Anthroposophy and Ecofascism 58

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

The statement that aboriginal peoples are devolving into apes I find nowhere in Peter Staudenmaier's cited source (which I have printed in its entirety below in my comments on Peter Staudenmaier's footnote 8) and is completely foreign to Steiner's Anthroposophy. Steiner's actual statement is: "These [the declining remnants of the Lemurian civilization] languished, and their descendants inhabit certain parts of the earth as the so-called wild peoples to this day." There is nothing about apes. Even Peter Staudenmaier's use of the word "degenerate" is a mistranslation, as we have seen. "Verfall" means "degeneration" only in biological contexts. When speaking of cultures or civilizations, it means "decline." Steiner did not say that they physically degenerated; he said that their culture declined.

In this paragraph we have here another fabrication and a mistranslation. Of course this is really the only way to make Steiner into a racist, but it is sad to see it being done so deliberately here.