Rudolf Steiner, founder of Waldorf schools and biodynamic farming, is scrutinized for his evolution from assimilationist rhetoric to explicit anti-Semitic theories blaming Jewish culture for societal decay. While his agricultural concepts gained traction in Nazi Germany with support from figures like Wilhelm Frick and SS slave labor camps, modern advocates often edit out these racist elements. The episode concludes by warning against trusting self-proclaimed experts who claim authority across unrelated fields, suggesting that such narcissism can dangerously bridge far-left and fascist ideologies despite valid benefits in organic farming. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:03:11
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What's anti-Semitic, my organic farming?
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards.
This was yet another trademark, unbelievably bad introduction.
My guest with me for part two of our series on Rudolph Steiner, as with part one, Chris Crofton.
Hey, how are you?
I'm good, man.
Harry.
I'm glad to be back.
I'm good.
I'm doing good.
I'm drinking some cold brew coffee and still got this sinus thing that I've had, but I think I'm going to have it for life.
Probably because of bad shit I did when I was a ghost.
Well, your ghost.
No, I mean, your ghost knew that the lessons you gain from this sinus infection are critical in your development as a person.
Cultural Disease Symptoms00:15:02
Yeah.
Nothing that I'm bald too.
I'm bald too.
Can you imagine all the shit I did when I was a ghost?
I mean, I can remember the deep satisfaction I had sitting in Mosul and watching airstrikes hit apartment buildings and seeing little kids stream out of them, just blood pouring down their faces and going, I'm glad their ghosts made the choice to go through this.
Yeah.
That was a smart decision for those ghosts.
Those kids are going to learn some lessons.
I go to those Rudolph Steiner doctor.
What are they called again?
Anthroposophist.
Yeah.
And I was like, I have a sinus infection.
And he was like, what do you expect?
And then I was good.
I had to pay him 50 bucks.
Gave you some crayons, though.
Yeah.
You know how you behaved?
Do you know how you behaved in the 14th century?
And I was like, I don't know.
You were a real dick.
Yep.
So you're, yeah, you're, you're, of course, you're bald and have a sinus infection.
So we're talking Rudolf 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 that looks as if it was coded and last updated around 2003.
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 2004.
So I'm just pretty good at guessing when websites were made, is all I'm talking about.
So here's what they have to say about anthroposophy.
Quote, Waldorf education was developed by Rudolf Steiner, 1861 to 1925, at the beginning of the 20th 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 as the embodiment of their spiritual nature.
This view is carried into Waldorf education as striving to develop in each child their innate 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, you gotta really have some goodwill to ignore the racism.
That's a funny way to put it.
That is a funny way to put it.
It must have taken a while to think of that one.
Yeah, that was a long meeting.
How do we phrase our leader was basically a Nazi?
Do you know who Frank Luntz is?
No.
He's the Republican guy that's made a zillion dollars off of naming social programs, entitlements, and he named Enhanced Interrogation.
And he's in charge of language for the Republicans.
Well, he's made a fortune.
I got to say, he's nailing it.
Yeah, he's nailing it.
Very punchable face.
What's interesting.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
No, I just, I was going to say he's nailing it like the CIA was nailing 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, goodwill.
Well, you have goodwill.
Read it with goodwill.
Like, read it like an asshole.
Again, once I get my friends dangerously drunk on Everclear at the end of a 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 Frank Luntz as a bastard.
And a friend of mine, he's, you know, so he's made a zillion dollars off of like rebranding 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 liberals bad at politics.
And they're not really liberals either.
But he hired my friend to play at his party, Frank Luntz.
Frank Luntz has a full-size 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 a, he had like a, he had like a, he has so much money, he has a replica of a diner in his yard.
He wants to live that scene from the first Back to the Future movie every day of his life.
Right.
And nobody came to his party.
Nobody came.
He had like a thousand waiters and a million.
He has no friends.
Well, yeah, why would you be that guy's friend?
That's behind the bastards.
The bastards end up all alone with all their shit and all their dumbest theories.
Yeah.
Now, so we just talked about how in the Waldorf Answers site, they really point out that Waldorf schools are non-discriminatory.
They don't take into account race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or national origin.
And here's where I point out that if you Google Rudolf Steiner anti-Semitism, you will find yourself presented with a return from this website and a page titled, Rudolf Steiner, 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 1890s, 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 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 1888, 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 a German.
That is so simple that one is almost stupid saying it.
How stupid does 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 in there about statements made by Steiner after 1900.
And number two, people who aren't anti-Semitic rarely need entire web pages devoted to how not anti-Semitic they are.
You don't run into that for, say, Georgia O'Keefe.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Thankfully, our old friend Peter Stadenmeier of Marquette University put together a detailed breakdown of 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.
Stadenmeier acknowledges that Steiner's views of the Jews changed significantly over the course of his published career.
Quote, in the overall arc of Steiner's intellectual development, his attitude towards 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.
Who is this Staddenmeier man?
Staddenmeier is a professor at Marquette University of German history who has done most of the writing that I found on Rudolf Steiner.
He's like the expert on Rudolf Steiner.
So the people of the Waldorf school do not like this Staddenmeier man.
They're not going to be fans of this Stadenmeier.
No, they're like, would you shut up?
Yeah.
Stop reading the things that our guru wrote.
Yeah, yeah.
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 goodwill.
So prior to about 1900.
