Post by Wayne Hall on Mar 12, 2011 7:57:33 GMT -5
Would the European federalist movement be able to mount convincing counter-arguments to these positions of Terry Boardman? You can see my answer (such as it is) from at the end from the perspective of the Capodistrias-Spinelli-Europe initiative.
Terry Boardman writes:
1.
As I see it, there is far more to the developing Middle East situation than what the BBC for example and the rest of the MSM media here in Britain would have us believe. Just as in 1989, they are telling us that "no-one could have foreseen the events that have unfolded so dramatically" and that "the West has been caught unawares" by these events etc. All of a sudden, they were talking about men such as Mubarak and the ex-President of Tunisia as awful dictators and tyrants who suppressed their own people for decades, talking about them as if they were Saddam Hussein. Yet our governments had supported these 'tyrants' for 30+ years, and the British mainstream media were largely silent about them all that time. They were installed during the Cold War as part of the bulwarks against communism and the USSR, and now, it seems to me, that certain forces in the West are moving to dismantle this last remnant of the Cold War (except, of course, for N.Korea, and arguably, China itself). I have seen wikileaks documents (via the Norwegian Aftenposten site) that detail how the US government, for example, was working for the overthrow of Mubarak since at least 2003, and using all kinds of "civil society NGO" covers and the like (as in the other 'colour revolutions') for the purpose. The British got up to similar tricks under Lord Palmerston in the 19th century when they sought to stimulate or back so-called 'populist' revolts against monarchic or aristocratic regimes in order to facilitate British economic ties and trade with those countries. This kind of manoeuvre is astutely shown, for example, in the old movie "Burn", starring Marlon Brando, made in the mid-60s. Rudolf Steiner pointed out how the Russians were doing the same thing in the Balkans from the 1870s to 1914, using so-called 'Slav Welfare Committees' (the NGOs of those days) to run guns and other weapons to Balkan pro-Russian forces.
What concerns me is whether we are going to see some kind of repetition of the events of 1917, the year of the *two* revolutions. After all, as in Russia in spring 1917, it is not as if the new 'governments' in the Middle East have any new ideas about how to cope with their socio-economic and demographic problems. The West made sure that Trotsky - the man who organised the Civil war victory for the Bolsheviks - got to Russia in 1917 from America and then made equally sure that the Whites received insufficient support and were blocked at every turn so that the Reds would win. And why? because the capitalist-communist dialectical world divide was intended to take place. C.G.Harrison was describing in London already back in 1893 how precisely such a 'managed' socialist revolution would emerge in Russia as "an experiment", managed from the West, that is. The totalitarian experiment lasted for exactly 72 years and was then terminated in accordance with the termination programme devised by "the 1980s Project" of the Trilateral Commission and the CFR (the CFR and RIIA having themselves emerged as twins c.1919-1921 from the very same western circles that devised the experiment).
Back in 1992, certain elite circles in the West (e.g. as described in The Economist in December that year) were already pointing to this year 2011, as the year in which the pan-Islamic world would undergo a revolution which would be the harbinger of even more dramatic events -namely a pan-Islamic 'Caliphate' would emerge that would eventually ally with China and make war on.....Russia and seize all its territories east of the Urals! Russia could then be drawn into the embrace of the transatlantic entity that would be created between North America and the then emerging EU. Recall also that 100 years ago, in late 1911, not only did the Chinese revolution begin that overthrew the Ching Empire, but also in that year Italy declared war on Turkey to seize the Turkish North African possessions in Tripolitania (Libya). This Italian war weakened the Ottoman Empire to the point where the small Balkan states (Serbia et al) saw their chance and formed a league to declare war on Turkey themselves in 1912. Two Balkan wars followed in 1912-1914, and these were the curtain-raiser for what then took place in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 which was followed just over a month later by World War One.
In the 1990s Samuel Huntington and his friend Brian Beedham of The Economist envisioned the 21st century world divided according to culture and religion rather than economic theory and politics as in the 20th century. They divided the world into cultural blocs. In the very week that George Bush 1 declared the New World Order in the US Congress on 9.11.1991, The Economist came out with this new world imagination or mental map for the 21st century. The 16 page special feature (complete with a new transatlantic flag that showed Europe inside the USA) was innocuously titled "Defence and the Democracies". The cover of that issue featured an Arab prince with his falcon and the headline "End of the Old Order". It identified the Islamic and the Confucian (i.e. Chinese) cultural regions as the two main remaining challenges to western 'democracy' (i.e. elite-dominated consumerist materialist 'culture'). Starting with Saddam Hussein, the Islamic world was promptly taken on. 3 x 7 or 21 years later, the final phase of the remodelling of the Islamic world is upon us, and out of it will either come consumerist pseudo-democracies that toe the western line and do as they're told, such as Turkey, or else a new global dialectic, a new enemy, a Green force to replace the Red, indeed to replace the non-existent illusion that was Osama bin Laden and his so-called 'global threat' of Al-Qaeda. The pseudo-democracies will most likely emerge in the short term, if at all, but in the longer-term, the pan-Islamic Sunni movement is all too possible; keep October 1917 in mind.
