V. The Auto da Fe

There exists yet another – scarcely known – peculiarity of Stalinism, without knowledge of which we cannot rightly understand either the second or the third nodal point of the “Decline of Europe”. This time we must turn to the books of an author who is often so disliked even by intelligent people, that they spit contemptuously at the mere mention of his name. This is unfortunate. After all, the task of cognition consists in the receiving and digesting of knowledge and not in immediately blurting out one’s own opinion. One cannot listen and speak at the same time. Moral objections to these books are fully legitimate, but this should not prevent us from testing the statements of their author in an unprejudiced manner.

We are thinking here of Grigori Klimov’s novel “The Prince of this World” and also his “Survey of the Content of Lectures” of the “Course in higher Sociology” known as “The Protocols of the Learned Soviet Elders”. They are important for us because they tell of the existence of a “red Papacy” and a “red Inquisition”. The author himself asserts at the end of the “Protocols” that they have come into being “under the guidance of his pen”. But we grant ourselves the freedom to disbelieve this. They document facts, of this there is no doubt, but one can only understand this by penetrating in thought the spirit of the struggle between forces that has brought about the “Decline of Europe”.

Admittedly, it would be a sign of spiritual poverty if we were to describe these documents as authentic in an immediate sense. This grows perfectly clear as we read the text. Its publication was conceived as a response to the psychological Cold War against the U.S.S.R. (the so-called Harvard Project) that had begun in the West. It had become politically expedient to reveal a few secrets of Stalinism and to do this in the form of a “literary work of art” of an individual author. Whereby this author himself many times challenges the reader to doubt the truth of what he is telling him, but at the same time brings in the course of his exposition any number of proofs that they are actually correct. In the end the reader capitulates before the overwhelming weight of proofs and will from then on never forget what he has learnt. A very effective stylistic method!

To summarize the essence of this book in a brief yet content-filled form is anything but easy, we must confess. It is absolutely unique in its character. It will appear to anyone who has read it as if, before his eyes, one person had said to another, his good friend, in the heat of argument: “Go to the Devil!” – and then the Devil had actually appeared in our so reliable material reality and carried the person away.

We did not choose this image by chance. The ideology of the “Protocols” is built up fully on the sexual complex, the “mud of the depths” (“slime at the very bottom” of the “soul provinces”) of psychoanalysis which, linked closely together, supposedly underlie all experiences and expressions of the human being. And here one can say that Dr. Freud with the invention of this theory and its introduction into science virtually sent the whole of humanity to the Devil, who did not wait to be asked twice and carried it off. This is exactly how modern civilization looks since psychoanalysis took hold in it. And this is also how Russia looked after the Bolsheviks had seized power there.

What had happened in the period of Stalinism was an attempt to snatch Russia from the Devil’s grip again, using the method of the Devil himself (in the “Protocols” this method is called “evil good”). This also found expression in the emergence of the “red Inquisition” described in the “Protocols”.

It is out of the question that these “Protocols” were the creation of a single individual. They are the product of a certain collective effort, the collaboration of a group of intellectuals, over-cultivated and standing on the brink of insanity, with the “Prince of this World”. This “Prince” is not simply a literary personality; he is a perfectly real spiritual being, of whom Rudolf Steiner says that he is the retarded, “fallen” spirit of Personality. This means that within the hierarchy of the Divine creators he stands higher than the Archangels. In the Bible he is called Satan.

He is the chief opponent of Christ and the enemy of the human ‘I’. Satan acts in such a way as to bring to a synthesis the polar opposition of Lucifer and Ahriman. Materialists speak in this connection of the law of the conflict and unity of opposites.

The inquisitors in professors’ gowns who hold the lectures in the courses for higher sociology, which form the content of the “Protocols”, appeal continually to this law. And this betrays the force that stands behind them. It determines the whole character of the activity of the “red Inquisition”, in which the antitheses between Lucifer and Ahriman come to a kind of unity.