It's fucking insane.
God damn it.
Yeah, 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?
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.
We're going to get into...
Most of your fucking time or any of your time talking about...
Let's put it this way.
If you spend a lot of your time talking about Jews, there's something wrong with you.
Yeah, if you specifically 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 it?
Just talk about...
Why don't you talk about what you had for breakfast?
Why don't you stop talking about the Jews?
And Rudolf Steiner talked about the Jews a lot.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
It's like the people defending Steiner, it's like, well, then why did he talk so much about the fucking Jews?
He's not Jewish.
So why is he talking about Jews so much?
Well, that's what we're going to get into.
So prior to 1902, it's fair to say that Rudolf Steiner's anti-Semitism was not out of line with mainstream anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria-Hungary.
During his pan-German nationalist period, he was no more racist than the average person, and he was probably less racist than the average American.
He was no more racist than the average person of goodwill.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you got to be fair about that.
Like, people believed all sorts of crazy shit about the Jews as a matter of course back then.
There's literally, there's still to this day churches in Europe with like reliefs of Jewish babies suckling at the udders 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 that 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 on you specifically as an anti-Semite, if you came up in Germany and Austro-Hungary during this period, you have to go to another level of anti-Semitism.
Yeah, yeah.
So in the early 1900s, Steiner's shit got weird and decidedly more hateful and extreme because, and yeah, we're going to spend a while talking about that.
Steiner spent most of his life as what you would call an assimilationist, which is what they talk about in that Waldorf Answers part, where he wanted to see integration.
But what this meant 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 still sought the elimination of Judaism.
Like, that was his goal.
He wrote that he hoped, quote, Jewry 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 die out.
Yeah, same way.
Fucking settlers that wanted to make Native Americans go to Christian schools and just make white people out of them.
Exactly.
You can say it's better than the literal Nazi policy of gassing them to death, but like not a lot better.
Right.
No, it's the same.
Yeah.
Motivated by the same ideas.
And you can also see how that could easily turn into the other thing given a couple of bad years.
Yes.
Yeah.
Now, Steiner considered himself, quote, German by descent and racial affiliation.
And he 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 Jewish 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 dumb is the point.
In 1890, 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.
Why didn't he just read them with goodwill?
Yeah, he didn't.
I'm not going to let this joke.
I'm still blown away by this goodwill thing.
I'm not going to stop saying it.
It's fucking amazing.
In 1886, 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.
My God.
In 1888, he wrote extensive defenses of a book, Homunculus, by Austrian author Robert Hammerling.
Homunculus was, of course, a work of profound anti-Semitism, chronicling what Hammerling viewed as the Jewish drive to conquer the entire world.
Hammerling 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?
If you're a racist, you do.
Now, Rudolph loved this book.
He called critics of it oversensitive Jews who couldn't make an objective judgment of the work.
This is 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 Jewry as such has long since outlived its time.
It has no more justification within the modern life of peoples.
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 Jewry, the Jewish way of thinking.
Now, what's the charitable reading of that?
I mean, how do we nicely interpret this?
You can't, 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 in his stupid study or whatever.
I mean, it's just so arrogant.
It's just the height of it's incredible that someone would sit and say, like, oh, a whole 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 mainstream society.
As a general rule, the most patriotic people in Austria and in a lot of like German-speaking areas were Jewish Germans.
During World War I, they served at a disproportionately high rate in both the Austro-Hungarian and the German militaries.
So the fact that Steiner targeted these Jewish people in particular suggests that he was really, really, really fucking anti-Semitic.
Because 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 yarmulcas and like furious about that.
So like he's not just an anti-Semite.
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.
That's important to note.
Churchill Racism Quotes00:07:18
Yeah.
So in the late 1890s, Steiner became intellectually taken by the writing of individualist anti-religious thinkers like Max Stirner.
As a result, he focused more on the Jewish religion and Zionism.
Now, if you'll remember that Waldorf Answer's defense of 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 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 hypersensitivity, but rather the false image of the anti-Jewish movement invented by overwrought imaginations.
Anyone who has dealt with Jews 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's saying that anti-Semitism is bad and 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.
Yeah.
Which sounds really familiar to the things some people say about racism today.
Like, oh, it's bad to be racist against black people or Native Americans or Hispanics.
But really, most of the time when those people see racism, they're just being oversensitive.
Like I'm entirely 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.
Yeah.
It's not because racism is terrible.
Yeah.
It's not because they're racist.
They just can't stop saying that because they just, yeah, they're just hysterical about race.
And it has nothing to do with the fact that we're all actively acting like racists.
No, it has everything.
They're just looking for racism.
Racism's at the same level it's always been, which is fine.
They don't charitably read our racism.
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 the Democrats, I mean, the Republicans saying, like, the liberals can't stop talking about racism.
Like, that's their thing.
It's just, yeah, it's a fake problem from oversensitive people of color.
Yeah.
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.
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-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, Herzl and Nordau.
They exaggerate an unpleasant childishness 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.
He's again saying this about 20 years before the Holocaust.
It's just gaslighting.
And that's, I mean, like there was no, you know, that's a modern expression.
But the idea is it's 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 took it wrong and then you say something horrible again.
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 introduce like you start the problem and then it becomes a problem and then you say that I don't know how to just I can't do it.
I can't.
I had it.
I had it and I lost it.