Think also of the situation in the Middle East some 700 years before, c.1250. Who was there? The European Crusaders, the Muslim forces and......the Mongols. For the first time in recorded history - all three Eurasian cultures clashed. The Muslims were squashed between the invading Crusaders and Mongols, but somehow managed to survive. Now think of Russia some 7 centuries years later, in 1917-1920. Who was there, after the exit of the defeated Germans? The Russians, fighting each other, Reds vs Whites (Sunnis and Shi'ites anyone?), the western Allies, the leading Freemasonic nations (Brits, Americans and French, oh and the Czech Legion on the Trans-Siberian Railway playing a not insignificant role) and....the Japanese, in Siberia.
Russia is the bridge of Eurasia and Israel is the centre of the world. Brzezinski understands all this very well. It is the goal of the forces opposed to healthy human development (though paradoxically they provide us with resistance for the development of our own freedom) that the middle term is always attacked by the poles on either side of it - the attempt to attack the heart and squash it between the head and the guts. The elite forces of the west will seek to use the East (Islam and China) as a hammer and themselves as an anvil, and between them crush the Russians and remake both Russia and Israel in their own image.
In 1992 The Economist forecast that by 2050 'the West' (aka 'the international community' aka Anglo-America, or the English-speaking world + its satellites) would have seen off the eastern challenge of the Muslim-Chinese alliance (rah rah Crusaders!!) but that in the meantime, unfortunately, Russia would have been radically truncated. "Truth" magazine of London in 1890, edited by a man with close ties to the highest echelons of the British elite, also forecast a coming European war, the result of which would be that all the monarchies of Europe - except that of Britain (well, well!) would be abolished and republics created everywhere, and that Russia would become.....a desert.
2.
I don't recognise the legitimacy of the "sovereignty" or even relevance of the EU at all. For me, the EU is a complete delusion. It's not an illusion, because in some formal way it does actually exist, and people do things in its name. But it's a delusion in the same sense that the Third Reich and the USSR and the Napoleonic Empire were delusions. Phantasmagorical crimes, we might say, spiritually and ethically 'illegitimate' acts against the evolution of humanity. Historical study of the origins of the EU reveals it to be a project designed not with the interests of the peoples of Europe in mind and certainly not by them. The EU is a train we have unfortunately been sheep herded onto by our sheep herders, the would-be oligarchs of the West, when we were mostly asleep, a train whose communication cord we need to pull so as to stop the train before it hits the buffers down the track in one almighty train wreck, and having stopped the train, we can then all get off. It is a project out of sync with the needs of the times and is fundamentally anti-democratic. Nor is there any point in trying to make it democratic by the creation of farcical organisations such as the European Parliament for non-existent citizenries and by technological pseudo-democratic fixes such as computer-based direct democracy, online petitions etc.
So, if I were to "make a proposal", it would be to hold conferences and events to the end of convincing the peoples of Europe of the above situation. The way forward for Europe is neither back to the old nation states of the 1920s nor forward to the steadily emerging United States of Federal Europe that is due to be combined in some kind of transatlantic Tweedledee-Tweedledumbness with a North American Union within the next 20 years or so that can take on the challenge of China. That is what they have lined up for us.
The way forward for Europe can only be *healthily* based on an acceptance of what Europe is in its essence, which is a threefold spiritual, political and economic culture that during the course of its history has intuitively in its best cultural manifestations sensed and indicated the balance needed for the human condition. It's not an accident that most European flags are tricolours, after all. Europe must be dominated neither by ONE pattern (the Roman Imperial/Napoleonic Imperial/EU standardised model) nor by tribal, mutally antagonistic nation states; neither ONE political ego nor nearly 30 viciously competing egos. It is a lie when representatives of the EU say they are not seeking to create a one-pattern Europe; those who say that are the ones who are either devious liars or else who are not in on the ultimate plan of the project. The European train is heading for a totalitarian destination and always has been; it is a monolithic entity directed by, and in the best interests of, self-appointed oligarchs and 'aristocrats' (in the Platonic sense: the so-called 'best' people). Think of the abomination of the EU flag - the ONE circle of identical stars and the ONE colour of blue freemasonry. "One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them..." Think of the masonry on all the Euro notes. These symbols show where we are heading and who's stoking the engine's boiler. The peoples of Europe ought not to cooperate with this mechanical beast; they need to wake up to its real nature and the delusions of the so-called founders of this 'Europe' (Coudenhove-Kalergi, Salter, Monnet, Spinelli, Schumann, Spaak and the rest).
When I wrote that the third mind will be "the one to go with" I meant, among other things, this third, Middle Way - an associative confederation of Europe - one that would promote free and open intercourse in the spiritual and cultural spheres of the European lands but which would strictly respect the political traditions, laws and rights of the many European peoples; a Europe which would maintain a balance between freedom for the individual to operate economically across the Continent while denying to transnational corporations and other such economic entities the right to impose their will on local and national conditions. Such a Europe would have no common military, police force, judiciary, Supreme Court, Parliament, Commission, Presidency, single currency, Central Bank or any such oligarchically imposed paraphernalia - all of which in any case are based on the models of the era of the nation state.
