Brexit as a Spiritual Question (3) A Personal View
Posted by Terry Boardman on Jul 8, 2019 in east west issues, most recent, nwo, threefold Society | 0 comments
This article was first published in New View magazine Issue 92 July-Sept. 2019
Chester, a city in the northwest of England on the border with Wales and some 17 miles from Liverpool, was the largest base of the Roman army in Britannia during the Roman occupation. The name Chester comes from the Latin castrum, which means fortified military base, camp or fortress. The city, which the Romans called Deva Victrix, was founded by the Roman Army in 79 AD, 46 years after the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. That was also the year of the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed the city of Pompeii.
Roman Chester (Deva Victrix)
From 1905 until 1972 Chester was the base of Western Command, the regional headquarters of the British Army responsible for Wales and the Northwest of England. My grandfather, who had married one of Britain’s first women soldiers (the Woman’s Army Auxiliary Corps, 1917), was a civilian manager at Western Command. From 1938 to 1972 the large site of Western Command was located above the River Dee, in front of the secondary school I attended – Chester City Grammar School. It was not a boarding school, nor was it a private school, but the headmaster had a classical and military background and wanted the school to be a worthy rival for the private schools in the local area. The school had all the characteristics of private all-boys’ schools in those days – uniforms for the boys, gowns for the ‘masters’, houses, prefects (elder boys chosen to act as the ‘police force’), Latin and Greek lessons, a rowing club, an Army Cadet Force and ferocious discipline maintained through frequent corporal punishment. We boys regarded the school as something of a concentration camp, an obstacle course through which for at least four years we had to negotiate fights with bullies and thrashings by prefects and masters. Only in the last two years of our time there, from the age of 16, were we suddenly treated by the school system like human beings with views of our own.
However, there were some very memorable ‘masters’, many of them real eccentrics. Some were wounded individuals, with problems left over from their service in the world wars, and some were near sadists, but others were excellent teachers who really taught us to think and express ourselves in debate and writing. Through my interest in history, I had already become fascinated by foreign affairs before I started at the school in the autumn of 1963 and my fascination was only spurred on by school trips to Austria and France. Some three years later, with three classmates, I started a political party. It was a school affair and came out of our debating society experience. We called it the European Nationalist Party, not because we were right-wing nationalists, but because we wanted Europe to become one nation, a United States of Europe, on the American federal model, because that was the only model we could envisage for such an entity at that time. We were naive and idealistic – and ignorant. We didn’t know much about the workings or the origins and intentions of the European Economic Community (EEC), which General Charles De Gaulle, the French President, had recently barred Britain from joining, and which the leader of the Conservative Party, Edward Heath, was keen that Britain should nevertheless still seek to join. Above all, we wanted the USA and the USSR to withdraw their troops from Europe, and to stop interfering in Europe, so that the peoples of Europe could be themselves and find their own way forward, independent of the Great Powers of East and West. Ironically, we felt that way forward should be through imitating the US model.
Britain and the EEC
American models in all things had, after all, been prominent in British life since the war years and were increasingly so. We knew nothing of Rudolf Steiner or of social threefolding, his vision, developed in the last years of the First World War, of a society organised in accordance with its three constituent parts – cultural life, legal/political life and economic life – so that they would be autonomous and not interfered with or dominated by each other, as had been the case for over a hundred years already, with the political State seeking to direct cultural and economic life in both communist and capitalist countries, in different ways. I would know nothing of Rudolf Steiner and threefolding until I was 29. What I did know by the time I left the ‘concentration camp’ in 1970 and went to university in Manchester was that I had a strong animus against any imposed uniformity and authoritarianism, the assumed right of ‘those on high’ to determine the lives of those ‘below’ them.
At university until the end of 1973, I became active in student politics in the Arts Faculty (I was studying history). While I was at university, Edward Heath, who was now the Prime Minster of a Conservative government, renegotiated Britain’s membership of the EEC, and on 1 January 1973, Britain formally joined. I didn’t take much interest in that whole process because besides history, and indeed, almost replacing it, was my new found love of music, for which Manchester in those days was a magnet, and my interest in politics at the local level of our own department. My pro-EEC sentiments had remained from my schooldays, however, and my hitch-hiking trips in western Europe only boosted my youthful fascination for the continent. Europe ¬ at least as far as the ‘Iron Curtain’ ¬ felt like my oyster, and I wanted, with all the self-centred egoism of the 21 year old, to explore and enjoy it – for myself.