But just the idea that basically you cause this situation and then you accuse everybody else of being oversensitive to it and then use that as part of your proof that the race you're talking about 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 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 shit as possible, but these Jews flip out about everything.
Watch this.
You know, it's a very subtle and insidious way of continuing the racism 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 do.
Exactly, yeah.
Like, why?
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.
Pretty much everybody.
It was in the air and literally chiseled into the stone walls of churches.
Winston Churchill is famous today among Israelis for being one of the greatest advocates that nation has ever had.
He was an intense and outspoken supporter of Israel and, of course, a staunch foe of the Nazis.
In February of 1920, Churchill wrote an article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald titled Zionism versus Bolshevism.
Quote, this movement among the Jews is not new.
From the days of Spartacus Weishop to those of Karl Marx and down to Trotsky, Bella Kuhn, Rosa Luxemburg, 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 is considered to be one of the great patrons of the Israeli nation in the 20s 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 shit Steiner's saying.
So my point in bringing this up is the fact that Steiner believed this shit during the late 1800s and early 1900s definitely qualifies him as anti-Semitic, 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, were 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 shit, he like stepped back from that.
So we can't necessarily say that Rudolf Steiner would have gone to bed with the Nazis, especially since he died in 1925.
But we can look at what his followers did once the Nazis came to power.
And speaking of the Nazis coming to power, Chris, it's time for an ad transition.
I don't know why that's a bad ad transition to make.
That's not a good one.
Oh boy.
Oh boy.
I have made an error.
Speaking of Hitler's unique brand of esoteric anti-Semitism, nope, that's not the right way either.
Whew shit.
Let me help you.
Yeah.
Now a word from our sponsor, which is not a Nazi.
Nazi Regime Persecution00:14:24
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Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
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Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
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I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
What I love about ads is that they aren't Nazism.
Oh boy, we're going to lose some money from this.
It's difficult to transition from this sort of subject matter into lighthearted, you know, whatever happens.
I don't know what sponsors you have, but, you know, something that delivers candy bars.
Yeah, they're not Nazis.
I should note that several times.
No, you know who were Nazis.
Go ahead.
Many of Rudolph Steiner's followers.
Yeah.
Fuck Rudolph Steiner.
This guy, man, someone needed to put him to bed.
He talked too much.
He wrote too much.
This man needed to have his coffee taken away.
Yeah, he's one of 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 set up.
No, see, I have nice ideas.
Like, I have nice ideas, but I also have clinical depression.
So I don't write 17 papers a day about my nice ideas.
But then there are these non-depressed assholes who are idiots who have boundless energy to write 5,000 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 too.
All right.
I'm too tired to make up shit like that.
You got to visit the ghost line.
You got to have a defective brain that has like, you have to be dumb and like really, really, really 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.
Assholes with endless energy is what ruins everything.
Trump's an example.
The guy's up wandering around all day just saying shit.
I mean, the guy's got a lot of energy.
This goes into my theory that you shouldn't stop rich people from developing problematic drug addictions.
I think that's true.
Yeah, you should just let them.
If Rudolf Steiner at age 19 had actually been doing a shitload of opium and had died at age 25, none of this would be a problem.
Right.
Yeah.
It's a shame.
It's a shame.
Hashtag give opiates to rich kids.
Yeah, like let's someone give some opiates to Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro.
Yeah.
Boy, how?
He's an example of one of these guys.
Like, it's just like, shut the fuck up.
Never had a real job.
Way too much energy.
Just set your alarm with some fucking oxy.
Sleep in one day, Shapiro.
Now, after 1902, when Steiner joined the Theosophical Society, he became inculcated with Madame Blavatsky's ideas about the mythical Aryan race.
After this point, the idea of root races and Aryanism 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 propaganda.
In a book called The Key to Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky 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 in the late 1800s, that's woker than most.
She wasn't like Europeans should own India, I guess.
So, yeah.
Now, Blavatsky viewed the Jew as the almost mythical antithesis to the Aryan, the opposite of the spiritual and progressive Übermensch.
If this sounds exactly like Nazi racial theory, that's because it essentially is.
Now, Chris, I'm going to guess you've heard of the Tula Society.
You know, I have not.
It's spelled Thule Society, like the top racks that people have on their four-wheel-drive cars.
T-H-U-L.
Yeah, I still really not.
I'm not familiar.
I mean, I'm not exactly sure what it is.
Well, if you've read your Hellboy comics or played a lot of Wolfenstein games where there's like Nazis doing dark occult magic and stuff, the actual historical root of all of those myths is the Thule Society or the Tula Society.
I've read about them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're pretty famous.
Nazi stuff, but.
Yeah, exactly.
This is the root of that.
And the Tula Society was a real occult society, and they financially supported a little group you might have heard about called the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which became the Nazi Party back before Hitler actually joined.
Now, Hitler himself was never a member of the Tula Society, but many influential Nazis were.
Guys like Hans Frank, who ran Poland for the Reich, Rudolf Hess, the deputy Führer, and Dietrich Eckhart, who actually founded the original Nazi Party.
The Tula 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 Aryans and Jews as the Theosophical Society did, which makes sense because both groups were closely tied together.
Many members of the Tula Society were adherents of Madame Blavatsky's teachings.
So the Tula Society is like they have events with the Theosophical Society.
They have members in common.
A lot of their teachings are based on Madame Blavatsky's writings, and the Thule Society becomes the sort of intellectual and spiritual center of the early Nazi movement.
