehungskunst.de/fileadmin/downloads/sonstiges/2015/Brief_BuVo_an_Waldorfkollegien_ 10_07_2015.pdf

 

A Global Conspiracy Theorists’ Event?

A notable blunder by the Swiss tabloid Press

Great events cast great shadows, but sometimes those shadows are cast not by the event itself, but by people for whom a future event is a thorn in the eye for some reason. The issue here is the seminar Terror, Lüge und Wahrheit (Terror, Lies and Truth) featuring Elias Davidsson, Daniele Ganser and Thomas Meyer, which was held on 3 March at the Scala in Basel and was moderated by Ken Jebsen.

Fake news
On 8 February and the following days there appeared in four regional daily newspapers in northwest Switzerland an article by Christian Mensch titled “Conspiracy mystics like Daniele Ganser from Basel capture the Rudolf Steiner movement”.1 In thick headlines Mensch comments: “Conspiracy mystics like the Swiss ‘peace researcher’ Daniele Ganser or the German Youtube moderator Ken Jebsen are to be supported by the anthroposophical movement of Rudolf Steiner. On 3 March the ‘Terror Lies and Truth’ seminar will be held in Basel at which propagandists of a global conspiracy will be able to put forward their theses.” Below the article is a large photo of the Goetheanum.

The facts
Mensch’s research on the event was so poor that he evidently became convinced that all the evils that have already been associated with the names of these speakers – rightly in his view – were now to be complemented by the incredible “fact” that the anthroposophical movement was going to give its full endorsement to the seminar or would be standing fully behind it.
The following facts should be noted here: 1. The conference stemmed from a private initiative by Thomas Meyer, the director of Perseus Verlag. 2. Meyer selected the speakers. 3. Meyer had first thought of a larger neutral conference centre in Basel. 4. He shared his plan for the seminar with Marcus Schneider, the leader of the Paracelsus branch [of the Anthroposophical Society] in Basel. 5. Schneider suggested that they should host the event together. 6. Meyer made Marcus Schneider aware of the risk that he would be stamped as a supporter of “conspiracy theorists”. 7. Meyer was very happy that Schneider was not bothered about that prospect. 8. The Scala in Basel, in which anthroposophical und non-anthroposophical events are regularly held, was chosen as the location for the event. 9. Daniele Ganser and Ken Jebsen had been Waldorf pupils; Schneider and Meyer had been teachers at Waldorf schools. 10. The seminar had as little to do with the Goetheanum in Dornach as Mr Mensch’s research had to do with reality, namely, – nothing.

An article by a “conspiracy theorist”?
Mensch proposes in the article that the term “conspiracy theory”, which he also uses, should no longer be applied to his victims, for this term would suggest that “their scenarios are based on a scientifically grounded theory” (emphasis TM). But Mensch wants to deny this completely in the case of these outcasts.
So straightaway, in his title he chooses to use the word “conspiracy mystics”, thinking that, this way, he can throw “conspiracy theorists” of the classical type and “anthroposophers” all into one pot. The irony here is that in Der Schweiz am Sonntag (Switzerland on Sunday) over two years ago an article appeared by Martin Wagner, Legal Counsel of the Chamber of Commerce of the Federal State of Basel, which attested that Christian Mensch was “regularly prone to conspiracy theories” which “clearly lead his writing into error”.2 Since then, nothing seems to have changed in this regard as far as Mensch is concerned.
To the credit of the newspapers which have propagated Mensch’s fake news, it should be said in concluding that in the days after his articles appeared in the Basel edition, the readers’ letters about his article were without exception critical. The tabloid Press therefore has readers, who it should look up to. Doing so would raise its own level…

T.H. Meyer

P.S. The conference was a great success; a report will appear in the next issue.

_________________________

1     https://www.basellandschaftlichezeitung.ch/schweiz/verschwoerungsmystiker- wie-der-basler-daniele-ganser-kapern-rudolf-steiner-bewegung-132179380

2     https://mobile.twitter.com/patrick_kuenzle/status/640801789835636736/photo/1

 

Information, The 13th Book and The Present Age

We know so much.
We are so terribly well-informed. Mails stream into my mailbox daily that tell me “the truth” about this or that greater or smaller event, with links to further information (or disinformation). Many people hastily point out new “news” and share it with dozens or hundreds, like a good friend who just wrote: “Don’t miss this”, and then just attached a link to a website.
We are like dogs driven around in an arena snapping for all sorts of information thrown in our direction. Or like the seagulls I could observe in the port of San Diego last autumn. They were following our sailing boat as soon as we started to throw pieces of bread up into the air. The quickest ones managed to catch the pieces in mid-air without in the least banging into their colleagues. Brilliant.
Do we want to become running dogs, hunting for information with our tongues hanging out, or like seagulls competing with each other to get the first bits?
In this inhuman info-hunting game all is momentary. We feel almost ashamed to think of the moment that has just past. We continually want to be in the latest, the present moment.
Dante? Homer? Steiner? They are all of yesterday, all passed. We have no time to look back. We are driven into the present moment like sheep into a pen, fed with the latest info found on the electronic pastures of the internet.
But information is not knowledge. It has to be digested, sorted out. Do we know how to sort out the essential from the inessential? To do this, thought is needed. But alas, there has never been an age with so much information and so little – thought.
*
Let us pause for a moment and look at the greater truths. What is The Present Age?
After the close of the Kali Yuga on 19 February 1899 we are in the beginning of an Era of Light which will carry us through another 4900 years to come. This is a truly long “moment” called “The Present Age”. We should not get dizzy looking up to such a lofty presence which fills up the whole horizon. This is the era of a new faculty to grasp the supersensible realities we once knew and then gradually lost.
But within this long present age we are presently at the darkest spot, around the time of the incarnation of Ahriman.
Ahriman’s weapons are sense-knowledge and quantity. He works with the sheer quantity of information. He wants us to believe: you have to strive to know everything. And only then you can understand and begin to form a modest judgment. What seeming modesty! What an illusion! No-one can ever know everything. It’s the wrong question. It’s not the quantity that’s decisive, but the quality. How do we know the essential, the things that have real weight? This is the real question.
To do this we need to develop the faculty of discernment.
As the young Elisabeth Vreede, later a member of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society, wrote her thesis, she was confronted with a mass of useless information. She told Rudolf Steiner about this, and how she went to the library, got the first book, got the second book, got the third book, all useless regarding the subject. Finally the thirteenth book contained something valuable. Steiner looked at her, smiled and said: “you have to learn to immediately grasp the thirteenth book.”
That requires that we trust in our ability to find the essential. We could go even further and say: We have to become magnets for the essential, so that it may find us.
Such attitudes and abilities cannot be developed as long as we constantly remain under the bombarding shower of information.
Do we really know? Only if we deepen info-knowledge by developing the “sense for the thirteenth book”.

T.H. Meyer

 

Living contrasts on my American lecture tour

Between 18 October and 24 November I had a unique occasion to tour the US 1. I gave 25 lectures in 10 places on the following subjects: “The World-Historic Significance of Anthroposophy”, “In the Sign of the Five”, “The Subterranean Spheres”, “The Mexican Mysteries”, “Technology and Spirituality”, “The Reappearance of the Christ” and “The Meditative Path of the Michael School”. The tour was most ably organized by James Lee, Paul O’Leary and Gene Gollogly. Here are some aphoristic impressions:
In Denver I was shown by my hosts a book by Henry Adams (1838–1918) with the title Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Adams was a member of the family who produced two US presidents. Unexpected and remarkable, never heard of before by this European traveller.
In the Seattle museum my host showed me a bronze sculpture (1898) by Augustus Saint-Gaudens entitled “Amor Caritas” which, according to my host, points to the deeper mission of America, even if not much of this mission seems to have been achieved.
Near San Diego, where the US Navy intercepted all the signals of the Japanese Navy in December 1941, withholding them from Admiral Kimmel on Hawaii, is Point Loma, a wonderful stretch of land going out into the Pacific. Here Catherine Tingley, the successor of William Q. Judge as president of the Theosophical Society, founded a centre for the “Revival of the Mysteries of Antiquity”. This attracted the young D.N. Dunlop who worked as her secretary for a short while.
On 1 November I went to Queretaro in Mexico. Everywhere costumes and figures of the festival of “merry death” as Mexicans call it, including visits to the graves of departed relatives, to whom food is offered. Ambiguous feelings, enhanced by the visit to Teotihuacan with its pyramids, a place where human sacrifices were undertaken . In Queretaro on 19 June 1867 emperor Maximilian was shot, thus ending the belated dream of a Habsburg world empire.
In Mexico City I visited the house of Trotsky, who was brutally murdered on 21 August 1940. In great contrast to this: the Virgin of Guadeloupe, to whose holy relic millions of people from South America stream every year on 12 December.
The Waldorf School in Washington lies two miles from Langley, Virginia, the centre of the CIA. My local wingman led me in his car to the fence of it, as well as around the Pentagon. But within his own school community one has to hide the fact that one did not vote for Hilary Clinton. When parting, he gave me a most valuable book about the foundation of the Federal Reserve: The Creature from Jekyll Island by Edward Griffin.
I arrived in New York just in time to make it to Symphony Space, a theatre in Manhattan which presented three whistleblowers: William Binney, Ray McGovern and Diane Roark, moderated by Sean Stone, the son of Oliver Stone, who had recently interviewed Putin. An extraordinary event: Binney was the chief programmer for the NSA who developed “Thin Thread” and was eliminated from his agency before 9/11. He claimed that everything needed to prevent the attacks was in the database.

On the way to my next place, Great Barrington in Massachusetts, I developed together with Thomas O’Keefe, who kindly accompanied me, two litmus tests for anthroposophists:
1. What do you think about the official story of 9/11?
2. What do you think about the handling of the Esoteric Class material today?
In my experience the two questions are related. Those people who naively accept the official 9/11 story are usually the same who believe the 19 lessons of Rudolf Steiner’s Michael School should and could still be “protected” (though Steiner envisaged their publication already in 1924), by publishing them only for “Class members”.
Boston was the end of my journey. Here I had inspiring talks with co-editor Andreas Bracher, who writes for this journal. In my last lecture on “The World-Significance of Anthroposophy”, Dan Emerson, the great grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was present. He kindly agreed to a private tour; officially, the Emerson house in Concord was already closed for the season. There we walked around for hours and could quietly look at the library and the etchings on the walls. It is not easy being related to a world-famous philosopher and essayist. Dan Emerson has mastered this challenge. “I am the living proof”, he said with a smile, “that genius is not hereditary.” At any rate, he has something of the genius of “Wit and Humor” about which his forefather wrote so brilliantly.

 

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1     See the Portland account in TPA, Vol. 3 No. 9.

 

The Source of True Positivity

What is the value of life? In a world of hunger, misery, continual acts of terrorism and war? In the face of the destruction, hatred, fear and greed that seem to dominate the world today, how can we maintain a positive attitude? It seems impossible. The question also arises for every single human being: don’t illness, constant pain and strokes of fate seem to rob life of all value? Put on one side of the scales all the positives we have ever experienced and all the negative on the other. It is clear that the negative experiences weigh heavier for the great majority of people. A completely negative balance. Isn’t suicide or “exit” the most sensible solution to put an end to the negative spiral of value?
So are we becoming pessimists? That was the philosophical consequence of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann and of all those who, like them, merely add and subtract. The calculation is accurate, but the human I reckons differently. It sees a different relationship between positive and negative experiences than adding and subtracting them. It carries out a division with them. Express all positive and negative experiences as a fraction: above the line (numerator) all the positive, and below the line (denominator) all the negative experiences. This fraction can never be zero! For this purpose, either the numerator would have to be zero or the denominator would be approximately infinite. Who can say that he did not experience anything of value until his last breath? Who can say that the number of his sufferings is infinite? The divisive relationship of positive and negative experiences therefore always retains a positive value, however slight it may be or appear to be. To experience this sober realization, gives our life an experiential, positive basic value. The I divides. This was the solution to the problem of value, as Rudolf Steiner stated in the thirteenth chapter of his Philosophy of Freedom. The ego divides; but it can only divide because it is itself indivisible, because it is in-dividuality.
The positivity, which Steiner also calls the “sense of affirmation,” is the o

nly one of Steiner’s six basic exercises known as the subsidiary exercises which he illustrates by means of a legend from the life of Christ: “There is a beautiful legend of Christ in Persian poetry, which brings to mind what is meant by this quality [of positivity]: a dead dog is lying on a path. Christ is also among those passing by. Everyone else turns away from

Der Auferstandene. von Vincenzo Foppa

the ugly sight of the beast; only Christ speaks admiringly of its beautiful teeth. That is how o

ne can feel about things; in everything, even the most

adverse, those who are serious seekers may fin

d something worthy of appreciation. And what is fruitful in things is not what they lack, but what they have.”1 For the divisory way in which the I beholds them, what they have is most definitely the positive th

ing about them.
Christ is the World-I, the great model for our microcosmic I, our individuality. He remained throughout absolutely unspeakable suffering in a state of total positivity. He is the true, essential source of all true positivity in our soul-spiritual striving.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1     Rudolf Steiner, Die Stufen der höheren Erkenntnis, GA 12.

 

Lafayette’s Sword and the Sword of Michael

At the beginning of the 1930s something unusual occurred in the USA. Monica von Miltitz (1885-1972) presented the Rector of Lafayette College with a sword¹ that had belonged to the namesake of the college in Pennsylvania.
The General and Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834) is known as one of the noblest figures of the French Revolution. He was active on both sides of the Atlantic, and indeed first in America, where he took part in the War of Independence. Back in France, he advocated for stronger French participation in this war. He became the embodiment and symbol of Franco-American friendship.
In 1789 he took part in the Estates-General as a representative of the nobility and was appointed Commander of the Paris National Guard. The draft of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (on the American model) also stems from him. But he did not approve of the evolutionary impulse falling into barbarism. He left his troops, who had joined in treason against the King, at the front with Germany. In crossing the border in the summer of 1792, he was called upon to hand over his sword to the envoy of the German Empire. This envoy was an ancestor of Monica von Miltitz, in whose family Lafayette’s sword was reverently guarded for 140 years. On exactly the 100th anniversary of the founding of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, she now presented the sword to the College during a solemn ceremony. At the time she said, “in the shortest speech of my life”: “I, a German, present to this American College the sword of a meritorious Frenchman, in the sincere hope that these three great peoples will find their way to mutual goodwill and understanding.”²
Lafayette was an ardent believer in the ideals of the French Revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity. But only the threefolding of the social organism, which is a Michaelic inspiration, can realise these ideals which are otherwise condemned to exist as a mere phrase.
In the time of the incarnation of Ahriman in the West, which has been discussed in Der Europäer more than once, these Michaelic impulses, which were at the basis of the French Revolution, and in which they could only express themselves chaotically, must be taken up and nurtured afresh. According to Steiner, in the USA today, one would first have to work towards the separation of the economy and the state. This does not involve a basic income introduced by the state, which even quite a few “Anthroposophers” are dreaming of these days³.
The presentation of Lafayette’s sword by Monica von Miltitz was a real symbolic act in a supranational, Michaelic spirit, in the way that America really needs now. To reawaken this spirit, we need the sword of Michael, forged of the iron and the gold of spiritualised thinking. One who wishes to pass on this sword to a group of human beings in Germany, France, America or Russia, should be very sure that it is a real Michaelic sword he is holding in his hand – and not just a gold-lacquered wooden sword.
(…)
The true sword of Michael has a much broader radius of action than any rapier or physical sword. It can be handed to anyone of good-will. Whether he wants to take hold of it must be left to his free choice.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1     To refer to the sword, Miltiz actually used the German word “Degen”, which in the 18th-19th centuries meant something like a ‘dress sword’, or ‘small sword’, commonly worn by members of the aristocracy. This was much longer and thinner than a dagger but shorter than a 17th century rapier.

2   The Lafayette Alumnus, Feb. 1932. My thanks to Marcel Frei for informing me of this account. – M. von Miltitz described the episode in “Erinnerungen an das Lafayette-College” [Memories of Lafayette College] in Einige Erinnerungsbilder, undated manuscript printing, p. 8.

