Reposted from my personal blog (Daniel Hindes' Blog)
Once upon a time I came across a site that annoyed me. It had a wealth of material on esoteric subjects, details that were available nowhere else on the web, and in some cases nowhere else at all. The only problem was that not one piece of it had any citations, and that made it essentially useless for my purposes. It is standard scholarly practice if you are talking about something that happened 300 years ago to describe the sources upon which you base your conclusions. Other scholars such as myself can then go back to the sources and verify your research, or come to different conclusions. But if you have only the conclusions without the sources, than the opinions are essentially worthless. The author of the site was revealed after some clicking around to be Eric P. Wijnants. I wrote as much in a blog post entitled “How Not to Write Occult History”.
It turns out I stumbled on something a little bit larger than just a personal annoyance. In the comments of my blog a graduate student came forward to tell how Eric P. Wijnants had conned her into sending review material, pretending to be a professor at the University of Vienna. Her entire research, previously unpublished, showed up on his website as his own work. In a follow-up post a few years later I summarized the whole affair: “Eric P. Wijnants and the problem of pseudo-scholarly writing without footnotes”. Eric himself, using psudonyms, jumped to his own defense in the blog comments.
But the story continues. It seems Susan Olsson was not the only researcher and graduate student whose material was “borrowed” by Eric P. Wijnants – solicited for scholarly review and then posted wholesale on his site. Brendan French's Ph.D. thesis was similarly plagiarized, as was that of Dr. Walter Penrose.
Because his own name is now linked to this broadening plagiarism scandal, Eric P. Wijnants has increasingly used pseudonyms to solicit work. He also uses the pseudonyms to reference his own work, support himself and his other pseudonyms, and defend himself in public discussions (a tactic known as sock puppeting). Ah the wonders of the Internet, when you can pretend to be anyone you want!
Among Eric’s many pseudonyms:
Eric P. Wynants
Dr. Brigitte Muehlegger
Robert Anton Wilson
Francois Martinet PhD
C.Wong
Bhakti Ananda Goswami
Dr. Raphael Vishanu
Brian Muehlbach
Amara Das Wilhelm
And there are doubtless dozens more. Some of these pseudonyms Eric P. Wijnants uses may be real people, but they are also names that have been borrowed and used by him on the Internet, either to post in public forums or to solicit articles from scholars and researchers.
Eric P. Wijnants’s own website (http://sociologyesoscience.com/) continues to be a hotbed of activity, to which Eric posts up to 20,000 words of unreferenced, often uncited, and unsigned material per day. Much of it is highly specialize and thoroughly researched (by somebody, though if Eric P. Wijnants did the research, you’d think he’d bother to mention the sources more often – but then if he was actually researching the stuff, there’s no way he would be writing 20,000 words of proofed, edited, and publishable <except for the frequent absences of references> material per day). Either he spends all day in front of a keyboard retyping everything he’s ever read in slightly different words and without a single citation or reference, or – more likely – he is copying and pasting wholesale from all over the place, leaving out the citations and references, and sticking it on his site, where it sits unsigned an unreferenced, but nonetheless implicitly as his own work.
For more evidence that he is likely cutting and pasting (and/or scanning and OCR-ing) consider the page “Historical Overview” on his site (http://soc.world-journal.net/HistoricalOverview.html). The entire page is a bunch of scanned pages from some book and/or magazines(s) showing the history of the world. No, he did not master Adobe Illustrator and make all the charts himself; he scanned them and posted the images on his site. And he did not say where they came from, either. So aside from the blatant copyright violation, if anyone wanted to use them, it would be extremely difficult to find the original source so as to be able to cite it.
Consider Eric P. Wijnants’s output in the first 10 days of March, 2008: 9700 words on the beginning of the cold war, part one. 15,700 words on the beginning of the cold war, part two (between them, 260 citations to over 200 books and documents – I’ll get to that in a minute). A 1500 word commentary to a BBC article on Hitler and the occult, no references. 5500 words on Chinese Tantra (a separate citations page lists 384 sources consulted, including over 100 primary documents – in the original Chinese!). 14,257 words on the end of the cold war (60 references). 628 words on the state of Eastern Europe today (no citations, but a scan of a map, uncredited). 17,700 words on “Populations at War” with 40 citations to over 80 sources. 1900 words on Kurdish nationalism (no references).