In my view, the peoples of Europe will have to come to see how the aims and methods of these Eurocratic elitists (Monnet et al) were associated with, and ultimately steered by, those of the Anglo-American elite reaching back *at least* a century. Above all, they need to see through to the basis upon which the worldview of that elite and of the Roman Church stands, namely, rank materialism. They need to understand how this materialism, this intellectual cancer poisoned first the spiritual and religious culture of Europe in the Middle Ages and then, from the 17th century onwards, spread through the whole intellectual and scientific culture, even the arts. Then and only then will they understand what the debates about nuclear power, chemtrails, geoengineering, the Co2 global warming scam, "the war on terror", HAARP etc are really about. All these things are only symptoms of the underlying sickness - our fear of death and our ignorance of what comes after death and before this life. Just as, if our sleep life is unhealthy then our waking life will also be unhealthy, so, if we are to take a holistic lifestyle seriously, we shall need to integrate an understanding of the existence before and after this physical existence into our understanding of human existence as a whole. Even in the decadent European Middle Ages, there was still a remnant of this holistic worldview, but since the 17th century it has disappeared, swept aside by rampant materialism and philosophical meaninglessness. Many Greens and New Agers profess to be committed to holism, organic this and holistic that, but like the Protestants of the Reformation era, they often simply substitute another form of materialism for (the materialism of) the worldview they say they are opposing. The dogmatism of the Protestants ended up being almost as bad as the dogmatism of the Catholics, and we are already beginning to see how the dogmatism of the Greens can be as strident as that of the Blues (egocentric capitalists) and the Reds (Leftists of various denominations): "To save Gaia, Mother Earth, a radical cull of the human population will be necessary!!!" and other such delusions.
I sense that on the whole, this reply may not satisy you, but I thought it best to try and clarify my views a bit, especially on the European issue. I am someone who cares deeply about the past, present and future of Europe. I know of the terrible errors committed in the years after the First World War by those elitists ignorant of Europe's past and present. By that I refer as much to the delusional idealists such as Woodrow Wilson and Lord Robert Cecil as to the unreconstructed chauvinists like Clemenceau and Poincare. I see similar errors being committed today by similar delusional 'idealists' seeking to put into operation a long-running, long-term plan. On the other hand, I know of one man especially, Rudolf Steiner, who saw through to the reality of what Europe needed in that desperate crisis of 1918-1919, and put forward profound and incisive ideas for addressing it. He was completely ignored, and as a result, Europe got what it got in 1929-45 and since.
3.
I returned yesterday. I was giving a lecture on likely future directions in American foreign policy, with special reference to Central Asia and the works of Huntington, Brzezinski and certain specific articles in the The Economist (London) from the early 1990s, one of which focused precisely on the year 2011 as the year when huge changes would begin across Eurasia. The end consequence of this would be that China and the Islamic world (via a new Caliphate, the goal of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, incidentally) would be used to emasculate Russia (the Eurasian 'bridge' state), which could then be drawn into the western camp. A new global bipolarity would then result, as in the Cold War, with the emerging Transatlantic Union (EU + North America) confronting the powers of the East (Oceania vs Islamistan & Eastasia, if you will - the western goal being to keep both India and Japan on the western side). This is the nightmarish scenario envisaged for decades now by forces in both East and West, by radical Islamists and resentful Chinese nationalists in the East, and by lunatic crypto-fascist elitists in the West.
IMHO, only the understanding and diffusion of the social threefolding approach will be able to resist this new destructive binary, which threatens to blight this new century as surely as fascism and communism did the last one.
This is another reason why I am so opposed to the unitarian direction in which the EU is heading under the influence of *western* philosophical, political and economic notions. Geographically, religiously, and politically Europe has had a long threefold tradition, but it has been largely unconscious. Now, it urgently needs to become conscious. What do I mean by "geographically, religiously, and politically"?
Geographically - one only needs to contemplate the shapes and gestures of the European continent, and also compare them with those of the continent of Asia, from Turkey to China.
Religiously - one can think of the broad threefold spectrum of Orthodoxy in the East, Catholicism in the south and centre and Protestantism in the north and west - and of the respective cultural attitudes of these three religious streams.
Politically - the picture of Europe that existed from c.1600-c.1800, when Europe emerged onto the world stage, so to speak, was one in the West, of compact and unitarian, relatively efficient nation states (England, France, Spain, Holland) dominated by centralised political systems and single metropolitan centres of power; in the East of vast, amorphous, polyglot, relatively inefficient empires that had only a loose control of their territories (Turkey, Poland, Russia, Austria): and in the middle, between these two western and eastern forms, a complex and mercurial patchwork of small states of differing constitutions: monarchical, princely, republican, aristocratic-clerical, papal - in Germany and Italy.
Although this political landscape would seem to have disappeared today, since the frontiers are now different from those of 1800, the French and English sense of themselves as unitary (and militarily active) centralised nation states with an aversion to federalism, the German sense of their multiplicity (that Hamburg is not Munich is not Berlin etc) and their consequent inclination to federalism, the ever-enduring Italian split between north and south, and the constant anxieties in eastern Europe about Russia and Turkey, as well as the crypto-religious approach to political life that pervades the Balkans - all of these are factors of Europe's complex historical and cultural make-up. These things are European reality; the Eurocrats' ideals are ideology and abstract illusion, as abstract and illusionary as those which Woodrow Wilson and his adviser Col. E.M.House sought to impose on the Europeans in 1918-19. One needs to work with the grain and evolve it, rather than ignore it and impose something external from on high.
