A recurrent practice in anthroposophy

The memory of an experience within a sectarian drift is comparable to a deep well in which the dirtiest things are found at the bottom: we only manage to bring them to the surface last.

During my many years spent in anthroposophy, I have often witnessed a recurrent practice of anthroposophists, whose nature this article aims to expose, to understand its mechanisms and to unveil its stakes.

This practice is that of false testimony in an organized gang. If I consider myself able to describe and bear witness to it today, it is because I have observed it on many occasions, not only when I was still an anthroposophy, but also since my graduation from anthroposophy and my denunciation of the Steiner-Waldorf schools.

I would like to point out that I have observed it on a wide variety of occasions, some of which concerned me, directly or indirectly, but others of which were totally foreign to me, for example when victims contacted me to tell me what had happened to them.

Although I was not able to verify the veracity of each of their testimonies in an absolute way – which would have required a police investigation each time – I judged them credible each time, because they were consistent with my own experience and similar to each other. However, all of them came to confirm the existence of this practice of false testimony in an organized gang, which I had already been able to observe for myself.

It is on the basis of these heterogeneous experiences that I would now like to give my testimony and try to produce an analysis. This may be imperfect, or incomplete. But it is nevertheless necessary, because it is intended to lay the foundations for a public understanding of this phenomenon, which in my view is inseparable and highly revealing of the sectarian drift of anthroposophy, and its emanations: the Steiner-Waldorf schools, Biodynamics, anthroposophical medicine, the anthroposophical banking sector (NEF, GLS, Triodos, etc.), etc.

In the course of this analysis, I will be careful not to mention precisely the cases of which I have been aware, or the events I have experienced, in order not to incriminate anyone in particular and to protect the victims. My goal is indeed to produce a general reflection on this phenomenon, not to settle scores with anyone, or to denounce people and institutions in particular.

As I write these lines, I am aware that some aspects of the recurrent anthroposophical practice that I am about to describe are not only morally proscribed, but also undoubtedly fall under the law, since false testimony is forbidden, especially when it is used in trials, for the purpose of deceiving judges, or when it is knowingly implemented for the purpose of public defamation. Nevertheless, this aspect of anthroposophy seems to me to be too characteristic of this movement to be ignored, especially since many people have been victims of it in the past and will most likely be again in the future, as long as this multi-branched organization has not been dismantled and banned.

Nor is it a question, for me, of discrediting and shame the whole of anthroposophy by this article. What I criticize and denounce are not all anthroposophists, nor certain groups of anthroposophists, nor even their leaders. What I denounce is a practice, a habit, a usual method of anthroposophists to solve a certain type of problem that sometimes arises in them.

I am convinced that those who implement it have not, for the most part, reflected on the immoral or illegal nature of what they are doing, but that they are blindly perpetuating recommendations and ways of doing things that were put in place more than a century ago by Rudolf Steiner himself, the founding guru of the Steiner-Waldorf schools and of anthroposophy. In a way, it is he – and he alone – who bears the full responsibility for this, even in his tomb in Dornach, where his ashes rest, at the foot of the Goetheanum, the world nerve center of the entire anthroposophical movement.

Testimonies that are granted, falsified and fabricated

Let us begin by describing this practice, in order to have an overview of it and to understand its systematic implementation. By "false testimonies in an organized gang", I mean a modus operandi consisting, among anthroposophists, in producing, in various contexts, a plurality of knowingly false testimonies, in a concerted and coordinated manner.

This practice is therefore to be distinguished from testimonies with erroneous or even misleading content, but which have been produced in good faith and/or without any consultation or coordination. Indeed, these also exist among anthroposophists. Sometimes it takes a keen sense of observation to discriminate between the former and the latter.

It can indeed happen that anthroposophists mobilize, more or less spontaneously, to bear witness in favor of the achievements of anthroposophy, or to speak well of the Steiner-Waldorf schools. Their testimonies will then be spontaneous, or relatively spontaneous, or perhaps even guided by a framework proposed by the anthroposophical authorities, but do not stem from a deliberate desire to lie, organized at the level of a community.

