Part Two: Rudolf Steiner: The Racist Who Invented Organic Farming and Waldorf Schools

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
What's anti semitic my organic farming. I'm Robert Evans hosted
Behind the Bastards. This was yet another trademark unbelievably bad introduction.
Uh my guest with me for part two of our
series on Rudolph Steiner, as with part one, Chris Croft Day. Yeah,

(00:21):
I'm good man, Harry had to be back. I'm good.
I'm doing good. I'm drinking some cold brew coffee and
uh still got this sinus thing that I've had, but
I think I'm gonna have it for life, probably because
of bad shit I did when I was a ghost. Well,
your ghosts, no, I mean your ghost knew that. The
lessons you gain from this sinus infection, yeah nothing, I'm

(00:45):
bald too. Can you imagine what should I did when
I was a ghost? I can remember. I can remember
the deep satisfaction I had sitting in mosle and watching
air strikes hit apartment buildings and seeing little kids stream
out of them, just blood pouring down their face is
and going, I'm glad they're ghosts made the choice to
go through this. That was a smart decision for those ghosts.

(01:06):
Those kids are gonna learn some lessons. I went to
one do I go to those Rudolph Steiner doctor, what
are they calling in anthroposophist? And I was like, I
was sinus infection and he was like, what what do
you expect? And then I was good. I had to
pay him fifty gave you some crayons, though you know
how you behaved? Do you know how you behaved in
the fourteenth century? And I was like, I don't know.

(01:27):
You were a real dick. So you're yeah, you're you're
of course you're bald, never signus infection. Mm hmmm. So
we're talking Rudolph Steiner now. Uh. Rudolf Steiner obviously still
has huge numbers of admirers and followers in the world today.
Some of those people maintain a website called Waldorf Answers

(01:48):
that looks as if it was codd and last updated
around two thousand three. And immediately after I wrote that line,
I actually browsed over to the chunk of the site
where I could find out when it was started, and
I found out that it was actually opened in two
thousand and four. So I'm just pretty good at guessing
when websites were made, is all. I'm all I'm talking about. Uh,
So here's what they have to say about anthroposophy quote.

(02:10):
Waldorf education was developed by Rudolf Steiner eighteen sixty one
to nineteen at the beginning of the twentieth century. It
is based on Steiner's broader philosophy and teachings called anthroposophy.
Anthroposophy holds that the human being is fundamentally a spiritual being,
and that all human beings deserve respect is the embodiment
of their spiritual nature. This view was carried into Waldorf education,
is striving to develop in each child there in eight

(02:30):
talents and abilities. Waldorf schools operate in a non discriminatory
way without regard to race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or national origin.
Some of the ideas in Waldorf education and anthroposophy are
complex and require a degree of goodwill on behalf of
the reader to grasp. So goodwill, yeah, yeah, you gotta really,

(02:52):
you gotta really have some goodwill to ignore the racism.
That's a funny way to put it. That is a
funny way to play. Most taken a while to think
of that one. Yeah, that was a long meeting. How
do we how do we phrase? Our leader was basically
a Nazi? You know, Frank Lance is no, he's a
Republican guy that's made a zillion dollars off of naming uh,

(03:16):
you know, social programs, entitlements and uh and uh he
named you know, enhanced interrogation and he's in charge of
like language for the Republicans and he is a fortune.
I mean, I gotta say he's nailing It's what's interesting?
Go ahead? Yeah no, I just he. I was going
to say he's nailing it like the CIA was nailing

(03:37):
those men's testicles to their wooden chairs in the enhanced interrogation. Yeah,
that's that's that's um So the kind of people that
come up with, like, how are we gonna say, like,
you know, you should you should uh read this and
and not be freaked out by the racism, like what
what you know? Good will? Well, good will read it

(03:58):
with goodwill? Like read it like an asshole. Again. Once
I get my friends dangerously drunk on every clear at
the end of the night and they wake up in
horrible pain, I tell them it's going to take some
goodwill on their behalf to forgive me for poisoning them.
And it does. And just real quick, here's something in
terms of behind the bastards. I would definitely fucking classify

(04:20):
Frank Lance as a bastard and a friend of mine.
He's you know, he's he's made a zillion dollars off
of like rebranding. Uh. Social The thing that makes me
the maddest is social programs being called entitlements. I mean,
I just can't believe how why liberals got on board
with calling him entitlements. But probably because they're not really
politics and they're not really liberals either. Um, but he

(04:44):
hired my friend to play at his party. Frank Lance.
Frank Lance has a full sized diner, an actual diner
built on his property, like a fantasy diner, like a
whole you know, with a working soda gun and everything.
Jesus Christ, and he had, he had like uh, he had,
Like he's so much money. He has a replica of
a diner in his yard, and he he wants to

(05:06):
live that scene from the first Back to the Future
movie every day of his life. And nobody can do
this party. Nobody can hit like a thousand waiters and
a million He has no friends. Well, yeah, why would
you be that guy's friends behind the masters? The Master's
end up all alone with all their ship and all
their dumb theories. Yeah, now, so we just talked about

(05:28):
how in the Waldorf Answers site they they really point
out that like Waldrop schools are nondiscriminatory, they don't take
into account race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and national origin. And
here's where I point out that if you google Rudolph
Steiner anti Semitism, you will find yourself presented with a
return from this website and a page titled Rudolf Steiner

(05:49):
an active opponent of Anti Semitism. That title is all
in big capital letters, and it purports to be a
study of the man's life and writing that proves that
Steiner battled against anti Semitism his entire life. The website
notes in the eighteen nineties, Steiner vehemently argued against the
outrageous excesses of the anti Semites and condemned the anti
Semitic brutes as enemies of the human rights. As a

(06:10):
convinced liberal whose position coincided with that of reform Jewry,
he actively supported the integration and full legal and social
status of the Jews in Europe. In eighteen eighty eight,
he wrote, the Jews need Europe, and Europe needs the
Jews against the anti Semitic propaganda of hatred. He set
his ideal one should only value mutual actions between individuals.
It is completely uninteresting if one is a Jew or

(06:30):
a German. That is so simple that one is almost
stupid saying it. How stupid there's one then not have
to be to say the opposite. So it goes on
like that for quite a while, quoting very real things
that Steiner wrote or said arguing against anti Semitism. The
essay would probably be very convincing evidence of the fact
that Rudolf Steiner was not an anti Semite if it
weren't for the fact that number one, there's almost nothing

(06:53):
in there about statements made by Steiner after nineteen hundred
and number two, people who aren't anti Semitic rarely need
entire web pages to voted to how not anti semitic
they are. Um, you don't run into that, for say
Georgia O'Keeffe, Yeah, yeah, yeah, thankfully, our old friend Peter
Staudenmeyer of Marquette University. But together a detailed breakdown of

(07:14):
Rudolph's ideas about the Jews, titled Rudolf Steiner and the
Jewish Question. It's a very nuanced piece, and I'm sure
that the Waldorf people would describe it as a hit piece,
but I don't think it takes that tone at all.
Stodden Meyer acknowledges that Steiner's views of the Jews changed
significantly overhit the course of his published career. Quote in
the overall ark of Steiner's intellectual development, his attitude towards

(07:35):
Jews moved from an unreflective embrace of anti Semitic prejudices
to public denunciation of the excesses of organized anti Semitism,
to an elaborate racial theory of cosmic evolution in which
anti Semitic themes played a prominent role. So he was
an anti Semite who had a creative history to his
anti semitism. Um who is the stodden Meyer man. Studden

(07:55):
Meyer is a professor at Marquette University of German History
who has done most of the writing that I found
ound on Rudolf Steiner. He's like the expert on Rudolf
stein So the people of the Waldorf School do not
like this stoden Meyer man. They're not going to be
fans of this Stodden They're like, would you shut up? Yeah,
stop reading the things that are Guru wrote, Yeah, Yeah,

(08:16):
you're making them look bad. You need to have more goodwill.
That's it. Yeah, you're not reading it right, you're not
using enough good will. So prior to about God, yeah,
it's it's baddie. Now. I want you to remember. In
the Waldorf Answers section, one of the things they say
is that he wanted greater integration of Jewish people with Germans. Right,

(08:38):
he wanted more integration, which sounds nice if you just
think of the term integration the way it was used
when say, we moved away from segregation in the United States.
That's not what Steiner means. If most of your fucking
time or any of your time talking about let's put
it this way, if you if you spend a lot

(09:01):
of your time talking about Jews, there's something wrong with you.
If you, specifically, if you're talking about the Jews, if
you're a white guy, why are you talking about the
Jews all the time? And why is anybody talking about
just talk about Why don't you talk about what you
had for breakfast? Why don't you stop talking about the Jews? Well,

(09:21):
and Rudolph Steiner talked about the Jews a lot. I
mean that's the thing is, like the people defending Steiner,
it's like, well, but why did he talk so much
about the fucking Jews. He's not Jewish, so why are
you talking about Jews so much? Well, that's what we're
gonna get into. So prior to n O two, it's
fair to say that Rudolf Steiner's anti Semitism was not