These various cultural 'gestures' continue to govern and influence European life under the surface of the bureaucratic uniform delusions that the EU is attempting to foist upon the continent in the name of 'modernity', 'the need to compete with the BRICs' etc.
Europe needs to become aware of its own threefold nature, understand why so many of its flags are tricolours*, while others are crosses, and what 'liberty, equality and fraternity', that much-abused and ill-understood slogan, actually means in its relation to the human entelechy and to society. Steiner argued that liberty in the cultural sphere, equality in the political/legal sphere and fraternity in the economic sphere were and are real developments that have been gradually emerging over the course of millennia, and not some intellectual ideology dreamed up by him or any other individual mind. History has moved from religious control, to political control and now to economic control, but the three spheres interfere with each other in damaging ways today because this long-range development has not been sufficiently understood. Hence the political sphere seeks to dominate the cultural (government controlling education), or the economic sphere seeks to manipulate the political (economic forces lobbying and manipulating governments), or the cultural sphere tries to dictate to the other two (Vatican, Iranian mullahs, EU judges). In fact, what is needed is a relationship between the three that operates like the three systems of the human body (the nervous, rhythmic, and metabolic systems) i.e. independent of each other and yet interrelational.
If Europeans came to grasp this, they could well come to play a crucial role in helping America and Asia to understand the threefold nature of the world itself, which extends as a spectrum in time and space from the collectivism of the past that is rooted in the Far East, to the selfish egocentrism of the present that is focused especially on the USA. Europe finds itself within this global polarity, while historically containing within itself the polarity and the potential for balance between them. On the global stage, Europe may thus be able, if it can only understand itself rightly, both to make amends for the global errors and crimes of its imperial past, and to prevent a future bipolar conflict between East and West. If it cannot do this, I fear that conflict will be inevitable, for at a profound level the Americans and the Chinese, insofar as they remain within their own cultural mindsets (the PLA vs the New York Times, so to speak) do not and will not understand each other.
We are continually being told that Europe has had its day, has no more dynamism and is bound to be only a museumpiece and entertainment quarter for the rich of America and the BRICs. If this picture gains ground, and the Europeans act accordingly, another world war will be inevitable, for there will be no-one to play the role of intermediary between the forces of expansion and contraction, of Yang and Yin - of collectivist group assertion and personal self-assertion. Europe's real destiny - and also that of Africa alongside it - is to be a bridge between America and Asia, not America's partner in a 'crusade' for 'freedom and democracy' against Asia, but this latter course is the one that has steadily been prepared in the circles and corridors of western power.
P.S. * The unitarianism and uniformity of the EU is well-expressed by the EU flag with its single colour and its circle of identical stars. The flag was a modification of that used by (the Catholic aristocrat) Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-European movement, which had a red cross within a round white or golden disc within the circle of stars. The cross was apparently removed on Turkish insistence in the 1950s as part of the price for Turkish cooperation in the Council of Europe vs the USSR. If the EU flag had a sun disk and a crescent moon inside the circle of stars, it would at least express something of Europe's threefold heritage, but it does not even have those. It has the 12-fold Zodiacal principle but not the 7-fold Sun principle nor the threefold principle of the macrocosm-microcosm. It has only TWO elements - colour and stars - the binary principle. The single blue colour is one with which both Jesuits (Marianism) and Freemasons ('Blue Lodges') can be content - which may well be ultimately why it was adopted - but it in no way expresses the variety of Europe's cultural heritage. In short, the flag is entirely inappropriate as a European symbol. It is a flag for a monolith and is as unsuitable and untruthful for Europe as the Nazi Hakenkreutz was for Germany.
Response from W.H.
On the threefold nature of Europe, there are interesting interactions between the Protestant and the Orthodox element if, for example, one traces the role played by Ioannis Capodistrias, first governor of modern Greece, in framing the constitution of Switzerland, and the role of the Geneva Philhellenes in financing the Greek revolution and building the Greek state. Jean-Gabriel Eynard,in particular, was Capodistrias' main financial backer and later, after Capodistrias' assassination, founder of the National Bank of Greece.
There is an Eynard association in operation in Switzerland.
www.ass-grecosuisse-eynard.ch/
We have a film on Eynard online but unfortunately still haven't got around to doing the English subtitling
We have the film in French also but haven't put it online.
Here is a Swiss press article of recent years on Capodistrias
cse.european-citizens-network.eu/spip.php?article39
Fortunately we have managed to do a little better with Capodistrias. Thanos Veremis film on Capodistrias has English subtitles.
There are interesting similarities between the present age, after the defeat of the Russian Revolution, and the age following the defeat of Napoleon. That was when the world saw an explosion of philHellenism culmiinating in the founding of the Modern Greek state. I do no more than gesture at this in the brief (non-historian's) address I gave at Ghent.
cse.european-citizens-network.eu/spip.php?article43
The island of Aigina, where the Capodistrias-Spinelli-Europe initiative originated, was the first capital of modern Greece:
cse.european-citizens-network.eu/spip.php?article44
I hope this is providing useful input.