It is therefore necessary to distinguish these testimonies, more or less spontaneous, from those that belong to what I call the process of false testimony in an organized gang, the characteristic of which is to produce lies artificially constructed and coordinated by certain authorities, or leading groups of anthroposophy, with a view to targeted deception.

Targeted
false testimonies
The phenomenon I seek to describe in this article is therefore very specific. For anthroposophists, it consists of first targeting a particular person. For example, in a Steiner-Waldorf school, it may be a parent of a pupil who has started to ask a little too many questions and criticise certain aspects of the pedagogy, or who has filed a complaint about serious facts concerning his own children.

In this context, they may also be teachers of these schools in conflict with their employer, who have brought their case before the Labor Court. They can also be students from these schools. Finally, they may be critics of the Steiner-Waldorf schools or anthroposophy, which anthroposophists publicly refer to as "detractors" in order to cleverly suggest that they are motivated by evil intentions.

Many people around the world and in a wide variety of contexts have had their honour and reputation tarnished, tarnished or destroyed by anthroposophists. The worst thing for them was not realizing that they were facing a recurrent and planned strategy to carry out what Rudolf Steiner himself called the "neutralization" of the critics of anthroposophy:

"This document shows us that it is not a question of bringing to reason those who write such articles, nor of convincing their readers. We just need to alert others to the fact that despicable people are wandering around the world writing slanderous articles. It is not a question of refuting the accusations of this kind of individual, but of doing everything possible to neutralize them. The mere fact that these people exist is in itself a prejudice. Rudolf?Steiner, GA 196

It should also be noted that in a letter recently sent to the Steiner-Waldorf Pedagogy Federation in France, which has reached us, a former President of this institution also uses the verb "neutralize" to qualify a large-scale communication action aimed at publicly discrediting me and silencing me:

We can therefore see that, since Rudolf Steiner, anthroposophists have always been concerned with "neutralizing" criticism in order to silence it, rather than responding to it with arguments.

False testimonies collectively elaborated and supervised

I will now try to describe how anthroposophists go about "neutralizing" the people who cause them problems. Indeed, when people are targeted in this way, they proceed in the following way:

To begin with, they elaborate a lie about them, in the form of a detailed account about them. This story is different and personalized each time. Indeed, it is developed from a meticulous investigation about the person concerned, based on knowledge of the intimate details of his life, his personality and his background. It is not only a question of the elaborated lie being credible, but also of being able to hurt the person when he or she becomes aware of it, by pointing out flaws in the person.

Thus, anthroposophists learn about personal aspects of his private life, his family or marital relationships, his medical history, his professional life, his possible criminal past or his habits. It is indeed a question of developing a portrait that is as faithful as possible and close to reality, while at the same time developing false statements. As a very senior leader of the Steiner-Waldorf schools in France once told me, it is necessary to "spread lies in which elements of truth are contained". To which he added: "the element of truth contained in the lie will come as a confirmation of the lie."

Teamwork

The construction of such a false narrative is very often, among anthroposophists, the fruit of the work carried out by a small team, which has devoted itself for a considerable time to its manufacture. Nothing is improvised or done in haste. Anthroposophists take their time, first gathering information about the target, discussing together the most relevant angles of attack, patiently shaping their lie, testing it and, finally, when everything seems ready, informing the governing bodies of anthroposophy at the global level before launching the offensive, so that it can be endorsed. Nothing is done without the goetheanum's green light!

These teams responsible for developing false testimony are made up of people who have a high degree of involvement in anthroposophy. They hold leadership positions. Very often, their family past means that they have known nothing else. They are reputed to be absolutely loyal and faithful to the doctrine and its emanations, to which they have devoted most of their lives. It is a question of absolutely preventing one day one of the people who participated in such an undertaking from becoming aware of the evil to which he or she has contributed and from testifying openly.

