On the
WC list, Peter Staudenmaier opines:
"Another good place to start
are the various anthroposophist and pro-anthroposophist replies
to my article on anthroposophy and ecofascism (by Waage, Schiotz,
Fant, etc.), which you can find at Tarjei's site. Along with
Peter Zegers, I have responded to Waage and Fant and pointed
out exactly where they have misunderstood, denied, or misrepresented
the historical record. Some of these debates are around matters
of interpretation, where more than straightforward historical
circumstances are at stake. But quite a bit of what the anthroposophists
have said in these debates is pure denial of well established
empirical facts."
Peter Staudenmaier also writes:
"..... I think that fascist
and semi-fascist anthroposophists have understood Steiner's racist
and nationalist teachings more or less correctly."
And:
"I would think that Tarjei's
site is about the last place that folks searching for a solid
defense of anthroposophy would look. Tarjei explicitly endorses
Steiner's racial theories (you can find many examples of this
in his posts to this list from last year), and he routinely invents
falsehoods about historical works that he claims to have read.
For a fine example of this latter habit of Tarjei's, compare
his posts from last Fall on Goodrick-Clarke's book The Occult
Origins of National Socialism with the thorough excerpts from
that very same book posted by Neil Faiman (a defender of Waldorf,
not a critic) in early September, 2001, in the thread titled
"Re: Steiner's role in laying the foundations for the Holocaust".
This isn't too surprising, since Tarjei explicitly rejects historical
inquiry as such; his stated position is that only occultists
can study occult movements like anthroposophy."
And:
"My personal favorite of Tarjei's
denials of history is his post from September 2001 where he claimed
that I had made "three factual errors" in the first
two sentences of my article on anthroposophy and ecofascism.
All three of these "errors" turned out to be his; he
didn't even bother to look up the easy ones before spouting off
about them, and made a complete fool of himself. Even after we
caught him red-handed he continued to deny the simplest historical
realities. Indeed I can't think of a single substantive historical
issue where Tarjei didn't shoot himself in the foot, whether
the question at stake was Steiner's father's job or the specifics
of the Nazi versions of the Aryan myth. In other words, Mike,
if you're looking for reliable support for a pro-Waldorf stance,
for goodness sake don't look to Tarjei."
My comment:
Peter Staudenmaier's problem is that he is aspiring to
appear a historian, a scholar, or an objective researcher. He
is neither of these, but he succeeds in giving the impression
of being all of these things to his faithful audience that shares
his views by using expressions like "how historians work,"
"what scholars think," etc. When Peter Staudenmaier
uses the expression "empirical fact," he is borrowing
a term from science that is also used in anthroposophy (spiritual
science), but he forgets that empiricism is first of all subjective
before it can ever hope to become an objective fact in the scientific,
or even in the spiritual-scientific, sense.
Peter Staudenmaier apparently knows that he hit his head
against the wall with the opening remarks in his infamously slanderous
article "Anthroposophy
and Eco-Fascism". The lies he presented were not claimed
by me out of thin air, which he alleges above. These lies were
discovered, among others, by Cato Schiøtz in his Libra
article The Relationship of
Anthroposophy to Nazism, Racism, and Eco-Fascism and merely
pointed out to him by me when I subscribed to the WC list.
This was so embarrassing, not only to Peter Staudenmaier,
but to his enthusiastic supporter Dan Dugan, that the latter
denied me the privilege of calling a lie a lie, saying it was
an ad hominem to do so. If a lie were a person, Dugan would have
had a point. The fact remains, of course, that a lie comes from
a liar, but when denied the right to say so constituted nothing
less than biased censorship, in spite of mr. Dugan being fairly
well balanced, disciplined, and gentlemanly in his list management.
But this was the final straw and an additional good reason why
I will never participate on that list again.
Peter Staudenmaier, of course, is free to call all anthroposophists
liars and deniers of truth who are making fools of themselves
and so on in order to cover up his own falsehoods in the eyes
of his supporters, but it's doubtful that his will get him very
far. What he says about my take on Goodrick-Clarke's book is
utter nonsense. I read it six years ago in connection with researching
material for my Gateavisa
article about Nazi-occultism
(in Norwegian) and has nothing to do with a statement of mine
on the WC list where I told Peter Staudenmaier that the roots
of anthroposophy are to be found in the spiritual world, and
that in order to understand this properly, an occult conception
of historical events must be taken into consideration. Peter
Staudenmaier mixes these separate statements of mine at his pleasure
in order to get off the hook with regard to his own falsehoods
in the derogatory article he wrote about Steiner. But as far
as I can see, he's still hanging there.