At the same time, I had been greatly disappointed by the victory of Heath’s Conservative Party in 1970. It seemed that after the radicalism of the 1960s, the country had opted to return to familiar conservative habits. Britain, despite the much-vaunted youth culture of the 1960s, the hippies (of whom there were really only a few in Britain) and the over-hyped culture of sex-drugs-rock’n’roll, seemed to me like a fossilised place in danger of becoming stuck in the past. Only music seemed to point a way forward for me. Entry into the EEC, in spite of its bureaucrats and legions of men in suits, was welcome, I felt, but it was not a great draw for young people in those days. It was mostly a project for middle-aged men. I remained unaware of the deceptions that had been practised by Heath’s government and by the Civil Service to get the country into the EEC club. Indeed, I would remain unaware of these for many years.
Japan, Britain and Europe
After university I went to Japan, where I worked as an English teacher. There I was so taken up with getting to grips with my job, with the culture and the language of Japan, that I had little time or inclination to give to the question of Britain in the EEC. I was hardly aware of the 1975 referendum in which the British people – finally given a chance to express a view on the issue of membership of the EEC two years after Heath had taken them into it – decided by a substantial majority that they wanted to stay in. As in the 2016 referendum, the financial and media lobby resources of the ‘Remain’ (in the EEC) lobby, far outstripped those of the ‘Leave’ (the EEC) campaign. In other words, in both referenda the British elites were very much in favour of Britain remaining in the EEC/EU. Later, I would discover why.
After being in Japan for about four years, I slowly began to look back towards Britain again. A summer trip there in 1979, in which my Japanese girlfriend and I hitch-hiked the length of the country up to the Isle of Lewis and back down to Cornwall, was a turning point in which I resolved to return. I could see that after the industrial turmoil of the 1970s, the upsurge of feminism, the extreme right-wing National Front, the explosion of punk rock, the country was much angrier, and Margaret Thatcher was now Prime Minister, a much more strident figure than I remembered her from Edward Heath’s government. From that 1979 trip I recall a punk band playing a live set in a pub in London: the lyrics of one of their ‘songs’ seemed to consist of nothing but the refrain: “We hate! We hate!” Hatred was not something that suddenly emerged in British society c.2016.
Nevertheless, despite the ugly aspects of a Britain in seeming decay in 1979, for the first time, I felt I was able to see ‘my country’ objectively – its positive sides as well as the negative, the gentle, beautiful and caring as well as the crass, aggressive and selfish. The years in Japan had separated me inwardly from Britain; something had been severed, and this, I would later realise, was the instinctive connection to the folk soul. When we grow up in a culture and live most of our lives within it and within its language, we are like fish in water. Living abroad for a period of time, certainly more than two years, as opposed to just holidaying abroad, enables us to come out of our own cultural water as we encounter the folk being of the other culture. After a couple of years living in Japan (it may be earlier for others, depending on the person) it seemed to me that I had crossed a certain threshold in my relationship with the country and the various earthly manifestations of its culture, its ways, habits, and characteristics. At this point, the initial openness, fascination and sympathy many feel on arriving in a new country can give way to antipathy, an awareness of the shadow side of the culture and judgmentalism. The newcomer may integrate this shadow side into his experience and understanding of the culture and choose to remain in the country or he will fail to do so and if he remains, he may become embittered and antipathetic; alternatively, incapable of dealing with it, he will reject that culture and will leave. I thought I had crossed that threshold after my first two years in Japan, but whereas my time there had somehow cut my inner connection to Britain, the trip home in 1979 reopened my eyes to the country, especially to the beauty of its nature and its historical heritage, but now from the outside, as it were. I now felt able to relate to Britain no longer as my country but as anothercountry, albeit as one with which I was familiar. Two years later, then, my Japanese girlfriend and I relocated to Britain and got married in my hometown of Chester. Almost immediately, we encountered Anthroposophy and Eurythmy.