(09:41):
out of line with mainstream anti semitism in Germany and Austria, Hungary,
uh during his Pan German nationalist period. He was no
more racist than the average person, and he was probably
less racist. He was no more racist than the average
person of goodwill. Yeah, yeah, well you gotta you gotta
be fair about that, Like people believed all sorts of
crazy shit about the Jews. As a matter of course,

(10:04):
back then, there's literally there's still to this day churches
in Europe with like reliefs of Jewish babies suckling at
the utters of a pig, Like that's a thing that's
on ancient medieval churches. So like you grow up in
that there's a base level line of anti Semitism, then
I can't judge you for more than you judge everyone
in the society for right, So there's like you have
to in order to for me to like really harp

(10:26):
on you specifically as an anti Semite, if you came
up in Germany and Austra Hungary during this period, you
have to go to another level of anti sent Yeah. Yeah,
Um So in the early nineteen hundreds, Uh, Steiner's ship
got weird and decided the more hateful and extreme because
and h yeah, Uh, We're gonna spend a while talking
about that. Steiner spent most of his life is what

(10:47):
you would call an assimilationist, which is what they talk
about in that uh in that Waldorf Answers part where
he wanted to see integration. Um. But what this mint
in Steiner's context is he wanted to see Jewish people
assimilated into German culture. Now, this is better than wanting
to kill them all, but he'd still sought the elimination
of Judaism like that was his goal. He wrote that

(11:07):
he hoped quote Jewelry as a people would simply cease
to exist. He didn't want this to happen by them
being killed. He just wanted them absorbed into German society
and the whole culture and religion. To to die was
his goal. Fucking settlers that wanted to make Native Americans
go to Christian schools and just exactly make white people
out of them exactly. You can say it's better than

(11:29):
like the literal Nazi policy of gassing them to death,
but like not a lot better the same yea motivated
by the same yeah. And you can also see how
like that could easily turn into the other thing given
a couple of bad years. Um yeah. Now. Steiner considered
himself quote German by descent and racial affiliation, and he

(11:51):
was offended by the idea that Jewish people considered themselves
Jews as well as Germans. He thought that represented a
fundamental conflict of interest and made it impossible for Jews
people to truly be loyal to Germany. This is silly,
but I'd like to remind you that when JFK was elected,
a whole lot of Americans were worried he'd be loyal
to the pope rather than the United States. So everybody's

(12:11):
dumb is the point. Uh. In eighteen nineties, Steiner wrote
an article on stylistic corruption in the press, in which
he blamed Jewish journalists for using quote Jewish vernacular idioms
and other expressions mocking the German language with goodwill. Yeah
he didn't. I'm not going to say it's fucking amazing.

(12:34):
In eighteen eighty six, he wrote an article in which
he called Jews a people whose religion does not recognize
freedom of the spirit. He believed Jewish people had no
ability to appreciate the religion of love that was Christianity.
In eight eight he wrote extensive defenses of a book
Homunculous by Austrian author Robert Hammerling. Homunculus was, of course,
a work of profound anti Semitism, chronicling what Hammerling viewed

(12:57):
is the Jewish drive to conquer the entire world. Hamerling
thought Zionism, which was the desire of some Jewish people
to immigrate to Palestine. He believed that was part of
a scheme to quote found a new kingdom of Israel,
destined to encompass the whole world Eventually, y'all remember when
Israel conquered the world. Uh, if you're a racist, you
do um. Now. Rudolph loved this book. He called critics

(13:21):
of it over sensitive Jews who couldn't make an objective
judgment of the work. Is this Steiner quote? It certainly
cannot be denied that Jewry today still behaves as a
closed totality, and that it has frequently intervened in the
development of our current state of affairs in a way
that is anything but favorable to European ideas of culture.
But Jewy as such has long since outlived its time.

(13:42):
It has no more justification within the modern life of
people's and the fact that it continues to exist is
a mistake of world history whose consequences are unavoidable. We
do not mean the form of the Jewish religion alone,
but above all the spirit of Jewelry, the Jewish way
of thinking. Now, what's what's the charitable read of that? People?

(14:06):
You can't eat this fucking one dude decides that a
whole fucking culture needs to go away because that's what
he thinks sitting in his fucking chair and his stupid
study or whatever. I mean, it's just so arrogant. It's
it's just the height of it's it's incredible that that
that someone would sit and say like, oh, a whole

(14:28):
culture needs to go away because I just I'm tired
of it or I don't like it, and it's it's
you know, it's particularly frustrating and particularly offensive because Steiner
directed his anti Semitic, his desire for assimilation was focused
primarily towards the Jewish people in his area, Viennese Jews,
which of all the Jewish communities in Europe, Austria's Jewish
population had done the most to integrate themselves in the

(14:51):
mainstream society. Is a general rule, the most patriotic people
in Austria and in a lot of like German speaking
areas were Jewish Germans. During World War One, they served
at a disproportionately high rate in both the Austria, Hungarian
and the German militaries. So the fact that Steiner targeted
these Jewish people in particular suggest that he was really, really,

(15:12):
really fucking anti Semitic, because like he wasn't just going
after like the like obviously it wouldn't be okay either,
But he wasn't focusing on like Jewish refugees from Russia
or whatever and like harping on them because they spoke
a different language. He was looking at people who were
identical to everyone else but wearing yamakas and like furious
about that. So like he's not just an anti Semite,

(15:34):
he's like a gold star fucking anti Semite. Like he's
he's particularly fucking racist in one of the most racist
places that's ever existed. Um, that's important to note. So
in the late eighteen nineties, Steiner became intellectually taken by
the writing of individualist anti religious thinkers like Max S. Turner.
As a result, he focused more on the Jewish religion

(15:57):
and Zionism. Now, if you'll remember that Wall dwarf answers
defensive Steiner. They called him an opponent of anti Semitism
and claimed that he railed against it. When they make
those claims, they pull out quotes like this from Steiner.
Anti Semitism is not only a danger to Jews, it
is also a danger to non Jews. Anti Semitism and
with it, racism is a symptom of spiritual decay. It

(16:17):
is a symptom of a cultural disease. Therefore, it is
a duty of everyone to fight against it in all
areas as energetically as possible. And that is something Steiner
really said. Here's another thing Steiner really said. Actual anti
Semitism is not the cause of this Jewish hyper sensitivity,
but rather the false image of the anti Jewish movement
invented by overwrought imaginations. Anyone who has dealt with Jews

(16:40):
knows how deep runs the tendency to create such an image.
Even among the best of their nation, mistrust towards non
Jews has completely taken over their souls. So Steiner is
saying that anti Semitism is bad and uh in you know,
evidence of ignorance. But he's also saying that anti Semitism
is for the most part, a fake problem invented by
Jewish people to justify their persecution complex, which sounds really

(17:03):
familiar to things some people say about racism today, like oh,
it's bad to be racist against you know, black people
in Native Americans or Hispanics. But really, most of the
time when those people see racism, they're just being oversensitive,
like like I'm tired fucking right wing Internet right there, Yeah,
right wing Internet or right wing people in general are
just like, oh, the liberals just love saying racist. It's

(17:28):
not because is terrible. Yeah, it's not because there since
they just can't stop saying that because they just the
other it's hysterical about race, and it has nothing to
do with the fact that we're all actively acting like
racists know it has everything. They're just they're just looking
for racist if racism is at the same level it's
always been, which is falling, don't charitably read our racism

(17:51):
Like if they did, they wouldn't have a problem with it. Yeah,
I mean I just saw it last night after the debates,
like something like, Um, the Democrat, I mean the Republicans
saying like the Liberals can't stop talking about racism, like
that's there, that's their thing. It's just yeah, it's a
fake problem. Yeum, the from over sensitive people of color. Yeah.

(18:14):
And you know, Steiner was the kind of guy his
defenders will always pull out. He has a bunch of
quotes about anti Semitism being bad, and they'll always pull
out those quotes where he rails against particularly organized anti semitism. Um.
And you know he did say those things, but the
write ups of him that quote them ignore quotes like this,
which is also from Rudolf Steiner. I consider the anti

(18:37):
Semites to be a harmless people. The best of them
are like children. They want something to blame for their woes.
Much worse than the anti Semites are the heartless leaders
of the Jews, who are tired of Europe, Herzel and Nordau.
They exaggerate an unpleasant childnishnists into a world historical trend.
They pretend that a harmless squabble is a terrible roar
of cannons. They are seducers and tempters of their people,

(18:58):
again saying this about twenty years before the Holocaust. It's
just a gaslighting. And that's I mean, like there was
no you know, that's a modern expression. But the idea is,
it's what what Trump does too. He says something racist
and then says that he didn't say it or that
it was taken wrong, and you just keep flip flopping.
You keep saying something horrible and then saying that people

(19:21):
uh took it wrong, and then you say something horrible again,
and then and then somehow you end up like you're
I don't know. It's like you introduce this is so complicated,
but like you introduced, like you start the problem and
then it becomes a problem. And then you say that
that I don't know how. I just I can't do it.
I can't. I had it and I had it and