As far as the European flag is concerned, it would be a great step forward for the Eurocrats to admit it is a Christian flag, in my view. After that talk about changing it.
Terry Boardman writes:
1.
As I see it, there is far more to the developing Middle East situation than what the BBC for example and the rest of the MSM media here in Britain would have us believe. Just as in 1989, they are telling us that "no-one could have foreseen the events that have unfolded so dramatically" and that "the West has been caught unawares" by these events etc. All of a sudden, they were talking about men such as Mubarak and the ex-President of Tunisia as awful dictators and tyrants who suppressed their own people for decades, talking about them as if they were Saddam Hussein. Yet our governments had supported these 'tyrants' for 30+ years, and the British mainstream media were largely silent about them all that time. They were installed during the Cold War as part of the bulwarks against communism and the USSR, and now, it seems to me, that certain forces in the West are moving to dismantle this last remnant of the Cold War (except, of course, for N.Korea, and arguably, China itself). I have seen wikileaks documents (via the Norwegian Aftenposten site) that detail how the US government, for example, was working for the overthrow of Mubarak since at least 2003, and using all kinds of "civil society NGO" covers and the like (as in the other 'colour revolutions') for the purpose. The British got up to similar tricks under Lord Palmerston in the 19th century when they sought to stimulate or back so-called 'populist' revolts against monarchic or aristocratic regimes in order to facilitate British economic ties and trade with those countries. This kind of manoeuvre is astutely shown, for example, in the old movie "Burn", starring Marlon Brando, made in the mid-60s. Rudolf Steiner pointed out how the Russians were doing the same thing in the Balkans from the 1870s to 1914, using so-called 'Slav Welfare Committees' (the NGOs of those days) to run guns and other weapons to Balkan pro-Russian forces.
What concerns me is whether we are going to see some kind of repetition of the events of 1917, the year of the *two* revolutions. After all, as in Russia in spring 1917, it is not as if the new 'governments' in the Middle East have any new ideas about how to cope with their socio-economic and demographic problems. The West made sure that Trotsky - the man who organised the Civil war victory for the Bolsheviks - got to Russia in 1917 from America and then made equally sure that the Whites received insufficient support and were blocked at every turn so that the Reds would win. And why? because the capitalist-communist dialectical world divide was intended to take place. C.G.Harrison was describing in London already back in 1893 how precisely such a 'managed' socialist revolution would emerge in Russia as "an experiment", managed from the West, that is. The totalitarian experiment lasted for exactly 72 years and was then terminated in accordance with the termination programme devised by "the 1980s Project" of the Trilateral Commission and the CFR (the CFR and RIIA having themselves emerged as twins c.1919-1921 from the very same western circles that devised the experiment).
Back in 1992, certain elite circles in the West (e.g. as described in The Economist in December that year) were already pointing to this year 2011, as the year in which the pan-Islamic world would undergo a revolution which would be the harbinger of even more dramatic events -namely a pan-Islamic 'Caliphate' would emerge that would eventually ally with China and make war on.....Russia and seize all its territories east of the Urals! Russia could then be drawn into the embrace of the transatlantic entity that would be created between North America and the then emerging EU. Recall also that 100 years ago, in late 1911, not only did the Chinese revolution begin that overthrew the Ching Empire, but also in that year Italy declared war on Turkey to seize the Turkish North African possessions in Tripolitania (Libya). This Italian war weakened the Ottoman Empire to the point where the small Balkan states (Serbia et al) saw their chance and formed a league to declare war on Turkey themselves in 1912. Two Balkan wars followed in 1912-1914, and these were the curtain-raiser for what then took place in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 which was followed just over a month later by World War One.
In the 1990s Samuel Huntington and his friend Brian Beedham of The Economist envisioned the 21st century world divided according to culture and religion rather than economic theory and politics as in the 20th century. They divided the world into cultural blocs. In the very week that George Bush 1 declared the New World Order in the US Congress on 9.11.1991, The Economist came out with this new world imagination or mental map for the 21st century. The 16 page special feature (complete with a new transatlantic flag that showed Europe inside the USA) was innocuously titled "Defence and the Democracies". The cover of that issue featured an Arab prince with his falcon and the headline "End of the Old Order". It identified the Islamic and the Confucian (i.e. Chinese) cultural regions as the two main remaining challenges to western 'democracy' (i.e. elite-dominated consumerist materialist 'culture'). Starting with Saddam Hussein, the Islamic world was promptly taken on. 3 x 7 or 21 years later, the final phase of the remodelling of the Islamic world is upon us, and out of it will either come consumerist pseudo-democracies that toe the western line and do as they're told, such as Turkey, or else a new global dialectic, a new enemy, a Green force to replace the Red, indeed to replace the non-existent illusion that was Osama bin Laden and his so-called 'global threat' of Al-Qaeda. The pseudo-democracies will most likely emerge in the short term, if at all, but in the longer-term, the pan-Islamic Sunni movement is all too possible; keep October 1917 in mind.