They therefore meet in secret and take an oath never to divulge to anyone the content of the exchanges, or the very existence of these meetings in which they participate. At the opening and closing of each of them, mantras by Rudolf Steiner are read aloud, in order to give these moments a solemn and sacred character.

The work is collective, but one person in particular is responsible for supervising it and making the final decisions. He is the "master of ceremonies". He is the one who will launch the attack and lead the smear campaign, once it has begun. This person will not take centre stage, but will remain in the shadows for the duration of the operations.

The people who are called upon to speak publicly, or to take responsibility for the defamation, are part of this restricted circle and participate in these meetings. But they only have the role of executors. They are smart enough to understand the strategy at work, but not smart enough to have designed it themselves.

Lying collectively to a member of the?school

community Let us now describe how this practice is implemented in practice. For this description, I base myself on my observations of it as an internal phenomenon of Steiner-Waldorf schools, when it is a question of the anthroposophical teacher community making one of the members of their team, or a parent of a student, or a student, to incriminate him and make him feel guilty, or even to make him doubt reality to the point of altering his mental health.

I have seen how members of the teaching team would get together, develop a fictitious story together, consider its possible inconsistencies in order to compensate for them in advance, distribute versions that had the function of complementing and consolidating each other, and then repeat the speeches, as actors would do for the rehearsal of a play.

These meetings even took on the appearance of artistic work, since a "director" or a "general coordinator" was appointed. The latter then checked that all the versions converged, organized individual passages where the "witnesses" had to improvise answers to questions they had not considered, had certain parts of the speech repeated, which had to be learned by heart, suggested particular intonations, asked to be silenced certain points, precauned certain emotions, certain gestures and certain looks.

When the lie had to be disseminated during a meeting, an organization of the meeting was designed, a round of speeches was organized, and fallback solutions were considered. It was indeed a real work of staging where everyone had their role to play, even though the people concerned (students, parents, teachers, etc.) suspected absolutely nothing.

The effect was formidable: the lie seemed all the more credible because it came from different sources that seemed to reinforce and complement each other. Even the person targeted – who knew by definition the false nature of what was alleged about him – began to doubt.

Collectively lying to?a National

Education inspector I was also able to observe how this bias was used to fool National Education inspectors when they came to visit a Steiner-Waldorf school. In this context, however, it was not a question of targeting them, but of making them believe that certain events had taken place, such as the holding of certain courses which, in reality, had never been given by the professors.

What was particularly clever was that some students had been taken into confidence and collaborated in the dissemination of this fictitious story. They had been given the task of stating this or that thing when the inspector questioned them individually, even though this did not correspond to the actual school work.

To prevent a particular student from being crushed by the weight of a lie that was too heavy for one person to bear, it was usually broken up into smaller, smaller lies and then distributed among a group of students. The inspector therefore received the falsified account from several sources, which unwittingly assembled a form of puzzle in his mind.

To my knowledge, this way of proceeding has enabled Steiner-Waldorf schools to obtain very good results, as the inspectors of the National Education Department have been caught in the trap of collective fables carried by children, which they could not imagine were entirely fabricated.

As

I have already had the opportunity to mention, one of the problems that can arise in Steiner-Waldorf schools is the denunciation by them of families to social services. Families have recently openly testified in the press about these odious practices:

These denunciations take place, to my knowledge, and according to the victims who told me their stories, when the families in question prove to be a problem at school, because they ask too many questions about pedagogy and anthroposophy, or because they openly doubt certain practices.

The schools that make such denunciations are, I believe, convinced of the merits of their approach and of the fact that they are acting in the interest of the child. Indeed, for anthroposophical pedagogues, those who question anthroposophy necessarily come from families that are dysfunctional. It is because Ahrimanic demons have taken possession of it that they dare to criticize the holy Steiner-Waldorf pedagogy. The proof of this is that all the other families in the school – therefore the "normal" families – do not criticize it and are in admiration of every word spoken by the teachers.