3   www.sozialezukunft.de/fileadmin/Soziale-Zukunft/Dateien/170922_Aufruf_SZJ.pdf

 

 

Trump, the Nation State and Ahriman

In his speech of September 19 in the General Assembly of the United Nations President Trump said:
“As President of the United States, I will always put America first, just like you, as the leaders of your countries will always, and should always, put your countries first. (Applause.) All responsible leaders have an obligation to serve their own citizens, and the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.”1
This is an objective untruth. A hundred years ago, in summer 1917, Rudolf Steiner clearly showed why the civilised world needs a transition from the nation-state to a threefold social organism. The First World War ended the long period of history in which the nation-state was both dominant and justified. This was in tune with some basic faculties of the human soul – thinking, feeling and willing – which were intimately interwoven and lawfully interacting within the soul. Thus the matters of spiritual or culture life (the extension of thinking), of the life of rights (the extension of feeling) and economy (the extension of will) were likewise interwoven. Of course, we are not saying that culture is only a matter of thinking; but this element is predominant in all of it, and likewise with the other two social spheres.
For more than a hundred years now the soul forces have undergone drastic change; their instinctive coherence has broken up, and they are striving towards independence from each other. Many pathological facts of our time can be understood in this light: children murdering others out of an unbridled will, not guided by thought or feeling; hyper-intellectualism (as in Transhumanism) without feeling or sound will forces and so on.
The threefold social organism is nothing other than the adequate outward sheath for these inner separating faculties of the soul. And because they have undergone drastic change, the nation-state has become outdated, once and for all.
In this sense, Trump, like most modern politicians, is not able or willing to read the signs of the times, not seeing the spiritual evolution of man and of mankind but only the more or less petty perspectives of one’s own national interests.
Turning from Trump’s words to some of his acts, we point to what is perhaps the most significant in recent months. The Washington Post reported on 18 September:
“Israel and the U.S. inaugurated the first American military base on Israeli soil on Monday, which will serve dozens of soldiers operating a missile defense system.”2
This direct military support of Israel by the US is a sort of culmination of what was born exactly one hundred years ago: the “Balfour Declaration” (Nov. 1917) which paved the way for the “nation-state” of Israel in Palestine. What a wild orgy of anachronisms!

Jahve spoke of the Jewish people at times as the “stubborn people”. Today, the Time Spirit Michael is witnessing how almost the whole of humanity is stuck in stubbornness, stubbornly ignoring spiritual realities like the evolution of the human soul and its relevance for the social question, or ignoring concrete spiritual beings like Michael himself or Ahriman and his present incarnation in the West. Ahriman is the greatest spiritual opponent of the Threefold Organism. People who cling to the nation-state today are simply inspired by Ahriman’s impulses, whether they know it or not. And in the majority of cases they have no clue that they think and speak under an occult influence. For their stubborn conceit does not allow for the recognition of anything higher than their Ego or purely physical realities.
If a people is stubborn, other peoples could balance it out. If the whole of humanity is stubborn, who or what can balance it out – if not a series of catastrophes which might waken up some souls?

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1     https://gadebate.un.org/sites/default/files/gastatements/72/us_en.pdf

2   https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israel-and-us-open-first-american-military-base-in-israel/2017/09/18/42c2ca82-9c9b-11e7-b2a7-bc70b6f98089_story.html?utm_term=.568bf3ef45f1

 

Our sick financial system and its healing

Editorial interview with Catherine Austin Fitts

After a recent encounter with Catherine Austin Fitts in Basel who did an earlier interview1 with the chief editor of The Present Age, he decided to ask her for a short interview for this issue. This will be published instead of the usual editorial, but it will surely be of no less interest for our readers!

THM: You wrote the book “Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Stock Profits”2. What made you write it?
CAF: I made the decision to write this book in the middle of a vegetable garden in Montana during the summer of 2005.
I had come to Montana to develop a venture capital model to support a healthier, fresher local food supply. If we want clean water, fresh food, sustainable infrastructure, and healthy communities, we are going to have to finance and govern these resources ourselves. We cannot invest in the stocks and bonds of large corporations, banks and governments that are harming our food, water, environment and all living things and then expect these resources to be available when we need them.
What I discovered, however, was that many of the people who needed to create and support such an effort continued to support and finance the growing corruption. I wanted to create a “case study” that would help them understand the nature and extent of the corruption in the hopes that such insight would inspire them to shift their time, attention and resources to invest in real solutions.

TM: There is an intro video to your book in which you speak about the discrepancy between what you call the “Popsicle index” and the Dow Jones Index. Can you briefly illuminate our readers?
CAF: I developed the notion of the Popsicle Index when I worked as Assistant Secretary of Housing in the first Bush Administration. I was being lobbied by business interests who wanted me to make decisions that would cause their stocks to go up. I realized that many of the things that made their stock go up would cause the deterioration of family income and wealth, and with it the deterioration of community health and well being. I wanted an “index” that would capture that wealth – the wealth of places.
The Popsicle Index expresses the percentage of people within a place who believe that a child can leave their home, go to the nearest place to buy a Popsicle (an ice cream on a stick) and come home alone safely. I have found that there is a direct correlation between the Popsicle Index and the social, environmental and economic health of a place. High trust results from places that work successfully for humans and living things.
I used the Popsicle Index to express the relationship between living assets and financial assets. I believe that if we financed places with equity, the inverse correlation that has existed between the Dow Jones Index (financial equity) and the Popsicle Index (living equity) could be transformed to an aligned correlation.

THM: What are the main characteristics of the present financial system dominated by the globalists?
CAF: The globalists are centralizing power and will continue to do so until they have eliminated human and property rights and individual sovereignty or are prevented from doing so.

THM: Some wizard designed a dollar note on which we read IN FRAUD WE TRUST instead of IN GOD WE TRUST. Is this the ruling “moral” principle in the present financial world?
CAF: Perhaps it should be IN VIOLENCE WE TRUST. The dollar as reserve currency is increasingly reliant on force to maintain its status.

THM: What do you think of the present Trump administration and its policies?
CAF: Trump’s election represented a productivity backlash. The Democrats represented the vested interests on the East and West Coast – Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington. These are all groups that deal with intellectual capital. The heartland contains the people who grow the food, drill for the oil, and run transportation and manufacturing. They deal with the concrete world. The heartland was disgusted with the cultural fascism and the pile on of surveillance, rules and regulations and financial fraud from the coastal groups. The extraordinary corruption of the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation became the poster child for their disgust. Hence, a person who had no formal experience in government endeared himself to the American people by openly speaking about what is really harming IN Americans’ time and resources – such as vaccines, Common Core curriculum, the failure of accountability on 9-11, and fake news media.

THM: What was and is the role of the dismissed main strategist Steve Bannon? He bragged with phrases like “Darkness is good” or “I am a Leninist” or “Satan, that means power”. Is this an expression of an extreme lust for power?
CAF: I don’t know Steve Bannon. I believe he tried to speak to the importance of rebuilding domestic health and productivity and withdrawal from engaging in regime change and violations of international law globally. It looks like Trump and Bannon struggled with how to do that given the challenges of managing the reserve currency, multiple global constituencies and the problems with the budget, including the black budget and many trillions that have been shifted out of the government balance sheet illegally.

THM: What about the new sanctions against Russia3. What will they lead to?
CAF: The Neocons and their allies globally want war. Hopefully there are enough cool heads to prevent such a war.

THM: Where do you see the role Europe could play in the near future? Should the Europeans just leave NATO, which has become a machine preparing for war and threatening Russia and the rest of the world?

CAF: Any ally who ties themselves to the United States in a manner that permits the US to declare war and drag them into it, will regret it. I recommend Malcolm Fraser’s interview on his book Dangerous Allies before he died: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F69baWypks&feature=youtu.be
The United States is a wonderful country. However, we have a relatively small group – the Neocons – with a small number of violent allies, including Israel, who are prepared to destroy both the United States and Europe to get their way.
The healthy thing is to separate, disengage, shun. The question is can we get rid of the parasite without killing the host. One way or another we will have to figure out how to do so or the parasite will kill the host.

THM: You have just read the book by the former Greek finance minister Varoufakis. Why should it be read?
CAF: This is an excellent account of the European Union’s economic strategies in Greece when Varoufakis covered them and then served as finance minister. I strongly recommend his book – Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment.

His report proves to me that the goal of the European Union was to reduce Greece to poverty. This was elites engineering a financial coup d’état – invasion and subjugation by economic means. The European Union leadership was committed to a win-lose result. They did not want Greece to succeed, let alone to be able to pay back loans. Debt is a weapon, not a financial asset. The goal is control and social engineering – including lower life expectancies and depopulation.
It is hard to fathom the truth. Varoufakis provides significant detail and comprehensive economic analysis that cuts through the lies, spin and fake news for those who can handle the truth.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1     Soon on www.solari.com.

2   Free download on https://dillonreadandco.com/why-i-wrote-this-story/

3   See also Mid-Summer Anger post from Oliver Stone: www.facebook.com/TheOliverStone/posts/1619882828036010

 

How Far-sighted Should We Become?

Oliver Stone’s interviews with Vladimir Putin
Oliver Stone (b.1946), the well-known American producer and film director, who recently made a film about Edgar Snowden, has undertaken, for more than two years, a series of interviews with President Putin. It is truly remarkable in many ways and can be downloaded at no cost1. Putin obviously feels free to speak with an intelligent partner who has no bias or political ambition. The panorama of topics is impressive: it encompasses the wars in Syria, Chechnya, right up to the assertions of hacking and the demonisation of Russia. Key are some statements to the coup d’état in Kiev and the incident with the destroyer USS Donald Cook near Sebastopol.
Putin confirms that after 1989 NATO assured his country that there were no plans for eastward expansion. And as he already did during his famous Munich speech in 2007, he openly questions the existence of NATO. He also mentions that Russia even proposed to President Clinton that it should join NATO, if the organisation was not to be dissolved. Clinton replied: “Why not?” But of course, these remained no more than nice words. Another key topic is the new arms race – the US spends about USD 600 billion per annum on its military, Russia “only” USD 60 billion. The US cancelled the ABM contract in 1991, heightening the danger of a nuclear confrontation.
One of the surprising features is the discipline with which Putin listens, the concreteness of his answers as well as the ongoing openness with international partners that have shown more than once that their word cannot be always trusted. He has however a keen eye for the blindness and the illusions of a superpower which cannot sacrifice some of its privileges. He prepares for the worst and hopes for the best.
One of Putin’s recurring statements is that we should always try to imagine the future and look at least 30 to 50 years ahead. It is clear that this is truly his mentality and that he is beyond the usual limited horizons that result from the short-sighted interests and turmoil of elections and party politics.
Appreciating Stone’s courageous initiative, he says to him at the end: “You are going to suffer for what you are doing” [with this interview]. No wonder that the corporate media try to play down the significance of these interviews, calling them mere Putin propaganda and worse. Thus the Swiss newspaper the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on June 17: “There are jovial conversations in which Stone figures as a stooge, so that Putin can put forward his propaganda.” May our readers judge for themselves.

Oliver Stone and the Kennedy assassination
Stone is, in the good sense, no blank page. He has already several times provided proof of his sense for behind-the-scenes political realities, above all perhaps in the movie JFK, first shown in 1991. The film was based on the investigations of the courageous district attorney from New Orleans, Jim Garrison, who even has a small role in the film as United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, the head of the commission that investigated the assassination in the 1960s. Garrison made clear that the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin, spread by the Warren Report after Kennedy’s assassination, was nothing other than a useless “conspiracy theory”. As mentioned before in this magazine, the poisonous term “conspiracy theorists” is an invention of leading members of the Warren commission and turns up in a CIA dispatch of April 1967 2. With this movie, Stone belongs to the whistle-blowers who have prompted new research and publications on the famous assassination, of which the excellent book by James W. Douglass, JFK or the Unspeakable3 seems to be the latest one.
No doubt Putin and his team carefully considered Stone’s background and his works before consenting to meet him for these interviews.

Former CIA agent as new 9/11 whistle-blower
As for important whistle-blowers, another one who recently spoke out about the controlled demolition of Building 7 on 11 September 2001 is the “retired 79 year-old former CIA agent Malcom Howard, [who] has made a series of astonishing claims since being released from hospital in New Jersey and told he has weeks to live. Mr. Howard claims he was involved in the “controlled demolition” of World Trade Center 7, the third building that was destroyed on 9/11”4. It is worth watching the documentation of this new truth witness lining up just after Michael Ketcham spoke out about the demolition of the same building a few months ago (see TPA Vol. 3 No. 1 April 2017).

Geopolitical tendencies for centuries ahead
It is good to try to see 50 years ahead. Deeper understanding of contemporary events urges us to see even further. Rudolf Steiner spoke of an occult group within the Anglo-American establishment that seeks to dominate the young Slavic cultural seed growing on Russian territory5. This occult group knows that the Slavic epoch is to begin in about 1500 years. “Occult” in this context means that this group works with some occult knowledge of the future development of races and peoples – and tries to make use of this knowledge in a group-egoistical sense, to favour uniquely the development of the Anglo-American cause. This knowledge was and still is in the background of the geopolitical conflict in the Ukraine to name but one example. To take this knowledge seriously implies to take the spiritual and its realities seriously.
There is in fact no true far-sightedness without, in the last resort, taking into account the reality of the spirit.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1     http://123hulu.com/watch/zGWJAPxP-the-putin-interviews-season-1.html

2   The Present Age Vol. 3 No. 1 April 2017.

3   See book review by John Schuchardt published in TPA Vol. 2 No. 1 April 2016.

4   See http://yournewswire.com/cia-911-wtc7/.

5    See p. 6 of this issue and also, at www.perseus.ch, the German original (Kampf um den russischen Kulturkeim) and the English translation of this key statement (“A Fundamental Indication by Rudolf Steiner, with Relevance to Present-Day Global Politics”) which is part of a diary entry of Steiner’s.

 

 

 

Sweet Freemasonry – an “Appreciation” in the Weltwoche

Modern Freemasonry celebrated its three-hundredth birthday on 24 June – and the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche added its voice to the celebrations.
The occasion: the day of the founding in 1717 of the first Grand Lodge in London (see the editorial in the June issue). The cover page with the issue title “The Freemasons”, surrounded by prominent heads, shows the square and compasses and promises “a long deserved appreciation”.
The article “Humanity, Tolerance, Freedom” by the chief editor Köppel drips with benevolence, praise and slogans. Some of the most significant Freemasons have been, as is well-known, people like Mozart, Haydn, Goethe, or Schiller, but also statesmen like Winston Churchill. All the personalities mentioned are indiscriminately covered with the gloss of truth and goodness. We even learn that we owe exquisite chocolate to Freemasonry, for Suchard and Tobler were Freemasons. O sweet naivete!
Die Weltwoche presents an inside view of the lodge “Zum Neuen Venedig” [New Venice]. This is situated directly opposite the Jesuits’ residential hostel “Borromäum” on the Byfangweg in Basel. Over a hundred years ago the Jesuit Abbé Joye established a pastoral care centre for young people, which purposefully installed the new medium of film. Anyone who believes that Freemasonry and Jesuit endeavours are absolute opposites, errs.

Steiner and Heise defamed
Rudolf Steiner already drew attention to the fact that Freemasonry was originally something good and necessary, but that it “simply becomes something bad when it is made into a power base for particular groups of people”. He wrote this in a Foreword that he contributed to a book which had as its object exactly this “retrogression” of Freemasonry at the time of the First World War. This was Die Entente-Freimaurerei und der Weltkrieg [Entente-Freemasonry and the World War] by the writer Karl Heise (1872–1939).
Meanwhile, continental Freemasonry, which had been founded from England, was increasingly dragged along in the wake of political and nationalist interests. This happened most clearly in the case of the “Grand Orient de France”, which since the 1880s has even accepted atheists.
Heise died before the outbreak of the Second World War; he did not always clearly judge the development of National Socialism. That his analyses were reviewed positively in the Völkischer Beobachter and thought well of by leading National Socialists like Himmler, is not a reason to accuse him, still less Steiner. But Die Weltwoche (in the article by Christoph Mörgeli) does not shy away from castigating Heise in general and Steiner with him as well – two birds with one stone, which of course cannot do without the slogan of conspiracy theory: “In 1919 a sensation was caused by the esoteric conspiracy theory book Die Entente-Freimaurerei und der Weltkrieg by Karl Heise, later a National Socialist. The Anthroposopher Rudolf Steiner had written a foreword to it and helped finance it.” In such a simplistic way Heise’s book is defamed and Anthroposophy at the same time is associated with National Socialism.                                                                                                                  No-one understands or presents the high origins of Freemasonry like Steiner; no-one else uncompromisingly diagnoses Freemasonry’s deviation from those high origins.
The superficial gushing praise of the Weltwoche shows that Steiner‘s diagnosis is still correct today. The sweet, clichéd whitewash deceives only the naive – and they can even sit as Freemasons – or would-be Freemasons – in chief editors’ offices and regard their whitewash as “humanity, tolerance and freedom”. But we can also be grateful to the chief editor and his team: we now know, from an authoritative source, which sworn oaths are enjoying a boom in Switzerland today. Oaths to truthfulness they certainly are not.
The long-deserved appreciation of that connoisseur of Freemasonry, Rudolf Steiner, is yet to be seen.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1     Die Weltwoche, No. 23, 7 June 2017.

2   The book appeared in Basel in 1919. Steiner paid 3000 SFr towards the printing costs. The book’s very proper subtitle was “A Contribution to the History of the World War and to the Understanding of True Freemasonry“. Heise had heard Steiner’s Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen lectures [published in English as The Karma of Untruthfulness], which had inspired him to write his book. His book went through several reprintings and can today be found online.