That is a total of 66,825 words in 10 days, or about a 200 page book. The topics span at least three different academic specialties, and the references (for 10 days of work, mind you) total 744 different books and documents (over 100 of them in Chinese). Not a bad output for 10 days! At that rate you should be able to complete about 10 doctoral dissertations per year, easily!
Aside from the improbable quantity (he’s been going at close to this rate for years now; in February he posted 24 different “articles” – there are 8 so far this March), what might cause us to believe that this isn’t all Eric’s original output? Well, there are the obvious OCR errors, for one. To give an example, “From romantic hero to man of steel; such was [he evolution of Stalin's self-image.2” (taken from http://soc.world-journal.net/startColdWar.html). Notice the “[he”. That is an OCR error. No typist would ever make that keystroke error. The [ symbol is the left pinky finger. A “t” is the right index finger. You don’t mix those up. But to an OCR program, t can look a lot like [. Notice also how the footnotes have lost their superscript. If you typed the document in MS Word, you could transfer it to the web easily while maintaining the footnotes properly. Instead Eric uses Netscape Navigator 4.7 to create his web pages.
The well turned phrase “From romantic hero to man of steel” is enough for Amazon to locate the book (thanks to the “Search Inside the Book” feature). Eric P. Wijnants has lifted the entire chapter from Melvyn P. Leffler’s recently (September 2007) published book “For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War”. Does Leffler’s name appear anywhere on Eric P. Wijnants’ website? No.
So what are we to conclude? Eric P. Wijnants is a blatant, serial, high-volume plagiarist. Almost everything on his site comes from somewhere else, and none of it is credited to the original authors. The strange thing is that he becomes indignant when this is pointed out. And the biggest irony is that he runs around the world pretending to be an academic. Half his pseudonyms have PhD’s!
2007 was a good year, and I wrote a number of interesting product reviews.
A recent article I wrote was a list of lens bargains for the Sony Alpha (formerly Minolta Maxxum) lens mount. The article was titled Sony Alpha (Minolta Maxxum mount) lens bargains.
I also wrote a review of my main wide-angle lens, the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM. And predictably review was titled Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM Review.
A couple years ago I wrote an article called How Ebay profits from software piracy, based on my experiences with one transaction. Those are the most recent articles on my photography blog.
Several years ago I wrote a review of the CompactDrive PSD PD7X. This is a portable hard drive casing that ran off of AAA batteries and allowed you to dump the contents of CompactFlash drive cards on to your portable hard drive in the field. In the days of 16 gig CF cards, it is not terribly useful anymore. It back when he spent $200 for a one gig card, it made a lot more sense.
I also written a review of Genuine Fractals 3.5, were I compared it to Photoshop CS bicubic interpolation, and found Photoshop to upsize better than genuine fractals. The article is titled Genuine Fractals 3.5 Review.
Before that I wrote a review of the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D. I am still very pleased with the camera, and think that the 7D still takes better pictures than my Sony Alpha 100. Read my review at Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D Review.
My latest article is titled Flatbed scanner comparison: The Canon CanoScan 4400F vs the CanoScan 8600F. in this article I attempt to answer the question, "What is the difference between the Canon CanoScan 4400F and the CanoScan 8600F?
Daniel
Continuing my commentary on the 14th paragraph of Peter Staudenmaier's Anthroposophy and Ecofascism.
Already as early as 1906, just four years after starting his work as an independent teacher in the context of the Theosophical Society, Rudolf Steiner stated publicly the term ' Root Race' was a misnomer.* By the time he had come to this conclusion, Steiner had already written a number of articles and given numerous lectures employing the term, and to this day they are republished with the term 'Root Race' unaltered. Most editions have an introductory note about the possibly confusing issue of inconsistent terminology. Steiner did rework some of his earlier texts and changed the terms, but he did not update all his writing this way. (One prominent example is the book Cosmic Memory, which is a collection of Rudolf Steiner's early writings on Atlantis and Lemuria, initially published in serial form in the periodical "Lucifer". Theosophical terminology, including the term 'Root Race' is present throughout, and Steiner never revised the volume during his lifetime, and it wasn't published as a book until 10 years after his death.) Most scholars of Steiner consider his thought and the development of his concepts to be consistent even as the terminology changed. In fact Steiner deliberately and continually employed varying terms in order to force his listeners to focus on his concepts rather than his terminology.