And of course, Rudolf Steiner was a hugely influential part of the development of the Theosophical Society.
Yeah.
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 strain carriers for the Nazi disease.
So that's where we're going to here.
So while it wouldn't be accurate to say that anthroposophy inspired 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 a loud critic of organized anti-Semitism.
His writing on the subject was mostly limited to the period right around when he first got involved in the Theosophical Society.
Once he left in 1912 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 Stoddenmeier's piece on Steiner and the Jewish question.
Quote: In Steiner's eyes, racial exclusiveness was 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 1900 to 1901 writings, by 1905, Steiner was complaining to his future wife about the corrosive and totally materialistic consequences of the continuing Semitic influence within the Aryan epoch.
Sounds like this.
I bet his wife was having a lot of fun.
Oh, she's, I bet.
His future wife was like, tell me more.
Bet he was great in bed.
But let me tell you about the Jews.
Yeah, 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.
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 20th century.
Oh, no, I've thought about that.
That's a big part of the problem.
Man, like, I don't know why I've pictured Hitler's parents fucking, but I have because I've seen pictures of their two of them, and I just was imagining like, not only did 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 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 something worth.
Oh, I don't know.
I just think about it because it's like, fuck, she probably was just, I mean, there was just no upside to 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, it's a bad tale.
Yeah.
We do have a fun two-parter of this show about Hitler's sex life and everything we know about how the Führer fucks.
Oh my God.
He probably mailed one of those sperm to like via post, like, he probably had his sperm delivered via like horseback to and had a dumpster.
It was a gave a bronze ear.
Now, I'm going to finish that quote about the continuing Semitic influence within the Aryan epoch.
Yes.
This tendency continued throughout Steiner's final anthroposophical period, even after his organizational break with mainstream theosophy in 1913.
In a 1918 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 antisocial as regards the whole of humanity and insisted that Jewish culture was a 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 Waldorf Answers site I referenced earlier has a page titled Anthroposophy in the Time of Nazi Germany.
Quote: Anthroposophists belong 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 1921.
By the spring of 1933, articles criticizing the movement began appearing more frequently in national socialist newspapers.
By 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 1935 after the extensive lobbying of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich.
Pre-War Teaching Rise00:07:52
This is, in fact, true.
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 Ecofascism.
Quote, immediately after the Nazi movement attained state power in early 1933, the leaders of organized anthroposophy took the initiative in extending their support to the new government.
In June of that year, a Danish newspaper asked Günther Walshmuth, 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, Wachsmuth went on to express his sympathy and admiration for national socialism.
Wachschmuth, one of three top officers at Anthroposophy's world headquarters in Dornock, was hardly alone in Steiner's followers in 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 1934, the German Anthroposophic Society sent Hitler an official letter pointing out Anthroposophy'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 to it.
In fact, some Anthroposophists, like the law professor Ernst von Hippel, endorsed the expulsion of Jews from German universities.
So.
I was just thinking about something.
So the post-World War I period for Germany was similar in a way to the post-9-11 post-Iraq war period we're in 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 I.
They lost.
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's sake, even if they're imaginary.
And in the United States right now, post-9-11 and post-government bailout of the banks and post-Iraq war, no one is sure what we stand for anymore.
They don't believe that America stands for, you know, 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 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 I.
I feel like America feels pretty bad about itself and it's looking for Away a narrative to attach.
I'm sure you've seen hyper normalization.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, that kind of thing, where it's just these spaces in 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 was in between 1913 and 1932.
One of the big benefits that we have is that a very, vanishingly tiny fraction of our adult population has any experience in combat or war, and that the wars that sort of have had a cratering impact on kind of our national self-image didn't involve 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 were guys.
Not a single one of them flinched from physical.
They were all physically courageous.
Adolf Hitler got 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, they were all one of the benefits we have is that our fascists are mostly physical cowards, which I think is one of the reasons.
Yeah, it's one of the reasons I have some hope that we can overwhelm this thing is that most of these guys, like the Nazis were more willing to gamble than our fascists have so far been.
So I just 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 wish they could just say, hey, here's a nuanced view of what's happening right now.
Here's what Trump is.
I mean, I know that's not going to happen, but you know what I mean?
Like, Trump is a cartoon to fill space in a historical narrative that is lacking direction right now.
Yeah, we need a new myth because myths are the core of any society.
And that's part of what Steiner and a number of other people collectively and over a long period of time created for Germans.
That's kind of why Madame Blavatsky's teachings really take off in a big way in the immediately pre-war and post-war period.
And these other thinkers like Steiner are providing this mythical idea of the Aryan race and this conflict that they have with the Jews.
And it explains like that was necessary for the Germans to explain how they lost World War I was this idea that there was this deeper conspiracy.
And, you know, 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 Aryans and how the Jews are not really a part of this like thing, like that, that all played into this greater theory of somebody is trying to stop us from taking our rightful ascendant place in the community of nations.
Yeah.
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 pesticides or fertilizer.
Like obviously people have been doing that since forever.
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 want to know.
He fucking got a lot done, right?
He must have slept like a half hour a night.
Like a lot of criticisms of Rudolf Steiner.
Laziness is not one of them.
I wish he had done less.
That's the thing.
Yeah.
These people need to fucking settle down.
When I started my research into Steiner, I found my way to a Twitter thread started by Dr. Sarah Tabor.