The 1980s
In the 1980s the government of Margaret Thatcher began to pull in two contrary directions with regard to the EEC: on the one hand the British made a signal contribution to the development of the Single Market through the work of Lord Arthur Cockfield, who Thatcher appointed to join the European Commission, but on the other hand, Thatcher felt Britain was contributing too much money to the European Community and gradually shifted during her three periods in office (1979-1990) from her pro-EEC stance of the early 1970s to a stubborn resistance against any further supranational moves towards unification and federalism. In the second half of the 1980s I became interested both in the story of the mysterious foundling Kaspar Hauser (1812-1833), who was dubbed the ‘Child of Europe’, as the newspapers interested all of Europe in his fate, and also in the role played in his destiny by the British aristocratic secret agent, Lord Stanhope. At this time I also developed an interest in Steiner’s ideas about social threefolding. It was through a short-lived British anthroposophical current affairs magazine Shoreline (1988-92) – produced and edited by Charles Lawrie – that I began to inform myself about the European unification project, having already studied Rudolf Steiner’s detailed exposition on the background to the First World War, a series of 25 lectures later published in English as the Karma of Untruthfulness, Vols. 1 & 2.1Steiner’s lectures had alerted me to a very different understanding of the history of the 20th century from the conventional one, the one I had become familiar with through my academic studies and the media. I gradually began to realise around the time of the Maastricht Treaty (1991) how the European Union project fitted into long-range and long-held plans for world domination by western elites, plans which went back to the late 19th century. In the early 1990s I wrote several articles about this, which became the basis of my first book, Mapping the Millennium, published in 1998.
From Cold War 1 to Cold War 2
During the 1990s it became clear that, despite the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, America and its allies had no intention of disbanding NATO, which from the first Gulf War (1991) now became the military arm of the American “unipolar world order”. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia (1991-1999) showed all too clearly the connection between the EU and NATO. Then with the rise to power of Vladimir Putin in Russia in 1999, 9/11 and the consequent wars it led to in Afghanistan and Iraq, China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2002, and the emergence of a new non-western economic bloc – the BRIC2 countries – , a new bipolar world order, a new East vs West rivalry gradually emerged. In this situation, western Establishment media began to regard Russia and China first as “rivals” then, more recently, as “threats” and to insist on “the solidarity of the West” in the face of these supposed “threats”. This foreign policy stance has not essentially altered with the change from Obama to Trump. Geopolitical commentators have seen similarities in the US-China relationship and the relationship between the British and German empires in the two decades before 1914 – a declining Power (Britain then, the USA now) felt challenged and “threatened” by a rising Power (Germany then, China now) – a very dangerous situation, because the declining Power feels tempted to use political and military means to try and reduce or quash the economic and cultural challenge. These same western commentators emphasised the need for EU countries, almost all of which had by 2014 been drawn into NATO, to remain closely bound to the USA. As the pro-western website Politico recently indicated in an article titled “Europe’s Dependence on the U.S. Was All Part of the Plan” : the USA has relied upon the EU and the European unification project, which the USA itself stimulated and promoted3, as the political and economic arm of its permanent military presence in Europe.4
The western Establishment media would have us believe that “fake news” and “post-truth” began c. 2016 with Donald Trump and Brexit, whereas in fact, while they have existed since the time when mass newspapers first appeared in the late 19th century, they were given a tremendous boost at the time of 9/11 and in the years that followed.
With the end of the (first) Cold War in the 1990s, I realised that what has to be avoided at all costs in the 21st century is another East vs West binary world order such as existed between the eastern communist (extreme collectivist) and western capitalist (extreme individualist) societies from 1917 to 1991. There has to be a middle region between the poles of East and West, and the danger is that Europe, which historically has contained these two individualist and collective poles itself within its own western and eastern regions respectively and is therefore well-suited to play the role of intermediary on the global scale, cannot do so because it has been ‘captured’ by one of the two poles. It is the EU and NATO which have effected this capture and which sustain it.