(19:42):
I lost it. But but just the idea that basically
you you caused this situation, and then you accuse everybody
else of being oversensitive to it, and and and then
use that as part of your proof that the race
you're talking about is is somehow flawed. Like look at
them flipping out, like you know what I mean, Like
that's kind of I'm not saying. I'm just saying, like

(20:03):
I didn't say anything that bad, but they're just their
nature is to flip out too much, which is a flaw,
like which is a way to be racist. Like look
at them, they can't take anything, like not like a
white person, I could take as much as possible, but
these Jews flip out about everything. Watch this, you know,
it's it's it's it's it's a very subtle um and
an insidious way of of of of continuing the racism

(20:25):
to say that they are overly sensitive. Yeah, and there's
a bunch of Steiner quotes that basically follow the pattern
of anti Semitism is bad. But here's what the Jews. Yeah,
like these people can't take any criticism because they're Jews. Now,
for the sake of fairness, I have to point out
repeatedly that everybody was anti Semitic in Germany at this time,

(20:48):
pretty much everybody. It was in the air and literally
chiseled into the stone walls of churches. Winston Churchill is
famous today among Israeli's for being one of the greatest
advocates that nation has ever had. He was an intense
and outspoken supple order of Israel, and of course a
staunch foe of the Nazis. In February of nineteen twenty,
Churchill wrote an article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald titled
Zionism versus Bolshevism quote. This movement among the Jews is

(21:12):
not new, from the days of Spartacus why Shop, to
those of Karl Marx and down to Trotsky, Bella Coon,
Rosa Luxembourg and Emma Goldman. This worldwide conspiracy for the
overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on
the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and of
impossible equality has been steadily growing. So Winston Churchill, who
again UH is considered to be one of the great

(21:35):
UH patrons of of the Israeli nation in the twenties,
was saying stuff that was essentially directly in line with
Nazi theories about like the Jewish people is behind socialism
in the Bolshevik Revolution, which is the same ship Steiner
saying so, my point in bringing this up is the
fact that Steiner believed this ship during the late eighteen
hundreds and early nineteen hundreds definitely qualifies him as anti Semitic,

(21:56):
but it doesn't mean he was or would have been
a Nazi if he'd lived long enough. There were people
who believed similar things to this, and when the Nazis
came along, we're able to recognize Nazi propaganda as insane
and evil and work against the Holocaust. Like Winston Churchill
for all of his flaws, once the Nazis started saying
the same ship, he like stepped back from that. Um

(22:17):
so uh. We can't necessarily say that Rudolf Steiner would
have gone to bed with the Nazis, especially since he
died in but we can look at what his followers
did once the Nazis came to power. And speaking of
the Nazis coming to power, Chris, yes, it's time for
an ad transition. I don't know why that's a bad

(22:38):
ad transition to make that that's not a good one.
Oh boy, oh boy, I have I have made an
error speaking of Hitler's unique brand of esoteric anti semitent Nope,
that's not the right way either. Um, who shit, um yeah,
now a word from our sponsor, which is not a Nazi.

(23:04):
We're back. What I love about is that they aren't Nazism.
Oh boy. Uh, we're gonna lose some money from this.
It's difficult to transition from this sort of subject matter
into lighthearted Uh, you know, whatever happens. I don't know
what sponsors you have, but you know something that delivers
candy bars. Yeah, they're not They're not Nazis. Uh. I

(23:27):
should note that several times, um, most were Nazis. Many
of Rudolf Steiner's followers. Yeah, funk, Rulf Steiner. This guy man,
someone needed to put him to bed. He talked, he
talked too much, he wrote too much. This man needed
to have his coffee taken away. Yeah, he's one of

(23:48):
those guys, like his whole life isn't that interesting. It's
just he had all these crazy ideas and people followed them,
and a lot of problems have been I have nice ideas, like,
I have nice ideas, but I also have clinic coll depressions,
so I don't I don't write seventeen papers a day
about my nice ideas. But then there are these non
depressed assholes who are idiots who have boundless energy to

(24:10):
write five thousand racist treatises every fucking week. Okay, well,
but maybe if you would spend more time reading the
ghost library that lives in space, you would have more
ideas to write about two. All right, I'm too tired
to make up ship like that. You gotta visit the
ghost like I gotta have a defective brain to that

(24:31):
has like you have to be dumb and like really
really really um not depressed, and just get out of
bed every morning and just start fucking jabbering about nonsense.
I mean, that's these kind of people. They had endless energy.
That assholes with endless energy is what ruins everything. Trump's
an example. The guy's up on you want to run
around all day to saying ship. I mean, the guys

(24:53):
much energy. This goes into my theory that you shouldn't
stop rich people from developing problematic drug addictions. I think
that's true. Yeah, if you should just let him. If
if Rudolf Steiner at age nineteen had actually been doing
a shipload of opium and had died at age none
of this would be a problem. Yeah, it's a shame.
It's a shame. Hashtag give opiates to rich kids. Yeah, Like,

(25:17):
let's someone gives them opiates to Ben Superior, Ben Sapiro. Yeah, boy,
he's an example of one of these guys. Like it's
just like, shut the funk up, never had a real job,
way too much energy, fucking oxy sleep in one day, Shapiro. Now,
after nineteen o two, when Steiner joined the Theosophical Society,

(25:40):
he became inculcated with Madame Blavatsky's ideas about the mythical
arian race. After this point, the idea of root races
and arianism took an increasingly central role in his developing philosophy.
The Theosophical Society was not an explicitly anti Semitic organization
Jewish people were allowed to join, but an awful lot
of their beliefs sound like straight up Nazi propagy and a.

(26:00):
In a book called The Key to Theosophy, Madame Blovotsky
wrote quote, if the root of mankind is one, then
there must also be one truth which finds expression in
all the various religions except in the Jewish. All religions
are cool except Jewish people, Which does I mean for Europeans.

(26:21):
In the late eighteen hundreds, that's woker than most. Um,
she wasn't like Europeans should own India, I guess, so, yeah, yeah, Now,
Blovotsky viewed the Jew as the almost mythical antithesis to
the Arian, the opposite of the spiritual and progressive ubermanch.
If this sounds exactly like Nazi racial theory, that's because

(26:44):
it essentially is. Now Chris, I'm gonna guess you've heard
of the Tuliss Society. You know, I have not. It's
spelled fuel society, like the top racks that people have
on their four wheel drive cars. Uh yeah, I still
really not. I'm not familiar. I mean, I'm not an
exactly sure what it is. Well, if you've if you've
read your Hellboy comics or played a lot of Wolfenstein

(27:05):
games where there's like Nazis doing dark occult magic and stuff,
the actual historical root of all of those myths is
the Tulis Society. Uh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're they're
pretty famous, more famous, but yeah, exactly, this is the
root of that um and the Tulist Society was a
real occult society, and they financially supported a little group

(27:29):
you might have heard about called the Deutsche are Biter
Partei which became the Nazi Party back before you know
Hitler actually joined UM Now. Hitler himself was never a
member of the Tulis Society, but many influential Nazis were,
guys like Hans Frank who ran Poland for the Reich,
Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Fewer, and Dietrich Eckhart, who actually

(27:50):
founded the original Nazi Party. The Tulist Society's impact gets
exaggerated often, but they did provide the core members of
the early Nazi movement, and these people held the same
esoteric anti Semitic beliefs about the eternal struggle of Arians
and Jews as the Theosophical Society did, which makes sense
because both groups were closely tied together. Many members of

(28:10):
the Tulis Society were adherents of Madame Blovotsky's teachings, So
the tool of society is like they have events with
the Theosophical Society, they have members in common, a lot
of their teachings are based on Madame Blovotsky's writings, and
the Thulish Society becomes the sort of intellectual and spiritual
center of the early Nazi movement and of course, Rudolf

(28:32):
Steiner was a hugely influential part of the development of
the Theosophical Society. It's hard to trace out how many
Nazi ideas are directly descendant of Steiner's and how many
are just sort of a lot of people thinking about
similar things. But he had a big influence on the
Theosophical Society, and the Theosophical Society was like one of
the strained carriers for the Nazi disease. So that's where

(28:54):
we're going to here. So while it wouldn't be accurate
to say that Anthroposophy inspire the development of Nazism, it
is accurate to say that Anthroposophy and Nazism share common
ideological origins. They are at least first cousins. It is
true that Steiner was allowed critic of organized anti Semitism,
his writing on the subject was mostly limited to the

(29:14):
period right around when he first got involved in the
Theosophical Society. Once he left in nineteen twelve and founded Anthroposophy,
he progressed towards racial beliefs that were basically identical to
where Hitler and his friends wound up. I'm going to
quote one last time from Professor Staddenmeyer's piece on Steiner
and the Jewish Question. In Steiner's eyes, racial exclusiveness was

(29:35):
the hallmark of Jewish identity. He accused Jews of national egoism,
along with materialism, abstract thinking, and an obstinate refusal of progress,
in a remarkable about face from his nineteen hundred and
nineteen oh one writings. By nineteen oh five, Steiner was
complaining to his future wife about the corrosive and totally
materialistic consequences of the continuing Semitic influence within the Aryan epoch.