3    See GA 265 and Der neue Kain. Die Tempellegende und ihre Vollendung durch Rudolf Steiner, ed. T.H. Meyer, Perseus, 2013.

At the Historical Museum in Bern until 3 September an exhibition is being held in which a Freemasonic ritual is shown.

 

1917-2017: Freemasonry, Globalisation and Threefolding

Rudolf Steiner clearly distinguished between a Freemasonry with high, universally human aims and one with particular political interests.
For the first kind one may look at the rituals for the first three grades renewed by Rudolf Steiner. Of the second type he said: “An affair which ought to serve the whole of mankind without distinction of race or [special] interests, becomes transformed from something good into something bad, when it is made into the foundation of power for particular groups of people.” These words appear in the Foreword, which Steiner contributed to the publication of Die Entente-Freimaurerei und Weltkrieg [Entente Freemasonry and the World War] by Karl Heise in October 1918.
Since the First World War it has been almost only this latter form of Masonry that has been propagated and  – effective. It originated in England, where at St. John’s [24 June] in 1717 the first London Grand Lodge was founded, which itself was of the first form mentioned above. However, the lodge foundations which stemmed from Grand Lodge increasingly took on  a political colouring throughout Europe. This was especially the case with the Paris Grand Orient de France, founded from London, the war policy of which moved Steiner to tear up the certificate that empowered him to conduct his own rituals.
In 1917 8000 Masons gathered in the Albert Hall in London to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the founding of Grand Lodge; in the same Albert Hall, in which the high grade Mason Winston Churchill would outline in 1947 the real aim of the unification of Europe that he was advocating: the establishment of an Anglo-American world government. This year the 300th anniversary was commemorated already in April.
A more important anniversary: in June it will be exactly a hundred years since Steiner spoke for the first time of threefolding (More details in the July issue).

The contemporary relevance of the Grand Orient
A year ago, the French President Macron, who has appeared as though out of nowhere, held a lecture under the auspices of the Grand Orient, a kind of inaugural speech, with the title “La Mondialisation peut-elle être synonyme de progress”? [Globalisation – Can It Be Synonymous with Progress?] A rhetorical question, which in reality promotes globalisation. Macron’s banal EU propaganda serves the global interests of the banking world and has nothing to do with the real needs of Europeans. 100 years after the birth of the idea of threefolding, President Macron, in the name of Europe, and with an EU fanfare that misused  the  Ode to Joy, set to music by Beethoven, promoted globalisation – a total caricature of threefolding, which neither strives for fraternity in the economy , equality in law and certainly not liberty in the cultural life. It is no accident that Macron has declared war on Russia Today, the only broadcaster which knows how to resist the western media monopoly successfully. Real Europeans will ultimately have to decide to pursue a policy of wide-ranging viewpoints, as Steiner developed in the Memoranda of July 1917. Otherwise, they will finally succumb to the machinations of political Masonic circles, which certainly do reckon with grand perspectives, but which continuously seek to use these “for the foundation of power for particular groups of people.

 

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1     See Der neue Kain, Die Tempellegende und ihre Vollendung durch Rudolf Steiner, Basel 2013.

2   GA 265, p. 110.

3    GA 174, lecture of 20 January 1917.

Hijacking Humanity’s Mind or Counting to Three?

One hundred years ago, in May 1917, Europe and the world were at war – as
they have been in today’s global “War on Terror”.
But in that spring month of May 1917 an idea came into the world which, if taken up, first by Europeans, then by the rest of the civilized world, would have changed the course of history throughout the whole 20th century, right up to our own present time. It was the impulse of a threefold social order born out of the insight of Rudolf Steiner. This impulse is the proper form for the human being with its own inherent, threefold nature – spirit, soul and body; thinking, feeling and willing, and, physiologically, the limb system, the rhythmic system and the nerve-sense system.                                                                                                      As the threefold nature of man is unfolding and has increasingly been demanding its autonomous development since the French Revolution, the threefold social organism is the necessary social answer to this development. In it the three ideals of the French Revolution can find their proper spheres for their unfolding: freedom in a free spiritual life; equality in the sphere of rights truly respected; and brotherhood in a true global economic life, of which the power elites around the globe have so far only realized an inhuman caricature. Their power is the concentration of capital in the hands of very few.
True economic life, as envisaged by Steiner and partially realized by his friend D.N. Dunlop, who founded the World Power Conference in 1924 as a first step towards a fraternal world economy, is there precisely to check the unbounded concentration of power in the hands of a few at the cost of the welfare of humanity as a whole.

Humanity gave in to the dualistic model with its conflict-engendering impulses of Bolshevism and of Woodrow Wilson’s abstract doctrine of the nation state. Today, society is dominated by the boundless, monstrous money power which rules over states and individuals alike and which creates endless conflicts.

Today’s “War on Terror” is entirely based on the fiction of “Islamic terrorism” created around the event of 9/11. Elias Davidsson, who was initiated into the fictional legend surrounding 9/11 by Thierry Meyssan’s publications about the attack on the Pentagon, speaks of the “hijacking of the American mind” which has caused so many people to accept this black and bloody fiction1. This fiction was created to justify wars and to strengthen the global economic power of the elite of the “Deep State”.

After “Islamistan,” the Anglo-American power elites will need a new enemy to play their dualistic game. Behind the Russian adversary is the rising China which will be the main opponent of the Western elites in the nearer future.
We should carefully watch the further steps of the seemingly confused Trump Administration in this respect.2

*

Steiner needed individuals to help the threefold impulse to unfold. There were initially three: Count Lerchenfeld, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz and Walter Johannes Stein. They were given the first Memoranda on the new impulse that even reached Emperor Karl of the dying Habsburg monarchy. But in the English version of the biography of this last European emperor, written by Polzer’s brother, all references to Steiner’s impulse were carefully cut out.3 The world was to be kept imprisoned by dualistic thinking and prevented from seeing the truth of ‘The Three’.

After the initial failure of the threefold impulse, Otto von Lerchenfeld wrote that when people took up this impulse later they would “realize what had been passed by and what infinite amount of misery and suffering could have been avoided”. (R. Boos, Rudolf Steiner während des Weltkrieges [Rudolf Steiner During the World war], Dornach 1933, p. 60)

To avoid the danger of not only America’s mind but of humanity’s mind being hijacked, strong, insightful individuals are needed who have learnt how to count to Three.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1     R. Steiner, Towards Social Renewal and World Economy. The Memoranda are reproduced in Rudolf Steiner, Social and Political Science – An Introductory Reader, Forest Row, 2003.

2   Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11: Counterfeiting Evidence, Algora Publishing, 2013, ISBN 978-0-87586-972-8.

3    See T.H. Meyer, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz, London 2014.

Phantoms of Untruthfulness and the Salt of Truth

By “phantoms of untruthfulness” [Lügen-Phantome] spiritual science understands a kind of “nature being” which is created by human beings – by human lies, hypocrisy and the like – even by so-called conventional or polite lies.1 Such beings fly about in the soul world and block development, notably by beguiling and befogging the sense for truth, and creating new lies.

The 20th century will perhaps one day be called the century of phantoms, for its course was paved with colossal lies like no other before it: the lies about the First World War (the war guilt lie) and the Second World War (the “surprise attack” by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor) have often been discussed in this magazine. Almost as often has been discussion of monumental lies with which the third millennium began: the lies that immediately surrounded the murderous events of 11 September 2001. As the Twin Towers collapsed in New York, gigantic towers of lies immediately shot up into the heights.

Every truth-seeker who tries to uncover the established lies comes into the field of vision of the above-mentioned beings. They defend themselves vehemently against every effort to find the truth. Today they are frequently active against the uncovering of the truth by making indiscriminate use of the deceitful slogan: “conspiracy theory”.2

This is their nature. It can have a discouraging and confusing effect, which is why the truth today has to be fought for by overcoming the resistance of such beings. Only in this way can they be liberated from their mendacious spell.

From a recent example in Switzerland one could see how the media today are permeated by an atmosphere of lies. In a TV broadcast the historian and truth-seeker Daniele Ganser was reviled, slandered and, amongst other things, associated with fabricated documents such as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”3. A good sign of the thinking capacity of 492 uninhibited respondents who immediately reacted was the following: “There have never been so many complaints [to the broadcaster, SRF]”, reported the Basler Zeitung newspaper [BAZ] on 18 March.

In the Basler Zeitung magazine one could read with regard to 9/11 and conspiracy theories, almost at the same time: “Everything I trust tells me that the events unfolded as I had always accepted they had: as a terrorist attack by al Qaida (…) Of course I can’t prove it. I simply have too little a sense of it.4” There speaks a mind which, confused by mendacious phantoms, has given up searching for the truth.
Again, almost at the same time as this article, Michael Ketcham, a long-time employee at NIST, revealed to the public the complete phantom nature of the report by these official investigative authorities on the collapse of the towers in New York.5 Here again one man in the midst of a gigantic tower of lies, which had almost buried him, suddenly woke up. Ketcham speaks of a widespread paralysis caused by fear of the truth. One day he was cured of it and transformed himself into a fearless advocate of the truth – a continually recurring phenomenon seen in individual Americans, in striking contrast to the intensive effects of the phantoms in their own homeland.

Ketcham also speaks of the “wounds of 9/11” and emphasises that they were so traumatic that only a strong painful remedy will serve to heal them – the unvarnished truth: “Truth is the hot [alkali salt retentive] soap water which will wash clean the wounds of 9/11.” Let us never forget: the 9/11 phantoms served as the mendacious excuse for all the US wars thus far in the third millennium. They therefore had a huge effect.
Hippocrates recommended the use of anti-inflammatory saltwater for wounds.  Whoever wants to prevent the damage caused by the inflammatory and infectious effects of phantoms should not shrink from rubbing the salt of truth into the wounds that are lies. It hurts – but heals.

 

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1     See the lecture by R. Steiner of 9 June 1908 in GA 98, published also as a single edition in Pfingsten, das Fest der freien Individualität.

2    Broadcast on SRF 1, 26 January 2017: “Anatomie von Verschwörungstheorien”, 26 January 17; “Arena”, 24 Feb. 2017. “So viele Beschwerden gab es noch nie”, 18 March in BAZ.

3    We have often drawn attention to the CIA origins of this phrase that followed the assassination of President Kennedy. – G.W. Bush, whose father had been the head of the CIA, said soon after 9/11: “Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September 11th.”

4    Das Magazin, 11 March 2017, p.11.

5    www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvAv-114bwM&feature=youtu.be See also Ketcham’s letter to the editor of Europhysics News at: www.ae911truth.org/news/324-news-media-events-former-nist-employeespeaks-out-with-lte-in-europhysics-news.html

 

Lenin before the “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” – and the “Post-Fake Era”

On a November evening in 1916 Vladimir I. Lenin (1870–1924), coming from his Zurich residence in exile, paid the city of Basel a little-known visit. The outward purpose of the visit was to give an address to Russian academics, workers and businesspeople. The gathering was held on the ground floor of what today is the restaurant “Chez Donati” at the Johanniter Bridge. Lenin’s speech, which called for the fall of Czarism, received little response. Lenin took his leave with the words: “You will be hearing more from me.” He stayed the night at the Blaukreuzhaus, today’s Hotel Rochat, where the Saturday seminars of Der Europäer are regularly held. There it was possible in those days to eat and stay overnight cheaply. The next morning he visited the Public Art Collection and spent a long time looking thoughtfully at a picture that plays an important role in Dostoyevski’s novel The Idiot: “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” by Hans Holbein the Younger.1
.

Preparing the way for the “socialist experiment”
On 15 March the following year, after the February Revolution (23 Feb. – 3 March O.S.; 8-16 March N.S.), came the fall of the Czar.
In April in Zürich Lenin began his legendary journey to Russia in the sealed carriage through Germany and Finland; he arrived in Petrograd on 16 April.
A hundred years later, Bolshevism seems to have passed into history, even if the wounds which its stone-cold intellectuality inflicted on the true Russian folk soul have still not healed.
In Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow, which is currently being renovated, the illusion of life that is his mummified corpse in its suit and tie can be viewed daily. He who once viewed the “Corpus Christi” has become a century-old corpse himself.

A new “Leninism” in the West
Yet the stench of the decomposing corpse of Bolshevism is still with us. And today it wafts precisely from that same West, which in its materialistic spiritual eclipse, conceived the socialist experiment and through tools like Lenin exported it to the West. Stephen Bannon, Chief Strategist in the Trump Administration, has openly boasted: “Darkness is good (…) It only helps us when [the opposition] get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.” And: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”2 Such admissions are not a good omen from the innermost circles of the new US administration.

…and a voice of reconciliation from the East
How differently things sound today from the East! At the recent Munich Security Conference, the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov called for a peaceful understanding with the USA and spoke of a “post-West world order”: At the end of his remarks he said: “Right now we need dialogue more than ever on all the difficult issues. We need to find compromises. (…) Russia is not looking for conflicts with anyone (…) We want to strive for dialogue to find understanding based on mutual benefit (…) we can simply overcome the ‘post-Truth’ period…let it be the post-fake era.”3,4
Much will depend today on whether the air of resurrection can enter into our thinking and feeling and suppress the putrefying stench of the dead intellect

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1     Adolf Wanner, Berühmte Gäste in Basel, Buchverlag der Basler Zeitung, 1982, p. 91 ff

2    Quoted from Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 5. 2. 1917. Bannon, however, seems to have been speaking in a joking, ironic way in making these remarks.

3    https://www.securityconference.de/en/media-library/munich-security-conference-2017/video/statement-by-sergey-lavrov

4    See this New York Times article on Bannon for another view of him: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/opinion/what-does-steve-bannon-want html?_r=2&mtrref=undefined&assetType=opinion

Trump – servant of America or humanity?

The name of the 45th President of the United States is Donald Trump. Trump’s inauguration speech1 was like a slap in the face for the US Establishment and the  US media, and was at the same time a verbal homage to the true sovereign – the American people, buttressed by the usual consciousness of the ‘chosenness’ of  the USA and its mission in the world. “America first”, “We will make America great again” were the often heard and applauded slogans.

A relevant indication by Steiner about the spirit of North America
The “God” invoked in many past inauguration speeches and also in that of Trump  cannot at any rate be equated with a God for the whole of mankind. He is a national God [Volksgott], who in  the age of Michael, the spirit of humanity, is an ahrimanic spirit, in contradistinction to Michael. He belongs to the “abnormal Spirits of Personality”, “who do not act for further development”, as Steiner carefully indicated in the Folk Souls cycle in 1910: “You only need study the character of the North American people; there you have a people that for the time being is based on this principle.”2 Real “further development” today is needed especially in the spiritual and cultural sphere; and of that there was certainly no mention in Trump’s speech. Externally, it may be worth building new roads, trains and tunnels; in a comprehensive sense, they can only serve “further development” indirectly at most.

Questions about Trump’s first acts in office
Why did he – to throw up only a few of the many questions about his administration’s intentions – nominate Nikki Haley for UN ambassador, who speaks up for Israel’s interests but against those of Russia? Why was his  first (jovial and friendly) visit as US President to the headquarters of the CIA, where he praised the 400 staff present for their work and assured them of his unlimited support? Why will the British Prime Minister Theresa May, who certainly does not share Trump’s pro-Russian views, be the first official visitor from abroad?  Does he intend by all this only to take the wind out of the sails of his internal and external opponents?

 

In the spirit of Churchill?
Trump has had the bust of Churchill – a gift from Tony Blair to G.W. Bush, and which Obama had had removed – returned to the Oval Office (see photo). The high-ranking Freemason Churchill, whom Trump admires, did not serve the true Time Spirit, but the Anglo-American spirit of “effective World  Super-Government”, for which the unification of Europe represents merely  a prelude3. Europe today is like the sinking Titanic, and the British have just abandoned ship. Now the representatives of the occultly oriented true British Establishment, freed from the “united” Europe, will work together with their US brethren, with the brakes off, on the realisation of such a world super-government. Their goal of world domination is, according to Steiner, intended to last centuries4. These centuries, despite all outer appearances, are not yet up. In all the noise of the politics of facades, which also include presidential elections and political slogans, one should not neglect to keep one’s eye on the long-term interests of such groups which, for example, set up the  “socialist experiment” [in Russia in 1917]. Will Trump perhaps be their willing but naïve, new instrument?
One thing is clear: whoever wants to make America “great again” is not yet any servant of mankind.