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 100 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 60 to 70% 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 of his work just deleted those chapters.
Eventually, 1960s U.S. counterculture kids picked up editions of Steiner's books with the most egregious race theory material deleted.
They picked up on the yay nature and back to the land, down with artificial vibe, and had no idea that it was all an anti-Semitic tirade.
Biodynamic Farming Origins00:04:28
And that's essentially accurate.
Dr. Sarah Tabor gives a pretty good summary there, but 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?
I'm doing an ad plug.
Yes.
You know, if you need glycophosphate that you can healthily drink, are you tired of bees existing?
Do bees piss you off?
Have you been on Santa B recently?
Welcome.
They just play that scene from Stand By Me when Macaulay Colkin gets killed by the bee.
It's like Monsanto putting an end to this bullshit.
So this is an ad break, I assume.
This is a fucking ad break.
Yeah.
Is it?
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So now we're talking about what did Rudolph Steiner do now?
What did that fucking dynamic caffeine racist do now?
Biodynamic farming.
This is still a thing today.
You know what's funny, real quick, Robert?
I got to tell you, I've mentioned this on 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, 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 the Renaissance.
And I guess that's a real fact.
So I really...
It had an influence for sure.
Yeah, I know.
It's probably not the whole thing, but I'd say it was 50-50.
So, so I just, it's amazing.
I wish that we could have shut off the coffee supply to Germany between the years 1918 and 1934.
I will say this.
When you really get into the weeds of reading about European history, one of the thoughts you repeatedly are led to is like, boy, we should have really cut the Germans off from their caffeine supply.
Yeah, 100% of the time.
Yeah, it was a mistake.
People give those people more tired.
Yeah, these people needed to be sleepier.
Okay.
I swear to God.
You really got too much done.
Time machine, go back, smash all the fucking coffee machines in Germany in 1936.
Well, you know what?
Speaking of where coffee came into Europe, there's a single point at which you could have stopped coffee spread.
So one of the sort of the what's generally credited as like how coffee became part of Europe is like when the Ottomans laid siege to, I think it was, I think it might have been fucking, I don't know if it was Vienna or, yeah, I think it was Vienna.
When the Ottoman Empire laid siege to 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.
They'll take your work there.
They left their camp behind, right?
So they outside this European city, they leave their camp behind.
And being Turks, their camp included huge bags of coffee and like jezvas, you know, their kind of coffee pots that use for Turkish coffee.
Oh, these are the stories I live for.
So Europeans like started trying this shit out and they were like, oh my God, this stuff's 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 tried the coffee because everyone was like, is this a devil drink?
Can we drink this?
And the Pope tried it and was like, this shit's amazing.
He's like, I've never wanted to say mass more in my life.
The Pope, I think it was Pope Clement.
I forget which number, but he had numbers after Zambia.
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 coffee came into Christendom, is the Pope officially baptized it so that Christians could drink it.
That's when the Pope's hats got tall, too.
Yeah.
That's an awesome story.
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.
Okay.
There's a lot of cool myths about that, too.
But back to biodynamic farming.
The Biodynamic Association, which is like 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, composts, people, and the spirit of the place.
Biodynamic farmers and gardeners 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.
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. Rudolf Steiner, whose 1924 lectures to farmers opened a new way to integrate scientific understanding with a recognition of spirit and nature.
Now, as with anthroposophic medicine, Rudolf Steiner was never a farmer.
That's interesting.
Absolutely in no way ever a scientist either.
Yeah, of course not.
Why would he do that?
I was wondering.
That's what I was wondering.
I'm saying, this man has got boundless assistance.
He's never a fucking doctor either.
He was dictating while he was farming.
I mean, I think he might have had like a PhD, but he was never a medical doctor.
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
So he never, he just like, he just possibly, he's like 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.
Yeah.
You sort of already said, yeah.
I mean, one of the things about impurities kind of impurities in society and in the farm.
He wasn't wrong about every aspect of biodynamic 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 I.
And it was like really toxic and involved a lot of horrible chemicals and like people were doing fucked up shit to the land.
And he was able to see like, oh, maybe we should do less fucked up shit to the land.
He also mixed that in with a bunch of insane bullshit, but every aspect of what he was saying wasn't wrong.
There were a lot of problems with industrial agriculture, as there are today.
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 fuck he was talking about in any complex sense of the phrase.
Right, it's like a clock being right.
Whatever they say, broken clock.
Even a racist clock is occasionally right about farming.
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.
So I found a 2017 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 non-profit certifier of biodynamic farms in the United States.
They claimed the acreage devoted to biodynamic farming in this country increased by 16% in 2017.
Here's how 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 to the cosmos mean?
Yeah, it means farming with witchcraft, basically.
Essentially.
As woo-y as that sounds, and it's about to get woo-ier, biodynamic foods are growing in popularity.
Demeter works with more than 50 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 where biodynamic farming first got its start.
So, in the episode we recently did on 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 3 billion people or so.
But all those chemical fertilizers also fucked up the topsoil.
And in many cases, they had a negative effect on the flavor of food.
This 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 instead using compost and manure.
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 shit like that.
It wasn't just harmless magic, though.
Biodynamism took 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 in Nazi Germany, The Politics of Biodynamic Agriculture.
It's written by, guess who?
Our old buddy, Peter Stoddenmeier of Marquette University.