Think also of the situation in the Middle East some 700 years before, c.1250. Who was there? The European Crusaders, the Muslim forces and......the Mongols. For the first time in recorded history - all three Eurasian cultures clashed. The Muslims were squashed between the invading Crusaders and Mongols, but somehow managed to survive. Now think of Russia some 7 centuries years later, in 1917-1920. Who was there, after the exit of the defeated Germans? The Russians, fighting each other, Reds vs Whites (Sunnis and Shi'ites anyone?), the western Allies, the leading Freemasonic nations (Brits, Americans and French, oh and the Czech Legion on the Trans-Siberian Railway playing a not insignificant role) and....the Japanese, in Siberia.
Russia is the bridge of Eurasia and Israel is the centre of the world. Brzezinski understands all this very well. It is the goal of the forces opposed to healthy human development (though paradoxically they provide us with resistance for the development of our own freedom) that the middle term is always attacked by the poles on either side of it - the attempt to attack the heart and squash it between the head and the guts. The elite forces of the west will seek to use the East (Islam and China) as a hammer and themselves as an anvil, and between them crush the Russians and remake both Russia and Israel in their own image.
In 1992 The Economist forecast that by 2050 'the West' (aka 'the international community' aka Anglo-America, or the English-speaking world + its satellites) would have seen off the eastern challenge of the Muslim-Chinese alliance (rah rah Crusaders!!) but that in the meantime, unfortunately, Russia would have been radically truncated. "Truth" magazine of London in 1890, edited by a man with close ties to the highest echelons of the British elite, also forecast a coming European war, the result of which would be that all the monarchies of Europe - except that of Britain (well, well!) would be abolished and republics created everywhere, and that Russia would become.....a desert.
2.
I don't recognise the legitimacy of the "sovereignty" or even relevance of the EU at all. For me, the EU is a complete delusion. It's not an illusion, because in some formal way it does actually exist, and people do things in its name. But it's a delusion in the same sense that the Third Reich and the USSR and the Napoleonic Empire were delusions. Phantasmagorical crimes, we might say, spiritually and ethically 'illegitimate' acts against the evolution of humanity. Historical study of the origins of the EU reveals it to be a project designed not with the interests of the peoples of Europe in mind and certainly not by them. The EU is a train we have unfortunately been sheep herded onto by our sheep herders, the would-be oligarchs of the West, when we were mostly asleep, a train whose communication cord we need to pull so as to stop the train before it hits the buffers down the track in one almighty train wreck, and having stopped the train, we can then all get off. It is a project out of sync with the needs of the times and is fundamentally anti-democratic. Nor is there any point in trying to make it democratic by the creation of farcical organisations such as the European Parliament for non-existent citizenries and by technological pseudo-democratic fixes such as computer-based direct democracy, online petitions etc.
So, if I were to "make a proposal", it would be to hold conferences and events to the end of convincing the peoples of Europe of the above situation. The way forward for Europe is neither back to the old nation states of the 1920s nor forward to the steadily emerging United States of Federal Europe that is due to be combined in some kind of transatlantic Tweedledee-Tweedledumbness with a North American Union within the next 20 years or so that can take on the challenge of China. That is what they have lined up for us.
The way forward for Europe can only be *healthily* based on an acceptance of what Europe is in its essence, which is a threefold spiritual, political and economic culture that during the course of its history has intuitively in its best cultural manifestations sensed and indicated the balance needed for the human condition. It's not an accident that most European flags are tricolours, after all. Europe must be dominated neither by ONE pattern (the Roman Imperial/Napoleonic Imperial/EU standardised model) nor by tribal, mutally antagonistic nation states; neither ONE political ego nor nearly 30 viciously competing egos. It is a lie when representatives of the EU say they are not seeking to create a one-pattern Europe; those who say that are the ones who are either devious liars or else who are not in on the ultimate plan of the project. The European train is heading for a totalitarian destination and always has been; it is a monolithic entity directed by, and in the best interests of, self-appointed oligarchs and 'aristocrats' (in the Platonic sense: the so-called 'best' people). Think of the abomination of the EU flag - the ONE circle of identical stars and the ONE colour of blue freemasonry. "One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them..." Think of the masonry on all the Euro notes. These symbols show where we are heading and who's stoking the engine's boiler. The peoples of Europe ought not to cooperate with this mechanical beast; they need to wake up to its real nature and the delusions of the so-called founders of this 'Europe' (Coudenhove-Kalergi, Salter, Monnet, Spinelli, Schumann, Spaak and the rest).
When I wrote that the third mind will be "the one to go with" I meant, among other things, this third, Middle Way - an associative confederation of Europe - one that would promote free and open intercourse in the spiritual and cultural spheres of the European lands but which would strictly respect the political traditions, laws and rights of the many European peoples; a Europe which would maintain a balance between freedom for the individual to operate economically across the Continent while denying to transnational corporations and other such economic entities the right to impose their will on local and national conditions. Such a Europe would have no common military, police force, judiciary, Supreme Court, Parliament, Commission, Presidency, single currency, Central Bank or any such oligarchically imposed paraphernalia - all of which in any case are based on the models of the era of the nation state.
