The Three Heads of the First Apocalyptic Beast: The German, Russian and American

The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art

Chapter Two: The Event in History

Part Two: The Historical Reversals in the 20th century

The Three Heads of the First Apocalyptic Beast: The German, Russian and American

Bolshevism in the east, Fascism and Nazism in the middle, and Capitalism in the west, in the course of the 20th century as the evil metamorphoses of liberty, equality, brotherhood. These three reversals are like three "heads" united together in the body of one and the same "beast" of historical reversal. (Archetypally, he beast has 7 heads, which we cannot study here in detail; in reality of course it has infinitely more, because it is individualized in each nation and person).

 Now we will look somewhat closer at the three revolutions: the communist-Bolshevik, the fascist-Nazi, and the perpetual revolution of the dominant American global market. Jacob Talmon, in his excellent book, Myth of the Nation and Vision of Revolution, covers the communist and fascist elements, but conveniently fails to mention the American hegemony. It is not because the American reversal is essentially different from the other two, but because academic Anglo-American historians typically overlook the complicity of their own nations, just as Alain Badiou overlooks the reversals of Lenin and Mao. This threefold reversal is the first fundamental variation through which the Ur-Phenomenon of modern history has been realized historically in the course of the last centuries, only ripening fully in the 20th century. The reversal is as modern as what it reverses and can take place only from the historical moment, described earlier, in which the individual as such and the universal as such appear for the first time in individual and universal human life.

The modern archetypal reversal, expressed through the American and French revolutions, demonstrates the above thesis of reversal as Ur-Phenomenon of modern history. We can grasp here very clearly how it works and understand the latter social and political developments of Bolshevism in the east, Fascism and Nazism in the middle, and Capitalism in the west, in the course of the 20th century as the evil metamorphoses of liberty, equality, brotherhood. These three brothers are like three "heads" united together in the body of one and the same "beast" of historical reversal. As the story goes in chapters 12 and 13 of The Apocalypse of St. John, after the first beast completes its mission, to show us that we are despicably evil and fatally mortal, there comes the second beast, which has the "healing" task: to demonstrate in a practical way, and convince humanity, that the "wound of mortality" inflicted on the first beast (the wars and evils of the 20th century), can be miraculously healed. And then it sets out to organize all aspects of human life in a wholly utopian and revolutionary manner. Both beasts represent the historical expression of the reversal, and its fully materialistic creativity. Let us shortly portray the three heads of the 20th century's beast of reversal through representative quotations, demonstrating the positive contribution of east, west and middle, each of which suffered its typical reversal.

The first one is a representative of the good future forces that the east as a whole and Russia in particular, has to develop. It is used often by Levinas, a Lithuanian Jew, whose philosophy as a whole represents in the most fine and elaborate manner this "eastern" positive mission of the future. It is taken from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: "All of us are guilty for everything and before everybody, and I am more than the others." It is not difficult to see how Bolshevism, in its Leninist-Stalinist as well as Maoist forms, is the exact reversal of this sentiment. It says in effect: "All of you are guilty for everything and for everybody and I am more innocent than all the others." So the practical consequence is naturally, that I have to be the first to kill everybody else, not as self-protection, but as ontological murder, because the other as other is primordially guilty and his guilt has already being established and needs no proof. This is the cold, annihilating reversal of the east that was actualized through the Bolshevik beast in the 20th century.

Next to the Russian reversal in the east, we have its twin reversal in Germany, that is, in middle Europe. Many have raised this deeply unsettling question: how did the nation of Dichter und Denker (thinkers and poets) become a nation of Richter und Henker (judges and executioners)? How did a place like Weimar, which in the 18th century was renowned for the most human-universal life forces of the Goethe-Schiller age, become home to the concentration camp Buchenwald? Only the theory of reversal as presented here can explain this. For the most beautiful and fruitful seeds of future spiritual life, science and art were created by Goethe and his contemporaries. Just consider his natural scientific method (only beginning to be appreciated today as a real holistic alternative to modern science), which stresses the investigation of Urphenomena, or the new image of human development in Faust and in the legend of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

For example, Goethe expresses this new image in the following initiatory ideal:

And until you have grasped This:

Die and Become!


You are just a dismal guest

On the dark Earth.

In order to better understand the German reversal, in this sense of Stirb und Werde (die and become), let us bring it together with Germany’s original myth, the initiation process of the god Odin, as given in the Edda:

I know that I was hung on a tree

Exposed to the winds


For nine nights


Wounded by a spear,

And I was sacrificed,

I, Odin,


By myself,


For myself.

Here the original middle European "I" initiation is portrayed in all its essential elements and meanings and note that it is the "I" that sacrifices its lower aspect for the development of a higher self. When this is reversed, immediately the meaning of the National-Socialist reversal becomes clear: instead of the spiritual- moral sacrifice of the lower “ego” in order to become the higher “self,” they reverse it and sacrifice the higher self in order to preserve the lower. The national race, blood and soil ego is elevated into universality, while the universal, represented by the Jew, is exterminated. German history in the 20th century could have consisted of self-transformation, Stirb und Werde, which would have brought healing and love to the world. Yet this reversal of Germany’s destiny also became an inverted killing of one’s true, higher self, and hence a moral self-murder, a national suicide, a most exact mirror image of the true initiation of the "I" which it is middle Europe’s mission to fulfill.

Side by side with the eastern and middle historical reversal, we have the western Anglo-American reversal of the true and beneficial mission of the English speaking peoples. As masters of the world by destination and capacity, first the British Empire, and now the American, could and should have used their given power and fantastic creative physical abilities, to create affluence for humanity as a whole. Instead of this, we see a complete reversal. Georges Bataille in The Accursed Share (1949) has defined the western catastrophe in its economic practice (which is served by its science, technology, education and culture as a whole, all geared to this one goal). He says that the problem of the world economy, ruled by the US, is what you do with the "excess" of economic prosperity as such. Production as a goal in itself can only become as social disease, a real social cancer, because it will not annihilate itself through free giving. This leads to monstrous accumulations, untold riches and power in the hands of very few, and also to necessary cycles that will destroy this excess. Economic life therefore makes uncontrolled destruction of its surplus (that is, war) a necessity, because unlike ancient societies, it has not institutionalized the "free giving" of gifts, such as the American Indian Potluck ritual (Bataille was using the studies of Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies). Bataille put is so:

"I will simply state, without waiting further, that the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles—the overturning of the ethics that grounds them. Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking—and of ethics. If a part of wealth (subject to a rough estimate) is doomed to destruction or at least to unproductive use without any possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return... the possibility of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving: The industrial development of the entire world demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations. An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire... It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences. Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tire".

Purely free giving is not only an ethical ideal, but also an objective economic reality. After all, pure consumers, that don’t produce physical goods and services, can only exist through an economic free gift: children, our next generation, for example. But any creative activity that will become fruitful in the future must be provided today by means of a surplus taken from the natural, given, excess produced in the global economy. Rudolf Steiner described this as a fundamental law of economy in 1922 in his World Economy lectures. Now, as history's fable tells us, this third beast, or third head of the first beast, fought a war of life and death over the domination of the earth with its two other sisters, or heads, the German and Russian, and has won the three world wars (the cold war was a real war for all purposes). This victory was celebrated with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the establishment of the US Empire in the 1990s. Since then the US has been consolidating its global hegemony. But this victory can be seen also from another perspective: it is gathering all the fruit into one basket, which is also gathering the three reversals into their original united root in the body of the first beast. And this reassembling of the three back into one, allows the one to appear in its true, pristine light.

We shall study now how the 2^nd beast that takes over humanity in the 21^stcentury.