Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

POLITICAL INITIATIVES 117

with an orange outline of new Britain superimposed, moving towards the European continent. It contained a weekly commentary, “The World We Live In” which, in the first issue, opened with the words:

It is with modesty moderated with confidence that we announce ourselves and state that the event of this week is in all truth the appearance of this paper. It is well to have faith in the fact of one’s earnest intention; and our endeavour will be to live and work for the renaissance and self-fulfilment of the British nation. There ought to be a New Britain; such is our heart’s desire, and such is the announcement. A new world and a better humanity must arise out of the present upheaval in human existence if that existence itself is not to be fatally thwarted. The moment has come for British men and women to take charge of their national destiny. In the dark labyrinth of the human crisis it is right for this Britain to lighten the darkness and find the way.

A group of regular contributors of a high quality were soon gathered together. Hugh Quigley, Matthew Norgate, Frederick Soddy, S. G. Hobson, Eimar O'Duffy, G. McEachran, J. MacMurray and John Grierson, and others.

Mitrinovic, under his old pen-name of M. M. Cosmoi, also contributed a series of articles to the first ten issues of the paper. Written in a style reminiscent of his first series of articles in The New Age, and with the same title of “World Affairs,’ the main theme was an extension of the ideas developed in that first series. They consisted of an examination of the crisis facing the world in the context of its evolution to a new age, a new Christendom. Hence, the crisis in Europe was nothing less than “a planetary spasm of birth and ascension into greater and new existence.’’° The responsibility for the creation of this new age lay not with the large collectivities of nation, race and class, but with alliances of individuals who were aware of themselves both as unique individuals and as constituent members of the whole of humanity. Such an order of knowledge could not be attained through “the imperialism of Science and the dictatorship of Technology.”37 What was required was the confidence and the faith to acknowledge “the glorious truth of the immanence of Divinity in our human essence. 38

Our human essence and meaning is the realisation in enfleshed and perishable experience of the true and actual universality of the Infinite in the actual and single uniqueness of the separated and unrepeatable individuality.

The goal and glory of humanity is to realise, both in action and will and also in the understanding and presentation, the vision that Reality is Spirit, and that