He seems to have something of an obsession for all things Steiner, and he's definitely the guy to go for on this one.
I'm going to quote from him now.
In the 1930s, biodynamic advocates touted their version of organic agriculture as spiritually aware peasant wisdom in contrast to civilization, technology, and modern urban culture.
Hippies.
Now, yeah, hippies, but there's a thinner line than you'd think between Nazis and hippies.
Because you know who else stood against modern urban culture and really pushed ideas of spiritually aware peasant wisdom?
The fucking Nazis.
And biodynamic advocates found a welcome home once the new Reich started winding up in 1932.
At that point, the main company selling biodynamism to the German people was Demeter, who's still around today.
Now, Demeter sold organic food, and Willetta sold cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
Both companies exist today and are, as far as I know, responsible corporate citizens.
But back in the 1930s, they were responsible corporate citizens of the National Socialist government.
In July of 1933, biodynamic farmers founded the Reich League for Biodynamic Agriculture.
Their leader was an anthroposophist named Erhard Barch.
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 1933, which is something the anthroposophists will point out regularly.
But that ban only lasted a year.
Quote, as early as 1934, Nazi Interior Minister Wilhelm Fricht visited Barch's Biodynamic Estate and expressed his support for the organization.
He was followed by a parade of similarly high-profile figures, including Rudolf Hess, Robert Lay, and Alfred Rosenberg, who were guests at biodynamic headquarters in Bad Saro and voiced 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 to growing food for the revitalization of the German nation.
They claimed that biodynamic farms enjoyed more abundant harvests 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, Barch disdained the Americanization and mechanization of agriculture as hazardous to the German 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, as talking about like the Aryan 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 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 well.
Where did 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 what exactly made the German economy function?
What was the money behind all this?
Like, obviously, if you want to sit around and talk about farming 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, which certainly Germany did not have, like, for a while before militarization?
I mean, who was funding?
Who was funding the free time speculation that these Germans were doing?
There's okay, so this is a very, there's the answer that's very complicated.
For a lot of these German philosophers, many of them did in the 20s especially, receive 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 FDR.
Which is an incredible story.
It is an incredible story.
We'll be doing an episode on it.
But more to the point, number one, the Weimar Republic had a lot of 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 paint it.
It had its bad years, but by the time the Nazi party really started to rise, the economy had started, was well on its path to recovery.
Now, a big part of what, you know, there's a lot of people who mistakenly 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 party's 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 of like unsustainably high rates and used that to push 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.
I'm just interested because deep thinking cultural, like the, like, like intellectualism is not, is, is, is 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.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, yeah, maybe we should reform things.
But yeah, but then that same thinking, that same like sort of luxury to ruminate leads to terrible ideas as well.
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 consideration that doesn't exist in culture anymore.
It doesn't seem to me.
Anyway, it's just a 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 bunch of good people doing the deep thinking that would be necessary to bring culture forward in good ways.
I don't know how to explain it.
You know, that's what we try to do here at Behind the Bastards.
Okay, well, good.
There you go.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe that's it.
If you want to draw even more comparisons between the rise of the Nazis and our own incipient fascist movement, one uncomfortable thing to look at could be the fact that if you guys like Hitler and 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 Mein Kampf and that's what gave him a lot of the time to formulate the rest of his philosophies and like figure shit out.
Hess Flight Comparisons00:06:20
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 family and stuff.
People like Ben Shapiro, people like Dave Rubin, people like Jordan Peterson, and also from the fact that they sell a shitload 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 it's scary where that might lead.
And we kind of saw where it led once when you give dumb assholes, tell them that they're really smart and give them a bunch of money to think of more dumb shit.
It gets really bad.
And yeah, that's...
I got you.
I'm just thinking about, okay, so maybe the best is less thinking.
Okay, I'm just trying to figure out what the hell's going on.
This is a lot.
It's hard to find lessons from history sometimes.
Yeah.
So when the Autobahn construction started in 1934, a group of landscape advocates oversaw the construction.
The guy in charge of this was Alwin Sievert, a biodynamic advocate who was considered the Third Reich's most prominent environmentalist.
Sievert 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, who were often one and the same, regularly encountered pushback and even oppression from Reich officials.
But that had less to do with the fact that Nazis saw them as fundamentally dangerous movements and more to do with petty infighting and bickering between different factions of Nazis.
So like the Waldorf answers people will claim that like, well, no, look, all these Nazis hated anthroposophy and like banned it at 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 Staudenmeyer lays out, most practitioners of Steiner-based philosophies had no problem with the Third Reich.
Quote, in 1937, an organic dairy farmer from Silesia declared that both biodynamics and Nazism were based on closeness to nature.
Well, in 1938, biodynamic advocates blamed profit-oriented chemical agriculture on Jewish influence.
A 1941 letter from an anthroposophist and biodynamic advocate similarly lamented that German efforts to maintain healthy soil were threatened by Jewish influence and racially foreign infiltration.
The biodynamic movement's anti-materialist stance sometimes won it praise from Nazi anti-Semites.
An adulatory 1940 text 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 have us believe.
See, first half of the sentence, I'm like, oh, maybe they're being in college when my Jewish professor told me that hens were egg-laying machines.
Yes.
Classic Judaism.
Yeah, the class was called hens.
Yeah.
Now, anthroposophy did succeed in getting itself heavily purged by the Nazis.
Now, this is largely because of a little fella named Rudolf Hess.