In the “Protocols” we are told that in the KGB, in addition to the 12 departments, there exists a 13th. This is the “red Inquisition”. It conducted the terror of 1935 to 1939 and after Stalin’s death it fought the opposition, the dissidents. The “red Inquisitors” actually call themselves “Inquisitors” but, they add, “this is also what we are called in the rumours about us that circulate among the population”. Such rumours did indeed circulate – how could it be otherwise, considering the scope of their activities. But here we are concerned not only with the name. Those working in the 13th department of the KGB represent in the theory and practice of their activity the positions of the medieval Inquisition in every respect. They study as learning material the protocols of the trials of heretics and witches conducted by it; they read books written by members or supporters of the Inquisition and in which are unmasked the stratagems of the Devil who draws the human being into temptation and leads him to the stake.

The “red Inquisition” also rehabilitates the medieval Inquisition completely (a case without parallel in history), in that it praises it as a fighter against the degeneration of the human race and as its saviour. Certainly the old Inquisition had to step down – be it because it was too mild, be it because human beings lack the capacity to fight against their own degradation, with the result that the Devil gained the victory over them – a victory which the degraded described as the dawn of the “century of Enlightenment”. But in the Russia of the 1930’s the Inquisition had to be reborn for the sake of Russia’s salvation.

In the opinion of the “red Inquisitors” all revolutions, rebellions and wars, in which many millions of human beings lose their lives, come about as the result of an unusual multiplication of those referred to in the Gospels as: “Their name is legion”, that is, people possessed by demons. The Inquisitors therefore call these people “legionnaires”. They were the ones who unleashed the Bolshevist revolution and plunged the country into suffering and chaos. These sufferings knew no end, because the “legionnaires” dreamt of a “permanent” revolution. For this reason, there was no alternative but to shoot them “like rabid dogs” – to quote the then State prosecutor Vishinsky. This was the actual reason for the repressions in the second half of the thirties.

In the courses for “higher Sociology” the professors, who are KGB generals, tell their students – ministers, especially important generals, members of Party leadership and government etc. – candidly, that the entire “Lenin Guard” which was liquidated during the purge, Lenin himself, even Stalin, Marx and many, many other personalities of whom history speaks in venerable terms, were complete degenerates. One can easily imagine what effect this had on the consciousness of the leading bearers of official Soviet ideology in the 1960’s and 70’s. They had in reality to pass through the Orwellian school of doublethink. Not all of them succeeded. A well-known general killed his wife, his children and finally himself; he left behind a farewell letter in which he said that, after what he had learnt in these courses, he could no longer live together with his family, nor could he live without them. The Inquisitors tell their students this story with pride. Thus, a completely different type of governing class was trained, of which a certain number still exists today. They were “inspired” by an entirely different ideology, one based on the Bible. The Inquisitors in professorial gowns are fully versed in its texts and know its content no worse than experienced theologians, only they describe the Bible as a symbolical, allegorical book. Of course, they admit that it was written by outstanding human beings who knew the nature of man through and through, but they were forced to express themselves in a language understandable to the lower level of consciousness of the people of antiquity. However, the Inquisitors have deciphered these symbols and therefore say proudly of themselves that “only God” knows more than they do. They say to the students: “Here we will give you the new law of God... something in the nature of a dialectical Christianity.”

We see here, that the old weapon of the “Fathers of Darkness” has indeed been replaced by a new one – which is what Konstantin Mereshkovsky advised them to do. And one can observe in reality how they took control of what the “Brothers of Shadow” had handed on, already under Lenin.

In the new “Divine law” God is understood as health and the Devil as sickness, as a complex of anomalies consisting of “sexual perversions, psychic illnesses and a number of physical deformities (stemming from bad genetic make-up)”, such as limping, squinting, large birthmarks etc.

Thus, the professors conclude, “evils, demons impure forces and evil spirits become an objective reality. They are nothing other than different forms of psychical illness. Soul is spirit. A mental (Ger. spiritual) illness is an evil spirit, a devil.”

“The process of degeneration,” they continue, “is a mass phenomenon, and for this reason the Bible says of the Devil: My name is legion.” All “legionnaires” are in their essential nature witches and wizards. And the medieval Inquisition acted wisely in sending them to the stake. Truths of this kind are “living water, to re-enliven Christianity, and to understand what it is.”

This is how the “secret police of the new young Russia” thought, and this is what it taught its pupils. At the end of the eighties the “red Inquisition” disappeared from the political arena and in Russia those people returned to power who, in their opinion, are “witches and wizards”. And a time will therefore inevitably come, when the Inquisition will raise its head again and apply its methods to “rein-in the chaos”, thereby saving Russia (and the world) from the degenerates who are ruled over by the Devil – that is, “the complexes” etc.