(29:58):
His wife was having a lot of fun. She's wife
was like, tell me more that he was great in bed.
Don't let me tell you about the Jews. God, she
must have been having a blast. Yeah, that's that's that
was like, Yeah, could you please stop talking about the Jews. Yeah,

(30:19):
I'm trying to cop and this is really Jewish. Why
do you talk so much about them? I mean, I
think one thing history tells us is that literally nobody
in Central Europe made a woman orgasm in the early
part of the twentieth century. I've thought, like, I don't
know why I've pictured Hitler's parents fucking, but I have,

(30:39):
because we all seen pictures of their two of them,
and I just imagining, like not only did like that
poor woman his mother have the worst sex imaginable with
this fucking cartoon mustache of a husband who probably like
was smoking cigars while he was having sex with her.
Then on top of that they have they give birth

(31:02):
to the biggest monster in world history. I mean, it's unbelievable.
I mean, she didn't like the journey of Hitler's mother,
I think is uh there's something worth Oh, I don't know,
I just think about it because it's like Fox, she
probably was just I mean, there's just no upside any
of it. She didn't enjoy the sex she gave birth to,
like the history's greatest monster. Oh yeah, it's a bad

(31:23):
it's a bad tale. We do have a fun too,
partner of this show about Hitler's sex life and everything
we know about how the fewer fucked oh my god,
like via post like probably that is firm delivered via
like horsebacked and had a dump a bronze ear Now
I'm gonna finish that quote about yeah, the continuing Semitic

(31:46):
influence within the area in HPOPS. This tendency continued throughout
Steiner's final anthroposophical period, even after his organizational break with
mainstream theosophy in nineteen thirteen. In a nineteen eighteen lecture
on Specters of the Old Testament and the Nationalism of
the Present, for example, he strongly associated the Jews with
a social element that is anti social as regards the
whole of humanity and insisted that Jewish culture was a

(32:08):
folk culture, not an individualized culture of humanity. So he
gets way more racist after his break with the theosophist society.
Now this brings us to the question what happened to
Steiner's followers once the Nazis took power. Well, the Waldorf
schools and the modern day anthroposophists will like to point
out that they too were oppressed under the Nazis. That

(32:29):
Waldorf Answers site I referenced earlier has a page titled
Anthroposophy in the time of Nazi Germany. Quote Anthroposophists belonged
to the many groups of people who were persecuted under
the Nazi regime. Hitler's own disdaining remarks regarding Rudolf Steiner
and the Anthroposophists appeared as early as nineteen twenty one.
By the spring of nineteen thirty three, articles criticizing the
movement began appearing more frequently in National Socialist newspapers. But

(32:51):
the summer of that year, Steiner's books were banned from
public libraries in Bavaria, and study groups and branches of
the General Anthroposophical Society, along with other cultural organizations, were
ordered to submit to national Socialistic leadership. Now, Waldorf answers
will point out that the Anthroposophical Society was banned in
November of nineteen thirty five after the extensive lobbying of
Heinrich Himler and Ryanhard Heydrich. This is in fact true,

(33:15):
but like all anthroposophist defenses of these kinds of charges,
they leave out quite a bit of contextualizing information. So
I'm going to quote now from Anthroposophy and eco Fascism. Quote.
Immediately after the Nazi movement attained state power in early
nineteen thirty three, the leaders of organized Anthroposophy took the
initiative in extending their support to the new government. In

(33:35):
June of that year, a Danish newspaper asked guntherro Walshmouth,
secretary of the International Anthroposophic Society in Switzerland, about Anthroposophy's
attitude towards the Nazi regime, he replied, we can't complain.
We've been treated with the utmost consideration and have complete
freedom to promote our doctrine. Speaking for anthroposophists generally, walk
Smith went on to express his sympathy and admiration for

(33:55):
national socialism. Walk Schmouth, one of three top officers at
anthro Postophees World headquarters in door Knock, was hardly alone
and Steiner's followers and his vocal support for the Hitler dictatorship.
The homeopathic physician Hans Roscher, for example, proudly proclaimed himself
just as much an anthroposophist as a national socialist. In
ninety four, the German Anthroposophic Society sent Hitler an official

(34:17):
letter pointing out Anthropostophe's compatibility with national socialist values and
emphasizing Steiner's Aryan origins and his pro German activism. The exception,
of course, was Jewish members of anthroposophist organizations. They were
forced under pressure from the state to leave these institutions.
There is no record of their gentile anthroposophist comrades protesting
this racial exclusion, much less putting up any internal resistance

(34:40):
to it. In fact, some anthroposophists like the law professor
Ernst von Hippel endorsed the expulsion of Jews from German universities.
So a couple I was just thinking about something like
so that the post World War One period for UH
Germany was um similar in a way to the post
um nine eleven UH post Iraq War period we're in

(35:04):
now in the United States, in the sense that the
narrative has been shattered, Like the narrative that Germany was
this ascendant power was shattered by World War One. They
lost UM and that fucked up their citizenry because there
was no more storyline. People need storylines to proceed ahead.
People like them, and they really need them for security sake,
even if their imaginary. And in the United States right now,

(35:26):
post nine eleven and post um government bailout of the
banks and post um Iraq War, no one is sure
what we stand for anymore. They don't believe that America
stands for, you know, UH, bringing democracy to the globe.
They don't believe that we stand for They don't believe
the American dream anymore. And it's so often that these

(35:47):
these spaces in history are filled with racist narratives to
give a storyline back to culture, because right now American
culture is flailing around, similar to Germany post World War One.
I feel like America feels pretty bad about itself and
it's looking for a way a narrative to attach. Um.
I'm sure you've seen hypernormalization. Yeah, you know that kind

(36:11):
of thing where it's just these these spaces and history
are very dangerous because they allow for anybody to come
in with some crackpot philosophy that people will be like, oh,
thank god, I just need something to follow well. And
one of the things that's luckiest about our current time,
because we are in what I consider to be a
dangerous situation, and there are some parallels to where Germany

(36:31):
was in between nineteen thirty two. One of the big
benefits that we have is that a very very very
very very very very vanishingly tiny fraction of our adult
population has any experience in combat or war, and that
the wars that sort of have have had a cratering
impact on kind of our national self image didn't involve

(36:52):
very many people. One of the reasons that the early
Nazis were so dangerous that is not something we see
with most of like the Proud Boys and the other
sort of fascist groups. The vast majority of those guys
in modern day have never seen combat. All of the
Nazis where guys, not a single one of them flinched
from physical They were all physically courageous. Adolf Hitler got

(37:12):
into whip fights with people where he would be like
tearing pieces of their faces off and would be like
getting shot at and stuff like. They they were all mean.
One of the benefits we have is that our fascists
are mostly physical cowards, which is one of the reasons. Yeah,
it's one of the reasons I have some hope that
we can overwhelm this this thing is that most of

(37:34):
these guys, like the Nazis, were more willing to gamble
than um our fascists have so far been. So I
just really have a saving grace. It's that I wish
there was a way democratic and I say democratic, I
mean politicians could just say something like that instead of
the nonsense democratic candidates say in debates like I mean,
I I just I wish they could just say, hey,

(37:55):
here's here's a nuanced view of what's happening right now.
Here's what Trump is. I mean, I know that's not
gonna happen. But you know what I mean, like Trump
is a cartoon um to fill space in a historical
narrative that is lacking direction right now. Yeah, we we
need a new myth because myths are the core of

(38:16):
any society. UM. And that's that's part of what like
Steiner and a number of other people like collectively and
over a long period of time created for Germans. That's
what that's kind of why Madame Blovotsky's teachings really take
off UM in a big way. And like the immediately
pre war and post war period is like she's She's

(38:38):
and these other thinkers like Steiner are providing this mythical
idea of like the Aryan race and like this conflict
that they have with the Jews, and it explains like, um,
like that was necessary for the Germans to explain how
they lost World War One. Um was this idea that
like there was this deeper conspiracy UM. And you know

(38:59):
Steiner wasn't saying that as much. He did say a
bit of stuff like that, but his beliefs about sort
of how these like alien races are like weakening the
Arians and how like the Jews are not really a
part of this this, this like thing like that. That
all played into this greater theory of somebody is trying
to stop us from taking our our rightful ascendant place

(39:22):
in the community of nations. Now let's talk about organic farming.
So I've mentioned a couple of times that Rudolf Steiner
kind of invented organic farming. And I don't mean that
he invented the concept of like farming without like pesticides
or fertilizer, like obviously people have been doing that since forever,

(39:42):
but he is one of the main people behind inventing
kind of our modern concept of organic farming, as in
opposition to industrial farming. What time does this guy get
up in the morning, That's what I wanted. He got
a lot done right. Half Like a lot of criticisms
of Rudolph Steiner, laziness is not one of them. I
wish he had done less. Yeah, these people need the

(40:06):
fucking settled down. When I started my research into Steiner,
I found my way to a Twitter thread started by
Dr Sarah Taper. She's a crop scientist, and she had
a hot take on Steiner's particular farming innovation, which is
called biodynamic farming. Quote. So organic is what happened when
Europe had to start using artificial fertilizers because they'd spent

(40:28):
a hundred plus years throwing sewage into the ocean and
the land was all out of nutrients. German spiritualists were like,
chemical fertilizers in my food. Oh, hell no, that's way
too Jewish. Rudolf Steiner's work was like sixty racist theory
and organic was just the So this is what my
racist theory means for farming side of his work. German
racism was soon judged to be embarrassing, so later editions

(40:49):
of his work just deleted those chapters. Eventually, nineteen sixties
U s counterculture kids picked up editions of Steiner's books
with the most egregious racial theory material deleted. They picked
up On the Nature and to the Land down with
artificial vibe and had no idea that it was all
an anti Semitic tirade. And that's essentially accurate. Uh Dr
Sarah Tabor gives a pretty good summary there. But but

(41:11):
we're going to get into the weeds of biodynamic farming next.
But before we get into the weeds, you know what
doesn't promote weeds? What is this are you doing? An
AD break from doing an AD plug. Yes, you know,
if you need glycophosphiate that you can healthily drink. Are
you tired of bees existing? Do bees piss you off?

