I have recently read the Andrew Rigby’s biography of Dimitrije Mitrinović, that I had found in Academia.edu and had downloaded freely and legally in PDF format.

To my knowledge, it is the only biography of Mitrinović, in English, and it was very interesting for me.

As the text can also be found in the Mitrinović Foundation’s website, I offer you a Microsoft Word version, with some small corrections1), clearer style, respecting the Rigby’s version pagination2, and with the addition of a final bibliography of personal recollections by the Mitrinović’s friends, made collecting the references given by the author throughout the text.

Some relations of Mitrinović with…

Investigating on Polanyi, I tried to focus on him and John Macmurray, his acolyte in the Christian Left3. But I discovered other thinkers as, for example, Erich Gutkind, Vladimir Solovyov, the Blutbund (W. Kandinsky, P. Klee, M. Buber…) or Frederik van Eeden.

… Polanyi

Concerning the personal relations between Polanyi and Mitrinović, I found nothing, but it was of great interest to see that the latter had a version of the “three revelations”, almost the same as the one that Polanyi added in the revised version of Origins of our Times (recalled The Great Transformation). I will focus on this point in another, dedicated future article.

… Rudolf Steiner

With this biography, we don’t know neither the exact links between Mitrinović’s group and Rudolf Steiner. I have seen, reading the different journals published by the Serbian guru, that Valerie Cooper was eurythmist and organized sessions in the Steiner’s Hall in London. The English group wanted to theorize a form of socialist guild, and they used Steiner’s “Three-Fold State” (or Parliament)4. Nevertheless, to find inspiration on this topic, they did not need a German speaker angry with the Fabian Society and the Theosophical Society since 1912, but could just have used ‘local’ thinkers as Morris, Cole, Owen, etc. So, why using Steiner and ask to Polányi to speak about him?

… other gurus as George Gurdjieff

Rigby shows in chap. 5, that Mitrinović wanted to become the A.R. Orage’s official guru, and was in competition with George Gurdjieff, then in France. He lost this battle, since Orage went to France to join him; we can conclude that they are not in the same network, or some kind of ‘colleagues’ as we could think after Rudolf Steiner’s denounced the English Freemasonry, in a 1918 text, Die soziale Grundforderung unserer Zeit – In geänderter Zeitlage [GA 186], and spoke about a crucial division between German and English freemasons that provoked the WWI – I don’t know if Steiner is a genius or a charlatan, I just see that M. and P. read him, and so I use his point of view as potential revealer of some hidden relations between influence networks.

… ‘open conspiracy’ Wellsian nebula

First, on the relations between Mitrinović’s nebula of ‘New’ (Europe, Britain, Atlantis, etc.) movements and journals and the associations that Wells wanted. Indeed, the New Europe movement leads to a Federal Union (and then, a World Federation), exactly as the New World Order that Wells will expose in 1939/1940 in his book The New World Order. So beyond the ideological similitudes we can observes, we don’t know which relations, or what position have the Mitrinović public groups with the ‘Open Conspiracy’ groups that Wells was looking forward to in 1928, and what relations could have Mitrinović and his Senate with other Wellsian and/or Fabian Society groups. Everything let think that they were two ‘pipers’5 paid by a US elite or the cosmopolite elite eager to develop a new form of aristocracy, on the ruin of the Catholic world, based on the new World religion and a technological rhetoric in order to convert all the Progressivists of all countries: the Rockefeller/Rothschild socialism, this kind of ‘socialism’ that could conceive an Iphone in a ‘capitalist’ country and produced it in another ‘communist’ one in order to sell it to all the Alpha and Beta humans of this ‘Brave New World’.

Remaining shadow areas on Mitrinović

After I read this biography, in spite of all its qualities, I stayed frustrated in some points.