* Explaining the issue at length in 1909, when he was still the General Secretary of the German section of the Theosophical Society in Germany, Steiner said:
”If we go back beyond the Atlantean catastrophe, we see how human races were prepared. In the ancient Atlantean age, human beings were grouped according to external bodily characteristics even more so than in our time. The races we distinguish today are merely vestiges of these significant differences between human beings in ancient Atlantis. The concept of races is only fully applicable to Atlantis. Because we are dealing with the real evolution of humanity, we [theosophists] have therefore never used this concept of race in its original meaning. Thus, we do not speak of an Indian race, a Persian race, and so on, because it is no longer true or proper to do so. Instead, we speak of an Indian, a Persian, and other periods of civilization. And it would make no sense at all to say that in our time a sixth "race" is being prepared. Though remnants of ancient Atlantean differences, of ancient Atlantean group-soulness, still exist and the division into races is still in effect, what is being prepared for the sixth epoch is precisely the stripping away of race. That is essentially what is happening.
Therefore, in its fundamental nature, the anthroposophical movement, which is to prepare the sixth period, must cast aside the division into races. It must seek to unite people of all races and nations, and to bridge the divisions and differences between various groups of people. The old point of view of race has physical character, but what will prevail in the future will have a more spiritual character.
That is why it is absolutely essential to understand that our anthroposophical movement is a spiritual one. It looks to the spirit and overcomes the effects of physical differences through the force of being a spiritual movement. Of course, any movement has its childhood illnesses, so to speak. Consequently, in the beginning of the theosophical movement the earth was divided into seven periods of time, one for each of the seven root races, and each of these root races was divided into seven sub-races. These seven periods were said to repeat in a cycle so that one could always speak of seven races and seven sub-races. However, we must get beyond the illness of childhood and clearly understand that the concept of race has ceased to have any meaning in our time."
Rudolf Steiner. The Universal Human: The Evolution of Individuality. New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1990. Pages 12-13. Lecture of December 4 th, 1909.
Continuing my commentary on the 14th paragraph of Peter Staudenmaier's Anthroposophy and Ecofascism.
In addition, Rudolf Steiner's conception of “Root Races” differed in a number of important ways, particularly concerning of the nature of the time period that comprises the present 'Root Race' and its constituent 'Sub-Races'. Whereas Blavatsky really did consider the racial aspects of the time-division to be of importance, Steiner saw the defining characteristics of these time periods of time to be the cultural phenomenon that occurred and the cultural achievements of the people's living in them. Thus to Steiner, calling the time periods and their cultural achievements 'Root Races' and 'Sub-Races' appeared to be mistaken. Steiner said :
“For this reason we speak of ages of culture in contra-distinction to races. All that is connected with the idea of race is still a relic of the epoch preceding our own, namely the Atlantean. We are now living in the period of cultural ages ... Today the idea of culture has superseded the idea of race. Hence we speak of the ancient Indian culture, of which the culture announced to us in the Vedas is only an echo. The ancient and sacred Indian culture was the first dawn of post-Atlantean civilization; it followed immediately upon the Atlantean epoch.”
Steiner, Rudolf. The Apocalypse of St John (GA 104), London 1977, lecture of 20 June 1908.
Continuing my commentary on the 14th paragraph of Peter Staudenmaier's Anthroposophy and Ecofascism.
The words “Root Races” (Würzelrassen) in Steiner's very early theosophical work aren't actually about race in the racial sense at all. When Rudolf Steiner was searching for an audience around turn of the century the only group he found that was in anyway interested in hearing in depth about the spirit and about spiritual matters were members of the Theosophical Society.* As a consequence, when speaking to these Theosophists Rudolf Steiner would employ terms familiar to them in order to convey the results of his own spiritual research.** Rudolf Steiner, who was an eminent scholar and thoroughly familiar with many areas of inquiry, had also read Blavatsky and was quite familiar with her work. His was not an uncritical take, and he once wrote privately that Blavatsky's work contained the highest spiritual truths mixed with the greatest nonsense***. Steiner of course admired certain aspects of Blavatsky's character and some of the things she was able to accomplish****, but his was not an uncritical admiration nor was he in complete agreement with all of her thoughts and views. But Steiner did use the terminology that Blavatsky had established in his early esoteric works. As his own work matured Rudolf Steiner moved away from more and more of Blavatsky's terminology, preferring to coin his own terms in German. The very first term that Steiner decided was inappropriate was the term 'Root Race'.*****
* "If I may once again introduce a personal note. I had to find a suitable opportunity on which to build. One could not simply crash in on our civilization with the spiritual world." Rudolf Steiner. The Anthroposophic Movement. Bristol, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1993. Page 22.