(41:38):
They just play that scene from stand By Me when
McCauley Colkin gets killed by the bee. It's like Monsanto
putting an into this bullshit. So this is an AD break.
I assume this is a fucking ad break. Yeah, is it?
Products We're back, So now we're talking about what what

(42:02):
did Rudolph Steiner do? Now? What did that fucking what
did the cafe? Did racist do? Now? Biodynamic farm still
a thing today? You know, it's funny, real quick, Robert,
I gotta tell you, I've I've mentioned this other podcasts.
I don't know why I just said that, but I
just mentioned I mentioned this all the time. Let me
put it that way, not on podcasts on the street anywhere,

(42:25):
because I'm still knocked out by the fact that the
Renaissance happened because of coffee, Like coffee became readily available
in Europe at the exact same time that I mean
that kicked off of the Renaissance. Um, And I guess
that's a real fact. So I really had an influence
for sure. Yeah, yeah, I know, and it's not probably
not the whole yeah, the whole thing, but I'd say
it was, um so so, I just it's amazing. I

(42:49):
wish that we could have shut off the coffee supply
to a Germany between the year's nineteen eighteen and nine.
I will say this, when you really get into the
weeds of reading about European history, one of the thoughts
you repeatedly are are led to us, like, boy, we
should have really cut the Germans off from their caffee
and something people more tired. Yeah, these people needed to

(43:15):
be sleepy. I really got too much done. Time machine,
go back, smash all the coffee machines in Germany and nine. Well,
you know what, Speaking of where coffee came into Europe,
there's a single point in which you could have stopped
coffee spread. So one of the sort of the which
generally credited as like how coffee became part of Europe
is like when the Ottomans laid siege to I think

(43:37):
it was I think it might have been fucking I
don't know if it was Vienna or um, yeah, I
think it was Vienna. When the Ottoman Empire laid sieged
one of the cities in Europe and they got their
asses beat. I think this is when like the Polish
winged Hussars like like broke their army and routed it there.
They left their camp behind, right, so they outside this
European city, they leave their camp behind, and being Turks,

(43:59):
their camping clue did huge bags of coffee and like
Jesuva's you know, they're kind of coffee pots that used
for Turkish coffee. So Europeans like started trying this ship
out and they were like, oh my god, this stuff
is amazing. But also they were like, oh my god,
this is like a heathen, evil Muslim drink, Like is
this something we have to ban and prosecute? And so
they took it to the Pope and like the Pope

(44:19):
tried the coffee because everyone was like, is this a
devil drink? Can we drink this? And the Pope cried
it and was like, this ship is amazing. I've never
wanted to say mass more than in my life. The pope,
I think it was Pope Clement. I forget which number,
but he had numbers after them, but it was a
Pope Clement, I think baptized the beverage of coffee in
order to make it acceptable for Christians. Like, that's how

(44:40):
coffee came into Christendom. Is the Pope like officially baptized
it so that that Christians could drink hats got tall too? Yeah, um,
that's an awesome story that. That's so great. I love
that the first people who discovered coffee in Europe, man
or anybody, the first person who discovered coffee, I'm just
jealous of. Oh yeah, A lot of cool myths about

(45:01):
that too. But back to biodynamic farming. The Biodynamic Association,
which is like a an organization for biodynamic farmers, says
this and explaining what it is. Quote, each biodynamic farmer
garden is an integrated, whole living organism. This organism is
made up of many interdependent elements fields, forests, plants, animals, soils, compost, people,
in the spirit of the place. Biodynamic farmers and gardeners

(45:24):
work to nurture and harmonize these elements, managing them in
a holistic and dynamic way to support the health and
vitality of the whole. So that sounds good, right yeah,
now right above that on their biodynamic principles and Practices page.
They say this quote biodynamics is rooted in the work
of philosopher and scientist Dr Rudolph Steiner. Lectures to farmers

(45:44):
opened a new way to integrate scientific understanding with the
recognition of spirit in nature. Now, as with anthroposophic medicine,
Rudolf Steiner was never a farmer. That's interesting, absolutely, and
was a scientist die there, Yeah, of course not. I
was wondering. I was saying, this man has got boundless.

(46:05):
It's never a fucking doctor either, Like he was dictating
while he was farming. I mean, I think he might
add like a PhD. But he was never a medical doctor. Yeah, wow, okay,
so he never he just like he just posted, he's
had this idea based on basically racism, that maybe farms
could be purer if they had less jew in them. Well,
that's that's kind of where this is headed. And yeah,

(46:29):
I mean one of the things about impurity. There's too
many impurities in society and in the farm. He wasn't
wrong about every aspect of biodamatic farming, because he was
one of a number of people looking at the way
industrial farming had been started in Europe since like World
War one, and it was like really toxic and involved
a lot of horrible chemicals, and like people were doing
fucked up ship to the land, and he was able

(46:50):
to see, like, oh, maybe we should do less fucked
up ship to the land. He also mixed that in
with a bunch of insane notion, but every aspect of
what he was saying wasn't wrong. There were a lot
of problems with industrial agriculture as there are today, um,
and he was one of the first people who pointed
that out. He just also was not a farmer and
did not know what the funk he was talking about

(47:10):
in any complex sense of the phrase. It's clock being right.
Every whatever they say a racist clock is occasionally right
about farming sides. Yeah, yeah, Now, you may notice that
none of what I've read there gives us much insight
into what biodynamic farming actually involves. It's just a lot
of vaguely positive, flowery language about the spirit of the land.

(47:33):
So I found a two thousand seventeen article in The
Guardian which focuses on the rapid growth of biodynamic farms
in the United States. It cited the co director of
Demeter USA, remember the name of that company, A nonprofit
certifier of biodynamic farms in the United States. They claimed
to the acreage devoted to biodynamic farming in this country
increased by sixteen percent in two thousand seventeen. Here's how

(47:54):
The Guardian described the methodology behind biodynamic farming. Quote Austrian
philosopher Rudolf Steiner, a controversial public figure, introduced biodynamic principles
by encouraging farmers to look to the Cosmos before planting
and harvesting crops. So it's space farming. It's space farming. Yeah,
what does look cosmos? Yeah it it means farming with

(48:16):
witchcraft basically essentially as wuy as that sounds, and it's
about to get wu were Biodynamic foods are growing in popularity.
Demeter works with more than fifty u S brands, including
Whole Foods, to add more of their food to the shelf.
They and a lot of people claim it tastes better.
But you know what doesn't taste good Nazism And that's

(48:37):
where biodynamic farming first got its start. So in the
episode we recently done in fritz Haber, we talked about
how the explosion in the use of nitrogen fertilizers made
possible the growth of the world's population beyond around three
billion people or so. But all those chemical fertilizers also
fucked up the top soil, and in many cases they
had a negative effect on the flavor of food. This

(48:58):
was noticed at the time, particularly by people living in Germany,
and the organic farming movement first arose as a response
to this. Steiner was not the only person who started
pushing for a reformation of farming methods, but he was
among the first and might have been the most influential.
His biodynamic approach involved rejecting artificial fertilizers and pesticides and

(49:18):
instead using compost and maneure. He urged farmers to reject
monocultures giant farms growing just a single crop. These are
all good enough ideas, but Steiner's biodynamism also involved a
lot of bullshit, not just following the lunar calendar, but
using homeopathy to channel astral energy and other dumb ship
like that. It wasn't just harmless magic, though. Biodynamism took

(49:39):
off in large part because it tapped into a very
dangerous part of the zeitgeist. I found an article from
the Journal of Environmental History titled organic Farming and Nazi Germany.
The Politics of Biodynamic Agriculture. It's written by guess who,
our old buddy, Peter staden Meyer of Marquette University. He
seems to have something of an obsession for all things Steiner,

(49:59):
and he's definitely the guy to go for on this one.
I'm gonna quote from him now. In the nineteen thirties,
biodynamic advocates touted their version of organic agriculture as spiritually
aware of peasant wisdom in contrast to civilization, technology and
modern urban culture. Now, yeah, hippies, But there's a thinner
line than you'd think between Nazis and hippies, because you

(50:23):
know who else stood against modern urban culture and really
pushed ideas of spiritually aware of peasant wisdom. The fucking
Nazis and biodynamic advocates found a welcome home once the
New Reich started winding up in nineteen thirty two. At
that point, the main company selling biodynamism to the German
people was Demeter, who's still around today now. Demeters sold

(50:43):
organic food and will Letta sold cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Both
companies exist today and are, as far as I know,
responsible corporate citizens. But back in the nineteen thirties, they
were responsible corporate citizens of the National Socialist Government. In
July of nineteen thirty three, biodynamic farmers founded the Reich
for Biodynamic Agriculture. Their leader was an anthroposophist named Erhard BArch.