At the same time as these denunciations, the school often begins to circulate rumours among the other families of the school about which one is the problem. It is indeed a question of putting her apart from others, in order to prevent their doubts from contaminating them. Rumours and defamation therefore have a sort of cordon sanitaire function, in order to preserve the purity of the opinions of families who are mostly in favour of Steiner-Waldorf pedagogy and anthroposophy.

The problem is that, following the denunciations, investigations are carried out by the social services, in order to determine whether these families are indeed dysfunctional and whether the children should be placed. It is therefore on these occasions that the other families and teachers of the school can be questioned by the social services, and will report to them the defamatory statements that are circulating within the school. The inspectors are then confronted with a context where terrible rumours have been spread about the incriminated families within the school community to which they belong. Some are the authors, others are only the propagators. For this reason, inspectors may encounter people who, in good faith, advise them to separate these children from their families for their own good.

This can obviously have disastrous effects, such as the decision to place the child in care, with immense consequences for his or her future and the link with his or her family. For having criticized anthroposophy, families can therefore be separated from their offspring: their banishment would thus be coupled with a potential deprivation of their parental rights, because inspectors will not have understood that they are dealing with rumors orchestrated with the aim of sidelining them.

Lying collectively to a police or gendarmerie
inspector
I have also observed this practice when some Steiner-Waldorf schools have experienced legal setbacks following, for example, complaints, and when part of the teaching staff and families were summoned to the police station to give their version of the facts. As investigations are currently underway about certain schools, I would like to point out that I will not make any reference to current events here.

Here again, I was able to see how the process I described above managed to deceive people who were nevertheless seasoned in spotting lies in those they questioned. Indeed, police inspectors are certainly used to people lying to them, but not to lies being addressed to them by an entire community. Since their professional habits consist of cross-checking versions in order to check whether they agree, the lies elaborated by the Steiner-Waldorf teaching community proved to be particularly effective, since they consisted precisely of a plurality of versions corroborating each other.

On the other hand, many of the witnesses were absolutely bona fide, since they were simply repeating to the inspectors the elaborate fable that had been invented by others and that they believed because it had been circulated in the context of the school community. This of course made it even more difficult for the inspectors to realize that they were being manipulated.

Furthermore, I believe that the reason the inspectors were looking at it is because it is more likely to be done in organized crime communities and not in schools, where they did not expect to see it at all.

Lying collectively in court

I have also been able to observe, on a personal level, but also by collecting the testimonies of victims who have had legal problems with the emanations of anthroposophy, how this practice was used to deceive judges during trial hearings, or through written testimonies. The context of these trials was that of industrial tribunals, proceedings before juvenile judges, civil proceedings and criminal trials.

For example, it could be a Steiner-Waldorf professor who had brought a dispute before the Labor Court of his department, but who lost his case in the last instance because the school had managed to provide an impressive quantity of false testimonies that all went in the same direction, i.e. against the plaintiff. Among these testimonies, there were even those of students, who had been put to work to "defend their school". They claimed, for example, that the teacher in question always arrived late for his classes, or was incompetent, even though he was sometimes not their teacher. The Labor Court did not go so far as to investigate this kind of detail, they did not detect the deception.

They could also be parents who wanted to remove their children from a Steiner-Waldorf school, following a divorce or ongoing separation proceedings. They were then in conflict with the other parent, who wanted his child to continue his education at the Steiner-Waldorf school. To get the judge to rule in his favour, the parent linked to the Steiner-Waldorf school then produced a quantity of written testimonies from other parents of students and teachers, stating that the child was happy and fulfilled in this schooling, which was not sectarian, while the complainant parent was described in a very negative way.

Here again, the juvenile judge saw nothing but fire, not suspecting that the apparently spontaneous testimonies of the parents of the pupils could have been elaborated collectively in order to produce a credible forgery.

