Responding to the WC II

Walden continues:

Looks like I might have found an answer to my question - but it seems confusing...

I previously wrote:

Trying to slowly make my way through a web site that Serena pointed out and I have a question regarding something the writer (Daniel Hindes) states:

"Blavatsky did indeed originate the term "Root Race". And she did declare that indigenous peoples are dying out. However, Staudenmaier has misunderstood (or never read) the explanation for how this is to be accomplished. Contrary to what Staudenmaier would have you believe, Blavatsky did not declare that those indigenous people who were alive ought to die for
karmic reasons. Rather, Blavatsky, accepting the scientific reports that indigenous peoples were dying out as a unique racial group due to sterility, declared that this sterility was due to the fact that souls no longer wished to be born into these races. The dying-out process she predicted would take another thousand years. The karmic necessity that Blavatsky talked about was that souls wishing to be born were choosing other races for karmic reasons, and not that indigenous peoples currently alive ought to die.26 Staudenmaier has treated Blavatsky with the same lack of scholarly care and accuracy that he brings to this study of Steiner."

http://www.defendingsteiner.com/refutations/ps01/Anthroposophy%20and%20Ecofascism.pdf

Does anyone know of these "scientific reports that indigenous peoples were dying out as a unique racial group due to sterility?"

Later on in the same piece, the same author seems to contradict his claim of scientific reports:

I'm not quite sure what Walden is talking about; he appears to be an extremely careless reader. Firstly, I do not identify with Blavatsky or hold up her opinions as Truth. I merely stated that firstly, Blavatsky believed one thing (and I gave specific page numbers for where it could be found in "The Secret Doctrine") and second that Staudenmaier seriously misrepresented Blavatsky's beliefs in writing about them, much as he seriously misrepresents Steiner's beliefs when writing about Steiner. Again, I am not adopting Blavatsky's position or even commenting on its accuracy. The entire point is that Peter Staudenmaier misunderstands and misrepresents both Blavatsky and Steiner. The point is not to determine whether Blavatsky or Steiner were correct, only to describe the positions of both writers.

[Daniel Hindes:]"The quote offered here is greatly helped by some context. Steiner wrote:

'The Native American population did not die out because this pleased the Europeans, but because the Native American population had to acquire such forces as lead to their dying out.'

This sentence does not make a lot of sense on its own. It is part of a larger thought that Steiner expressed over several pages on how the geography of the earth influenced the formation of racial characteristics in past epochs. In the west, said Steiner, the forces that lead to the overcoming of the influence of racial characteristics are strongest, and this he tied to the physical weakness behind the death of so many Native Americans. Though not explicitly mentioned in this context, this weakness was immunological, as research from the last 40 years has indicated. Steiner strongly deplored the behavior of the Europeans towards the Native Americans, but the simple fact remains that most of the inhabitants of the Americas in 1491 would not have survived the contact with Europe even if not a single one as murdered directly at the hands of a white man. Steiner intuited this even though the science of his day had no concepts to express why."

[Walden:] Makes me wonder: when Daniel Hindes tells us that Blavatsky accepted the *scientific reports* that indigenous peoples were dying out as a unique racial group due to sterility, why does he later tell us that science of his (Steiner's) day had no concepts to express why - and that Steiner "intuited this?"

So here is Walden's quandary: how can Blavatsky accept so-called scientific reports about the sterility of Native peoples, and yet the science of Steiner's day doesn't know why the Native Americans died of disease in such numbers? This is then trumpted as a major flaw in the logic of the writer. Well Walden appears to be seriously confused on a few points. Firstly, sterility is not the same as immunological susceptibility. And Blavatsky's concept of Native peoples dying out over the next 1000 years due to sterility is not the same as the historical extermination of Native peoples or the mass deaths due to disease. So there is no contradiction between reporting that Blavatsky claimed that she knew of scientific reports of sterility that would cause a gradual dying out of Native peoples over the next 1000 years (had Walden checked the reference, he would have noted that Blavatsky was talking as much about Pacific Islanders as Native Americans) and Steiner explaining that Native Americans were particularly weak physically and had been dying out.

If this is an example of Walden's logical abilities, then I have to conclude that he can't reason. He is simply fabricating contradictions because he would so very much like to find my writing in error. This type of "emotional logic" seems typical of the WC as a whole.

By the way, many of my First Nations friends take strong exception to this stuff and last I checked - they have not yet "died out."

-Walden

The gratuitous "my First Nation friends" is an unnecessary and insulting. Neither I nor Steiner in any way approve of what was done to the Native Americans. Both he and I deplore it. The implication that we in any way approve is completely unjustified. Why Walden presumes that describing an event is equivalent to condoning it is beyond me. I believe I had the same argument with Diana Winters; just because it happened doesn't make it good. And describing how or why it happened does not imply approval.