 

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1     www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/20/watch-donald-trumps-inauguration-ceremony-live

2     GA 121, Oslo 8 June 1910

3    Churchill on 14 May 1947, quoted from https://fassadenkratzer.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/hintergrunde-der-europaischen-integrationsbewegung

4     R. Steiner on 21 March 1921, in GA 174b.

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

_________________________

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/

Media Disgrace, a New Magazine and a Hero of the Spirit

In the last issue we presented some sinister news about the media infowar.
Firstly, we focused on the absurd campaign by western media like the BBC in England against the Russian broadcaster Russia Today, which culminated in a temporary closure of RT bank accounts in England. But who can still take the mainstream media seriously after the double disgrace of their false prognoses about Brexit and the US election?1 Claiming it wants to counteract “propaganda pressure on the EU from Russia and Islamist terrorist groups”, the European Parliament has recently passed a resolution to block  opposition to mainstream media pro-EU demagoguery.2

Today we can report something positive: since November 2016 we have had in Switzerland ExpressZeitung.com, published by André Barmettler and Ruben Buchwalder. This monthly magazine has no time for the dogmas and lies of the mainstream. The editors seem to be driven by an uncompromising will for the truth. Media deceptions are exposed. The site analyses, amongst other things, Trump’s Wall Street connections, calls for critical investigations of 9/11 and cites Anthony Sutton’s book Wall Street and The Rise of Hitler, of which the editors write: “Absolutely essential reading for a critical grasp of [modern] history.”

The ExpressZeitung could develop into another David in the landscape of the mendacious propaganda of the Goliaths. We shall keep our eyes on it.
With regard to the spectacle of the election in the USA, it should not be overlooked that the ultimate decision-making power never resides with US presidents; they are only the executive organs of the financial elite, the “plutocrats”, as Steiner called them already 100 years ago3; if US presidents do not perform in the desired manner, their actions are terminated, if necessary by murder. One only needs to recall the coup against John F. Kennedy, which was designed and then covered up by the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles.

The ruthless will to power of these elites is recounted by Andreas Bracher in his article on Rasputin, who was murdered a hundred years ago, on 30 December 1916 by a British secret agent. Rasputin wanted to keep the Czar from involving Russia in war and therefore, sooner or later, “had to” fall.

2017 will see the 100th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s first attempt to assist the breakthrough of a threefold social organism in Central Europe. We are also featuring contributions on the greatest and perhaps the only initiate that Switzerland has ever produced – Nikolaus von der Flüe (b.1417), who Steiner once called a “hero of the spirit” (see p. 24). Where are such figures today? Contemplation of von der Flüe’s spiritual and social impulses for peace would be far more worthwhile for Switzerland than cultivating any “Partnerships for Peace” and lavishing praise on “common values” in similar hollow rhetoric. And not only for Switzerland.The times are serious and could lead to an awakening to the bloody facts that are occurring. But such times also involve an awakening to the spiritual dimension of reality. This urgent necessity has been hovering over mankind for more than a hundred years. If it is not fulfilled, then what remains of materialistic “civilisation” will soon completely sink into the abyss.
Our readers will understand why precisely this Christmas issue carries more articles which in one form or another can lead to an awakening to the spirit. May they have an infectious effect in a healing sense.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1    www.rt.com/usa/367557-ron-paul-fake-news/
www.rt.com/op-edge/367625-fake-news-post-truth-iraqi-wmds/

2    http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20161118IPR51718/meps-sound-alarm-on-anti-eu-propaganda-from-russia-and-islamist-terrorist-groups
https://www.rt.com/news/367984-eu-double-standards-sputnik-rt/

3    www.perseus.ch/PDF-Europaer/JG_03/Europaer_05_1999.pdf

From the First World War to Today’s Propaganda War

A Moltke Première in Colmar
On 16 and 17 September a conference was held in Colmar dedicated to Helmuth von Moltke.colmar The title was far-reaching: “Helmuth von Moltke et le Destin de l’Europe”.  It was the first official event on the theme of a figure who in France understandably is the object of prejudice and difficulties. The organisers were Antoine Dodrimont and Jean Hèches. On 17 Sept. Dodrimont gave a brilliant overview of the situation in Europe in the weeks before the outbreak of war. He also described the “will for war” in England and France and pre-war propaganda war waged by the Entente against Germany.
In this issue we examine once more the riddle of the Battle of the Marne that the Germans lost and adduce some very significant post-mortem statements by the soul of Moltke, which can fundamentally correct the mostly one-sided picture of Moltke, for example: “an external victory would have meant the utter downfall of the German people” (see p. 8).

Putin at the World Energy Conference in Istanbul
At the beginning of October President Putin concluded a gas  pipeline deal withworld_energy_logo the Turkish President, which is a thorn in the side of the other NATO states and especially of the USA.  The deal was done in the framework of the 23rd World Energy Conference, an organisation founded in 1924 by Daniel N. Dunlop. Even if the organisation today has moved away from Dunlop’s far-reaching goals, on its website1 under “About Us/History” there is an extraordinary appreciation of the founder, Dunlop. It ranges over his economic and spiritual activities and describes his plan to prepare an economic order in the sense of Rudolf Steiner’s threefolding impulse. It is to be hoped that Putin’s advisers have taken a look at the background of the organisation in the context of which the Russian and Turkish heads of state were conducting their negotiations. Dunlop’s ideas have in them a power for the future which should gain an understanding especially in today’s Russia.

The current propaganda war against Russia
On 17 October the British bank NatWest terminated its dealings with the  internationally increasingly well-known Russianrt broadcaster Russia Today (RT)2 (see also the articles by Terry Boardman in TPA Vol.2 No.7 on p. 9 and on p. 11 of the current issue) and closed the broadcaster’s accounts. There was no specific reason given for this sudden move, which was announced as “final”. It is no coincidence that this attempt to shut down the accounts of Russia Today in the UK comes at a time when the western media, including the BBC, are waging a propaganda war against Russia which is no less intense than that waged by the Entente against Germany before and during the First World War.
A few days earlier, President Obama announced the “need” for controls on the Internet, which, he said, often spreads nonsense such as, for example, that “we have never been to the Moon”3 and at the same time he put pressure on Ecuador to cut the Internet connection of Julian Assange, who has taken asylum at the embassy of Ecuador in London. Wikileaks has been releasing very uncomfortable facts about the presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.
Just as before 1914, there is also “a will for war”, this time against Russia.
It is to be hoped that the attempt to bring the free alternative media to heel will fail, and that the mendacious Anglo-American media war against Putin and Russia Today does not become the prologue to a real war against Russia – a hope which seems less grounded with each passing day.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1    www.worldenergy.org

2    www.rt.com

3    www.uncutnews.ch

9/11 Article in Physics Magazine Alarms the Media

steven_jonesClose to the 15th anniversary of the attacks of 11 September 2001 a very timely article appeared in the magazine Europhysics News at the end of August with the title “15 Years Later – On The Physics Of High-Rise Building Collapses” (www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2016/04/epn2016-47-4.pdf).
The article, by Steven Jones, Robert Korol, Anthony Szamboti and Ted Walter, discusses amongst other things the collapse of Building 7 alongside the Twin Towers in New York; this building was not crashed into by any airplanes that started fires. The article states, moreover, that fire has never caused steel-structured buildings to collapse.
It particularly examines the phenomenon that in the first two seconds Building 7 collapsed at free fall speed. This was after a while also accepted by the official examining body NIST. The collapse of Building 7, like that of the Twin Towers, which also suffered collapse at free fall speed, can only be explained by controlled explosions, in which lower floors must first have been made to collapse and the ones above them could then fall without resistance. NIST still claims today that the cause of the collapse of the towers was fire from the aero-engine fuel and concedes that in the case of the analogous collapse of Building 7 it can provide “no full explanation of the total collapse” (p. 25). The authors see it as a “moral imperative” that the investigating authorities finally carry out “a truly scientific and impartial investigation” (p. 26).
This article in a scientific magazine has unleashed a storm of indignation in the mass media. On 16 Sept. the [Swiss] Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in its section “Research and Technology”, sought to bat it away with recourse to the usual CIA-inspired slogan of “conspiracy theories”1, but advanced not a single relevant argument against the authors’ case. At the same time, the newspaper polemicises against a conference event organised in Bern by the Swiss branch of AE911truth (see www.ae911truth.ch). The organisers and the participants were all casually described as “adherents of conspiracy theories”, who had now received some “backing” in the Europhysics article.
On 9 September the Washington Post and the Daily News also carried polemics against the article, which had meanwhile spread widely on Facebook2. Die Welt criticised Jones, one of the authors, because of his Mormon faith.3
Previously, not one respected scientific magazine had dared to publish criticism of the official explanation of 9/11. This has now changed. The dictators of “truth” in the mass media were afraid that all their hopes of maintaining their already 15 year-long, badly soiled cover skins of indoctrination would even now be dashed by scientific arguments. It has not yet happened. Hence the pseudo-scientific furore. This furore unmasks the mendacity which has been practised in relation to the 9/11 event – with all its consequences – from the very beginning. It is comparable to the mendacity which, for almost 100 years, has disguised the Anglo-American string-pullers of the First World War. Let us hope that this time it does not take 100 years until the full truth comes to light.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1    See the inset box in the issue on p. 8.

2    www.lunaticoutpost.com/thread-689934.html

1    www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article157971801/Fachmagazin-publiziert-9-11-Verschwoerungstheorie.html). – Also on Focus-online: www.focus.de/wissen/mensch/geschichte/ueberwaeltigende-beweisewissenschaftsjournal-veroeffentlicht-starke-zweifel-an-9-11_id_5905051.html

Simple Facts – Gigantic Deceptions

On 19 September the speech of Winston Churchill that he gave on the same day in 1946 in Zurich will again be much in the news: it was a great call to create a United States of Europe. The Swiss Federal Council and the Churchill-devotee Schneider-Ammann will take this occasion to receive Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the EU Commission. The meeting is intended to use Churchill’s visit and speech in 1946 as a means of trying to stir up once again an appetite among the Swiss people for a gradual entry into the EU. We shall repeat once again the key sentence from a speech which Churchill gave on 14 May 1947 in London: “The creation of an authoritative, all-powerful world order is the ultimate aim towards which we must strive (…) Without a United Europe there is no sure prospect of world government. lt is the urgent and indispensable step towards the realisation of that ideal.”1
Those who don’t want to have sand kicked in their eyes should, beyond the Zurich speech, not forget the almost unknown, and much more important London speech, which reveals the distant Anglo-American goal connected with the unification of Europe. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 13/14 August 2016 put the following sentences on its front pages: “Russian foreign policy is concentrating on its military and is provoking NATO from the North Sea to the Near East. The West must find an appropriate answer.”
The fact is that in 2015 the annual military expenditure of the USA at $596 billion puts that of China ($215 billion), Saudi Arabia ($87 billion) and Russia into the shade. Russia is fourth with $66 billion. The military spending of the NATO countries combined is more than ten times that of Russia.
While this twisting of the facts by the NZZ is highly unpleasant, more welcome news is that there has recently been founded in Switzerland an organisation for the uncovering of the deliberate deception of the public with regard to 9/11. A call for an event on 10 September states: “11 September 2001 continues to determine our present. This is still shown whenever it is said that since that date everything has changed. The so-called ‘War on Terror‘ has not only cost 1.5 million lives, suffering, poverty and mountains of money on armaments, it has also destabilised countries in the Near East and has made millions of people homeless, causing them to become refugees. Systems for mass surveillance have been built up which also affect data traffic in and out of Switzerland. The knowledge of the truth that on 11 September 2001 the three (!) towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York were blown up, changes our perspective on the ‘War on Terror’. Terror can also be a crime committed with the knowledge of politicians and institutions such as secret services, in order to push through spending on armaments, to limit basic democratic rights and to set up bogeymen, or to influence elections, all of which Operation Gladio showed in the 1980s in Europe.”- Andreas Gross, AE911truth.ch
A year ago we highlighted the activities von Richard Gage, the founder of the organisation Architects and Engineers for  9/11 Truth, which has now founded a Swiss branch. Among the courageous 9/11 critics in the West is also Catherine Austin Fitts, whose many-sided activities we have drawn attention to for the first time in this issue (see p. 12).
The President of Turkey likes to make himself out to be a new Atatürk. Erdogan abuses the good name that the founder of the new Turkey in the 1920s still has today among most Turks. What Mustafa Kemal Atatürk really did and wanted will be presented in the next issue.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1    May 14, 1947 in Albert Hall, London, in: Winston S. Churchill, His Complete Speeches, Vol. VII, New York 1974.

What is Truth?

The question which Pilate put to Christ in the course of his interrogation of Him, has many levels.
Someone who follows the news will have to put this question continually in the sense of asking how far truth is really presented to him. The New York Times has always carried on its title page the slogan: “All the News that’s Fit to Print.” But who decides what is fit to print? And what is the necessary selection based on? What are the criteria?
We can – especially in relation to the reporting of international events – principally distinguish three kinds of media reports: 1. true 2. true-false and 3. false. As the first is extremely rare – exceptions are notices of deaths, accidents, natural catastrophes or externalities such as new appointments to official positions etc. – let us go on to consider the second:

The mixture of truth and falsehood
What happens when the truth about certain important events comes to light? A recent example: according to the “Chilcot Report” which was published in London in July Tony Blair knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Yet this was the main justification for Britain’s military intervention in Iraq in 2003. Today Blair admits that the secret service had not provided the right information about this, but he emphasises that he had trusted them.
The Iraq war led to a million deaths. The economic sanctions that had gone on for years beforehand had also caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands, mostly children: their nutritional conditions had become catastrophic. Critics spoke of an “insane inferno”. The infrastructure of the country was totally destroyed. In the part of Iraq occupied by the British ISIS emerged.
Has the revelation of these truths had any consequences? So far no.1 The headlines stayed with Brexit, Cameron’s exit and the installation of a new Iron Lady in the government.
After his “confession” Tony Blair was still able to assert that Britain’s intervention had been right: “I believe we made the right decision and the world is better and safer,” Blair said at a lengthy press conference following the Chilcot inquiry report.2 “Better and safer”?
Seen as a whole: here we see truth mixed with quite blatant untruth (and lies).

Completely untrue reporting
Since the beginning of the mass media we have had the third category of reports about major world events. One can recall “German war guilt” in the First World War, the deliberate misrepresentation of the events surrounding Pearl Harbor, or 9/11 or the present “aggression”, of which Russia is daily accused. The latter accusations enabled NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg to “justify” NATO’s recent intensified activities in the Baltic states bordering Russia.
One wag opined that “Russia obviously wants war: look how close they have put their country to our NATO bases!”3
One might think that the third category of reporting would be the easiest to see through, but it just isn’t so. Such reports are propagated by extremely suggestive methods. Those who don’t make a real stubborn effort to form their own judgments are taken in by such suggestions. The American Congressman Hamilton Fish III was one of the first to expose the monumental lie about Pearl Harbor and placed in the frontispiece of his book the motto: “Magna es veritas et praevalebit” – Truth is mighty and will prevail.4
Pilate’s question is not new, but it remains extremely contemporary.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1    Remarkably, the initiative of the Iraq War Families Campaign Group raised the necessary £ 50,000 in less than 9 hours seeking to bring  to justice those responsible for the War and the deaths of their loved ones. https://www.crowdjustice.co.uk/case/chilcot/

2   http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/07/blair-says-world-is-better-and-safer-after-iraq-war/

3   https://futuristrendcast.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/nato_bases_russia.jpg

4   See H. Fish, The Other Side of the Coin – How We Were Tricked into World War II, Vantage Press, 1976

Mt. Sainte Odile, Brexit, Skull & Bones

Church policy as world policy
On 19 June a small group of people found themselves on Mont Sainte Odile in Alsace, France. They commemorated the great individualities Helmuth and Eliza von Moltke, who in the 7th and 8th centuries were incarnated in that place – Eliza von Moltke as St. Odile and Helmuth von Moltke as her brother Hugo. Their father Eticho was later reincarnated as the German Emperor Wilhelm II (r.1888-1918); Wilhelm was presented by the town of Sélestat with a castle not far from Mont Sainte Odile; it was as though a reminder of his incarnation as Eticho. In the 9th century Pope Nicholas I and his adviser, in whom Odile and her brother were incarnate in Rome soon after the time of Odile, made the world-historical decisions which were to separate the West from the East.1
On 19 June – the day of our visit – in 1911, Helmuth von Moltke paid a visit to Mont Sainte Odile. He would have seen the sarcophagi of Odile and Eticho, and also the Chapel of Tears with its image of Pope Leo IX, who was of the family line of Odile and who drew the consequences of the ecclesiastical policy of Pope Nicholas I: the ultimate separation of the Eastern Church from the Western, the Great Schism of 1054.
On the same 19 June this year (2016) – it was Whitsun in the Greek Orthodox Church – the first Orthodox Council for over a thousand years took place on the island of Crete.2
Pope Francis called on the Holy Spirit to protect the Council. Are we now at the beginning of an attempted resolution of the Great Schism by the Catholic Church? Its spirit is alert and pays attention to significant places around the world in terms of etheric geography: in the Odile Chapel there has been a relic of the blood of Pope John Paul II for a few years. Relics, however, belong to the soul constitution of the Middle Ages. The spiritual unification of East and West should not remain in the hands of the Church. It can only be realised by people who want to foster the spirit of the new age.

