watto
26.02.04, 18:25
www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=1561
In 1916 and 1917, in the midst of the catastrophic First World War, Steiner gave a series of 25 lectures to a group of his followers who gathered together in their center in Dornach in neutral Switzerland. These lectures, since translated and published in English,(1) offer a unique reading of contemporary events. Behind the outer façade of world affairs, suggested Steiner, the machinations of occult groups or ?brotherhoods? were at work. Certain of these brotherhoods had wanted the Great War to take place, and had manipulated events to bring it about. In doing this, they sought to protect the dominant economic position of the English-speaking world, and in turn to crush the ?mediating? role of Central European powers such as Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and so on.
These occult brotherhoods ? small groups of men who met together in ?lodges? and practiced ceremonial magic as a means of achieving certain goals ? originated from the English-speaking world and were allied, in particular, with Anglo-American interests. Their aim was to extend Anglo-American influence across the globe, and to ensure the predomination of Anglo-American culture. Furthermore, they sought to extend its superiority into the distant future; essentially to ensure that the present state of affairs continues evermore.
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The Anglo-American brotherhoods who seek dominion over mankind know this, and hence today are deliberately sponsoring various kind of materialism in the hope of halting and trapping humanity at the present stage of its development. They don?t want humans to progress beyond the present stage of immersion in the material world. In other words, they don?t want us to reconnect in a free way with our spiritual ?I?, because they know that their grip over humanity would then be lost. Human progress is dependent on spiritual knowledge, and thus the occult brotherhoods work against it.
Steiner explained further that the brotherhoods were aware that the Slavic peoples were to be given the task of leadership on behalf of humanity during the next great period of history. For this reason, the Anglo-American brotherhoods not only sought to dominate the present ?great period? of human development, but ? knowing that the Slavs had an important mission in the future ? sought to gain control over the Slavic peoples (Russia in particular) in the present, in order to interfere with or even put a halt to their coming task. In this way, the Anglo-American brotherhoods could extend their control over human development into the distant future. Steiner later claimed that the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which led to the later USSR and the 72-year cultural, intellectual, economic and political repression of the populations of its various peoples, was masterminded and sponsored by these same brotherhoods as a means of controlling the region and its peoples