***

The “Protocols” are also an extremely subtle book. It is not by chance that it was written by no less than the “Prince of this World”. Whatever its content may be, one should not categorically reject it, nor affirm it, of course. It is indeed inspired by the “Prince of this World” who today is Satan, the fallen spirit of Personality. Our soul-world, particularly its lower regions, stands open to his gaze; he also describes it to us, while trying to represent this as the ultimate truth of the human being, and for this purpose he uses the refined sophistry of his gigantic intellect.

This world can also appear to the human being supersensibly in the form of his doppelgänger, which Robert Louis Stevenson so remarkably portrayed in his work “The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. Rudolf Steiner says of it that it is the personification of all human inadequacies and vices, which on the astral plane are elemental beings. The human being must ennoble his doppelgänger. The means for achieving this are culture, education and training, but especially spiritual knowledge and practical esoteric exercises which strengthen the human ‘I’ and lead it to moral purification. The nature of the doppelgänger needs to be understood by spiritual-scientific means. It is unusually deep and has its roots in the character of man’s earthly evolution.

In the course of evolution, says Rudolf Steiner, “the physical body must lose all its dominance... It must be killed: ‘Kill in yourself the Father principle’... what can [the human being] then do? He can unite in the etheric with that which lives in the spirit... In the past it was said: He who kills the Father element within himself unites with the Mother principle’... Then something terrible happens if the human being achieves this suppression and union prematurely... This comes to disturbing expression in the drama of Oedipus... Just as in Cain’s fratricide we see the unresolved conflict between astral body and ‘I’, so do we see in the drama of Laios and Iokaste (Oedipus) initiation without purification. The following was to come through the Christ- impulse: through the new, strengthened power of the ‘I’, of self- consciousness, such confusion (and error) should no longer be possible... That which had come with the Christ was to imbue the old initiation with new forces”. (Lecture of 11.01.1910)

This and nothing else needs to be set over against the psychoanalytic “soul provinces”. Psychoanalysis replaces this knowledge with something repulsive – the ‘Oedipus complex’, the ‘Electra complex’, the supposedly inborn inclination of the human being towards incest etc. It is also such spiritual aberrations that have sent our civilization to the Devil and handed over responsibility for it to Satan’s rulership. Under this rulership the centuries-long conflict between Left and Right wing became the struggle for the means to free the human being from complexes and forms of degradation. Those of the Left insist in this struggle that it is necessary to allow complete freedom to the instincts, and call out to the human being: Do as you please! In time he will grow tired of this freedom and become a moral and wonderful person. Those of the Right wish, by contrast, to lead the human being back to the time before the Fall into sin in Paradise – that is, to deprive him of all knowledge, release him from progress, make him spiritually into a child, infantile. This was Mereshkovsky’s dream, and it also extends as an idea through the whole of the “Protocols”. And we can now see that there is no question of a chance correspondence here. Both camps stand on the foundation of an extremely crude materialism, and this gives rise to mental illnesses in human beings. If things continue in this way, epidemic outbreaks of madness will begin in the near future, and no Inquisition will be able to bring them under control, considering its members are themselves mentally abnormal.

It is of course very ingenious on their part to describe the Bible as an allegory, but it is not a new idea. A contemporary of Jesus Christ, Philo of Alexandria, interpreted the entire Old Testament allegorically; all that is, as Rudolf Steiner says, given as living experience, he turned into thought-pictures. It was a spiritual achievement for that time, but not for ours.

“These are the two great polar opposites. The abstract world that is anticipated in an Ahrimanic way in Philo and the world that is to enter human evolution with Christianity. One could say that, from this standpoint, the whole world becomes a question. The abstract thinker – and Philo of Alexandria was perhaps the greatest genius of abstract thought, because he anticipated Ahrimanically the abstraction of later times – wishes to find the answer to the world’s mystery by taking hold of thoughts of some kind that are meant to solve the riddle of the world. The Mystery of Golgotha is the all-embracing, living protest against this. The world riddle can never be solved by means of thoughts; the solution remains something living. The human being in his totality is the solution to the world-riddle. The sun, the stars, the clouds, the rivers, the mountains, the single beings of the various natural kingdoms, as they reveal themselves outwardly, appear to us as a great question. And the human being stands there and in his whole being he is the answer. That is also a viewpoint from which the Mystery of Golgotha can be considered. One does not try to set thoughts in their dead nature over against the riddle of the world; one sets over against the whole human being that which can be experienced from out of the human being as a whole.

