Anthroposophy and Ecofascism 57

Continuing my commentary on the 17th paragraph of Peter Staudenmaier's Anthroposophy and Ecofascism.

Steiner, a cosmopolitan humanist renowned for his calls for a universal brotherhood of man and the overcoming of racial and ethnic prejudice, is here depicted on the flimsiest pretenses as a heartless spiritualistic racist. Steiner deplored the treatment of Native Americans by the Europeans, yet a comment he made explaining their genetic susceptibility to diseases – a point today well established – is here offered as evidence of his callous disregard for their suffering and even overt racism. 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 present time, indeed for the last 10,000 years, the task of humanity has been to overcome racial divisions, according to Rudolf Steiner. ) 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.

* Translation by the author. In the original:  

"Nicht etwa deshalb, weil es den Europäern gefallen hat, ist die indianische Bevölkerung ausgestorben, sondern weil die indianische Bevölkerung die Kräfte erwerben mußte, die sie zum aussterben führten."

Steiner, Rudolf. Die Mission Einzelner Volksseelen. Dornach: Verlag der Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung, 1962. (GA 121, page 75).