" There was now no longer any reason why I should not bring forward this spiritual knowledge in my own way before the theosophical public, which was at first the only audience that entered without restriction into a knowledge of the spirit."
Steiner, Rudolf. The Course of My Life. New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1951. Pages 297-298.
** “My first work of lecturing within the circles which grew out of the Theosophical Movement had to he planned according to the temper of mind of the groups. Theosophical literature had been read there, and people were used to certain forms of expression. I had to retain these if I wished to be understood. But with the lapse of time and the progress of the work I was able gradually to pursue my own course, even in the forms of expression used.” Rudolf Steiner. The Story of My Life. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1928. Page 313.
*** Rudolf Steiner and Marie Steiner. Correspondence and Documents: 1901-1925. New York: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1988. Pages 17-18. He repeated this characterization publicly 20 years later in a lecture on June 10 th, 1923:
"In short, Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine is a peculiar book: great truths side by side with terrible rubbish." Rudolf Steiner. The Anthroposophic Movement. Bristol, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1993. Page 23.
**** For an example of the high regard that Steiner nonetheless had for Blavatsky, see pages 61 to 63 of Rudolf Steiner and Marie Steiner. Correspondence and Documents: 1901-1925. New York: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1988.
***** In 1908 Steiner said:
“When people speak of races today they do so in a way that is no longer quite correct; in theosophical literature, too, great mistakes are made on this subject ... Even in regard to present humanity, for example, it no longer makes sense to speak simply of the development of races. In the true sense of the word this development of the races applies only to the Atlantean epoch ... thus everything that exists today in connection with the [different] races are relics of the differentiation that took place in Atlantean times. We can still speak of races, but only in the sense that the real concept of race is losing its validity."
Steiner, Rudolf. Universe, Earth and Man (GA 105), London 1987, lecture of 16 August 1908.
Peter Staudenmaier writes in Paragraph 14 of Anthroposophy and Ecofascism:
Steiner asserted that root races follow one another in chronological succession over epochs lasting hundreds of thousands of years, and each root race is further divided into sub-races which are also arranged hierarchically. By chance, as it were, the root race which happened to be paramount at the time Steiner made these momentous discoveries was the Aryan race, a term which anthroposophists use to this day. All racial categories are purely social constructs lacking any scientific meaning, but the notion of an Aryan race is an especially preposterous invention. A favorite of reactionaries in the early years of the twentieth century, the Aryan concept was based on a conflation of linguistic and biological terminology backed up by spurious "research." In other words, it was a complete fabrication which served only to provide a pseudo-scholarly veneer to racist fantasies.
Aside from the fact that in the anthroposophical world-conception the periods of time described by the term "root races" are tens of thousands of years, and not hundreds of thousands of years, and that time is linear and not, as Peter Staudenmaier conceives, hierarchical, there are several further and more significant errors in his presentation. There is simply no talk of any Aryan race among anthroposophists today or during Steiner's time, and Steiner did not talk of an Aryan race either. Peter Staudenmaier's derision for the very notion of an Aryan race is clearly evident, but his indignation towards anthroposophists is simply misplaced. It is rather sad to see the vehemence with which he denounces so-called Aryan superiority directed against a philosophy that inherently opposes it.
Continuing my commentary on the 13th paragraph of Peter Staudenmaier's Anthroposophy and Ecofascism.
We have already heard Steiner's comments on how little he “built” on any of Theosophy's “postulates.” (“No one was left in uncertainty of the fact that I would bring forward in the Theosophical Society only the results of my own research through perception.” (Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life, New York 1951, page 297 ). The claim that Steiner and his disciples tied racial classifications to spiritual advancement is really a two-part claim. I have not studied the works of every last person who claims Steiner as an inspiration, so I cannot say with certainty that no disciple has ever done this. However, I am familiar with Steiner's work, so I will object to that part.
Steiner's “systematic racial classification” is hardly elaborate. Steiner considers there to be 5 races. Or rather, there were five races. Today racial characteristics are, in Steiner's view, unimportant and gradually disappearing. This he considers a natural development in the course of human evolution. Steiner explained that there can be no talk of racial purity; everyone is mixed to one degree or another, and this is natural. This is contained in the book Peter Staudenmaier has cited in the first paragraph: "The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls in relation to Teutonic Mythology" so he ought to be familiar with it. How it came about that there are five races, and what their purpose might have been 20,000 years ago may be elaborate, but to Steiner, racial characteristics in the individual today are unimportant.