(51:05):
The movement saw Nazi policies as more or less in
line with their own esoteric beliefs. They encountered some early
issues and were briefly banned in nineteen thirty three, which
is something the anthroposophists will point out regularly, but that
ban only lasted a year. Quote As early as nineteen
thirty four, Nazi Interior minister Wilhelm Fricht visited Barch's biodynamic

(51:25):
estate and expressed his support for the organization. He was
followed by a parade of similarly high profile figures, including
Rudolf Hess, Robert Leigh, and Alfred Rosenberg, who were guests
at Biodynamic headquarters in bod Sorrow and a voice their
support for the undertaking. Representatives of the Reich League for
Biodynamic Agriculture publicized the achievements of their organic farming methods
in various media, highlighting the virtues of a natural approach

(51:47):
to growing food. For their revitalization of the German nation.
They claimed that biodynamic farms enjoyed more abundant harvest and
produced higher quality crops than conventional agriculture, adding that organic
procedures were more efficient, healthier, and more conducive to the
well being of the peasantry and the German people at large.
Depicting the farm as a unified organism, Bart disdained the
americanization and mechanization of agriculture as hazardous to the German

(52:10):
peasant life and its connection to the living soil. One
Nazi catchphrase that you'll hear a lot even today is
blood and soil, And most people think of that more
literally than they should is talking about like the area
and blood and the soil of Germany. But when they
talk about the soil, they're actually talking more about like
a metaphysical connection to the dirt. Because again, this sort

(52:32):
of like connection to like peasant farming and stuff is
a huge aspect of what the Nazis were pushing at
the time, and it's something that you know, biodynamic farming
really played into quite where the Nazis get all this
free time. This is what I want to understand, I mean,
I really do want to understand this Robert, you might
know something that I don't really understand. Why did like

(52:56):
what exactly made the German economy function? What was drying?
What what was the money behind all this? Like like obviously,
if you want to sit around and talk about farming
and and and and whether or not people should be
more like peasants or any of this kind of stuff,
you need spare time, and you need a functioning society,

(53:20):
which certainly Germany did not have, like for a while
before what militarization, I mean, who was funding That's who
was funding honest free time speculation that these Germans were doing.
There's okay, so this is a very cop there's the answer.
That's very complicated. You don't want to for a lot
of these German philosophers, many of them did in the

(53:42):
twenties especially, received funding from a number of kind of
shady sources, including a lot of very wealthy American businessmen,
including some of the businessmen who carried out the business plot,
which was an attempted fascist coup against Um, which is
an incredible story. It is an incredible story. We do
in an episode on it. But more to the point,
Um number one, the Weimar Republic had a lot of

(54:04):
problems and was also came of age in a very
difficult time to be running Germany. But it was not
as dysfunctional as history books often painted. It had it's
bad years, but by the time the Nazi Party really
started to rise, the economy had started, it was well
on its path to recovery. Now a big part of
what you know, there's a lot of people who mistakenly

(54:25):
believe that at least Hitler's policies were good for the
economy of Germany. They were not. Where all of the
money came from in the early chunk of the Nazi parties,
like time and power was they stole it from all
of the Jewish people. They took their businesses, they took
their money, they took their houses, and they gave them
to party members, and robbery is a large part of
what stimulated the German economy. They also borrowed at sort

(54:47):
of like unsustainably high rates and used that to push
a remilitarization which like gave jobs and stuff, but it
was not sustainable and it was not sound economic policy,
which is part of why conquest eventually became necessary if
they were going to maintain anything close to the same
pace of development, but it's interested because deep thinking cultural
like like the like like intellectualism is not is is

(55:11):
good and we're kind of going through that right now.
Like the good part of it is maybe thinking well
maybe I just mean the good part would be the
part where you think about, well, maybe farming should be
should be organic like, but then that same thinking, that
same like sort of luxury to ruminate leads to terrible

(55:32):
ideas as well. Um, it's just very interesting to me
because you know, like what we it seems like this
is proceeding toward, is like so many things that are
currently happening came out of this fucking horrible period like
like and some of them are good and some of
them are horrible, but you know what I mean, like,
but they all come from this like deep thinking and

(55:53):
consideration that doesn't exist in culture anymore. It doesn't seem
to me anyways. Just the thought that's just something that's
occurring to me. Is like it's like, it seems like
a lot of stuff happened as a result of the
Nazis having too much time on their hands, and I
wonder where that time came from and why there's no
time anymore for it or it seems like there's no

(56:15):
there's no there's no bunch of good people doing the
deep thinking that would be necessary to bring culture forward
in good while not explain it. You know what we
try to do. Hear it behind the best. Okay, maybe
that's it. Maybe that's it. If you if you want to,
if you want to draw even more comparisons between the
rise of the Nazis and our own recipient fascist movement,

(56:36):
one uncomfortable thing to look at could be the fact
that if you, guys like Hitler and his his fellow
thinkers in the Nazi Party did a lot of their
development after they started becoming political figures, and they were
essentially paid and subsisted on donations and sales of their books.
Hitler got very wealthy off of the sales of Mind
comp and that's what gave him a lot of the
time to formulate the rest of his philosophies. And like

(56:57):
figure sh it out um and nowadays we have a
class of people who have been paid by a mix
of largely by right wing oil billionaires and fracking billionaires
like the Wilkes uh family and stuff um, people like
Ben Shapiro, people like Dave Ruben Um, people like Jordan Paterson,
and you know also from the fact that they sell

(57:17):
a ship load of books about their philosophies and stuff.
And these people are just continuing to think about things
and stuff like cultural Marxism and whatnot. And uh, it's
scary where that might lead. And we kind of saw
where it lead once. When you give dumb assholes, uh,
tell them that they're really smart and give them a
bunch of money to think of more dumb shit, it

(57:38):
gets really bad. And uh, yeah, I'm just thinking about Okay,
so maybe maybe the best is less less thinking. Um
I am okay, I'm just I'm just trying to figure
out what the what the hell is going on? This
is a lot It's hard to find lessons from history sometimes. Yeah.
So when the Auto bond construction started in nineteen thirty four,

(58:01):
a group of landscape advocates oversaw the construction. The guy
in charge of this was Altwin Siefert, a biodynamic advocate
who was considered the Third Reich's most prominent environmentalist. Siefert
considered himself to be national socialist through and through, and
his beliefs on biodynamism were directly intertwined with his beliefs
on race science. It is true that anthroposophists and biodynamists,

(58:23):
who are often one and the same, regularly encountered pushback
and even oppression from Reich officials, but that's had less
to do with the fact that Nazis saw them as
fundamentally dangerous movements and more to do with petty in
fighting and bickering between different factions of Nazis. So, like
the Waldorf answers, people will claim that, like, well, no,
look the all these Nazis hated anthroposophy and like banded

(58:43):
it a couple of points, and like, that's proof that
we were oppressed by the Nazis too. And the reality
is that certain Nazis loved anthroposophy and certain Nazis hated
it because Nazis were caddy bitches who spent most of
their time fighting with each other. As Stott and Meyer
lays out, most practitioners of Steiner based philosophies had no
problem with the third Reich quote. In nineteen thirty seven,

(59:04):
an organic dairy farmer from side Leezie declared that both
biodynamics and Nazism were based on closeness to nature, while
in nineteen thirty eight, biodynamic advocates blamed profit oriented chemical
agriculture on Jewish influence. A nineteen forty one letter from
an anthroposophist and biodynamic advocates similarly limited that German efforts
to maintain healthy soil were threatened by Jewish influence and

(59:25):
racially for an infiltration. The biodynamic movements anti materialist stance
sometimes when it prays from Nazi anti semites, and adulatory
nineteen forty texts proclaimed, we are confident that biodynamic agriculture
will continue to realize the ideal goal. Ordinary materialism is
digging its own grave. The cow is not a milk factory.
The hen is not an egg laying machine. The soil
is not a chemical laboratory, as the jew professors would

(59:48):
have us believe. See first half of the sentences there.
Maybe they're being in college when my Jewish professor told
me that hens were egg laying machines. Yeah, classic Judaism. Yeah,
the class was called hands. Yeah. Now, anthroposophy did succeed

(01:00:08):
in getting itself heavily purged by the Nazis. Now this
is largely because of a little fella named Rudolph Hess.
What do you know about Rudolph Hess, Well, I know
Rudolph Hess was wasn't a Hitler's best friend for a
long time, or he was Hitler's best his Reich's fearer
or his second in command or what he was the
deputy fearer of the Reich for a while. Um, he