The British Brexit
A few days later, another event of at least European political dimensions took place: the vote by the British people for Brexit. It is a positive sign that the majority of the British population have turned their backs on an institution which has become the epitome of an anti-national, Kafkaesque form of government by elites. The hollowness of the EU was impressively documented in a video which went the rounds in the weeks and months prior to the referendum in Britain and recorded far higher viewing figures than Prime Minster David Cameron’s propaganda speeches: “Brexit – the Movie” (https://www.brexitthemovie.com).
But here too, the British departure from the EU will not solve Britain’s or the EU’s problems. At most, it will create a free space for a new, really comprehensive economic and social politics, which will not be conducted in closed venues behind the scenes by the “Bilderbergers” and similar anti-democratic bodies. Where are those who will carry forward such a new politics?

Clear-sightedness in Germany
In Germany, happily, critical voices have been raised against NATO’s warmongering on the western borders of Russia. Is NATO seeking to invade, not Poland like Hitler, but Russia, on pretexts at which it is constantly working? The consequences would obviously be catastrophic. Those who perceive these things with clarity include the German Foreign Minister Steinmeier, the writer Rolf Hochhuth, the former Ministers Andreas von Bülow and Willi Wimmer; their comments and points of view on the subject can all be found on the Internet. In October Der Europäer will be carrying an interview with Daniele Ganser, an expert on NATO.

Hillary Clinton and Skull & Bonesh-clinton
A particularly symptomatic, current political spectacle recently occurred in the USA. Hillary Clinton, on whose public appearances  a great deal of money and attention has been spent, was awarded an honorary membership of Skull & Bones during a ceremony at the elite  Yale University. We have often discussed the dubious machinations of this elite Order which has been in existence since the year of Goethe’s death (1832). Its main concern is to control completely contradictory political directions, by supporting both left-wing as well as right-wing administrations. Those who set up polarities can be the masters of what results from them! For Skull & Bones, Left and Right are only two wings of  one large party, as Gore Vidal once remarked. Mrs Clinton is therefore playing her theatrical role on the puppet stage of the political party spectacle and at the same time fostering more intimate relationships with the actual string-pullers behind the curtain.3

 

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1    See Helmuth von Moltke, ed. A. Bracher and T. Meyer, Basel, 1993. 

2   albeit without the participation of Russia and Bulgaria.

3   See:http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/connecticut-hillary-clinton-made-honoary-skull-and-bones-member-during-yale-ceremony/

LETTER FROM STOURBRIDGE Britain’s EU Referendum – The Courage of One’s Convictions

keep-calm-and-brexit_NETThere are certain periods, even certain years, in a human life which are of special significance, and the same is true of the history of nations. I wrote in the February issue of TPA (Vol. 1 no.11) that “this year [2016] promises to be a memorable one for Britain” and that the result of the EU referendum “will determine Britain’s future for decades and perhaps centuries.” In that same issue I also pointed to the significance of the number 23 in British history. The intense, frustrating, and sometimes banal national debate on Britain’s membership of the EU came to a dramatic climax last month against a background of massive summer storms and the murder of a member of parliament only a week before the referendum vote. Presented with the binary choice of whether to remain in the EU or to leave it, 48.1% of the population opted to remain and 51.9% opted to leave. 46.5 million people were registered to vote and 33.5 million valid votes were cast – a 72% turnout. Voting in the referendum was held on 23 June, Midsummer’s Eve, or St. John’s Eve, and closed at 22:00. The ‘midsummer night’s dreaming’ then immediately began as to which side was going to win. The financial markets had for some time been convinced that it was the Remain camp, and soon after the polling stations closed, the value of the pound sterling shot up to US$1.50. When the earliest results became known at about midnight the £ began to drop like a stone, finally reaching $1.3777, its lowest level since 1985. It recovered somewhat within three days. On the stock market, after opening on 24 June, the US Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 450 points (2.5%) in under 30 minutes.

The ‘experts’ and ‘Project Fear’
For months, day after day, a continuous succession of economic so-called ‘experts’ such as George Soros, Jacob Rothschild, Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase, Christine Lagarde of the IMF, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, numerous foreign politicians, from Angela Merkel to Barack Obama and Shinzo Abe, senior British military figures, groups of businessmen and multinational corporations, both British and foreign, large groups of scientists and academics, including such as Stephen Hawking, various figures in the arts and sports, such as footballer David Beckham, and a host of media pundits – all urged the British people to stay in the EU and outlined the terrible disasters that would follow if their ‘advice’ was not heeded. Day in, day out, especially in the last three months before the vote, this parade of doom-mongers, wagging their admonishing fingers, passed before the media gaze of the British public. All this ‘advice’ was regarded by supporters of the ‘Leave’ campaign as ‘Project Fear’, the attempt to intimidate the voters into remaining in the EU. “Don’t take a leap in the dark”, these Jeremiahs told the British public, “don’t take a risk; don’t risk the uncertainty! Stay with what you know”. This, despite the fact that for decades the media had continually emphasised the importance in economic and artistic life, indeed, the importance in life in general, of taking risks, and jumping into the unknown. How many times had we been told that the modern age was “an age of uncertainty” which we had to get used to. Even Tony Blair had frequently lectured the British people and others on the fact that change was the norm in modern life and that they had to accept it 1.
But when it came to the EU referendum, suddenly all talk of risk was forgotten as the British were told from all sides that under no circumstances should they dare to contemplate leaving the comfortable and prosperity-enhancing safety of the EU, or the sky would fall on them, the economic ground under their feet would collapse. They would revert to a state of barbarism dominated by nationalists and the Far Right and would become an isolated, inward-looking, puny little nonentity in the world, adrift in the great tides of the times, unable to meet the challenges of China, India, and America.
On 23 June over half the British population showed that they had the nerve and the imagination, or else the sheer stubborn bloody-mindedness, to reject all this ‘advice’, whether well-meant or fear-mongering. They voted, albeit by a minority of just under 4%, to leave the EU. Certainly, many did not take kindly to all the foreigners trying to interfere, as they saw it, trying to influence a British democratic decision. They also did not take kindly to being branded as uneducated and ignorant, retrogressive racists by many in the Remain camp and by sections of the media who tried to make out that the young, the educated and the well-informed all wanted to stay in the EU. In fact, it was clear from numerous interviews and articles in the media that many of ‘the young, the educated and the well-informed’ did not have a clue about the origins and motivations of the EU. The young, primarily, if understandably, concerned for themselves rather than the country, and mostly lacking any sense of the country’s historical development, saw the EU predominantly in terms of what they believed it would give them personally, in the way of educational grants and subsidies, travel and job opportunities etc. The so-called ‘educated and well-informed’, especially in the media and the political world, often turned out to have no more idea of what the EU was really about, where it came from or what it was intending to become than did some in the Leave camp.

EU origins and aims – hidden again
As a result, this referendum focused mainly on two issues – economics and immigration, especially the former, rather than on issues of democracy, sovereignty, war and peace, which took very much a back seat. There was endless bickering over how much money ‘the average family’ would lose a week or a year if Britain were to leave; endless imagined statistics were bandied about regarding the negative effects on Britain’s economy. Many tried to point out in vain that all this was speculation, not fact. Those on the Remain side taunted the Leavers with the fact that so many British and foreign ‘experts’ had lined up on the side of Remain; they did not seem to know that many of these ‘experts’, especially the international ones, are linked by a complex web of contacts in the global elite, regularly meeting and keeping in touch with ‘received views’ at numerous conferences, seminars, congresses and the like, from Davos and Bilderberg to the Trilateral Commission and NATO meetings, to name but four and that this complex network of global elitists has a common interest in supporting and advancing an American agenda and a NATO agenda with regard to Europe.
Just as in the referendum of 1975, in which the British voted to decide whether to stay in the EEC, which they had joined two years earlier, the fact that the ‘European project’ had always been, from its beginnings in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1950, a political project aimed at the creation of a centralised, federal United States of Europe, and that the economic focus of debate about the EEC/EU was merely used to mask that fact, was again hidden from the people, this time by the mainstream media. The difference from 1975, however, was that in 2016 the EU doubters and Eurosceptics had access to the Internet and could find out or confirm these things for themselves. The mainstream media debate nevertheless still sought to keep the EU origins hidden and especially to keep the British and above all the American instigation of and constant contribution to the European project hidden. Just as in 1975, no mention was made in the mainstream debate of the millions of CIA dollars that went to fund the European movement in the 1950s, all in the service not of peace or European harmony but of American Cold War aims and will to hegemony over both Europe and the USSR. A so-called expert and veteran commentator on constitutional history, politics and the intelligence services such as the academic Sir Peter Hennessy – ennobled in 2010 – could appear on the BBC (24.6.2016) and misleadingly claim that the Schuman Plan of 1950, which launched the ECSC, was the brainchild of French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, adding, almost as an afterthought, “with some help from Jean Monnet”. In fact, of course, the Plan was the brainchild of Jean Monnet, and Schuman was simply used to introduce and ‘front’ the Plan.2
Once again, as in 1975, the media sought to distract and divert the people from the reality of the EU’s origin and aims into fruitless bickering over statistics on economics and immigration. In 1975, the people were almost totally bamboozled by the tactics of the media and the pro-EEC supporters in the political class and allowed themselves to be convinced the EEC was just an economic club that would make Britain more prosperous. They voted to stay in the EEC by 67.23% to 32.77%. This time, however, despite the media distraction tactics and fearmongering, many more people had become wise to what the EU was and is really about. They judged that its anti-democratic, centralist and overly bureaucratic aims are not the way of the future for Britain or for Europe and voted to reject them.

EU unreality
As numerous spokesmen and supporters of the Leave campaign pointed out, the British decision to leave could inspire other European countries to leave the EU as well, leading to the end of the EU itself. This would indeed clear the decks, so to speak, for new thinking about the future for Europe, and 100 years on from the emergence of Rudolf Steiner’s threefolding initiatives (1917-1922), this new thinking could and should focus on ideas and solutions influenced and informed by threefolding. In 1930, the Soviet Union seemed to many so-called ‘progressives’ and ‘idealists’ in western and central Europe to be a fully-functioning reality, a focus of hope for the future of the continent and the world. We now see that what once seemed so solid was actually built on a foundation of sand, and in just two short years (1989-91) it collapsed and was washed away. This writer feels confident that a similar lack of historical ‘legitimacy’ and fundamental reality in relation to the real needs of our modern epoch has always afflicted the EU, and that when sufficient people realise this and see that the would-be Emperor has no real clothes, the EU too will swiftly wither and fade away, as did the USSR and also the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ of the Carolingians after less than 100 years of existence in the 9th century (800-888). Top-down, elite-driven, one-pattern systemic solutions are not the way forward for Europe or anywhere else in this 5th post-Atlantean epoch (since 1413) and this Age of Michael (since 1879) – the epoch and age of increasing individual autonomy and diversity. In this epoch of the Consciousness Soul new communities have to be built by free, self-realised individuals and not from above, by elites working in accordance with intellectual constructs and abstract plans, no matter how ‘idealistically’ such constructs and plans may be presented.

Historic turning point for England
The phenomena of the tremendous storms over Britain in the week before the referendum and of the extremely rare and horrific murder, in very suspicious circumstances, of the 41 year-old Member of Parliament Jo Cox, a mother of two small children (the last time an English politician had been assassinated by an Englishman was in 1812!) exactly one week before the referendum vote and the fact that the referendum was being held between the anniversaries of those two great battles, so significant for Britain during the First World War, the battles of Jutland (31 May 1916) and the Somme (began 1 July 1916), were all evidence of the remarkable historical moment that this vote represented in British history.3 Exactly 1000 years after the conquest of England by the Danish Vikings in 1016 and 950 years after the invasion of England by the French-speaking (but originally Danish Viking) Normans in 1066 – conquests which began England’s long process of aggressive expansion, first to the Celtic periphery, then to the European continent and finally throughout the world – this whole historical process has now come to a close. The Scots, who cling to the illusory dream of the EU, will now refuse to be taken out of the EU by the English and it is expected they will press for a second independence referendum (the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon already intimated this on 24 June), in which they will most likely vote to leave the UK; in N. Ireland nationalist leaders have reacted to the referendum result by saying that N. Ireland, which voted largely to remain in the EU, also deserves not to be taken out of the EU and that a democratic vote to unite with the Republic of Ireland should be held.
We may now therefore be facing the imminent break-up of the United Kingdom, which actually only dates to 1801. This is not like the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918-1920; it is a totally different historical phenomenon. England’s expansionary world role is over; the English need to realise this and accept it. The referendum campaign showed that there were still too few people – in both the Remain and Leave camps – who do understand this, again because of the short-sighted focus on economic and immigration statistics. The English still have a substantial problem with national vanity and pride, the product of 300 years of world empire and almost 1000 years of expansionism. This vanity and pride has become a drug; too many Britons are addicted to this drug, but it is a drug that will have to be kicked, in one individual soul at a time, if the country is to become free of it. The bombastic conservative and idealiser of the Roman and British Empires, Boris Johnson, former mayor of London, a leader of the Vote Leave campaign and now a prospective candidate to replace David Cameron as Prime Minister, is not the man to help the English kick this habit. His instincts are to stay close to the USA, to remain in NATO, to retain as much global power as possible, and approve the TTIP trade agreement deal with the USA. As Prime Minister, he would be the English counterpart to a US President Donald Trump. But perhaps the imperial nations, the UK and the US, will have to experience this double absurdity of the two blond buffoons with bizarre hairstyles as leaders before their peoples can see through the vainglorious illusions, and ultimately socially destructive consequences, of the habit of world domination.
The British have played a significant part over the past centuries, for both good or ill, in helping to create global consciousness. Perhaps it is now time for them to realise that they should ‘return’ to their mother continent and help her to play her part in the threefold world that consists of the Americas, Europe and Africa, and Asia-Pacific. The EU, however, was the wrong way to do this. Like the USSR, and like many other abstract intellectual designs that emerged in the 20th century, the EU – secretive, elitist, bureaucratic – goes against the real striving of human development in the modern age. When the EU has gone, Europe, and the English – if only they can kick their ‘habit’ – will be able to play the role on the world stage together with the other European peoples, that the 21st century is truly awaiting: an associative, mercurial role of mediation between East and West, North and South.
It is wonderful to behold when an individual (or a nation) stands up against all the odds and resists external pressures to conform and deny his own being, resists attempts to hector and bully him into submission, refuses to enter, or remain in, a conformist sheep-pen, no matter how attractively packaged and decorated the sheep-pen may be, and instead, asserts his individuality. For all their faults and problems, and they are many, over half the people of England and Wales at least, have shown the courage of their convictions and a faith in themselves. I hope that it may be an inspiration to other European peoples to do likewise – and that the result will be an alternative, real Europe, a threefold Europe.

Terry Boardman, Stourbridge (England)

_________________________

1    E.g. Blair’s Flora Cameron Lecture on Politics and Public Affairs, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA in March 2008: http://www.trinity.edu/departments/public_relations/on_campus/0803_blair/

2   See, for example, R. C. Mowat, Creating the European Community (1973), and C. Booker and R. North, The Great Deception – Can the European Union Survive? Paperback ed. (2005) ch. 4..

3   There are also suspicious similarities to the assassination of the Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh who died on 11 Sept. 2003, following a fatal attack the day before. She died three days before Sweden’s referendum on joining the Euro. Just as Jo Cox supported remaining in the EU, Anna Lindh had supported joining the Euro. They were both murdered by individuals with mental problems who had been on drugs. Before Jo Cox’s murder, the Leave campaign momentum had been mounting and was 6-10 points head of Remain. Although the media tried to present her as a secular saint in the days after her death, and her murder did reduce the Leave lead, in the end it did not do so sufficiently to affect the final vote. The same had been true in the Swedish referendum in 2003; the Swedes voted to reject the Euro. On 16 June, the day of Jo Cox’s death, and after her murder, reporting restrictions were lifted on the case of 13 Muslim men who were convicted of sexual abuse of a 13 year old white girl over a 2 year period in Halifax, not far from Cox’s constituency, and sentenced to 150 years in prison. If she had not been killed, the Halifax case would have been a big news story and might well have had an effect on the immigration aspect of the referendum debate. The case was in effect ‘buried’ by Jo Cox’s murder.