Finally, it was a question of false testimony produced in court during civil and criminal proceedings. As part of the preparation for their hearings, the witnesses' accounts had been elaborated collectively, their speeches rehearsed and coached, to the point of anticipating in advance certain intonations and inflections of their voices, certain gestures and certain postures. They had also been trained to be able to improvise credible answers to questions that judges might ask them, or to put up with those that might be asked of them by opposing counsel.

For these witnesses, it was mainly a question of painting a defamatory portrait of a specific person, in order to falsely accuse him or her and discredit him or her in the eyes of the judges, based on a cleverly conceived account.

Their strategy to avoid conviction for perjury

Lying under oath and public defamation can be condemned by the courts. This places anthroposophists who practice this strategy under an obligation to circumvent this risk. I will now try to show how they go about minimizing the risks when they use this process.

First of all, as I said, the meetings whose purpose is to collectively elaborate the targeted lies are kept absolutely secret. No one should tell anyone about it. The sacredness and ceremonial nature of these meetings is primarily intended to consolidate their confidentiality.

Secondly, the strategy is to elaborate lies that are as much as possible by omission, rather than lies that would consist of inventing facts. Indeed, through lies by omission, if we do it right, it is possible to present an alternative version of reality. The deceptive nature of such a process is particularly difficult to detect because, technically speaking, for the average person, the one who lies by omission has not really lied: he has just "forgotten" to mention certain facts, which would have been absolutely necessary for the intelligibility of the situation by an outsider.

Lying by omission, as anthroposophists do, is therefore very clever. If they are later reproached for not having spoken about important points, they may pretend to have simply oversighted, or for not having been able, at the time, to talk about them, because they had not been aware of them. For a judge, who knows the unreliability of human memory, it will be very difficult to oppose such an argument.

To the omissions themselves, anthroposophists often add the highlighting or exaggeration of certain details. By exaggeration, I mean the fact that they can invest certain specific elements with artificial emotional charges, in order to magnify their importance. Again, they did not lie strictly speaking, but they slightly modified the narrative framework in order to highlight certain elements and hide others.

But in the end, it was indeed false statements and the dissemination of an alternative reality that took place. By lying by omission in a concerted manner, artificially emphasizing certain details and removing others, anthroposophists have indeed produced a fictitious narrative designed to damage the honour and reputation of the person they have targeted, and to deceive the judges. However, their clever tactics allow them to reduce the risk of being caught and convicted of perjury.

Lying collectively to the press and the public

When lying in court has not allowed anthroposophists to "neutralize" the targeted person, i.e. to silence him or her definitively, anthroposophists then use the strategy of public defamation. The false testimony, which they developed in a small committee, after having been discreetly tested, is therefore disseminated publicly, using the relay of the press.

Indeed, anthroposophists have many relays in the regional and even national press. In France, media such as Les Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace, or L'Est Républicain, have many journalists in favor of anthroposophy. Catherine Chenciner, head of education at DNA, is an anthroposophist. This is also the case for a major national newspaper such as Le Monde. Le Monde des Religions is directed by an anthroposophist: Virginie Larousse. The newspaper Marianne currently has an editor-in-chief, Marie-Estelle Pech, who is close to anthroposophists and the Steiner-Waldorf schools. Lloyd Cherry, a journalist at France Inter and deputy editor-in-chief of Métal Hurlant, is a former Steiner-Waldorf student close to anthroposophists who actively participated in the smear campaign against me. In other countries, such as Germany, other newspapers are linked to anthroposophical networks.

Anthroposophists can therefore ask them to relay the false testimonies they have elaborated against a person who denounces them a little too successfully. This has taken place, for example, in Germany, with the whistleblower Oliver Rautenberg, in the United States with Roger Rawlings, or in Sweden with Alicia Hamberg. This also took place with me, in the columns of the newspaper Le Monde.