The USA requires a European Union under its wing, rather like Batman requires his junior assistant, Robin. Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz, one of Rudolf Steiner’s closest pupils and a man with a deep understanding of geopolitics and world events from a spiritual perspective, wrote in 1928: “The Middle of Europe is a Mystery space. It requires of people that they conduct themselves accordingly with regard to it. The path of the cultural epoch in which we live leads from the West to the East through this space [of Middle Europe]. […] All old forces lose themselves on this path to the East, they cannot pass further through this space without renewing themselves out of the spirit. If they seek to do so, they become forces of destruction and give rise to catastrophes. It is in this space which, from human knowledge, human love and human courage, that must come about which may then proceed in a healing way towards the East.” 5
Western parliamentarianism and other political movements, such as fascism6 and communism – all have become perverted or have lost themselves en route in the East because they have not renewed themselves out of the spirit, and they have become forces of destruction in either central or eastern Europe over the past 100 years. The same has been happening with the impulse of the Catholic Church since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s to penetrate the Orthodox regions of eastern Europe, notably Ukraine, and also with the western, American-inspired impulses of the European Union and NATO. The former President of the EU Commission, the Portuguese José Manuel Barroso, said in 2007: “Sometimes I like to compare the European Union, as a creation, to the organisation of empires, the empires, and because we [the EU] have the dimension of the empires. But there is a great difference. The empires were usually made through force, with a centre that was imposing a diktat, a will, on the others, and now we have what some authors call ‘the first non-imperial empire’. We have, by dimension, 27 countries that freely decided to work together to pool their sovereignties…and work together to add value. I believe it’s a great construction and we should be proud of it. At least, we in the Commission are proud of it.” At this point his fellow Commissioner, the Swede Margot Wallstrom, Commissioner for Communications, interjected: “I think, wasn’t it [Jacques] Delors who said, jokingly, that you have to be either a genius or French to understand the construction of it. But I propose something much more useful to citizens [i.e. to help them understand the EU], and that is ‘Solutions United’ – like a football team.”7 Wallstrom, a non-academic Scandinavian, may have felt uncomfortable here with the academic Barroso’s reference to the EU as an ‘empire’ and, as more of a professional politician than Barroso, she sought to explain the EU through a more ‘folksy’, media-savvy slogan that she evidently felt was ‘closer to the people’. But her football team analogy not only masks the reality of the EU, it serves to lead attention away from the ‘imperial cat’ that Barroso, perhaps inadvertently, let out of the bag.
The Four Kings, the Palladium and Parsifal
What then must proceed in a healing way towards the East, from Europe as far as China and Japan to build a human bridge between these communities? The insight that, as Steiner put it in what he called ‘the Motto of the Social Ethic’: “The healing social life is found when in the mirror of the human soul the whole community finds its reflection and when in the community the strength of each one is living.” This implies a society in which individuals constantly seek to be aware of and responsive to what is going on in their society and one in which the community values and upholds the qualities of each individual member of the community. This unites the individual and communitarian impulses of west and east, respectively.
Based on this ethical insight is what Steiner called the Fundamental Social Law: “The well-being of a community of cooperatively working human beings is the greater the less individuals demand the proceeds of their work for themselves or, in other words, the more they make over these proceeds to their co-workers and the more their needs are met not by their own work but from that of others.” This calls for insight on the part of individuals, especially those in the West, into how much they depend on each other for their needs to be satisfied. If, given today’s world economy, we really thought of how much we depend, for example, on the work of millions of workers in China to sustain our lifestyle, how could we possibly regard the Chinese as enemies? But China’s authoritarian regime is sustained by a bizarre mix of western Marxism-Leninism, Confucianism and western capitalism, a mixture the Chinese Communist Party likes to call “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Drawing from Goethe’s Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795) China’s system today, we can say, is neither a golden king, a silver king, nor a bronze king; it is the fourth king in the story – the king who is a mix of the three elements. Steiner described how the three kings are symbols of wisdom (gold/thinking), beauty (silver/feeling), and strength (bronze/willing). Goethe was not thinking of China when he wrote his story in 1795, but we can say that in the case of modern China, the thinking of its rulers is based on Marxist-Leninist thought; its will, the basis of its physical economy, is capitalist, while its social and ethical feeling is still informed by ancient Chinese sentiments, a further mix of Confucianism and Legalism, despite 70 years of Communism. The current Chinese system is a 70 year-old mixed king.