See:http://www.halifaxcourier.co.uk/news/crime/more-than-150-years-jail-for-13-men-who-sexually-abused-vulnerable-halifax-schoolgirl-1-7968693

A Great Bridge-Builder: Helmuth von Moltke – In memoriam

In this issue we are devoting a special insert for the commemoration of the 100th death day (18 June 1916) of Helmuth von Moltke (b. 23 May 1848), this important individual with his world-historical task.
Moltke is one of the great shapers of European history in the last thousand years – and indeed, over incarnations. In the 9th century in his incarnation as Pope Nicholas I, the Moltke individuality made the decision to ward off atavistic eastern spirituality from Europe, so that Europeans could embark on the necessary path to materialism, natural science, and technology. The Great Schism between East and West in 1054 was the consequence of Nicholas’ actions in the 9th century. It laid the ground for the conflict-ridden scenario of 1914: from the East-West divide came the East-West Conflict.
Moltke’s role as Chief of the General Staff of the German army as well as his whole personality have for the most part been distorted and slandered. Moltke’s connection with Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science has been the object of further slanders, also against Rudolf Steiner himself.
Steiner’s memorial address for Moltke on 20 June 1916 calls for objective accounts of the role and personality of Moltke in the future. Steiner sees Moltke’s world-historical significance primarily in the fact that he stood with the greatest sense of responsibility firmly on the earth  but also took the path to the spirit. Steiner followed the post-mortem life of Moltke’s soul and wrote hundreds of notes of post-mortem messages. These messages also sketch a picture of the spiritual activity of the Moltke individuality in the present and the future. They complement the picture of Moltke’s outer, earthly activity in a unique way. They represent a cornerstone for every future biographical and historical account which also seeks to include the esoteric, spiritual side.
In 1993 Perseus Verlag presented the exoteric and esoteric double nature of Moltke  in a two-volume publication titled Helmuth von Moltke –Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Wirken [Helmuth von Moltke  – Documents on his Life and Activities]1. It was republished in an expanded version in 2005/07. The first edition had followed substantial collaboration with Johannes Tautz, to whom the Moltke connoisseur and defender Jürgen von Grone (1887–1978) had entrusted Steiner’s original documents. The second edition contained, amongst other things, valuable commentary on the letters by the Der Europäer author Andreas Bracher; of especial note here are Bracher’s observations in his essay at the end of the second volume: “Der erste Weltkrieg in den nachtodlichen Mitteilungen”. [The First World War in the Post-mortem Communications].
The Moltke soul sees from its post-mortem perspective its present and future task in a new reconciliation between the sense world and the spiritual world, which should correspond to a new relationship between Central Europe and the Slavic East. This was for the Moltke individuality the consequence of the catastrophe of the First World War. On 22 June 1918 the post-mortem communications included this sentence: “It will be the reverse task of that in the 9th century”.
This new Moltke mission is in sharpest contrast to the present East European policy of the US regime and its NATO instruments, a policy supported by most Europeans, but which has not drawn the necessary consequences from either the First or the Second World War. This policy is short-sighted and spiritually blind and must, unless there is a change at the last minute, end in a third catastrophe.
May this centennial commemoration of Moltke not remain merely a historical retrospect, but lead to an awakening to the great historical tasks of the present and future.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1   Available in English in a single volume Light for the new Millennium – Rudolf Steiner, Helmuth von Moltke, Eliza von Moltke, Letters, Documents, and After-Death Communications ed. T.H. Meyer (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1997, rep. 2014).

The moon landing and the manipulative power of the mass media

In the family in which I grew up there was no television, but we had some good neighbours, so my sister and myself, more often myself, from time to time were allowed to go over to them and watch TV a bit. So on a July evening in 1969 I was sitting once more in the dining room of the friendly couple who accompanied our childhood with much warmth and kindness.
And there and then I was told by the TV reporter that man had just landed on the moon. And what a great achievement this was. I had already built a detector radio, which happened to be tuned to Radio Moscow, and had biked with a friend several times to Basel airport where we admired the first Caravelle jet ever landing on it. Truly fascinating, including the thundering noise of the engines.

neil_armstrong_on_moon_NET
And now I was supposed to be fascinated by the first moon astronauts. All I could see was some little men in white suits and with huge helmets with a reflecting Plexiglas front, walking at the speed you would go when walking through water and occasionally jumping in slow motion up and down on the hilly, sandy ground. I was more puzzled than fascinated. And in a strange way I found the whole scene rather comical than truly impressive.
Over thirty years later I was reading the first critical comments that doubted that the moon landing ever really happened. Again not very impressive. Why should it have been faked? Cui bono? But after 9/11 the moon-landing question took on a new form. If nothing else, it was the living and peaceful proof that you could advertise an event exactly in the way you wished it to be interpreted. The modern mass media’s power of deception had reached a new climax. That was a real achievement. And this “success” emboldened some manipulators of  public opinion to spread an obviously faulty and even ludicrous “conspiracy theory” of a truly terrible and not in the least ludicrous event – 9/11 – to the whole world, consuming the mass media.
9/11 was named the “new Pearl Harbor” on the very day it occurred. Well, its official narrative was as mendacious as the one about the old Pearl Harbor. In both cases the world was misled to believe in a “surprise attack” which was only a surprise for the gullible who did not see behind the scenes. The official Commission Report was justly dubbed “Omission Report” by some critics.
The scapegoat of the old Pearl Harbor was Admiral Kimmel (see p. 26) who died 33 years before 9/11, the new Pearl Harbor. Kimmel was something like the Alfred Dreyfus of the American nation, blamed for a catastrophe others had brewed up.
For the reasons briefly sketched above, we welcome a critical article on the alleged moon landing (see p. 17), clarifying the deeper implication of this modern “myth” for the strengthening of materialism in modern natural science.
The neighbour at whose home I first watched the “moon walkers” had grown up among the people of Dornach and as a girl she had known Rudolf Steiner, as a very friendly man who smiled at the children, sometimes giving them sweets. She witnessed the burning of the Goetheanum when she was about 12. And she had tears of pity in her eyes when, much later, she spoke of this event, full of empathy for this blow against the work and life of the “good man”. She never became an “anthroposophist”, but her faculty of compassion and her sense of truth may have inspired the young neighbour watching the “moon walkers” with the eerie feeling of witnessing some kind of unbelievable comedy or fake.

T.H. Meyer

Princes, Monarchs and the Drama of the Future

On 19 February this year at the opening of a congress for biodynamic agriculture, a video was shown in which the Prince of Wales gave an address. In it Prince Charles chastises in a calm and factual manner the destructive treatment of the Earth through the use of artificial fertilisers and monocultures etc. He draws attention to the fact that the right methods and resources have long been available in the agricultural course which Rudolf Steiner gave in Koberwitz in 1924. This means that Steiner’s indications have finally been
taken up worldwide and are being followed. (see http://www.convegnobiodinamica.it/ it/video-19-febbraio-2016/)

With this address Prince Charles joins a number of other representative personalities who have been receptive to a new, threefold world order in the sense of spiritual scientific impulses.
In the late 1930s King Leopold III of Belgium was concerned to support the establishment of an institute in Brussels headed by Walter Johannes Stein. The aim of this was to gather and coordinate data on the real economy and worldwide resources fur a constructive ordering of the global economy. Stein had a number of conversations with the interested monarch about world history in the light of anthroposophy. He also made contact with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who also showed interest in the work of such an institute.

Both the fundamental intentions of the Bretton Woods conference (1944) and the Bilderberg Group, set up in 1954 by Prince Bernhard, originated, albeit in a modified sense, in the efforts of Stein’s Brussels institute, which had to be closed at the beginning of the war. Stein had sought to establish it at the
urging of D.N. Dunlop, the founder of the World Power Conference, which still exists today as the World Energy Congress. (see J. Tautz, Walter Johannes
Stein – A Biography.)

In July 1924 D.N. Dunlop had been able to persuade Edward, the Prince of Wales, to open the World Power Conference, which made it well-known and lent it prestige right from its beginnings. (see Thomas Meyer, D.N. Dunlop – A Man of Our Time)

In the summer of 1917 Arthur Polzer-Hoditz gave Emperor Karl I of Austria- Hungary a Memorandum for the possible reshaping of conditions in the Dual Monarchy. This fact was revealed, along with the first publication of the Memorandum, in the biography of Emperor Karl by Arthur Polzer-Hoditz;
in the English edition of the book (1930) it was omitted. (see Thomas Meyer, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz – A European)

For the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare on 23 April we recall a dream figure that connected Shakespeare and the Egyptian Mysteries. It comes from Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz, who himself had had a great Roman monarchical past and had been born on 23 April 1869.

Edi_JG20_06-07_2016_Europaer

Notes of a dream of Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz 29/30.7.1941: Participation in an Egyptian-style cultic ritual. Stood with crossed arms as a bearer of light. [The] content [was] in the sense of a Shakespearean drama. Probably an indication of a connection between Shakespeare and Egypt.

 

Did Shakespeare’s dramatic art originate in Egyptian initiation rituals? As Shakespeare represents an absolute peak of occidental drama, in the 20th century Rudolf Steiner, with his Mystery Dramas, planted the seeds of the drama of the future. It will be built on the reality of reincarnation and karma.
May this year’s Easter Festival enable the true contemporary spiritual deeds of monarchs, poets and of the founder of spiritual science and his truest pupils to be resurrected in real, active drama.

T.H. Meyer

Russian Roulette, “Conspiracy Theories” and a great European

In February US President Obama quadrupled the 2016 military budget for the NATO armies advancing towards Russia’s western borders. These armies have, until now, constituted nothing but a provocation of Russia,  warranted by nothing if not arms deals or other ignoble motives.The ‘Cold War’ is now threatening to move into a real war, in which the use of nuclear warheads by Russia is also a possibility.
“This step [by the  Obama Administration] is unprecedented in modern history”, remarked Stephen Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Russian Studies and Politics at Princeton University. “Apart from Nazi Germany on the eve of its invasion of Russia, the military power of the West has never positioned itself so close to Russia. The decision of the Obama Administration is nothing other than Russian roulette à la  Washington.”1
This move of course immediately makes all the alleged peace efforts by the USA, and others towards Russia, look like a farce – another opportunity to realise the fundamental hypocrisy of US foreign policy today. The word  “hypocrisy” is not applied here as the expression of any subjective indignation, but as an objective characterisation of the basic drive of this policy, in the sense of Rudolf Steiner’s words: “the lie with which the West has to work, if it wants to succeed (…)”2

During a pedagogical conference in Hamburg in the second weekend of February, the former Member of the German Parliament for the Greens and also Member of the European Parliament, Gerald Häfner, said to a small circle how shockingly slight the resistance in the Bundestag had been after 9/11 against the “unconditional solidarity” with the US government called for by Chancellor Schröder and the leader of the Greens, Fischer. That resistance was finally able to ensure that only a deployment of the Bundeswehr to Afghanistan was approved, and not also to Iraq etc. It is grotesque that in such circumstances in the world Anthroposophists who seek to be leaders believe they have to take up the fight against “conspiracy theories”, as has happened with the League of Free Waldorf Schools since last summer3 – without troubling themselves about the fact that this poisonous propaganda term (conspiracy theory) originated in the circle of the conspirators against John F. Kennedy.4

1916 is also the year in which to commemorate an important European, who was not murdered but has nevertheless been the victim of a persistent campaign of character assassination: Helmuth von Moltke. It is to be hoped that more contemporaries will be able to consider the life and suffering of this personality of world-historical significance without prejudice (and not rest content with questionable spiritual encounters with him in which one is assured: “One likes to work with such people!”).5 We would like to draw attention here to the remarkable impression of Moltke by Heinrich Mann in the article by Andreas Bracher in this month’s issue of TPA (p. 22).

 

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1   globalnet@mindspring.com

2   Der Europäer, Vol. 3 / No. 5 / March 1999

3   “What Is Public Opinion?” TPA, Vol. 1 / No. 8 / June 2015. On the death of Kennedy see James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, 2010

4   This happened when the spokesman for the League of Free Waldorf Schools, Henning Kullak-Ublick, warned against inviting “conspiracy theorists” as lecturers to Waldorf Schools. In a letter of 2 November 2015 defending himself against “Heinz Mosmann and many others” he recommended the book by Karl Hepfer, Verschwörungstheorien: Eine philosophische Kritik der Unvernunft, [Conspiracy Theories: A Philosophical Critique of Unreason] Hepfer gives an overview of current “conspiracy theories”, without presenting even a single serious representative of views that diverge from the “politically correct”.

5   As has been proclaimed in the German language publication Erlebnis Erdwandlung, 2009, p. 154.

Correction
In the article “The Anglo-American and the Middle European-German Mission” (Vol. 1, No. 11/ February 2016, p. 3ff.) by Thomas Meyer the quotation from The Mission of the Archangel Michael (GA 194) – “Now, the actual victors are the Anglo-American peoples…” – was erroneously cited as being from Steiner’s lecture of 15.12.1919. It is actually from the previous day’s lecture, 14.12.1919.

Living with Anthroposophy and True Positivity

Overcoming A Critical Experience

Anyone who has for many years been seriously occupied with Anthroposophy will, sooner or later, experience something like what could be described in the following way:
He will feel the need to bring something new into his relationship to Anthroposophy.
This feeling is not about simply studying a new cycle of lectures, but about developing a new quality, a new degree of earnestness with regard to Anthroposophy. With some people, it leads to a crisis; they feel they are up against a dark wall, which they perhaps feel to be impenetrable and they give up any further study of spiritual science.
This wall actually exists. It is the threshold of the spiritual world. It can only be crossed when the path of spiritual exercises is taken; at the point where the above-mentioned experience is encountered, perhaps for the first time; or with the decision, to go on along this path with new strength and new courage.
Most readers will know the six qualities, which are also known as the six “subsidiary exercises”, that is, exercises besides actual meditations, as given by Steiner on several occasions. They are: control of one’s thoughts, control of one’s actions, endurance (tolerance), open-mindedness, trust in the world (also known as positivity) and inner equanimity. These are the terms Rudolf Steiner uses in, amongst other works, the books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (GA 10) and The Stages of Higher Knowledge (GA 12). To train oneself consistently and repeatedly in these qualities is already a very secure way to overcome the above-mentioned critical experience. They are also worth recommending to those who do not actually also practise meditation.
If the crisis is not mastered, then anthroposophical “knowledge” threatens to become  superficial. Spiritual science or Anthroposophy is a living being. It therefore has to be lived with. The soul cannot do this as long as it only accuses the cold intellect of being “muck”.

 

Positivity and the Value of Life

The exercise of positivity has a special meaning in the face of the wold situation today which creates such untold catastrophic suffering. This exercise is one for strengthening the I. 1
The thinking human I is the judge of the value of life, which seems oppressed in so many ways today, if not even negated. But how does the I determine the value of life? By means of a division. The denominator below the line may contain countless negative experiences. As long as there is even a single positive value of life in the numerator – hourly, daily, yearly etc., the value of life can never become zero. In no hour, on no day, in no year, in no life.2
In-dividuality divides. When we become real individualities, life appears worth living under all circumstances.

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1   Rudolf Steiner in a lecture in Leipzig, 2 January 1914 (GA 266c)

2   This is, in short, the way in which Steiner determines the value of life in the 13th chapter of the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom).

 

Gazing across centuries or digital dementia?

Some World Historical Rhythms and Motifs

The year 2016 does not promise to be a calm one, certainly not calmer than 2015. In such times of war, migrations, economic crises and general unrest in human souls it is particularly appropriate to raise our gaze a bit above the horizon that usually just comprises days or months.
In spiritual science we learn to look at larger rhythms. Foremost among them is the rhythm of 33 1/3 years. Any year chosen can be regarded as a germ of impulses, good or bad, which will unfold and finally blossom after 33 1/3 years.1 A strong historical impulse may roll on for another 33 years or even blossom again hundred years after the original event. In the following we enumerate a few examples, which could, of course, be multiplied at length.
33 years ago, in 1983, the first mobile phone was put on the market in the USA; more important maybe: IBM presented the first PC. In 1989 the World Wide Web started with global internet access. All three inventions have become indispensable to modern humanity, but they are also the causes of (dis-)information flooding into human souls and they make it difficult to come to independent individual judgement. There was perhaps never an age better informed and more devoid of real thought. For information and thought are quite different things. Only a thinking consciousness can separate useless information from that which points to essential facts and events. Without such a consciousness the soul simply drowns in a flood of information. A new epidemic disease is emerging: digital dementia.
In November 1983 the German government allowed the installation of Pershing II missiles in the country. Today, Germany is harbouring US bombers with atomic devices and is cooperating in a barbaric multi-national war in Syria without any legitimation. Russia is the only nation fighting ISIS which was asked for help by Syria; this is a bad token for future relations between Germany (and other European states) and Russia.
In 1950 (when the Korea War began) Senator McCarthy started the US anti-communist witch hunt. Today a similar hunt is undertaken against anyone asking questions about key events of our time (like the 9/11 attacks, the Charlie Hebdo incident or the recent Paris attacks last November); such people are labelled “conspiracy theorists”. This term was coined by the former CIA director Allen Dulles to discredit all those who did not swallow “the lone gunman theory” after the Kennedy assassination in 1963.

