On the WC list, Peter Staudenmaier opines:¹

"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.² 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.

Tarjei Straume

1. The WC list in April 2002
2. Written in 2002. For an update on Peter Staudenmaier'r real or alleged academic credentials, see http://thebee.se/comments/PS/Staudenmaier.html

Anthroposophy, Critics, and Controversy