Claims of 'Steiner racism' are a fraud.

Dear Folks;
The numerous postings by Peter Staudenmaier claiming to expose Rudolf Steiner as an arch-racist, give important insight into the educational methodologies proposed by this teacher, and the PLANS group who certainly approve of him, in contrast to what Waldorf schools offer that they so stridently oppose.
There are many examples, as for instance Staudenmaier’s claim that the Nazis persecuted the Ariosophists, Thule Society, and other white racist organizations. Immediately we see the respect he holds for his audience - he’s no less than proposing that the Nazis persecuted the Nazis, and thinks no one will call to mind the ‘night of the long knives’. The Nazis no more persecuted these white racists than they persecuted their own brownshirts. The Nazis didn’t persecute these groups, they exterminated a potentially rival leadership and assimilated a tractile membership into their own ranks. Staudenmaier knows this, and has consciously lied merely to be able to associate the name ‘Anthroposophy’ with these groups. He knows there are Nazi records to the effect that there was no question of assimilating the Anthroposophical Society into Nazism, any more than the freemasons, Jews, communists, etc., and so they were all persecuted throughout. To equate the paranoid extermination of like-minded leadership and assimilation of members (these groups did not need to exist because the Nazis did what they wanted better), to equate that with a persecution that totally rejects, is a conscious lie intended, not to educate, but to misinform and create prejudice.

And don’t we have a long road of misinformation (mal-education) to travel. I can only take a few beginning steps, right now. Another example is the repeated claim that Dr. Steiner borrowed, or owed, or derived basic content of his reports from Blavatsky and other Theosophists. This unsupported and unsupportable statement is always presented in a condescending manner and is used to introduce distorted fragments from wholly outside Steiner’s work, as if they represent what his roots were.
Well, Steiner insisted throughout his life that he reached his observations in an independent manner that relied on a clearly and repeatedly described philosophical method. He then tested his observations in light of the evidence of others, for years if not decades. He accorded much more unqualified credit to the likes of Goethe, Hegel, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, Moses, Pythagoras, etc., than he ever did to Blavatsky, and he positively warns about her successors. He states flatly and repeatedly that he neither approached the Theosophical Society, nor had anything to gain from it. On the contrary, he considered its founder, and especially later leaders, as confused, chaotic and prey to dubious spiritually investigative techniques. When invited to join, he did so on the basis of the spiritual wasteland of the time, the fact that he could recognize certain details which, though distorted, he could independently affirm, and on the hope of the clearly stated aims which the founders of that Society insisted on, that is:
1) To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour.
2) To encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy and science.
3) To investigate unexplained laws of nature, and the powers latent in human beings.

Boy! I can see the racists in their thousands flocking to march under that banner, can’t you? Well.... can’t you? No?
Yet that is exactly what PLANS, and Staudenmaier, propose again and again. And it is equally ludicrous to propose any racist attraction to the modern Anthroposophical statutes:

#4 The Anthroposophical Society is in no sense a secret society, but is entirely public. Anyone can become a member, without regard to nationality, social standing, religion, scientific or artistic conviction, who considers as justified the existence of an institution such as the Goetheanum in Dornach, in its capacity as a School of Spiritual Science. The Anthroposophical Society rejects any kind of sectarian activity. Party politics it considers not to be its task.

And of course these educators won’t tell you that the faulty educational methods employed by the Theosophists led to such a farcical fraud that Steiner had to rightly object, and so was forced out and had to help develop the independent group. Staudenmaier and PLANS won’t tell you these things because they are using related, faulty educational methods themselves to foist their own fraud, and they think they can manipulate their audience enough to assume that people won’t investigate facts for themselves.