In Goethe’s story, at one point the mixed king cries out with a broken voice: “Who will govern the world?” and the Old Man replies: “He who stands upon his feet”. “I am he”, says the mixed King. “We shall see”, replies the Old Man, “for the time is at hand.”8 When Goethe’s story reaches its denouement, and the hidden temple, its dome lit by the sun, has risen from the depths of the river, the three kings stand up one by one but the mixed king collapses into a misshapen lump when the will-o’-the-wisps have licked the gold veins from out of him. The mixed king can also be said to refer not only to the Chinese regime but also to all the unitary nation states of today - including the nascent super-state that is the EU – where the government seeks to combine and control all three spheres of social life: the cultural, the political and the economic i.e. the spheres of thought, of feeling and of will. Steiner insisted that in the modern world the three spheres must not be controlled by one power, the political government, but must be autonomous, with their own forms of administration. Only in this way can individuals be free in the cultural sphere (the gold king) – through teaching, research and jurisprudence – to contribute to the efficacy of the other two spheres, the political and the economic. The unitary nation state, in which the State functions rather like the board of a corporation, managing and taking responsibility for almost everything, is a hangover from the 18th and 19th centuries, a pre-democratic age when most individual citizens were not trusted by their self-appointed social ‘superiors’ with any or much responsibility. In those centuries and also in the 20th century, the State arrogated to itself ever greater powers, especially in times of war, in order to mobilise and control the population for the war effort. The unitary nation state is a State organised for war, and competitive economic life in the West since the 18th century is predicated on conflict and strife between individuals, companies and nations – in direct contradiction to the realbases of economic life, which are cooperation and service, without which no economic life can take place.
Goethe wrote his Fairy Tale in response to the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man written by his good friend, the poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). The subject of the Letters was the triad of necessity, reason and freedom. “Schiller saw that a harmonious social life could only be founded on the basis of free human personalities” and that “there was an ‘ideal human being’ within everyone. […] the challenge was to bring the outer life experiences into harmony with this ‘ideal’. Then the human being would lead a truly worthy existence.” The French “revolution was driven by a desire for outer social changes to enable human personalities to become free. But both Schiller and Goethe recognised that freedom cannot be ‘imposed’ from the outside but must arise from within each person.”9
The EU cannot bring ‘freedom, peace and prosperity’ to Europeans from outside; only they themselves, through their own experience and efforts, can produce those qualities from within themselves and between each other – if they recognise how those three elements (the three kings) live within themselves as individuals in Europe and between each other. The three mixed kings of the EU, of the PRC and of the USA are bound to fall, most likely in this century, and most likely in that order. Along with them will likely also fall the United Kingdom, the artificial construct that was created only in 1801 during the war against Napoleon’s France and which since the late 20th century has often been dubbed “UK plc” – the nation regarded as an economic corporate entity, engaged in constant economic conflict with other national plcs.
This model of national economic competition and conflict arising from it is what the West has ‘bestowed’ upon China since the time of the Opium Wars (1839-1860). Bestowed with the aid of missionary ‘Christianity’, it has little to do with anything Christian. By contrast, Steiner pointed in 1921, at the time of the Washington Conference between Britain, the USA and Japan, to the story of the Palladium10, a symbol (actually a wooden statue) of the Goddess Pallas Athena, who was one of the forms in which the ancients understood the Being of the Sun, the Being who had not yet incarnated on the physical plane. With the Palladium, which the Trojans held to be a symbol of divine protection of their city, the priests of Troy taught the people through their rituals about the threefold nature of the cosmic Sun Being – Light, Life and above all, Love.
The Palladium was later taken to Rome, where it was safeguarded in the temple of Vesta, and its existence was known only to initiate priests and emperors. But its connection with the knowledge of the Cosmic Sun Being was, according to Steiner, what drew early Christians to Rome. Later, the Emperor Constantine removed it to Constantinople, and hid it under the great porphyry Column of Constantine, which was topped by an image of himself in the figure of Apollo. In thus removing from Rome the protective power of the Palladium, goes the legend, Constantine doomed the old city of Rome and also removed from Roman Christianity the last vestiges of an understanding of the cosmic Sun Being, the cosmic understanding of the Christ Logos, the relation between Christ and the Sun, the Logos being the source of Light, Life and Love and indeed of the created world, as the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John makes clear. Christ was and is thus far more than a Messiah, an earthly political ruler for a particular people.
Following Constantine’s removal of the Palladium, however, over the next 1200 years, from Constantine to Henry VIII of England (1509-1547), spiritual and temporal rulership in Europe – the spiritual and the political - increasingly tended to merge.