In my view, the peoples of Europe will have to come to see how the aims and methods of these Eurocratic elitists (Monnet et al) were associated with, and ultimately steered by, those of the Anglo-American elite reaching back *at least* a century. Above all, they need to see through to the basis upon which the worldview of that elite and of the Roman Church stands, namely, rank materialism. They need to understand how this materialism, this intellectual cancer poisoned first the spiritual and religious culture of Europe in the Middle Ages and then, from the 17th century onwards, spread through the whole intellectual and scientific culture, even the arts. Then and only then will they understand what the debates about nuclear power, chemtrails, geoengineering, the Co2 global warming scam, "the war on terror", HAARP etc are really about. All these things are only symptoms of the underlying sickness - our fear of death and our ignorance of what comes after death and before this life. Just as, if our sleep life is unhealthy then our waking life will also be unhealthy, so, if we are to take a holistic lifestyle seriously, we shall need to integrate an understanding of the existence before and after this physical existence into our understanding of human existence as a whole. Even in the decadent European Middle Ages, there was still a remnant of this holistic worldview, but since the 17th century it has disappeared, swept aside by rampant materialism and philosophical meaninglessness. Many Greens and New Agers profess to be committed to holism, organic this and holistic that, but like the Protestants of the Reformation era, they often simply substitute another form of materialism for (the materialism of) the worldview they say they are opposing. The dogmatism of the Protestants ended up being almost as bad as the dogmatism of the Catholics, and we are already beginning to see how the dogmatism of the Greens can be as strident as that of the Blues (egocentric capitalists) and the Reds (Leftists of various denominations): "To save Gaia, Mother Earth, a radical cull of the human population will be necessary!!!" and other such delusions.
I sense that on the whole, this reply may not satisy you, but I thought it best to try and clarify my views a bit, especially on the European issue. I am someone who cares deeply about the past, present and future of Europe. I know of the terrible errors committed in the years after the First World War by those elitists ignorant of Europe's past and present. By that I refer as much to the delusional idealists such as Woodrow Wilson and Lord Robert Cecil as to the unreconstructed chauvinists like Clemenceau and Poincare. I see similar errors being committed today by similar delusional 'idealists' seeking to put into operation a long-running, long-term plan. On the other hand, I know of one man especially, Rudolf Steiner, who saw through to the reality of what Europe needed in that desperate crisis of 1918-1919, and put forward profound and incisive ideas for addressing it. He was completely ignored, and as a result, Europe got what it got in 1929-45 and since.
3.
I returned yesterday. I was giving a lecture on likely future directions in American foreign policy, with special reference to Central Asia and the works of Huntington, Brzezinski and certain specific articles in the The Economist (London) from the early 1990s, one of which focused precisely on the year 2011 as the year when huge changes would begin across Eurasia. The end consequence of this would be that China and the Islamic world (via a new Caliphate, the goal of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, incidentally) would be used to emasculate Russia (the Eurasian 'bridge' state), which could then be drawn into the western camp. A new global bipolarity would then result, as in the Cold War, with the emerging Transatlantic Union (EU + North America) confronting the powers of the East (Oceania vs Islamistan & Eastasia, if you will - the western goal being to keep both India and Japan on the western side). This is the nightmarish scenario envisaged for decades now by forces in both East and West, by radical Islamists and resentful Chinese nationalists in the East, and by lunatic crypto-fascist elitists in the West.
IMHO, only the understanding and diffusion of the social threefolding approach will be able to resist this new destructive binary, which threatens to blight this new century as surely as fascism and communism did the last one.
This is another reason why I am so opposed to the unitarian direction in which the EU is heading under the influence of *western* philosophical, political and economic notions. Geographically, religiously, and politically Europe has had a long threefold tradition, but it has been largely unconscious. Now, it urgently needs to become conscious. What do I mean by "geographically, religiously, and politically"?
Geographically - one only needs to contemplate the shapes and gestures of the European continent, and also compare them with those of the continent of Asia, from Turkey to China.
Religiously - one can think of the broad threefold spectrum of Orthodoxy in the East, Catholicism in the south and centre and Protestantism in the north and west - and of the respective cultural attitudes of these three religious streams.
Politically - the picture of Europe that existed from c.1600-c.1800, when Europe emerged onto the world stage, so to speak, was one in the West, of compact and unitarian, relatively efficient nation states (England, France, Spain, Holland) dominated by centralised political systems and single metropolitan centres of power; in the East of vast, amorphous, polyglot, relatively inefficient empires that had only a loose control of their territories (Turkey, Poland, Russia, Austria): and in the middle, between these two western and eastern forms, a complex and mercurial patchwork of small states of differing constitutions: monarchical, princely, republican, aristocratic-clerical, papal - in Germany and Italy.
Although this political landscape would seem to have disappeared today, since the frontiers are now different from those of 1800, the French and English sense of themselves as unitary (and militarily active) centralised nation states with an aversion to federalism, the German sense of their multiplicity (that Hamburg is not Munich is not Berlin etc) and their consequent inclination to federalism, the ever-enduring Italian split between north and south, and the constant anxieties in eastern Europe about Russia and Turkey, as well as the crypto-religious approach to political life that pervades the Balkans - all of these are factors of Europe's complex historical and cultural make-up. These things are European reality; the Eurocrats' ideals are ideology and abstract illusion, as abstract and illusionary as those which Woodrow Wilson and his adviser Col. E.M.House sought to impose on the Europeans in 1918-19. One needs to work with the grain and evolve it, rather than ignore it and impose something external from on high.