What do you know about Rudolf Hess?
Well, I know Rudolf Hess wasn't Hitler's best friend for a long time or is it not?
He was Hitler's best Reich's Führer or his second in command or whatever?
He was the deputy Fuhrer of the Reich for a while.
And didn't he used to be some butcher or something?
I mean, all these fucking Reich guys were all like ex, like, like just regular motherfuckers, like loading dock managers and shit who put on like outfits.
He was a favorite chicken farmer.
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 Mein Kampf and Hess did a 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.
Sophie just showed me a picture of his eyebrows.
That's the first thing that came to my mind.
I don't understand how these master race motherfuckers excused like these obvious.
I mean, the master race has fucking eyebrows that look like two goddamn snakes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
It's baddie.
So yeah, Hess was a big, big fan of the occult, big supporter of, he was in, you know, the Tula Society.
He was a big believer in like a lot of the stuff Steiner said.
And he was a major supporter of anthroposophy and like biodynamic farming and like was a big advocate for Steiner type beliefs in the Reich.
But in 1941, 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 succeed in this and was instantly captured.
And the nobler was incredibly embarrassing to Hitler.
Hess had, again, been Hitler's right-hand man throughout most of his rise to power, literally writing down a lot of Hitler's words.
When Hess abandoned him, Hitler took it personally.
And since Hess had been a major Nazi advocate for occult bullshit, his exiting the picture provided more practical monsters like Reinhard Heydrich with an opportunity to purge other Nazis they disagreed with.
Heydrich, by the way, is like maybe the worst of the Nazis.
I know.
Widely considered to be the architect of the Holocaust, the butcher of Moravia, terrible person.
Now, while anthroposophy was excised from German public life due to this, biodynamic farming continued.
From the very start of World War II, biodynamic growers had worked with Heinrich Himmler's SS to help plan for the agricultural colonization of the occupied Eastern territories.
The plan was to uproot and eliminate the Slavs 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.
Starting in October of 1939, the SS established a biodynamic agricultural school in occupied Poland.
So, after Hess's flight, Heinrich Himmler ordered the SS to use the term natural farming for organic agriculture rather than biodynamic.
New Age Enticement Patterns00:13:09
But nothing changed about the methods or the individuals involved, many of whom were dedicated anthroposophists and Steiner followers.
Gunther Punk, a biodynamic advocate, became head of the SS Office of Race and Settlement in 1938.
His goal was to fill the conquered East with biodynamic farms run by soldier farmers.
I'm going to quote from Staudenmeier one more time.
The centerpiece of the biodynamic operations was the sizable plantation at Dachau, which produced medicinal herbs and other organic goods for the SS.
As at Ravensbruck, the labor at the Dachau Biodynamic Plantation was performed by camp inmates.
From 1941 onwards, the Dachau operation was overseen by anthroposophist Franz Lippert, a leader of the biodynamic movement from its beginnings and head gardener at Walleta from 1924 to 1940.
So, in at least two concentration camps, there were biodynamic farms operated by slave laborers.
That is the birth of organic biodynamic farming.
It was literal concentration camps.
So, that's cool.
Willetta and 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 sizable minority of organic farmers in the U.S. and 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 farm or supports organic farming is a Nazi.
The ideas have evolved a lot since then, any more 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 influential to this day.
And this, my friend, is when we talk about Marianne Williamson.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now, she is not, to my knowledge, an 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 Isms and Ologies, All the Movements, 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 1889 as a sort of combination of new thought, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Theosophy.
Quote, Today, unity and 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.
Marianne Williamson, who is a unity pastor, Gary Zukov, and Wayne Dwyer are only a few best-selling writers who proclaim 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 Steiner, we must read and make connections with 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 are to develop our own ability to see the spirit, we must develop the ability to think for ourselves.
Even study of contemporary spiritual teachers like Marianne Williamson can help us develop this ability.
So, 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 piece or Marianne are fascists, because again, a lot of the racism has been pruned out of the modern publications of Steiner's work.
But it is worrying to me how close some of her beliefs seem to intertwine with Steiner's.
A terrifying number of his followers had no difficulty diving headfirst 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, Jewish, 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, sickness is an illusion and does not actually exist.
And the fact that this sort of nonsense isn't seen as immediately disqualifying in 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 Rudolph Steiner.
That's the end of the episode.
Hey, listen to this.
Marianne Williamson is another one of these rich kids.
She had a wasted decade where she moved to New Mexico and lived in a geodesic dome with her boyfriend.
And she also was going to pursue a career as a cabaret singer, but got distracted by, quote, bad boys and 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 attach like you take your personal journey and then you kind of try and impose it on everybody else.
It's like it's very, it's very like myopic.
Yeah.
Tunnel vision.
And there's some it's just very selfish.
It's this idea that your personal journey somehow you forget that you're a privilege.
You're one of this privileged class that gets to spend all its time, you know, thinking about shit that you really shouldn't be thinking about.
You should just be most of the time probably minding your own fucking business.
But you ended up with this huge amount of space in your life where you live in geodesic domes and 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 leads to problematic shit like what you see in Marianne Williamson's writings and stuff, where she'll talk about sickness and disease as if it's not a thing that just happens randomly to some people.
It's tied into like aspects of your, what you believe or like how you act or 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, like people who were born with like, you know, disabilities or whatever, like get really scared when they see this person starting to gain steam in politics because a shitload of stuff that she's written is the same kind of shit 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 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 shit, you're a Nazi, obviously.