(01:00:31):
was like Butcher or something. I mean, all these fucking
Reich guys were all like ex like like just regular motherfucker's,
like loading doc managers and ship who put on stupid
ass outfits. So Hess was the guy. He was Hitler's
best friend for a long time. When they were in
prison together, Hitler dictated mind comp and Hest did a

(01:00:52):
lot of the actual typing for it. So Hess was
like as close to Hitler as a person could be.
And Hess was a believer in all of the ridiculous
esoteric witchcraft Nazism stuff that you could possibly fucking believe.
A picture of his eyebrows, that's the first thing that
came to my mind. I don't understand how these Master
Race motherfucker's excused like these these obvious I mean, the

(01:01:16):
Master Race has fucking eyebrows look like to goddamn snakes
or Yeah, anyway, it's Battie. So yeah. Hess was a big,
big fan of the occult, big supporter of He was
in you know, the the Toulist Society. He was a
big believer in like a lot of the stuff Steiner said, uh.
And he was a major supporter of anthroposophy and like
biodynamic farming, and like was a big advocate for Steiner

(01:01:38):
type beliefs in the Reich. But in he hopped in
a plane and flew to Scotland. Now we don't know
why exactly. The most plausible theory is that he was
a legitimately delusional person and actually mentally ill, and convinced
himself that he could negotiate peace with England on the
eve of the German invasion of Russia. He did not

(01:01:58):
succeed in this and was instantly captured, and the bear
was incredibly embarrassing together um Has had again been Hitler's
right hand man throughout most of his rise to power,
literally writing down, yeah, a lot of Hitler's words. When
Has abandoned him, Hitler took it personally, and since Hess
had been a major Nazi advocate for a cult bullshit,
his exiting the picture provided more practical monsters like Reinhard

(01:02:20):
Hydrick with an opportunity to purge other Nazis. They disagreed
with Hydrick, by the way, is like maybe the worst
of the Nazis, widely considered to be the architect of
the Holocaust, the Butcher of Moravia. Terrible person um. Now,
while anthroposophy was excised from German public life due to this,
biodynamic farming continued. From the very start of World War two.

(01:02:42):
Biodynamic growers had worked with Heinrich Hitler's s S to
help plan for the agricultural colonization of the occupied Eastern territories.
The plan was to uproot and eliminate the slabs and
replace them with German farmers. To biodynamic advocates, this represented
an incredible opportunity. They would have a chance to rework
all of Eastern Europe into one enormous organic, biodynamic farm.

(01:03:04):
Starting in October of nineteen thirty nine, the s S
established a biodynamic agricultural school and occupied Poland. So after
Hess's flight, uh Heinrich Himmler ordered the s S to
use the term natural farming for organic agriculture rather than biodynamic,
but nothing changed about the methods or the individuals involved,
many of whom were dedicated anthroposophists and Steiner followers. Gunther punk,

(01:03:28):
a biodynamic advocate, became a head of the s S
Office of Race and Settlement in nineteen thirty eight. His
goal was to fill the conquered East with biodynamic farms
run by soldier farmers. I'm going to quote from Staudenmeyer
one more time. The centerpiece of the biodynamic operations was
the sizeable plantation at Dachau, which produced medicinal herbs and
other organic goods for the s S. As that ravens Brook,

(01:03:50):
the labor of the Dachau biodynamic plantation was performed by
camp inmates from nineteen forty one onwards. The Dachau operation
was overseen by anthroposophist Fronds Lippert, a leader of the
biodynamic movement from its beginnings and head gardener at will
Lada from nine to nineteen forty. So in at least
two concentration camps there were biodynamic farms operated by slave laborers.

(01:04:11):
That is the birth of organic biodynamic farming. Um was
literal concentration camps. So that's cool, we'll let it end demeter.
Both operated happily under the Third Reich, along with other
less mystical companies like IBM, but the inherently fascistic roots
of much of the organic farming movement have continued today.
A sizeable minority of organic farmers in the US and

(01:04:32):
Europe are far right extremists whose quest for purity unfortunately
extends beyond keeping their corn pesticide free. Obviously, this doesn't
mean anyone who runs an organic farmer supports organic farming
is a Nazi. The ideas of evolved a lot since then,
anymore than the IBM chip in my laptop makes me
a fascist. But it is important to understand the problematic
roots of Steinerist ideas because they are still very much

(01:04:53):
influential to this day. And this, my friend, is when
we tell talk about Mary Anne Williamson. Okay, yeah, now
she is not, to my knowledge and anthroposophist, but her
beliefs are close enough in line to anthroposophy that she
regularly shows up alongside them in literature. For example, I
found the book is Ms and Ologies, All the movement's

(01:05:15):
ideas and doctrines that have shaped our world. It includes
a brief discussion of Steiner and anthroposophy. The very next
paragraph discusses the Unity Church, which was founded in eighteen
eighty nine as a sort of combination of New Thought, Hinduism, Buddhism,
and theosophy quote today Unity a new Thought have blurred
into the New Age, which adds a spiritualized version of
quantum physics and a psychological therapeutic aspect to the doctrinal mix.

(01:05:38):
Mary Ann Williamson, who is a Unity pastor, Gary Zukov,
and Wayne Dwyer are only a few best selling writers
who proclaimed that spiritual growth follows from a transformation of
our ways of thinking. Now, I found another interesting article
on the Southern Cross Review reflection on the Anthroposophical path
of Schooling. It mentions Williamson and Steiner in the same paragraph.
Like Sneiner, we must read and make connect actions with

(01:06:00):
the great spiritual literatures of the world. This enriches our
view of the spiritual world and can also provide assistance
when we have difficulty with meditation or get stuck in
our personal growth. Although our goal is to gain knowledge
of the spiritual worlds that Steiner saw so clearly and beautifully,
we should not become dependent on his insights. If we
were to develop our own ability to see the spirit,
we must develop the ability to think for ourselves. Even

(01:06:20):
study of contemporary spiritual teachers like mary Ann Williamson can
help us develop this ability. So that's that's a guy
advocating for the charitable reading of Steiner's texts. Now, again,
there's nothing inherently Nazi here. And I'm not saying the
author of that Peace or Marianne are fascist, because again,
a lot of the racism has been pruned out of
the modern publications of Steiner's work. But it is worrying

(01:06:43):
to me how close some of our beliefs seemed to
intertwine with Steiner's. A terrifying number of his followers had
no difficulty diving head first into fascism. Many considered it
a natural step forward, and I'm worried that some of
those same ideas are still very common today. Now. Marianne
Williamson herself, is, of course Jew, and I do not
believe she is a fascist, but I do think she
harbors a number of these toxic beliefs. She's famously said

(01:07:06):
sickness is an illusion and does not actually exist. And
the fact that this sort of nonsense isn't seen as
immediately disqualifying and a candidate deeply concerns me. When one
type of anti scientific bullshit can propagate other more toxic
ideas can also breed. This is the most important lesson
we can take from the life and ideas of Rudolf Steiner.

(01:07:26):
That's the end of the episode. Hey, listen to this.
Maryann Williamson, there's another one of these rich kids. She
she had a wasted decade where she moved to New
Mexico and lived in a geodesic dome with her boyfriend.
And she also was gonna pursue a career as a
cabaret singer, but got distracted by quote, bad boys and

(01:07:49):
good dope. I mean, well, you know, we all get
distracted by bad boys and good dope for a period
of time, right, But then when these people find the way,
or what they think is the way, these big ego
people decide that everybody. I mean it's so like you
basically attach universal. You have a huge ego, so you attached,

(01:08:12):
like you take your personal journey and then you you
kind of try and impose it on everybody else. It's
like it's very it's very like uh myopic uh tunnel visions.
It's just very selfish. It's this idea that that your
personal journey somehow, um, you forget that you're a privilege

(01:08:33):
you're one of this privileged class that gets to spend
all its time, um you know, uh thinking about ship
that you really shouldn't be thinking about. You should just
be most of the time, probably minding your own fucking business. Um.
But you ended up with this huge amount of space
in your life where you live in jazesic domes. And

(01:08:54):
then it just leads to this, I don't know, attaching
so much importance to your own narrative that it doesn't deserve. Yeah,
and it's it leads to problematic shit, like like what
you see in Marianne Williamson's writings and stuff, where she'll
talk about sickness and disease as if it's it's not
a thing that just happens randomly to some people. It's

(01:09:16):
tied into like aspects of your what you believe, or
like how you act, like what sort of energy you invite,
and it's it's not She would never say you, if
you have cancer, it's your fault, but that's one of
the interpretations of the things that she writes. And it's
why a lot of like disabled people are like people
who were born with like you know, disabilities or whatever, um,

(01:09:37):
like get really scared when they see this person starting
to gain steam and politics, because a shipload of stuff
that she's written is the same kind of ship Steiner
was writing about. How like, oh, well, you know, if
you didn't, I don't think she would literally says that, like, oh,
you're your ghost, you know, balked before jumping into your body,
and that's why your arm doesn't work right. But a