These various cultural 'gestures' continue to govern and influence European life under the surface of the bureaucratic uniform delusions that the EU is attempting to foist upon the continent in the name of 'modernity', 'the need to compete with the BRICs' etc.
Europe needs to become aware of its own threefold nature, understand why so many of its flags are tricolours*, while others are crosses, and what 'liberty, equality and fraternity', that much-abused and ill-understood slogan, actually means in its relation to the human entelechy and to society. Steiner argued that liberty in the cultural sphere, equality in the political/legal sphere and fraternity in the economic sphere were and are real developments that have been gradually emerging over the course of millennia, and not some intellectual ideology dreamed up by him or any other individual mind. History has moved from religious control, to political control and now to economic control, but the three spheres interfere with each other in damaging ways today because this long-range development has not been sufficiently understood. Hence the political sphere seeks to dominate the cultural (government controlling education), or the economic sphere seeks to manipulate the political (economic forces lobbying and manipulating governments), or the cultural sphere tries to dictate to the other two (Vatican, Iranian mullahs, EU judges). In fact, what is needed is a relationship between the three that operates like the three systems of the human body (the nervous, rhythmic, and metabolic systems) i.e. independent of each other and yet interrelational.
If Europeans came to grasp this, they could well come to play a crucial role in helping America and Asia to understand the threefold nature of the world itself, which extends as a spectrum in time and space from the collectivism of the past that is rooted in the Far East, to the selfish egocentrism of the present that is focused especially on the USA. Europe finds itself within this global polarity, while historically containing within itself the polarity and the potential for balance between them. On the global stage, Europe may thus be able, if it can only understand itself rightly, both to make amends for the global errors and crimes of its imperial past, and to prevent a future bipolar conflict between East and West. If it cannot do this, I fear that conflict will be inevitable, for at a profound level the Americans and the Chinese, insofar as they remain within their own cultural mindsets (the PLA vs the New York Times, so to speak) do not and will not understand each other.
We are continually being told that Europe has had its day, has no more dynamism and is bound to be only a museumpiece and entertainment quarter for the rich of America and the BRICs. If this picture gains ground, and the Europeans act accordingly, another world war will be inevitable, for there will be no-one to play the role of intermediary between the forces of expansion and contraction, of Yang and Yin - of collectivist group assertion and personal self-assertion. Europe's real destiny - and also that of Africa alongside it - is to be a bridge between America and Asia, not America's partner in a 'crusade' for 'freedom and democracy' against Asia, but this latter course is the one that has steadily been prepared in the circles and corridors of western power.
P.S. * The unitarianism and uniformity of the EU is well-expressed by the EU flag with its single colour and its circle of identical stars. The flag was a modification of that used by (the Catholic aristocrat) Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-European movement, which had a red cross within a round white or golden disc within the circle of stars. The cross was apparently removed on Turkish insistence in the 1950s as part of the price for Turkish cooperation in the Council of Europe vs the USSR. If the EU flag had a sun disk and a crescent moon inside the circle of stars, it would at least express something of Europe's threefold heritage, but it does not even have those. It has the 12-fold Zodiacal principle but not the 7-fold Sun principle nor the threefold principle of the macrocosm-microcosm. It has only TWO elements - colour and stars - the binary principle. The single blue colour is one with which both Jesuits (Marianism) and Freemasons ('Blue Lodges') can be content - which may well be ultimately why it was adopted - but it in no way expresses the variety of Europe's cultural heritage. In short, the flag is entirely inappropriate as a European symbol. It is a flag for a monolith and is as unsuitable and untruthful for Europe as the Nazi Hakenkreutz was for Germany.
Response from W.H.
On the threefold nature of Europe, there are interesting interactions between the Protestant and the Orthodox element if, for example, one traces the role played by Ioannis Capodistrias, first governor of modern Greece, in framing the constitution of Switzerland, and the role of the Geneva Philhellenes in financing the Greek revolution and building the Greek state. Jean-Gabriel Eynard,in particular, was Capodistrias' main financial backer and later, after Capodistrias' assassination, founder of the National Bank of Greece.
There is an Eynard association in operation in Switzerland.
www.ass-grecosuisse-eynard.ch/
We have a film on Eynard online but unfortunately still haven't got around to doing the English subtitling
We have the film in French also but haven't put it online.
Here is a Swiss press article of recent years on Capodistrias
cse.european-citizens-network.eu/spip.php?article39
Fortunately we have managed to do a little better with Capodistrias. Thanos Veremis film on Capodistrias has English subtitles.
There are interesting similarities between the present age, after the defeat of the Russian Revolution, and the age following the defeat of Napoleon. That was when the world saw an explosion of philHellenism culmiinating in the founding of the Modern Greek state. I do no more than gesture at this in the brief (non-historian's) address I gave at Ghent.
cse.european-citizens-network.eu/spip.php?article43
The island of Aigina, where the Capodistrias-Spinelli-Europe initiative originated, was the first capital of modern Greece:
cse.european-citizens-network.eu/spip.php?article44
I hope this is providing useful input.
As far as the European flag is concerned, it would be a great step forward for the Eurocrats to admit it is a Christian flag, in my view. After that talk about changing it.