Rasputin, Moltke, Editorial TPA Vol1, No. 10 NEW

 

A hundred years ago, two great, though extremely different personalities died. They were involved in the tragic course of the First World War: one of them was Rasputin who tried to convince the Czar that the war was bad for Russia; he was murdered on 30 Dec. 1916 in a plot supervised by a British agent.
In June of the same year, Helmuth von Moltke died in Berlin. He is, next to Rudolf Steiner, the most misunderstood and slandered individual in the history of Europe in the 20th century. Moltke was outstanding in combining the utmost earthly realism with a deep enthusiasm for studying spiritual truth. After his death, this latter aspect of his being blossomed  intensely. His after-death communications are full of insights about the real signs of the times. He knew that Europe and the whole world must wake up to a science of the spirit, or materialism would suffocate human development. He knew that more and more people would be possessed by demonic powers, as in Dante’s “Inferno”, and as we can see them at work in many infernos in our own time. He knew that to recognize these beings spiritual science is indispensable. He knew that the dead live on and can become helpers for the living. And he once stated: “Out of the body, one must direct the gaze of the soul across the centuries. And this gaze across the centuries must be illuminated by the understanding which one has been able to acquire through contemplating ideas of how things relate to one another in the greater dimension of the spirit.”2
Such a larger and spiritualized gaze is without doubt necessary for meeting all the challenges and conflicts of the time to come.

 

T.H. Meyer

_________________________

1   See Rudolf Steiner on Dec. 17 1917 in GA 180

2   See Light for the New Millennium, Rudolf Steiner’s Association with Helmuth and Eliza von Moltke, Letters, Documents and After-Death Communications, London 2nd edition 2015, Message of 1 March 1918.

 

The Paris Attacks – Cui Bono?

Just one day after the ISIS attack in Beirut which took the lives of more than 40 people, there was a series of attacks in Paris which killed more than 130 people and for which ISIS also claimed responsibility. This came ten months after the ISIS attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine.
The day after the attacks of November 13th we received a letter from Jacques Le Rider, a friend and Professor of French and German Studies, who flew from Vienna to Paris on the 13th of November. He reports:
“Yesterday evening there was the most horrible terrorist bloodbath in recent history in Paris (…) Parisians have learned that they live in a dangerous war zone. Paris is becoming the West European Beirut.”
On his flight from Vienna to Paris many hours before the attacks Le Rider had the following experiences:
“I had a flight from Austria to Paris (Charles de Gaulle). Already in Vienna there was a warning: ‘Starting from today the Schengen Regulations have been cancelled by France’; so one had to prepare for passport control when arriving in Paris. I thought: this might be a precautionary measure because of the large Climate Conference in Paris in the beginning of December. At the CDG airport there seemed to be a certain nervousness at the border controls. Never before had I seen such a number of policemen and customs officials. For the first time in years my luggage was searched. (My passport and identity papers were not inspected.) The wave of attacks in central Paris started a few hours later. I am convinced that all security services in France and Europe were on alert. (…) Who were the killers? How could they move in the centre of Paris like fish in water and organise this without anybody noticing, – loaded with heavy weapons as they were? These are open questions …”
At the moment only those who pulled the strings will be able to answer these questions in detail. But at least one should avoid getting hooked on wrong or one-sided questions. For example, the question is not whether “ISIS” is really behind the attacks, but Cui bono? Whom do these attacks serve? An answer to this question is already revealing itself with an almost eerie clarity: those power circles, who want to get Russia, which alone was purposefully fighting against ISIS, out of Syria, because they still want to topple Assad; as well as NATO led by the US, which could now force all NATO member states into a bloody commitment in Syria, with France leading the way.
We would remind you that a political plan of Western powers for a “new caliphate” can be traced back to at least the 1990s, for example in an article in The Economist from the turn of the year 1992/1993.1

*

All contemporary wars are, from a spiritual viewpoint, proxy wars by the Ahrimanic powers, which want to keep mankind from finding the modern path to the spirit by enmeshing it constantly in terror and war. The human propagandists of these wars are really Ahriman’s conscripts. Their wars only appear to circle around Rights, Democracy, Western values etc.; in reality they serve to undermine the modern path to the spirit.
Given the gloomy state of the world, we would like to point our readers to two extraordinary Christmas pictures by Charles Kovacs, which deals with this path to the spirit.

Thomas Meyer

_________________________

1   This article was the topic of an essay by Terry Boardman in The Present Age of last month (Vol. 1, No. 8.), titled “The Disastrous 21st Century”.

 

The “New Caliphate” – Planned Long Ago

Many Europeans lack the capacity to grasp long-range perspectives of the development of Europe and the world. This is not the case with the leading political circles in the West (or at the Vatican).
We have in this magazine repeatedly drawn attention to the world map that appeared in September 1990 in The Economist. This map was accompanied by an article which portrayed a kind of futurological programme for how the world would look in the 21st century. There would no longer be a single Europe. Europa is shown torn into eastern and western parts; the one is in the sphere of influence of an ‘enlightened’ Protestantism/Catholicism, the other is within the Orthodox stream. Nearby are imaginary continents, which are also given “religious” names: Hinduland, Confuciania and Islamistan. Ten years later followed the attacks of 11 September 2001, which were blamed on Islamist perpetrators. Now the Islamistan Project could be put into operation. The struggle against “Islamist Terror” has served as an excuse for the destruction of  Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and so on. Now it’s Syria’s turn, while elsewhere Russia is threatened, where the attempt is being made to tear Ukraine, which many Russians see as a piece of their heart, away from Russia.
In both cases an apparently new phenomenon is involved: the new Caliphate. But only apparently new, for this too was “foretold” in The Economist not long after the publication of the above-mentioned map. Just over two years after the appearance of that map, at the turn of the year 1992/3 an ingenious “fantasy” article appeared in The Economist with the title “LOOKING BACK FROM THE YEAR 2992” – thus 1000 years in the future. It posed as an extract from a book of world history that had been published in the year 2992 and bore the subtitle: “A World History, Chapter 13: The Disastrous 21st Century”1. Since “Islamistan” has now been realised (by the so-called ‘Islamic State’ group) there is every reason to take a closer look at this article. It describes, amongst other things, the emergence of a New Caliphate, whose “driving factor was not religion, though that created the movement’s sense of identity. It was hypernationalism….The first victim was Turkey (…) The forces of the New Caliphate swept up to the Bosporus [sic], and, in the War of the Sanjak (2016), established their first bridgehead in south-eastern Europe. The main target, however, was the decaying corpse of Russia (…) and here the New Caliphate found the basis for the alliance with China…” At the end of the extract from this fictitious world history is described how both the Caliphate and China have eventually had to abandon their world role. The final sentences: “The conditions of a Pax Democratica” – naturally under US direction – “have finally arrived. If only the people of 1992 had seen what their direct descendants could do.
In other words: the aim is an Anglo-American world government, and Islam is currently being used as a means to this end, to destabilise whole countries and throw them into chaos. Now, after the above-mentioned countries, the “united” Europe is also to be chaoticised.2
This is the real background of the current wave of migration streaming mainly from Muslim countries. The New Caliphate is intended to drive a wedge between a chaoticised Europe and a chaoticised Russia. Behind these “fictions” from the West is some real long-range planning; behind the leading policies of the Europeans is a pile of naïve illusions.

 

Thomas Meyer

_________________________

1   The Economist, Dec. 26th 1992 – January 8th 1993. See the article by Terry Boardman in this issue of The Present Age on p.9.

2   No greater obstacle stands in the way of the Anglo-American plans for world domination that appear in the form of such fictional maps and book extracts than a Europe united in a real way, for this could establish a really viable connection to Russia, which it has been the explicit intention of US foreign policy over the last 100 years to prevent.

 

Beyond Ambition, Vanity and Untruthfulness

One can certainly object to much in the policies of the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Mihály Orban, especially in regard to the current refugee crisis. But in one thing the Hungarian Premier is correct. The architect Attila Ertsey (Budapest) has drawn to our attention that “Viktor Orban has said that the crisis has been caused by us – that is, by the West and NATO, of which we are members – and therefore the responsibility lies with all of us.” The western media are silent about such statements by Orban. Ertsey argues that the meddling in the Middle East by Cameron, Hollande, the USA and their Middle Eastern allies has to be stopped so that the countries affected can decide about their own futures. We would like to add: unfortunately, the chaoticisation of Europe by the wave of refugees is entirely in line with an ambitious long-term Anglo-American strategy. The plan of the establishment of “an all-powerful world super-government” spoken of by Winston Churchill (14 May 1947) will only be realised through a chaoticised Eurozone, not a united one. Only on the ruins of Europe is Churchill’s aim attainable. Europe will not manage to deal with the refugee problem until it sees through this western ‘chaos strategy’, in which the ISIS terrorists are playing their part even while being fought in a pretentious manner by the West and its allies. According to Ertsey, an ISIS-leader has boasted that around 4000 ISIS fighters have already been infiltrated into Europe amongst the refugees.
*
Rudolf Steiner ascribed three cardinal vices to our modern era: ambition, vanity and untruthfulness.1
In relation to the last of these, he once said that “hypocrisy is the basic characteristic of public life in our time”.2
According to Steiner, it is not only many private actions that are motivated by vanity, but also a great deal of “science”. For example, one can point to the questionable, extremely complex and not entirely danger-free research that goes on at CERN.
Personal ambition is perhaps the worst enemy of all spiritual development, as Mabel Collins wrote in her book of esoteric schooling Light on the Path. The first step on the path of occult development she therefore gives as: “Kill out ambition”. No easy matter, for ambition is deeply rooted in most people’s habits of life and training today.
One has to go far back in human history to find a time when ambition was still completely unknown: the first Atlantean epoch, which was permeated by the mighty sound of TAO. It was a golden age of selfless devotion to nature and spirit, which were experienced as a powerful unity.3
The “unholy trinity” belongs to the deeper causes of the present war in the Middle East, which stands in a reciprocal relationship to the rejection of the spiritual knowledge that has been available for the past 100 years and more: the more rejection of the spirit in the form of personal ambition, vanity and untruthfulness, the greater the powers of war. Without an energetic turn towards concrete knowledge of the spirit, there will be no lasting solution either of the current refugee crisis 4 nor of the future destiny of Europe and the world.

 

Thomas Meyer

_________________________

1   To W.J. Stein, Mitteilungen aus der anthroposophischen Arbeit in Deutschland, Michaelmas 1966.

2   On 21.8. 1920, GA 199.

3   See R. Steiner, Cosmic Memory, GA 11.

4   It goes without saying that the maximum humanitarian aid possible is necessary in all circumstances.

Through dark events to the light of the spirit

The shooting down of the MH-17 airliner in Eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014 was and still is a cornerstone of Western policy against Russia. The mainstream media have with one voice targeted Russia as the scapegoat for the tragic event. They thus acted as the mouthpiece of US Secretary of State John Kerry, who immediately after the incident spread this view of Russian guilt. The justifications for sanctions against Russia initiated after the Crimea events were substantially fuelled by these accusations. This fuel seems to have evaporated, since the investigation in the Netherlands has not yet produced a clear and transparent result. To cover up for this barren investigation, a new tribunal was to be established within the Security Council, although this same Council had passed resolution 2166 on 21 July 2014, which demanded an international independent investigation. But such an investigation never took place, as the Dutch investigation committee appointed to carry out this task was neither unrestricted, international nor independent.
Now Russia is blamed for vetoing the new tribunal and demanding that resolution 2166 should just be adequately implemented. In an interview for AsiaNews (5 Aug.) Secretary of State Sergei Lavrov soberly points out some blatant holes in the Dutch “investigation”. Though almost the whole world blamed a Russian ground-based BUK air defence system for bringing down the plane, no-one has ever contacted the fact-ory producing the system to link the identity of the BUK system in question with the phenomena of the wreckage of the downed airliner. Why has the US never published satellite photos that could allegedly prove Russia’s guilt? 1
The MH-17 incident is one of the most deadly fruits of an earlier event which triggered a whole series of wars in this millennium, from Afghanistan to the war in the Ukraine, namely, the attacks of 9/11 2001. The fuel that produced the black fruits of this event was the untrue myths spread about it. Everyone could easily see the anti-truth character of these myths. It suffices to follow the analysis of the collapse of WTC Building 7. Such an analysis has been carried out and published for many years by Richard Gage, the founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which has by now more than 2200 members. 14 years after this matrix event of all subsequent events of a similar “terrorist” character (London 2005, Boston 2013, Paris 2015), we decided to look at the 9/11 investigation results of independent truth-seekers like Gage and many others.
Untruth or lies are not abstract things. From a spiritual point of view, they create a certain sort of elemental beings which blur our vision of facts und inspire new lies.2 Thus, uncovering lies and false myths is an act of purifying the polluted spiritual air which we all breathe. Everyone benefits from the selfless work of genuine truth-seekers.
How “simple” things were in earlier times, like the Middle Ages! Usually a conspiracy was a conspiracy, the murderers known, their motives evident. A good example of this is the murder of archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on the evening of 29 December 1170. John of Salisbury, an eyewitness of this event and a friend of Becket, collected Becket’s blood in a vial. Later he brought it to Chartres, where it produced a healing miracle and inspired the Becket window. No-one doubted at that time the existence of a spiritual aspect of all things and events. The dead were living helpers and inspirers from the beyond.3 This we can learn from such a period of history. It was a period of spiritual brightness, whereas we live in a world-historical moment of great spiritual darkness. Only if we acknowledge this fact and try to pierce through the darkness to the hidden spiritual light, can we start to become true contemporaries – contemporaries of the living spirit and its manifold beings.

 

Thomas Meyer

_________________________

1   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE1cLkOvkbw

2   R. Steiner, June 9 1908 (GA 198)

3   See the report on the first performance of “The Blood of Thomas Becket”, p 3

Will there be a rise of Europe?

Every summer at the end of July and the first half of August in the northern hemisphere the so-called Perseids are visible in the constellation of Perseus. On founding our publishing house we named it after this constellation. In doing so, we had in mind the Greek myth which tells of how Perseus, with the wings of Mercury on his shoes, and by using his shield as a mirror, cuts off the head of Medusa with his sword. Medusa embodies the decadent powers of ancient clairvoyance. They had to be killed in the mirror of reflective reason, if human progress was to develop further.
Only after the company was founded did we become aware that the astronomer and Anthroposopher Elisabeth Vreede (1879-1943) had once spoken of Perseus-Michael in relation to the constellation of Perseus. She writes: “It must already seem meaningful to us that in summer, when it is already moving towards autumn, those shooting stars which bring the cosmic iron that defeats the sulphurous dragons of summer appear from that direction in the cosmos where Perseus stands, which according to ancient tradition is to be regarded as the constellation of Michael.”1
In Perseus then we have a Michaelic fighter, who has to push back old forces that have become anti-rational. His sword is the sword of Michael.
Today’s Michael-Impulse calls for an energetic “spiritualisation of the intellect”, including a new awareness of the reality of the “dead” and of karmic and reincarnational facts. Michael sounds a call to a spiritual struggle which is waged in each individual soul. It is the struggle within the human soul between reason, striving for real spirituality, and the irrational forces of Medusa.

The Birth of Europe
Perseus was a son of Zeus (Jupiter). Another kindred being of likewise divine origin and with an intimate link to Zeus was “Europa”. Her Phenician father Agenor was a son of Poseidon and of Libya, an Egyptian daughter of a king. Europa had as a young maiden a dream in which two women appeared, one of an Asiatic kind with a familiar appearance, the other quite foreign-looking. It is known that Zeus, fulfilling this prophecy, approached Europa disguised as  a lovely bull, taking flight with the naïve maiden across the Sea to Crete where she bore him two sons. One of them was Minos, the inspirer of the Minoan culture, the other one Rhadamanthus ruling with his brother over the kingdom of the dead. Then Zeus left her in desolation and solitude. Thereupon she was approached by Aphrodite, telling her: “Love has brought you here, therefore be consoled. It was Zeus, as a bull, who stole you away, and to Zeus you have given your hand in marriage. Now you are the earthly wife of a invincible God. Your name will be immortal, for the foreign part of the world which has given you shelter, will be called for all time Europa.”
Thus the future mission of Europa was inspired and guided by a supersensible being – Zeus. The great values of art, philosophy and democracy were her primary gifts.

Europe has lost its spirit
Today we are at the dead end of this process. No supersensible being nourishes Europe anymore. Art, philosophy and “democracy” are mostly dead or dying. A Golden Calf of pure materialism has replaced the the divine bull (Taurus) of Europe’s origin. Spirit has become spiritless “gold”. It is no accident that it is precisely Greece, once the origin of the best values of Europe, that is now bitterly reflecting the process of decadence in the whole of Europe. The European Union is a purely materialistic concept that has not worked and can never work, and Greece has been taken prisoner in the labyrinths of this disunited union. Not because of the other Europeans’ love for Greece, but out of financial and geopolitical interests. The highest value, the highest criterion for “reality” is money and power. It is no accident that the most important European institutions (IMF, ECB and EC) are all based on these two powers. The high priests of the European Golden Calf are the “Gods” of Goldman Sachs. They tricked Greece into the EU, and they might have to face a later lawsuit against their calculated bad “advice”. They are not likely to lose, for one of the former Goldman Sachs high priests (Mario Draghi) is the president of the ECB.