(01:09:57):
lot of her beliefs about sickness and stuff are very
much in line with that. And it's this like it's
this new Age positive thinking bullshit, a lot of which
is directly descended from theosophy, which is also one of
the root movements of the Nazi movement. And it doesn't
mean that like if you're into New Age ship, you're
a Nazi, obviously, but it does mean that, like similar

(01:10:20):
patterns of thought can lead to both things. And like,
one of the things I found that was really interesting
to me while I was doing this research was just
like a Twitter post Marian Williamson said where she noted
that like, oh, people on the left or way meaner
than me than people on the right. Like everybody talks
about how me and the right is, but the left
has been really like those are the ones who've been
the meanest to me. And somebody quoted and said, I

(01:10:40):
think one of the scary things about American politics in
the next few years is that people don't realize how
easy it is for folks with kind of kookie new
age left wing views to turn hard right. Um, I
knew and not like it was a journalis talking about
Like I talked to a Nazi militia leader once who
sent his kids to a Waldorf school because he leaved
in a lot of the same wooey bullshit, Like there's

(01:11:02):
a certain level of like if you get into some
of these weird esoteric beliefs, other esoteric belief systems like Nazism,
are going to be more enticing into you than just
embracing like the world's like like let's not believe this
kind of bullshit, Like you'll be more ext like fixed problems. Yeah,
if you get you'll be more accepted. If you get cookie,

(01:11:23):
you're gonna want to hang out with kuks And um,
only cooks are gonna are gonna tolerate you or or
respect you because you are talking ship and you make
no sense. I mean, she has no business, um speculating
about the causes of diseases. She's not a doctor, She's
a person who comes from a background of geodesic domes

(01:11:43):
and bad boys and good dope and uh and you know,
I hate the expressions day in your lane. But to
an expect to it is it's a matter of you're
talking out of your ass, and people who are also
talking out of their asses will be a lot nicer
to you than other people who are like realistic and
saying you don't know what you're talking about. Stop talking

(01:12:05):
about diseases and causes of diseases. You don't know what
the funk you are saying? Pure, you know, And then oh,
but these other people are much nicer to me because, um,
because they're insane, that's why. Yeah. And it's it's like
you find like a lot of the ship that like
was at the core of biodynamism is also at the
core of like what Williamson says about health care. She
said this recently in Detroit while she was like campaigning

(01:12:28):
for president and talking about like reforming the health care system.
We need to be the party talking about why so
many of our chemical policies and our food policies, and
our agricultural policies and our environmental policies and even our
economic policies are leading to people getting sick to begin with, which, again,
you can interpret that in a reasonable way, or you
can interpret it in a Stinerian way where it's like, oh,
that could lead to some really fucking uncomfortable conclusions about

(01:12:52):
the world. Um. She said, ship like people who want
to avoid the swine flu should pour God's love on
their immune systems. Um Like she said, shit about vaccines.
That's really unsettling. Um. And you know, obviously, like Steiner
was an anti vaccine guy, and so are a lot
of Nazis. And it's one of those things. There's a
lot of very far left people who are very anti

(01:13:12):
vaccine and a lot of Nazis who are anti vaccine.
And one of the things that's scary to me is
that if you push a lot of those far left
anti vax people, they won't drop being anti vax and
stay left wing. They'll just go over to the Nazis. Like,
not all of them, but a decent amount of them.
It happens. Yeah, I feel like I feel like, um
um uh. People need to uh tell more people who

(01:13:36):
are talking about stuff that they don't know anything about
to shut the funk up. Yeah, and and when somebody who, yeah,
when somebody who. I mean, it's narcissism. All all it
is is narcissism. It's just narcissism makes you think you're
an expert on fucking everything and and want someone. It's
just annoying to me. Those are so many good people
who don't aren't aren't, just aren't blabbing what is I

(01:13:59):
forget what anchor it was said this, but like the
greatest problem in the world is that fools are so
confident and wise men are so full of doubt. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's it's trying to get this whole episode. Yeah, be
be really fucking careful about anybody. And this is one
of the problems, the fundamental problems with having a president

(01:14:19):
is that then you have this person who has to
pretend like they are competent about everything from nuclear policy
to energy policy, to climate change, to international policy, to
national defense to military intervention. There's not a single human
being on the face of this earth, and there never
will be who is competent on all those things. Not one,
never will be, never will happen never ever ever ever ever.

(01:14:40):
But because of our system, they all have to be
able to bullsh it at being good at all that,
even though at best the best of them are competent
at like two or three of those things. I mean, yeah,
the yeah, and and once you get into the world
of like, oh, I know about diseases even though I
don't have any background in science, then next thing, you know,

(01:15:04):
your best friends are gonna be uh uh people who
don't believe in climate change because they think it's uh
you know, some people who have expert opinions on things
that they know nothing about. Yep. Fuck then and fuck
Rudolph whatever Steiner, Rudolph Steiner. So in conclusion for today,
fuck Rudolph Steiner, country dancer, and uh, farms are bad?

(01:15:29):
May that might not be the lesson to take out
of this uh uh fuck Rudolph Steiner. Man, he's you know,
I don't know what to say. Yeah, it's just a
wild story. It's almost hard because it's like, obviously there
are actually very important aspects of like organic farming, and

(01:15:49):
some of the ideas even in biodynamic farming, like about
like that are critical, like like we're having a major
problem now with like our top soil is being eroded
and there's like certainly aspects of organic farming and biodynamic
farming that are better for the top soiled than a
lot of the industrial ship we're doing. That's absolutely a
fair point. He wasn't wrong about everything. He just talked

(01:16:09):
about everything, so he was mostly wrong like that Steiner
in a nutshell. Yeah, I wonder if Jefferson's a farmer.
I don't know. I wonder if Jennifer Aniston was just
like I just thought it was a school about acting,
Like I just learned how to be an actress. Yeah,
that's right. Uh, these these kids, I uh, you know,
I don't know. I don't know. I I think that. Um,

(01:16:32):
I have no idea. I'm trying to think of something
to say, and I can't think of anything. I mean,
I guess. In order to determine whether or not Steiner's
influence was on balance bad or good, you have to
weigh on one hand slave farms, on concentration camps, and
on another hand Rutger Howard's Tears in the Rain speech
from the end of Blade Runner, and really, who's to

(01:16:52):
say which is worth more? Uh, concentration camps it was bad,
oh boy, good times. How do you wrap it up? Usually?
Do you wrap it up with a with a grand
statement about the history, or is it just sort of
like a public service. I don't trust grand statements. If

(01:17:13):
I were to come out with some like conclusive, simple
one sentence summary of like what actually is worth understanding
in this, that would be me oversimplifying things to the
point of inaccuracy, just like all of these grifters I
talk about do. I'm not going to try to do it.
It's fucking complex context, it's information. It's really I tend
to want I tend to want narratives with endings and things,

(01:17:34):
but this is sort of seems like one of those
things where it's like you're just it's good to know
these things, and they give you the ability to keep
an eye on on warning signs and and sort of
problematic little things about yeah, there's an organic farmer because
he might be getting a little too weird. If there's

(01:17:54):
a single sentence summary I can give this that isn't
entirely inaccurate or two to succinct to be valuable, it
would be don't trust anyone who talks with expertise about everything,
because no one's an expert on everything. Uh, and sometimes
that includes me. Definitely don't trust me. I'm I'm a
I'm a terrible person. And that's the note that we

(01:18:17):
should end on. You want to plug your plug. Thank
you Robert so much. I really really enjoyed being on
your show, and I'm I'm deeply impressed with with your
research and writing and uh and uh, I would love
to come back on again. And in the meantime, you
can find me on at the Crofton Show or I
talk about uh complete nonsense, so you don't have to
worry about me being an expert on anything on there.

(01:18:39):
And um my advice column which is equally uh uh,
I mean it's sometimes it's serious, sometimes it's not serious,
but it's called the Advice King. And you can listen
to my album Hello It's Me on Spotify and everywhere
and uh uh Pitchfork gave it a seven point four.
So go listen to my Pitchfork approved album, Hello It's Me,

(01:19:01):
and go buy a Pitchfork along with some bolt cutters
to get ready for the upcoming civil unrest. That's that's
my plug. Um, I am Robert Evans. You can find
me on well, you can find the sources for this
website on Behind the Bastards dot com. I do want
to give a special shout out to Peter stouten Meyer,
who has done a whole funkload of the left eide
with his own research. So thank you, Professor stotten Meyer.

(01:19:23):
I hope I pronounced your name not wrong. Um. You
can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at at
Bastards pod. Uh. You can find me on Twitter at
I right. Okay. You can buy T shirts at t
public dot com. If you want T shirts that have
anything to do with this podcast, you should look up
Behind the Bastards on t public dot com. And that

(01:19:44):
is it. That's the episode. Go fucking hug a cat
and punch of Dancer. Thanks Robert. Okay, Sophie, should we
be advising people to assault random dancers? Okay, well, the
episode is over. Coolm

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: Rudolf Steiner: The Racist Who Invented Organic Farming and Waldorf Schools