  • the Europe and then, World Federation, that wanted Mitrinović’s group is very similar to the New World Order that H.G. Wells wanted in 1939/1940. We don’t know which relations, or what position have the Mitrinović public groups with the ‘Open Conspiracy’ groups that Wells was looking forward to in 1928, and what relations could have Mitrinović and his Senate with other Wellsian and/or Fabian Society‘s groups
  • Rigby shows that Mitrinović wanted to become the Orage’s official guru, and was in competition with Gurdjieff in France. He lose, since Orage went to France to join him; we can conclude that they are not in the same network, or some kind of colleague6
  • Ramiro de Maeztu if often quoted in New Britain, and he is strongly conservative. All these guys write about Christianity in spite of the fact that they are more Kabbalists than Christians, and they claim they are socialists in spite of the fact that they seem to prepare the advent not even of a Lenin Bolshevism, with a vanguard, but they are some dandies preparing the advent of some kind of Rockefeller/Rothschild/Carnegie/Ford ‘socialism’7 with an aristocracy and maybe the necessity to this aristocracy to invent themselves a new divine origin in order to have the legitimacy to create a new theocracy [see what Napoleon tried to organise in the beginning of the 19th century: not a catholic theocracy but a freemason/bourgeois theocracy]…
  • Rigby writes that the group never wanted to speak to him about sex or affairs between people of the Senate. However, when one investigates in some (almost) sectarian group, or mystical groups, like this one, it is important. Secret agencies use the acronym MICE(S) (for Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego, Sexuality), that are the five pillars that allow them to manipulate someone. So, if one can suspect a publisher or a thinker to have been a ‘piper’ for some sponsor(s), one has always to look these biographical aspects. Here:
    • Money: Rigby gives some explanations – Mitrinović didn’t have a lot of money and a benefactor lent him a flat in Bloomsbury street.
    • Ideology: this point is not totally clear. M. was a Serbian nationalist, then went to Germany were a gap appears in his ideas. Has he changed his mind, or has he been used as ‘piper’ for a hidden group, or a kind of Faust, notably the Blutbund group?8
    • Compromise: no element about that, or maybe in 1913 when he was in Munich and let the nationalist struggle quite strangely. He could have been involved in something and obliged to change life to play a new role for some hidden masters, maybe he entered in the freemasonry.
    • Ego: M. seems to have been a dandy. Maybe a role of guru in Bloomsbury was acceptable for him, with a few money, enough to pay restaurant and publish his journals, writing some sympathetic esoteric texts with a pseudonym in his publications, drink alcohol and maybe have affairs with his flocks, accepting not to be a top-level organizer or intellectual
    • Sexuality: Rigby writes that the group never wanted to speak to him about sex or affairs between people within the Senate. Valerie Cooper seems to have been his girlfriend – in the journals not a lot of theory about sexuality9, but in his conferences.

Notes

  1. All indicated by the markups of the Track change tool.
  2. So you can use it to quote the original pagination.
  3. They join the Auxiliary Movement (future Christian Left), in 1935, just after they both (and, to my knowledge, two unique ones to have been committed with both projects) participated in the Mitrinović’s journals.
  4. See Karl Polanyi’s “The Social State and the Three-Fold Parliament”, a 1935 article, I found in The Eleventh Hour.
  5. See STONOR SAUNDERS Frances, [1999] Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.
  6. Steiner, in Die soziale Grundforderung unserer Zeit – In geänderter Zeitlage [1918] spoke about a crucial division between German and English freemasons that provoked the WWI – I don’t know if Steiner is a genius or a charlatan, I just see that Mitrinović and Polanyi read him and so I use his point of view as potential revealer of some hidden relations between influence networks.
  7. Something that we could today call the Corporate Communism, that Klaus Schwab and World Economic Forum, or Bill Gates and some the GAFAM CEOs could represent clearly.
  8. Steiner made almost the same trip during his life but in the opposite direction, first London to meet the Theosophic Society, and then Kandinsky and the Misraïm-York Masonic rite in Berlin, where he published his journal Luzifer.
  9. Note that in his 1956 letter to Mihály [57/08, 23] (29 February 1956), P. noticed that Bolshevik were the only antinomian movement without theory about sexuality, conversely to Wells. See the Days of the Comet – or the Grants/Macmurray’s mores.

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