But it does mean that like similar 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 Marianne Williamson said where she noted that like, oh, people on the left are way meaner than me than people on the right.
Like everybody talks about how mean the right is, but the left has been really like, those are the ones who've been the meanest to me.
And somebody quoted this and said, I 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 kooky new age left-wing views to turn hard right.
I knew a not like it was a journalist talking about like I talked to a Nazi militia leader once who sent his kids to a Waldorf school because he believed in a lot of the same wooey bullshit.
Like there's 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 to you than just embracing like, the world's like, let's not believe this kind of bullshit.
Like I'm going to try to actually like fix problems.
Yeah.
If you get it.
If you get kooky, you're going to want to hang out with kooks.
And only kooks are going to are going to tolerate you or respect you because you are talking shit and you make no sense.
I mean, she has no business speculating about the causes of diseases.
She's not a doctor.
She's a person who comes from a background of geodesic domes and bad boys and good dope.
And, you know, I hate the expression stay in your lane, but to an expense, 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 about diseases and causes of diseases.
You don't know what the fuck you are saying.
And then, oh, but these other people are much nicer to me because they're insane.
That's why.
Yeah.
And it's, it's like, you find like a lot of the shit that like was at the core of biodynamism is also at the core of like what Williamson says about healthcare.
She said this recently in Detroit while she was like campaigning for president and talking about like reforming the healthcare 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 Steinerian way where it's like, oh, that could lead to some really fucking uncomfortable conclusions about the world.
She said shit like people who want to avoid the swine flu should pour God's love on their immune systems.
Like she said shit about vaccines that's really unsettling.
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-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 people need to tell more people who are talking about stuff that they don't know anything about to shut the fuck up.
Yeah.
And when somebody who, yeah, when somebody who, I mean, it's narcissism.
All it is is narcissism.
It's just narcissism makes you think you're an expert on fucking everything.
And once some, it's just annoying to me.
There's so many good people who don't aren't just aren't blabbing.
What is, I forget what thinker 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 that's what I've been trying to get at this whole episode.
Yeah.
Be really, be really fucking careful about anybody.
And this is one of the problems, the fundamental problems with having a president, is that then you have this person who has to pretend like they're 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.
But because of our system, they all have to be able to bullshit at being good at all that, even though, at best, the best of them are competent at like two or three of those things.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
Yeah, 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, your best friends are going to be people who don't believe in climate change because they think it's, you know, people who have expert opinions on things that they know nothing about.
Yep.
Fuck them.
And fuck Rudolph, whatever, Steiner.
Rudolph Steiner.
So in conclusion for today, fuck Rudolf Steiner.
Fuck that.
Punch a dancer.
And farms are bad?
That might not be the lesson to take out of this.
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 some of the ideas even in biodynamic farming, like about like that are critical.
Like we're having a major problem now with like our topsoil is being eroded.
And there's like certainly aspects of organic farming and of biodynamic farming that are better for the topsoil than a lot of the industrial shit we're doing.
That's absolutely a fair point.
He wasn't wrong about everything.
He just talked about everything.
So he was mostly wrong.
Like that's Steiner in a nutshell.
I wonder if Jennifer Aniston'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.
These kids, you know, I don't know.
I don't know.
Grand Statement Distrust00:06:02
I think that 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 Hauer's tears in the rain speech from the end of Blade Runner.
And really, who's to say which is worth more?
Concentration camps.
It was bad.
Oh, boy.
Good times.
How do you wrap it up usually?
Do you wrap it up with a grand statement about the history or is it just sort of like a public service grand statements?
I don't trust grand statements.
If 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 that.
It's fucking complicated.
So you're providing context for information.
It's really, I tend to want, I tend to want narratives with endings and things, 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 warning signs and sort of problematic little things about the organic farmer because he might be getting a little too weird.
If there's a single sentence summary I can give this that isn't entirely inaccurate or too 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.
And sometimes that includes me.
Definitely don't trust me.
I'm a terrible person.
And that's the note that we should end on.
You want to plug your plug up?
Thank you, Robert, so much.
I really, really enjoyed being on your show.
And I'm deeply impressed with your research and writing.
And I would love to come back on again.
And in the meantime, you can find me on at The Crofton Show where I talk about complete nonsense.
So you don't have to worry about me being an expert on anything on there.
And my advice column, which is equally, I mean, 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 Pitchfork gave it a 7.4.
So go listen to my Pitchfork approved album, Hello, It's Me.
And go buy a pitchfork along with some bolt cutters to get ready for the upcoming civil unrest.
That's my plug.
I am Robert Evans.
You can find me on, well, you can find the sources for this website on behindthebastards.com.
I do want to give a special shout out to Peter Stoddenmeier, who has done a whole fuckload of the left edge of this episode with his own research.
So thank you, Professor Stoddenmeier.
I hope I pronounced your name not wrong.
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at at BastardsPod.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
You can buy t-shirts at tpublic.com.
If you want t-shirts that have anything to do with this podcast, you should look up Behind the Bastards on tpublic.com.
And that is it.
That's the episode.
Go fucking hug a cat and punch a dancer.
Thanks, Robert.
Okay.
Sophie, should we be advising people to assault random dancers?
No.
Okay, well, the episode's over.
Cool.
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