What exactly do these people mean by ‘racist’ and ‘racism’ anyway? This is most interesting. Throughout, the terms are used solely in association with bits and pieces of Steiner’s work, chopped up to the point of inserting ‘quoted words’ in sentences made up for their own purposes. The only racists otherwise referred to are the widely advertised ‘white aryan’ cults who’s pathetic, unhealthy habits are media fodder. But now we come up against a really bold-faced Staudenmaier lie, in that there is a continual equation made between Steiner’s use of the word Aryan and the use of the word by white racists. This is a wholly conscious lie, designed to mis-educate.
As he well knows, Steiner uses the term Aryan to encompass seven great groups of people: 1) the East Indians, 2) the Persians, 3) the Assyrians, Babylonians, Chaldeans (whence Jews and Arabs) and Egyptians, 4) the Greeks and Romans, 5) the Anglo-Saxons & Germanics, 6) the Slavic peoples, and 7) the American First Nations. Go ask the white racist sects, with whom PLANS and Staudenmaier continually equate Steiner, to go march under that banner! The Nazis couldn’t.... actually no racist of any stripe could, but the lying educational methodology supported by PLANS foists the preposterous notion that Steiner’s explicitly transient, inclusive and non-aggressive use of the word Aryan is the same as the explicitly dogmatic, segregationist and aggressive use of the term by white racist groups, who have as little interest in the truth as Staudenmaier does
And this impossibility of racists actually employing Steiner’s work, in any other way than the butchered, hate-mongering form used by Staudenmaier, is easily shown by an actual thorough, open-minded review of all that Steiner had to say about the nature of race overall, and also of what he saw as essentials of inter-human relationships.