Only very slowly and gradually can humanity find the way to understand this” (GA 210, 18.02.1922).

As to original sin, the “mud and slime” of the doppelgänger and the hopeless struggle with it, Anthroposophy teaches us, in contrast to psychoanalysis: “In past ages when knowledge and religion were one, knowledge was only ever seen as being, at the same time, a source of guidance for man in his quest for healing. Here we start to become clear about the fact that original sin is in reality a sickness of the human being. If consciousness is also taken hold of by this sickness, then this results, not in healing, but in further sickness. We must wrest consciousness, the soul with all its forces, from the sphere of the sickness of sin.

We must therefore reckon with the real possibility that, with the downfall of the earth, all that has been founded morally could suffer downfall, if we were not to keep it alive through Christ Jesus and lead it through the earth’s decline, onward to future stages of existence” (GA 343, 1.10.1921).

Original sin does lead via cognition to sickness, but only if thinking remains abstract, intellectual, not metamorphosed into a living, beholding activity. And one must not be shocked over this sin. It is a necessity on man’s path to freedom:

“Thus, we have beings who have nothing to do with original sin. Even those beings who were the actual tempters of man in the course of earth evolution and are represented by the serpent in Paradise – these beings, too, have to do, not at all with original sin, but with a sin committed by them freely. It is what we call original (Ger. inherited) sin, and then freedom, that is actually specific to the human being. One finds everywhere that the establishing of a new level of existence has a good meaning and significance within the universe as a whole, so that nothing is repeated in a vertical direction. Thus, what the animals have, human beings do not have; and what we find in human beings, we do not find in the Angels, and so forth” (GA 343, 6.10.1921).

***

In the lessons held by the “red Inquisitors” extensive quotations are given from the works of Western authors of different periods, which awakens in the reader the impression that the “Inquisitors” are merely summarizing the “wisdom” of humanity. “And when you understand all this,” the Inquisitors in professors’ gowns say to their students, “you will be able to say nothing else than: Indeed, Stalin was right when he shot all these degenerates ‘like rabid dogs’”. He conducted in fact a gigantic auto da fe throughout the whole country. And as he was himself a degenerate, once the disintegration of his personality had begun, he too was burnt: an Inquisitor and doctor handed him the “Last Supper” – i.e. poison.

“The great Purge was a historical law. This is dictated by the law of all revolutions.” For, Robespierre, Danton, Napoleon, Hitler were degenerates, but also Churchill and Roosevelt.

A special form of degeneracy is, in the opinion of the medieval and also today’s Inquisitors, people’s enthusiasm for “mysticism”. All members of secret societies and Lodges, they say, “call themselves humanists and the ordinary people call them ‘Satanists’”, they are all sexually perverse and so on. The Inquisitors also counted among them the Theosophists and the followers of the “Anthroposophy of the Jew Rudolf Steiner”.

This leads to the general conclusion: the human spirit grew far too complicated, as the “Mentor” says in Mereshkovsky, and it is therefore the source of all human suffering. And in this case – away with development, away with education!

The “red Inquisitors” love to repeat the well-known saying, that the Devil is God’s monkey. Two monkeys, we would suggest. One of them is now doing cartwheels in Europe and is trying in the shortest time to compel all Europeans to love the whole of humanity as itself, or even more. But they want to compel not only the Europeans to do so, but also all the Africans and Arabs arriving in Europe, who know nothing, and want to know nothing, of Christianity and its commandments. For example, in Germany someone has come up with the idea of demanding from the migrants a written promise to love the Jews and Israel. There is no more effective means than this, of increasing the hostility of the Muslims towards the Jews. The second monkey in the “red Inquisition” has shut off all access to psychosophy, the spiritual scientific doctrine of the soul, and made psychoanalysis the official policy of the totalitarian State.