The elusive lecture

An analysis of Mr. Staudenmaier as "Protocol of Steiner" forger and the stages in his efforts to cover up his untruthfulness as self-proclaimed "historical scholar" (part VII)

(Continued from here)

On his mailing list, Mr. Dugan, secretary of PLANS, in June 2005, disclosed that the PLANS web site now publishes yet another paper by Mr. Staudenmaier, written for a workshop conducted by PLANS during an "anti-cult" conference in Atlanta in October 2004.

In his new paper, Mr. Staudenmaier -- seemingly faithful to his habit, rooted in his understandable and justified personal horror feelings about anything that could even, as theosophy, hint at the mentioning of the word "Aryan" in any context -- continues to repeatedly mix truths with untruths in what he writes on anthroposophy, even as a -- when writing the paper in 2004 -- graduate student of history at Cornell.

For more on this new paper by Mr. Staudenmaier, and the continued untruthful intricacy of his new writings, published six months after the publication of the discussions of a number of central aspects of Steiner's views on "race" in April 2004, found here, here, here, and here at the site of Waldorf Answers, see here.


"I don't take these things nearly as seriously as you do" 


After the discussion exposing his first "Protocol of Steiner" forgery, Mr. Staudenmaier stated in private correspondence in November 2001 that he, in some undescribed way, had "corrected" the article in later translations of it, writing that if one searched the Internet, one would find them (something which -- again -- turned out not to be the true, when using the major search engines on the Internet to search for them).

He also wrote -- when pointed to the fact that his untruthful story continues to be published, both at the site of the "Institute for Social Ecology" with which he is associated, as also at the PLANS site -- that he at one time communicated with the web master of the Institute for Social Ecology site to make the web master "correct" the article.

But he then -- when seeing that the untruths remained uncorrected -- did not bother the web master again about it, adding:

"I don't take these things nearly as seriously as you do".
He also did not bother to correct the article with regard to even the most obvious untruths, described above, at the PLANS site, with whose secretary he regularly communicates up to this day, until 2005, more than five years after its original publication, four years after the discussion and documentation of his original untruths.

He then has replaced it with a slightly "edited" version, to try to avoid a continued discussion of his documented, repeated and persistent untruthfulness in what he writes about anthroposophy. But he keeps publishing its basic untruthfulness with regard to the whole lecture series, to which he refers also in the new introduction, and has continued to defend by referring to a well documented mistranslation of lecture six in the series.

Nor did the secretary and web master of PLANS remove or correct it, consciously continuing to publish and defending the untruths by Mr. Staudenmaier, documented by the discussions in 2001, described above, as part of the anti-anthroposophy and anti-Waldorf demagoguery and defamation cultivated at Mr. Dugan's PLANS the site.

In defense of his documented untruths, Mr. Staudenmaier in 2003 expressed the view that he can not be accused of having lied, as he himself has believed that what he has written was true.

This defense does not apply to the time after he (during a visit to Germany during the summer of 2001) had actually bought the published source he had argued about, and still continued to defend the untruths he had written about it, continuing to assert in October 2001:

"The published version of the lecture doesn't contradict my description of it".

Never ending new stories by Mr. Staudenmaier, now  in 2005 ... 
In 2005, the undersigned became aware that the organizer of the above mentioned "anti-cult" conference in Atlanta in October 2004, Dr. Langone, seemed to plan to publish the mentioned new paper on anthroposophy, presented by Mr. Staudenmaier during a workshop at the conference, in a journal for which he is editor; "Cultic Studies Review".

I then wrote to Dr. Langone, expressing my surprise when learning about it, based on my experiences of Mr. Staudenmaier's repeated untruthfulness as repeatedly self-proclaimed "historical scholar", as documented at these pages and by the analysis by Daniel Hindes of the first part of Mr. Staudenmaier's paper from 2000).

In the ensuing mail exchange, Mr. Staudenmaier told and tried to convince Dr. Langone, for which he -- seemingly -- had a respect, that seemed mutual at the time, of some new interesting stories, seemingly trying to convince Dr Langone of his own seriousness as "historical scholar".
 
 

NEW STORIES SIX, SEVEN AND EIGHT - SEPTEMBER 2005

As comment to my description of Mr. Staudenmaier's stories "one" to "five", documented above (described at an earlier version of this article from July 2005), Mr. Staudenmaier in a mail of 13 September 2005 writes to Mr. Langone, with a CC to the undersigned, on his own earlier published statements as historical documents:

"I don't think it would be helpful to engage most of those arguments because they are about positions I don't hold and never have held ..." [bold by the undersigned]
He also writes to Mr. Langone on his own confusing and contradictory floating position from 1 May to 2 October 2001, story two above, about the lecture he never has found as he describes it in the introduction to his article, neither as lecture one, nor as lecture six in the series:
"If you think it relevant, I can also show you the publicly accessible archived exchanges between me and Sune (several of which I pointed out to Michael L. a few days ago) where readers can see that I did not at any point invoke 'a lecture held by Steiner in Oslo at the time of the lecture series, but not published in the lecture series', ..." [bold by the undersigned]
A third new story he tells is:
"I did not at any point refer solely to a single lecture rather than the full lecture series, ..." [bold by the undersigned]
As noted, Mr. Staudenmaier has an outstanding way with words. Taking part in what he writes at different times about Steiner and on his own earlier writings at different points is an ever new intellectual adventure.

If Mr. Staudenmaier objects to these quotes from a personal mail from him to Dr. Langone, me, and someone else, and tells me about it, I will replace them with descriptions of them in my own words.

In the exchange Mr. Staudenmaier also compared his own writings on Steiner to those of

"Galen's polemics against the various medical sects of his day"
seemingly not taking the distinction between polemics, and outright untruthfulness about well documented historical sources as something that needs to be taken that very seriously, and clearly considering the latter to be something permitted in what he describes as his own "polemical" writings about anthroposophy, as documented above.

On Galen's writings from the second century, Kenneth Walker writes (The Story of Medicine, London: Arrow Books 1959.):

"the stories which from time to time enliven the endless discussions of Galen are introduced either to show how much cleverer he was than his colleagues, or at best to exemplify and support some particular theory." (p. 59)
To what extent Mr. Staudenmaier also compares to Galen beyond this, I leave to others to judge.
 

An insult to the concept of "historical scholar" 


The preceding discussion of the misrepresentations by Mr. Staudenmaier about Rudolf Steiner, and the comments by Mr. Staudenmaier himself, describing his own work as applying "standard scholarly procedure", in addition to other discussions about his writings, demonstrates not only the repeated complete unreliability of what he writes on Rudolf Steiner, depicting him as an Aryan supremacist and anti-Semite, but it also indicates his seeming profound disinterest in whether what he writes and publishes on anthroposophy actually is true or not, even in his own view.

What he has written and continues to write is understandable on a personal level as an expression of his seeming deep horror and antipathy behind the surface of anything that could even smack of something related to the anti-Semitism that later came to expression in the Holocaust, and arguing for an "Aryan Supremacy" in relation to Jewry and Judaism.

But the repeated untruths of Mr. Staudenmaier, rooted in this seeming understandable personal horror behind the surface of his writings are inexcusable, when coming from someone who repeatedly describes himself as a "scholar", and even a "historical scholar", and constitute an insult to the concepts of "scholar" and "scholarship" with which he likes to describes himself and his writings.

For more, on Mr. Dugan's conscious publication and repeated defense of Mr. Staudenmaier's untruths at his site, continue here.