Destructive militarism as a result of materialism
A by-product of European materialism is destructive intellectualism and a blind alliance with the Western high priests of unlimited financial greed. Sadly, in Europe today, it is mainly Germany that is host to most of these decadent features. A shocking example of this, which is like the other side of the “Greek coin”, is the following: A US military base near Mannheim which was to have been closed in the course of 2015 has received permission to remain open for US military operations. On 23 June the new American minister of defence, Aston Carter, announced the transport of heavy military equipment to Central and Eastern Europe, to counter alleged “Russian aggression”. One of the results: in June 250 Bradley battle tanks and other military equipment were shipped to Bremerhaven, and from there by train to the military base near Mannheim. A 9 minute video filmed the continuous rolling in on a train into the Mannheim base. It is a sinister funeral cortege accompanied by the famous Funeral March by Chopin.
The EU is a “Titanic” project, aiming at the utter destruction of Europe and involving it in the next Great War. The iceberg is Europe’s stubborn materialism. The European Union is but a prelude to “some effective World Super-Government” (Churchill, 14 May 1947, London), doomed to sink as old Atlantis once sank. But Europe is helpless as it has lost its spirit and has mocked most of those who wanted to introduce that spirit in a new form.
One of these individualities was Helmuth von Moltke who is like the personified conscience for the spiritual origin of Europe as well as for the spiritual future of this continent – if there is to be a future for it at all.

Europe needs to discover its path to the new spirit
Behind all the noisy inner and outer warfare, Europe is crying for a new spiritual realism, in the knowledge that there is no “reality” whatsoever without a spiritual component in it, that the so-called “dead” belong to life as a whole as well as the so-called “living” and that even behind money there is a concrete spiritual component. This new mission of Europa is present among the living as among the “dead” souls. After his death in June 1916, there resounds mightily from the soul of von Moltke: “Europe must come to its senses and find its way to the spirit.”
That is the present and future mission of this continent, of Europa, who was born out of an old spirituality that has been totally lost. If Europe finds the way to the spirit, other words of the Moltke soul will come true: “Europe’s materialistic era will be like an interlude when the new Spirit Sun begins to shine for humanity.”

Thomas Meyer

_________________________
1    E. Vreede, Anthroposophy and Astronomy, Ch. 25, “Shooting Stars and Meteors”

The powerful few and a speech by Vladimir Putin

We are heading into a summer that holds much potential for conflict.
From 10th to 14th June a Bilderberg Conference was held in Telfs, Austria. The topics on the agenda, amongst others, were: artificial intelligence, Greece, Russia, NATO. The participants included US strategists such as the Neo-Con Robert Zoellick, formerly of Goldman Sachs, and Jens Stoltenberg, who heads the US-controlled NATO war alliance. That Russia was to be discussed in the absence of Russians shows that the western power groups à la Bilderberg rigidly hold to NATO’s original intention “…to keep Russia out”.
As to the function of such exclusive meetings which are inaccessible for the Press and the general public we remind our readers of a fundamental task pointed out by Rudolf Steiner already in 1917: that there exists “a spiritual aristocracy parallel to that democratic stream which was at work in the French Revolution (…) Usually people are (…) hypnotized into looking at only one of the streams, while they fail to see the other flowing beside it during the same period in history (…) To see clearly as a human being today, to be open to the world and to understand the world, it is necessary not to be dazzled (…) by empty phrases about democratic progress and so on; it is necessary also to point to that other stream which asserted itself with the intent of gaining power for the few by means that lie hidden within the womb of the lodge.”* Only the beginnings of a realisation of a threefold social structure would take some of the abused power of the “aristocratic” few away and hand it over to the representatives of the people.
In the run-up to the Bilderberg Conference President Putin gave a very noteworthy interview to Luciano Fontana, the new chief editor of Corriere della Sera, on 6 June in Moscow. It is characterized by a discriminating, self-confident and relaxed attitude on Putin’s part and is evidence of the Russian President’s sincere search for peace. Some of Putin’s key statements in it were: “I believe that this crisis was created deliberately…the [media] coverage of [the] process has been absolutely unacceptable…. we are simply forced to respond to what is happening. … The point is that relationships should be built on a long-term basis, not in the atmosphere of confrontation, but in the spirit of cooperation. (…) our policy in this respect is not global, offensive or aggressive. (…) US military spending is higher than that of all countries in the world taken together. (…) I invite you to publish the world map in your newspaper and to mark all the US military bases on it. You will see the difference. (…) I think that only an insane person and only in a dream can imagine that Russia would suddenly attack NATO (…)The aggregate military spending of NATO countries is 10 times – note 10 times – higher than that of the Russian Federation. Russia has virtually no bases abroad.
Finally, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. (…) I have proposed to our American partners not to withdraw from the treaty unilaterally, but to create an ABM system together, the three of us: Russia, the United States and Europe. But this proposal was declined (…) For example, the Americans do not want Russia’s rapprochement with Europe.”
Only extracts of the interview were quoted in the Press.**
May the meteor showers from the constellation of Perseus-Michael*** at the end of July and in August encourage clear thinking about the world situation which is currently pervaded by the most unhealthy Medusa forces. May they enable us to differentiate ever more clearly between appearance and reality in the current world crisis.

Thomas Meyer

_________________________
*    (Jan. 8 1917, The Karma of Untruthfulness, Vol 2, London 2005.)
**    Full transcript in English :http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/49629
***    More about this in the August Editorial

Elemental Catastrophes and their Background

Almost daily, earthquakes or volcanic eruptions on various scales are occurring somewhere or other on our planet. Since the end of February Chile has suffered repeated earthquakes. Since mid-April Nepal has been hit twice with particular violence. Alongside the usual, more or less materialistic explanations following the first earthquake in Nepal, on 25 April, to which many thousands fell victim, one unusual voice was heard. In the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on 27 April the Indian writer Anita Nair wrote: “By ravaging the planet in an egoistic fashion and by showing an attitude of complete indifference to the environment, we have contributed to all these catastrophes.” And also: “It seems to me that the people of Nepal are paying the price of human greed.” A great thought about the joint responsibility of all human beings for what goes on on our planet! Such a thought is not only rational, it carries a force – through spiritual scientific insights into the interior of the earth and its relationship to what goes on in the human soul – which can remedy not only the material damage, as far as is possible – but which can also teach us to pay close attention to the soul-spiritual causes of such catastrophes. “The Earth does not belong to us”, Nair writes at the end of her article, “and we cannot simply do what we want with it.” (…) It is a matter of a collective guilt (…) We must find the remedy for this guilt.” A hundred years have already passed, but hardly any use has been made of the remedy. Its names are “inner development” and “spiritual knowledge of the relationship between mankind and the Earth”.

Other kinds of elemental catastrophe occurred 80 years ago, as was mentioned in last month’s editorial:  on 14 April 1935, on the day of the exclusions from the G.A.S., almost the whole of the USA was hit by a vast dust storm, later referred to as “Black Sunday”, and Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz, who had sought to stop the exclusions in Dornach, experienced a “spiritual storm” in his sleep that night.  The other noteworthy event around that time was the unexpected death of D.N. Dunlop on 30 May 1935, and that same day, 50,000 people fell victim to an earthquake in Pakistan. (The 80th anniversary of Dunlop’s death was commemorated at an event in London at the end of May).
The words which Rudolf Steiner put into the mouth of the Spirit of the Elements, a character in the fourth scene of his first Mystery drama The Portal of Initiation, in regard to people’s materialistic attitudes, apply both to the more natural and to the spiritual elemental catastrophes:
“…the consequences of your labour / unchain the powers of storm / in the ultimate depths of the world”. Only when more and more people take the concrete unity of the world and the human soul really seriously, can the two kinds of catastrophe gradually be avoided.
Material aid is of course first required in physical catastrophes; those of the second kind call for reflection on causal spiritual intentions. But both kinds of catastrophe will continue until we learn to seek out their deeper soul-spiritual causes.

Thomas Meyer

April 14, 1935 – the twofold Black Sunday

April 14, 1935 was a Sunday . . . though no ordinary Sunday.  It was what was later called Black Sunday*. On that very day there was a dust storm in the United States, as has never raged through the States before or since.
Many people believed that the end of the world had come! The damage was devastating.
Woodie Guthrie, inspirer of a generation of folk singers, sang in the Dust Storm Disaster** as an eye witness of the event: “On the 14th day of April of 1935, there struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky (…) And through our mighty nation it left a dreadful track (…) It fell across our city like a curtain of black rolled down, We thought it was our judgment, we thought it was our doom.”
On that very same Sunday a spiritual dust storm raged through Europe and left behind no less serious devastation; its centre was in Dornach, Switzerland. On this day leading members of the anthroposophical society founded by Steiner in 1923, as well as the entire British and Dutch national societies, were expelled from the General Anthroposophical Society***. Steiner had hoped to strengthen the awareness of the eternal individuality in the hearts of his pupils, shining like spiritual suns amidst the diverse personalities and their conflicts.
Ita Wegman, Elisabeth Vreede, Eugen Kolisko, Willem Zeylmans und D.N. Dunlop – to name but a few – became the victims of a spiritual storm of fanaticism and petty-minded self-righteousness within the society. Personal impulses within the members triumphed over those of true individuality. The Over-Soul, as Emerson called the sun of individuality, was darkened by this storm. As Vreede, Wegman and Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz predicted, the events of this day gave enhanced strength to Hitlerism. The universal substance of anthroposophy was weakened. Since that day there have been anthroposophists outside the Anthroposophical Society. It is high time that this fact and its implications were truly recognized.

On May 30, 2015 there will be a commemoration in London of the 80th death day of D.N. Dunlop, one of the principal victims of the spiritual Black Sunday. Rudolf Steiner saw in Dunlop the ideal leader for the British Anthroposophical Society. Dunlop’s premature death, which occurred just six weeks after Black Sunday, stopped the unfolding of his fruitful and selfless endeavours for the blossoming of anthroposophy in the West. When Dunlop died on Ascension Day 1935, there was an earthquake in Quetta, Pakistan.
Discussing the egotistical aspects of personality, Dunlop, at age 28, wrote an article in the last volume of the Irish Theosophist entitled “By-paths of Occult Progress”. In it we find: “To paralyze this personality, to make it an obedient slave and to learn to take away our attention from it and listen to the voice of the Oversoul, – this is the science of true, practical occultism.”****
Like few others, Dunlop practised this very science in his many successful activities within the theosophical, later anthroposophical, movement as well as in the outer world.
This issue of The Present Age is dedicated to D.N. Dunlop in the hope that his supra-personal attitude and achievements may fructify and inspire anthroposophical work worldwide. May the devastating effects of Black Sunday be thoroughly transformed into the dawn of a coming White Sunday.

Thomas Meyer

_________________________
*    It was Richard Ramsbotham who first drew my attention to Black Sunday.
**    http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Dust_Storm_Disaster.htm
***    The expel took place exactly 23 yrs after the Sinking of the Titanic (see April Calendar, TPAVol.1/No.1)
****    This article will be reprinted in the June issue of The Present Age.

Spiritual Knowledge as a Constructive Power

Charles Kovacs, in his important lecture about Anthroposophy, points out that all knowledge of the spirit rests within each human soul, like the fish in the depths of the sea. But he also shows that if it is not raised into the light of thinking consciousness, this knowledge becomes a destructive power. There is as much destructive power in the world as there is suppression of the spirit.

Instead of concrete spiritual insight almost everywhere we find phraseology, Nominalism and theoretising intellectualism. But it is good that here and there one sees individuals who at least do not cover up the phenomena of destruction with mere phrases, but call them by their names. To give just two examples: the whistleblower Edgar Snowden, who enabled us to glimpse something of the extent of the surveillance State in which we have been living for a long time now, even if – until now – he has done nothing to illuminate the prime catastrophe of the 21st century, the 9/11 attacks; there has also been George Friedman, originally from Hungary, founder of the think tank STRATFOR, who, in a lecture on 4 February 2015, made clear that the main concern of US foreign policy over the last 100 years has been to prevent a collaboration between Russia and Germany, for only such a collaboration, he said, could threaten the power of the USA. Friedman also points out that with the US-organised “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine, the Russian government understood that the West’s aim was to shatter the new threat from the power block of the Russian Federation by dividing Ukraine. We recommend our readers to watch Friedman’s lecture at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaL5wCY99l8

In anthroposophical waters too we see an intellectualism devoid of spirit or solid foundation floating in many places, like an oil slick shimmering with many colours which is threatening the life of the world of fish. In the witches’ kitchen of Facebook, in which those who do not wish to be seen as “yesterday’s men or women” feel they have to spend time every day, the particularly shimmering initiator of the Critical Edition of Steiner’s works (known as the SKA in German) from Salt Lake City reveals a shocking face, very different from the one seen between the covers of his academic books. Last autumn a ‘Facebooker’ wanted to know whether it was correct, as had appeared in Der Europäer, that Rudolf Steiner had been baptised post-mortem by the Mormons [it took place on 22 January 19901], and found the notion of such baptisms “bizarre”. The SKA editor replied to this on 17 October 2014: ”Say, Roswitha Hoppe, isn’t it just as “bizarre”, to sit down and read Steiner books out loud – and to expect that the dead up there are now really happy because they are at last receiving the blessings of spiritual science? How much more bizarre is a vicarious baptism than a vicarious reading of Steiner?”2

Another day he put down another Facebooker with a word that begins with ‘a’ and ends with ‘hole’. So much for the “blessings” from the new scholar of Steiner’s works. There is a straight line from cynical and frivolous use of thoughts and facts to social barbarism.1
In an enduringly relevant post-mortem communication from Helmuth von Moltke he said: “People on Earth must learn from events, that thoughts are facts” 3, and a year later: “In times like the present wrong thoughts are the actual forces of destruction”.4

Through serious thinking to spiritual knowledge – that is the constructive path. Only on that path can Anthroposophy be found.

Thomas Meyer

 

1  With reference to the editorial of Der Europäer, Vol. 18. No. 2/3, 2013/2014 that will be brought to our readers in May
2  Source: Facebook Group ‘Virtuelle Anthroposophische Gesellschaft‘ Sebastian Gronbach, posted by Christian Clement; 17 October 2014, 16.00 pm
3  24 May 1918, see Helmuth von Moltke – Light for the New Millennium, p. 207, Vol. 2, Basel 2nd ed. 2006
4  1 May 1919, see Helmuth von Moltke – Light for the New Millennium, p. 242, Vol. 2, Basel 2nd ed. 2006

What is “The Present Age”?

Dear readers and future subscribers,

This is the “free trial” issue of the English-version of the German-language monthly journal Der Europäer, now running into its 19th year. We decided to call this English edition of our magazine “The Present Age – an international monthly journal for the advancement of Spiritual science”.

W.J. Stein (1891–1957), inspired by D.N. Dunlop (1868–1935), had already published a journal with this title in the 1930s (1936–39). By choosing this title we aspire to connect with and continue the great, unfinished impulses of Stein, Dunlop, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz (1869–1945) and many others. These individuals were pio- neers in realizing the impulses of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) for the modern world, each in his own way. Stein wrote the first thesis ever written on anthroposophy; Polzer-Hoditz was instrumental in publicly launching the idea of the threefold society; Dunlop laid the groundwork for a true world economy, which is not yet realized.

The Present Age will try to discuss all major events and developments of our time from a spiritual scientific viewpoint. It is edited on a completely independ- ent basis and has no financial or spiritual obligation to any society or trust.

The Present Age will cover, as does Der Europäer, “Symptomatic events in the fields of economy, culture and spiritual life” and is based on the spiritual research published by Steiner. Its aim is to reach readers in English-speaking countries, as well as English-speaking readers in other parts of the world.

We will, without being dogmatic, not be shy in speaking about spiritual science or “Anthroposophy”, trying to show its unique potential in understanding and tackling all major questions of life. The first issue, which will come out in April, will bring an as yet unpublished article about “The Meeting with the Being of An- throposophy” by Charles Kovacs (1907-2001), an outstanding teacher and painter who worked and lived in Edinburgh.

The editors for the journal are Thomas Meyer (Basel, CH, editor-in-chief), Terry Boardman (Stourbridge, UK, also responsible for translations), Andreas Bracher (Cambridge, USA, co-editor) and Orsolya Györffy (Basel, also responsible for coordi- nation and Admin). Graphics and layout are done by Nils Gunzenhäuser (Bruchsal).

This Zero issue is composed of articles and article excerpts that have been published earlier in Der Europäer or are otherwise from would-be collaborators of The Present Age. They convey an impression of the kind of writing that The Present Age will contain.

To apply the words of D.N. Dunlop for one of his own publications to The Present Age: “It will interest you more than you dream… The price of it is only (… ) £ 10, which is not much if you consider the research necessary for compiling such treasure.”

We value your interest in our publication very much and we would greatly appreciate it if you would pass this “free trial” issue on to friends.

With all best wishes,
Terry Boardman, Andreas Bracher, Orsolya Györffy, Thomas Meyer

See the editors’ introduction on page 11.