But we’re still left wondering, what do these people actually claim as racist? If they include the frank description of racial qualities, both desirable and undesirable (Steiner discusses lots of desirable qualities, but these are hidden or scoffed at as ‘contradictory’) - if frank racial descriptions are to be exposed as ‘racist’, then these boys and girls better sharpen their pencils and warm up their computers, because there’s a whole army out there to warn people about. Just review what archaeologists describe as magnificent ruins left by superior races and how they describe the primitive, backward relicts left by savage, barbaric races. Steiner is accused of racism when he points out that savage tribes today are declining left-overs of prehistoric races, but this same fact is elaborated innumerable times by historians, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists. Geo-political scientists, comparative religionists, geneticists, epidemiologists, etc. all provide a wealth of terms and descriptions that could quite as easily be twisted to appear ‘racist’.
Nowhere in Dr. Steiner’s frank descriptions can we find any call to racist segregation, hatred or attack against any individual or group - the fact that he describes hate-filled groups that will segregate themselves and attack others is a warning. Racist implications are all suggested and insinuated from outside by ‘introductions’, ‘headings’, and ‘explanations’ from Staudenmaier. Steiner’s descriptions are actually warnings of intrinsic qualities that must be, and can be, overcome to avoid future misery and strife.
In fact, if you subtract all the so-called anti-racist activity that Staudenmaier directs against Steiner, you are left with an embarrassingly paltry anti-racial effort, that leaves the real sources, and instigators, of racism quite untouched. In fact, the whole anti-racial stance of this group is sheer fraud. The truth of this seemingly extreme assertion is made evident in that Dr. Steiner gives us far, far more information to use in our fight against racism than they even attempt, which these people try to hide from us, or ‘sneer away’. To give merest beginning examples, let’s start with Staudenmaier’s complete perversion of the explicitly anti-racist Ahasuerus, or Ahasver, legend which he tries to fool us into thinking is racist and anti-Semitic.
We must be perfectly clear that Christianity was the first world-view that was able to accomplish in the West, what Buddhism had begun in the East - that is, to break the strangle-hold that the old racist Pagan religions held on humanity for millennia. For this reason, Christ Jesus, the Jew, was rightly viewed as the representative of the universal brotherhood of humanity. The legend runs thus: Christ was struck and rejected by Ahasver, as He laboured on his way to be crucified, and so Ahasver was condemned to harden in his race. That is, the Jew Ahasver rejected the Jew, Christ Jesus, not because He was a different race, but because Ahasver was a Jewish racist who hated the universal brotherhood He represented. Steiner lifted this out of its specific Jewish racist context to point out that racists of any stripe that reject advances towards the universal humanity brought by great leaders, preferring their own racial characteristics, will harden in the narrower limits of those characteristics. He also expanded this warning by insisting that if xenophobic racists like Ahasver (that even reject members of their own race who embrace other races), if these arch-racists succeed in maintaining their introverted racial rejection of human brotherhood for the next 4000 - 5000 years, then the changed conditions of life of those times will force their independent, highly self-conscious personal ego to become enslaved in a narrowly racially circumscribed, animalistic ‘group-ego’. We are assured that this will entail exceptional hardship for those involved, including the much abused ‘war of all against all’, and that it will be very difficult to ameliorate. Whatever else you may think of these ideas, they are certainly a strong warning against racism in any form. Staudenmaier completely hides this stark, anti-racist message and chops the whole story into perverted pieces so he can proclaim Steiner, and the legend, racist and ‘anti-Semitic’. This is only one clear sign of the sheer fraud of his, and his PLANS supporters, self-proclaimed anti-racism. Their only interest in ‘racism’, period, is that it’s the only way to attack Steiner’s work and pervert it into an emotionally charged, hate-mongering and therefore headline grabbing issue.
They are also not likely to soon tell us that Steiner said, flat out, that when it comes to social issues, Germans are either hopeless idealists, or colossal liars; nor that he insisted that the leading ‘races’ of any cultural epoch must maintain the highest moral standard or they themselves fall to the deepest depravity (ring any bells?).
And it’s Dr. Steiner, not them, who will give us the following advice, which would make any racist choke!.....
“But in order to grasp this, one must understand that in the outer sense world men can eliminate the antagonistic attitude arising from their differences of opinion, feelings and actions only by combating and adjusting within themselves all that would otherwise flow out into the external world. No one is going to quarrel with a different opinion in the soul of another if he first fights against all that must be combated in himself, if he establishes harmony among the various principles of his being. He will confront the outer world as one who loves, not as one who quarrels. It is all a matter of diverting the conflict from the outer world to the inner man. The forces holding sway in human nature must battle each other within man.”
“Two conflicting opinions must be looked at as follows: This is one opinion, it is tenable. That is the other, it is also tenable. But if I recognize only the one and consider justifiable only what I want, then I shall be involved in a struggle on the physical plane. To affirm my own opinion alone is to be selfish; to consider my actions the only justifiable ones means being egotistical. If I consider the other man’s opinion and endeavor to create harmony within myself, my attitude toward the other will then be a very different one. Only then will I begin to understand him. Diverting external strife into another channel - the harmonizing of inner human forces - that would be another way of expressing the idea of progress in the evolution of mankind.” (4 July 1909, in: The Gospel of St. John and Its Relation to the Other Gospels, 1982, The Anthroposophic Press, pp.209-210)
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Next we come to some real ‘meat and potatoes’ of PLANS’, and Staudenmaier’s, fraudulent educational methods. For what do they claim, over and over? That anthroposophists are hiding and sanitizing - that is, selectively presenting - Steiner’s work. The sick joke of this claim is made evident by asking one simple question.... Where, then, do these pretend experts get all the so-called damning evidence they have regarding Steiner’s work? Have they snuck into some secret vault, or received brown envelopes from some guilt-ridden insider?
No! These passages all come from freely available texts provided with the assistance of the Anthroposophical Society. It is Staudenmaier and his cohorts at PLANS who butcher, hide and distort. A great example are lectures said to be crucial examples of Steiner’s racism not yet translated into English. So does he grace us with a full presenting of these lectures? Not a chance. Given the vast amount that he has posted all over, and the seriousness with which he claims to view the issue, we can’t suppose that it would have been too great an effort for him to type these up. Indeed, he has time to dig up poor old Blavatsky, and lay some of her shreds at Steiner’s feet. It’s clearly not in his interest to actually present any full accounting of Steiner, even to the point of individual lectures - in his view, we’re too likely to make up our own minds, so we need a carefully weeded version, framed in suitable language of his to incite shock and disgust.... in short, hate-mongering.
This educational method is applied to all Dr. Steiner’s work cited, carefully omitting or discounting crucial qualifying concepts which totally eliminate and reverse, racist implications. These pathetic liars better pray there’s no reincarnation, but at any event it’s not part of their educational agenda to inform you that Steiner insisted that karmic balance is maintained, by those who hate a race in one lifetime being reborn in that race in the next. Nor are they going to give any credence to Steiner’s insistence that souls actually do go through Kamaloka after death, where they truly reap as they sowed; nor to his repeated view that the only justifiable role for the leading culture is to develop love, compassion and self-sacrifice to the highest degree, and that variance from this will bring dire consequences; nor the whole core of moral implications which really occupy the vast output of his work.
Not a chance! PLANS and Staudenmaier merely sneer that these are ‘invoked doctrine’, supposedly used by Steiner to sanitize and sugar-coat their invented so-called ‘core teaching of racism’.
Here’s a brief example : “That which manifested itself to the shepherds and hovered above the head of the Nathan Jesus extended its power into John the Baptist, whose preaching was primarily the re-awakened preaching of Buddha. This fact is in the highest degree noteworthy and cannot fail to make a deep impression upon us when we recall the sermon at Benares wherein Buddha spoke of the suffering in life and the release from it through the Eightfold Path. He often expanded a sermon by saying in effect: ‘Hitherto you have had the teaching of the Brahmans; they ascribe their origin to Brahma himself and claim to be superior to other men because of this noble descent. These Brahmans claim that a man’s worth is determined by his descent, but I say to you: Man’s worth is determined by what he makes of himself, not by what is in him by virtue of his descent. Judged by the great wisdom of the world, man’s worth lies in whatever he makes of himself as an individual!’ - Buddha aroused the wrath of the Brahmans because he emphasized the individual quality in men, saying: ‘Verily it is of no avail to call yourselves Brahmans; what matters is that each one of you, through his own personal qualities and efforts should make of himself a purified individual’. Although not word for word, such was the gist of many of Buddha’s sermons. And he would often expand this teaching by showing how, when a man understands the world of suffering, he can feel compassion, can become a comforter and a helper, how he shares the lot of others because he knows that he is feeling the same suffering and the same pain.” (20 Sept. 1909, in: The Gospel of St. Luke, 1964, Rudolf Steiner Press, pg. 120)

“Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless true that all the philosophical and moral teachings since produced by humanity are no more than a feeble beginning of what was established by Buddha. However greatly people may admire different philosophies, however fervent their enthusiasm may be for Kantian thought and other such systems - everything is elementary compared with the all-embracing principles of the Eightfold Path. Humanity can only slowly reach the stage of understanding what lies behind the words of this teaching. At the right moment something of this kind is established in the world for the first time; from this point evolution advances and humanity acquires, but only after long ages, what was first exemplified in a mighty deed. Thus in his day Buddha brought to the world the teaching of love and compassion as a token for coming generations of human beings who must gradually acquire the capacity to recognize and understand from within themselves the principles of the Eightfold Path.” (24 Sept. 1909, in: ibid, pp. 155-156)

“We have heard that Buddha brought to mankind the great teaching of compassion and love. Here is one of the instances where what is said in occultism must be taken exactly as it stands, for otherwise it might be objected that at one time Christ is said to have brought love to the Earth, and at another that Buddha brought the teaching of love. But is that the same? On one occasion I said that Buddha brought the teaching of love to the Earth and on another occasion that Christ brought love itself as a living power to the Earth. That is the great difference. Close attention is necessary when the deepest concerns of humanity are being considered; for otherwise what happens is that information given in one place is presented elsewhere in a quite different form....” (25 Sept. 1909, in: ibid, pg.172)

What is it called when someone ignores, discredits, and hides everything that another person says, except what they can twist into a bad light...., according to Staudenmaier and PLANS, it’s education!

Finally, for now, one of the really educationally damaging fraudulent claims made again and again by this group, is that Dr. Steiner is to be despised, discounted and ridiculed for contradictory statements, as though this was a sure sign of falsehood. Aside from several invented, phony ‘contradictions’, one is left wondering, then, when this group so sanctimoniously concerned with sound education, will start railing against biologists for claiming that the flight of the bumblebee is aerodynamically impossible, or physiologists for insisting that the only way we see is through a microscopic, inverted image at the back of our eyes - when what we experience as sight is a macroscopically detailed, right-side-up view projected into space, or astronomers for saying they need three mutually exclusive calculations to correctly predict the suns’ position through the year? When will they sneer, ‘and here he goes again contradicting himself’, the next time they hear a doctor say that he can use a poison to make someone healthy, or a physicist describe light as a particle and a wave, or expound on the several contradictory forms of sulfur that exist at the same temperature and pressure?
The real world abounds with contradictions, and you cripple students in life if you teach them to reject them or cover them up, instead of open-mindedly and persistently investigating them avoiding easy theories and preconceptions. But of course, Staudenmaier, and his PLANS cohorts, are not interested in actual education, otherwise they wouldn’t expect us to ‘learn’ from such a pathetically picked-over shred of Steiner’s work, carefully framed by them to incite prejudice.


Take care, Give care
Be aware....... And beware. Rick