Once again we have here a paragraph that is factually inaccurate, partisan and without specific citations. Where, if anywhere, Steiner directly tied spiritual advancement to racial classification cannot be determined from the footnote.
Building on Theosophy's postulate of root races, Steiner and his anthroposophist disciples elaborated a systematic racial classification system for human beings and tied it directly to their paradigm of spiritual advancement. The particulars of this racial theory are so bizarre that it is difficult for non-anthroposophists to take it seriously, but it is important to understand the pernicious and lasting effects the doctrine has had on anthroposophists and those they've influenced. [Footnote: Steiner's racial teachings, a crucial element of the anthroposophic worldview, are spread throughout his work. The most concentrated and most chilling presentation is to be found in volume 349 of his collected works, published by the International Anthroposophic Society in Dornach, Switzerland. For a concise overview in English see Janet Biehl's section on Steiner in Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, San Francisco 1995, pp. 42-43.]
A minor point is that Peter Staudenmaier cites the wrong publisher (which is actually the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung in Dornach) and misnames the General Anthroposophical Society, also located in Dornach (accuracy in details, I find, is the mark of serious scholarship).
This paragraph better describes Alfred Rosenberg than Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy. Here and in the paragraph following Peter Staudenmaier fails to cite any sources. His footnote actually cites Steiner's collected works of 349 volumes (actually, the numbering goes to 354 volumes, and because of gaps there are only really about 330 - new ones come out from time to time) of some 90,000 pages. Is this to indicate that Peter Staudenmaier has read all of them? I suspect not, as he has cited the wrong publisher. The "International Anthroposophical Society" in Dornach does not publish Steiner's complete works; the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassvervaltung is the publisher. Steiner set up a separate foundation to hold his copyrights after his death, and this foundation is a separate legal entity from the General Anthroposophical Society. I know that these are really just little nitpicking details, but getting the nitpicking details correct is the mark of serious scholarship. [For an overview of Steiner's complete works, in English and German, see: www.rudolfsteinerweb.com). The volume numbers go from 1 to 354; however there are a number of gaps, as well as a few numbers that cover multiple volumes (for example volume 300 is actually 3 books: 300a, 300b and 300c). New volumes come out occasionally, so the total number of books is not yet fixed.]
Steiner's description of the Akasha Chronicle from the last post was also to take a position against C.W Leadbeater's (a prominent Theosophist) description of the Akasha in a 1903 book titled “Clairvoyance.”
"When the visitor to [the mental] plane is not thinking specifically of them in any way, the records simply form a background to whatever is going on, just as the reflections in a pier-glass at the end of the room might form a background the life of the people in it. It must always be born in mind that under these conditions they are really merely reflections from the ceaseless activity of a great Consciousness upon a far higher plane, and have very much the appearance of an endless succession of cinematographs, or living photographs. They do not a melt into one another like dissolving views, nor do a series of ordinary pictures follow one other; but the action of the reflected figures constantly goes on as though one were watching the actors on a distance stage. But if the trained investigator turns his attention special especially to any one scene, or wishes to call it up before him, an extraordinary change at once takes place, for this is the plane of thought, and to think of anything is to bring it instantly before you. For example, if a man wills to see the record of that event to which we before referred – the landing of Julius Caesar – he finds himself in the moment not looking at any picture, but standing on the shore among the legionnaires, with the whole scene being enacted around him, precisely in every aspect as he would have seen it if he had stood there in the flash on that autumn morning in the year 55 B.C. Since what he sees is but a reflection, the actors are of course entirely unconscious of them, nor can any effort of his change the course of their action in the smallest degree, except only that he can control the rate at which the drama shall pass before him – can have the event of the whole year rehearsed before his eyes in a single hour, or can at any moment stop the movement altogether and hold the particular scene in view as a picture as long as he chooses."
C.W. Leadbeater. "Clairvoyance." Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1903. 13 th Reprinting, 1978. Pages 141-142.
Neither classical Theosophy nor Steiner's Anthroposophy consider the Akasha Chronicle to be a written record. While throwing around words like "scripture" and "tenets of belief" is a clever way to impute religious character to Steiner's work (and blind faith on the part of his followers), it remains clear that Peter Staudenmaier has no actual understanding of that which he condescendingly denigrates.
Bravenet Blog 
Blog Community
Get a Free Blog
Manage your Blog
bravenet.com