Legends tell of a future removal of the Palladium to the Slavic northeast when the East, devoid of its ancient wisdom, will have become utterly decadent. Then it will be the time for the Palladium to receive illumination from the West. The East, its ancient spirituality still alive but decadent, waits for a new light of spiritual illumination and inspiration from the West, but the West is mainly interested, Steiner claimed in 1921, only in economicbenefits from the East. If Asia finds in what the West brings to it only bullying, arrogance, and greed, it will increasingly meet the West with antipathy and eventually violence, as happened with Japan in 1941. In terms of the Grail story, however, the Asian Fierifis needs what the western Parsifal has to offer – individual conscience and freedom, the resurrected Sun force within the human individual that brings light and warmth to others – and Asia will recognise these out of the forces of its own declining spirituality, just as Fierifis recognised the quality of Parsifal. Then the ‘Palladium’ in the East, which is currently still in darkness, as we see today in the collectivist forms of Chinese Communism and Indian nationalism, will be able to light up again and be re-enlivened by the Parsifal spirit of the West, which is actually the spirit of Christian conscience and Christ consciousness.
By the time I wrote my first book in 1998, I had realised, as I have argued in these three New View articles on the subject of Brexit, that the EU is a regressive step not only for Britain but for Europe as a whole; it manifests the spectre of ancient Rome in modern times, the gradual emergence of an all-imposing totalitarian spirit via the method of boiling frogs: placing frogs in cool water and gradually turning up the temperature so that not realising what’s happening, the frogs remain in the water until they are boiled alive. The EU, in its relationship with the USA, reduces the global triad of East, Middle and West to a binary: the West (America and Europe) against the East (Russia, Iran, China). Europe is unable to fulfil its proper global intermediary function between East and West because it is bound to America.
The unitary super-nation state that the EU is seeking to become, step by inexorable step, will restrict the free spiritual and cultural life of the individual and make it subject to the dictates of economics and politics. For these reasons, and because I now knew about the extent of the deception and lies that many British politicians of all parties and the media had been telling the British people for 50 years about the EU project and Britain’s entry into it, I now knew that I would have to support exit from the EU in the referendum that was held on 23 June 2016, despite the very dubious nature of the campaign on both sides in the run-up to the event, and the tactical untruths told by both sides in the referendum campaign.
If the British people, against the odds, succeed in leaving the EU and then succumb to the siren song of those Anglo-chauvinists who wish to continue – albeit in a different form – dreaming the imperial dreams of Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner by further consolidating the relations of the “Five Eyes” countries11 (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) to maintain the financial and military domination of those English-speaking countries in world affairs, then the British people would only be taking a different path backwards towards the spectre of Rome. If, however, they can resist those siren voices, then perhaps they can be an inspiration to the other peoples of Europe to withdraw also from the delusional EU neo-Roman ‘empire’ construct of Monnet and Barroso, Macron and Merkel, so that the peoples of Europe can eventually set about creating a truly threefold European associative community that is appropriate for this modern epoch.
This European associative community, open to the world for research and economic relations, though not to free mass movement of economic migrants, would thereby maintain a real ‘diversity’ of European cultures, rather than become a single conformist unitary state in which the cultural, political and economic spheres are increasingly uniform. It would be based on something like Steiner’s Motto of the Social Ethic and the Fundamental Social Law – a threefold European community that can indeed function as a healing, helpful intermediary between East and West.
Terry Boardman
Endnotes
1 Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2005.
2 Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.
3 See my first article in this three-part series in New View Issue #90, Jan.-Mar. 2019.
4 https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-dependence-on-the-us-was-all-part-of-the-plan-donald-trump-nato/
5 T.H. Meyer, Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz – A European (Temple Lodge, 2014) p. 249.
6 The word fascism comes from the bundles of rods (fasces) containing an axe held by the lictors, the official bodyguards who protected Roman magistrates wherever they went. The axes symbolised the power of capital punishment. Fasces can be seen flanking the Speaker’s chair in the US House of Representatives.
7 Youtube: Euractiv TV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Ralocq9uE
8 Interestingly, the words “Stand up!” feature strongly in “The March of the Volunteers” – the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China.
9 See Tom Raines, New View summer 2003, https://web.archive.org/web/20070929202046/http://www.newview.org.uk/green_snake.htm
10 Rudolf Steiner, The Sun-Mystery in the Course of Human History – The Palladium, Dornach, 6.11.1921, Collected Works GA 208.
11 So called because they only share certain highly classified intelligence data amongst themselves and not even with their NATO allies. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
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