The problem for anthroposophists is that these newspapers are bound by a requirement of appearance of ethics. They cannot circulate defamatory statements about specific people without risking a lawsuit, or at least tarnishing their reputation in the long term. This is why it is necessary for anthroposophists to call on what could be called pseudo-journalists, or downgraded journalists, who will take care of the dirty work, in return for a remuneration that is most often undeclared.

In Switzerland, the pseudo-journalist Martin Bernard published a filthy article about me in 2019 in order to spread the defamatory rumours of anthroposophists about me, in an attempt to discredit my testimony. In France, it is currently the downgraded journalist Brice Perrier who is in charge of taking over, by spreading false testimonies against me on his own blog.

A practice favored by self-absorption and the habit of lying

The question that arises at the end of this presentation is to ask how such a practice is possible within the anthroposophical community? Indeed, anthroposophists are human beings like any other. As such, the fact of knowingly fabricating and disseminating false testimonies against people they want to "neutralize" at all costs could provoke in them a form of moral repugnance and self-loathing.

However, in no country, at no time, has it been possible to observe that anthroposophists who participated in such undertakings have not expressed the slightest regret, even many years later. None of the people who witnessed it protested, either internally or externally, against such a practice. Most of them died taking their secret to their graves, and never having breathed a word to souls who live by the misdeeds to which they had contributed, or assisted. How is this possible?

In my opinion, such a capacity to take on these heinous acts comes from the fact that the notions of "good and evil", of "justice and injustice" are deliberately blurred in anthroposophical doctrine. Respect for laws and morals is described as superfluous. The notion of honor does not exist there, while the multiple meditation exercises have the effect – and no doubt also the function – of making anthroposophists morally insensitive. The latter therefore persuade themselves, individually and collectively, that they are acting for the good of humanity and defending the achievements of anthroposophy by the worst means.

Moreover, in my opinion, anthroposophists manage to obtain from everyone the false testimonies they ask of them through demonization. By describing the targeted person as diabolical, perverse, harmful, criminal, etc., they create a kind of climate of hatred and a ripple effect that justifies in the eyes of those who are asked to testify that everyone feels authorized to exaggerate the facts, to distort them, to reorganize them according to the objective to be achieved: to do everything possible to put out of action an evil entity that unjustly attacks anthroposophy, to Steiner-Waldorf schools, to Biodynamics, etc. A form of collective blindness and individual self-justification thus allows everyone to allow themselves to add their little lie to the collective lie, their little touch of immorality to public defamation, forgetting to have invented the fact themselves, or to have heard it from someone else and not to have been a direct witness to it, or to have confused their interpretation of it with reality.

An effective method that must be denounced

To assert, as I do, that anthroposophy and its emanations borrow certain methods that are observed elsewhere in organized crime is not to say that anthroposophy is a criminal organization. It is even less to call anthroposophists and teachers of Steiner-Waldorf schools criminals because some of them use this method. Nor does it impute, I say this expressly, the legal responsibility of the Steiner-Waldorf schools or the Anthroposophical Society as institutions. What I am denouncing are not people, or even institutions, but practices that I have been able to observe have a customary character.

In any case, the qualification of a criminal organisation does not fall within my competence, but that of the police and judicial institutions competent in this matter. My work and my writing have no other ambition than to lift the veil on a part of the reality of anthroposophy that I have witnessed, as I have been able to perceive and understand it. It must be included in all the other writings that I have been able to produce on this subject, for many years now.

The need for this denunciation became apparent to me when, over the years and the victims contacting me, I realized that many people and competent authorities were still being fooled by this practice, simply because it had never yet been described or formalized in a sufficiently clear way to be quickly identified.

I sincerely hope that this writing will remedy this lack and help those in need in the future, starting with the victims who do not understand what is happening to them. I also hope that it will be able to enlighten the competent authorities, when they are confronted with the phenomenon described in this article.

Grégoire Perra