Hitler and Nazis | SabrangIndia

Writings of French Hindu who worshipped Hitler as an avatar of Vishnu are inspiring the US alt-right

Sat, 17 Dec 2016 09:16:08 +0000

Savitri Devi was born Maximiani Portaz in 1905.

South Asian religious traditions have long attracted admirers from the West, but none have been as flamboyant or as dangerous as Maximiani Portaz (1905-1982). This French convert to Hinduism believed that Hitler had been an avatar of Vishnu sent to prepare for the end of the Kali Yuga – the last of the four stages the world goes through according to Hindu scriptures. Her ideas, known as Esoteric Hitlerism, are now making a surprising comeback on the internet.

Before becoming a far-right mystic, Portaz was on track for a brilliant academic career. She earned a master’s degree in chemistry and a doctorate in the philosophy of mathematics, but underwent a spiritual crisis at the end of her studies. She abandoned academic life, renounced her French citizenship, and became fascinated by the rising Nazi Party in Germany. The Nazis held that the Aryan race was the basis of all civilisation, so Portaz went to India in 1932 to discover the supposed Aryan homeland for herself. She fell in love with India. Changing her name to Savitri Devi, she converted to Hinduism, married the nationalist activist Asit Krishna Mukherji, and dedicated herself to freeing the subcontinent from both British imperialism and Christianity, which she condemned as an anti-Aryan faith.

Esoteric Hitlerism

As a Nazi sympathizer and supporter of Indian nationalism, Devi saw the outbreak of World War II in 1939 as a golden opportunity. After an unsatisfying meeting with Mahatma Gandhi in the fall of 1941, Devi and her husband embraced Subhas Chandra Bose. They were instrumental in setting up his first meetings with the Japanese government. Devi was so committed to the Third Reich that she continued to fight for it even after its defeat in 1945. She returned to Europe, distributing pro-Nazi propaganda in the ruins of German cities. She was arrested, and after a few years in prison, passed the rest of her life between France and India.

As she reflected on the war during her imprisonment, Devi decided that the Nazis had been fighting not for mere political power, but for a spiritual ideal that few had understood. Combining Nazi ideology with elements of Hindu theology, she began publishing numerous books that claimed to reveal the hidden message of the Nazi cause. Hitler, she claimed, was no mere mortal: he was an avatar of Vishnu, sent to clear the way for Kalki, Vishnu’s final avatar, who will end the Kali Yuga and renew the cosmic cycle. Hitler’s apparent defeat in the political realm, then, had been in fact a spiritual victory hastening the salvation of the universe.

Toward the end of her life, Devi became interested in the United States, seeing it as fertile ground for her doctrine. She is even buried in Virginia, next to the grave of prominent American neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell. And, just as she predicted, America has begun to welcome Devi’s teaching. After years of being relegated to the fringes of far-right occultism, her writings have re-emerged in recent years as an inspiration to the alt-right, a new movement of fascists and white nationalists based in North America. Rising to the attention of the mainstream media in the wake of the Trump campaign, the alt-right combines an ironic, playful style with an appeal to spiritual ideals.

The alt-right spin

One of the most important thinkers on the alt-right, Greg Johnson, has spent the last several years promoting Devi’s ideas through his web-journal Counter-Currents and associated publishing house. Johnson holds that Esoteric Hitlerism is a form of spirituality designed for white people, an Indo-European religion emphasising violence, power and virility. Johnson also suggests that Devi’s faith solves a critical problem for neo-Nazi movements: the fact that fascism seems to have failed so utterly, and caused so much horrible suffering. If, as Devi claimed, Hitler was not a failed leader but a successful herald of a new golden age, then fascism may be able to rise again.

While Counter-Currents publishes high-brow articles on Esoteric Hitlerism, other leading alt-right sites such as TheRightStuff.biz reach a broad audience by promoting Esoteric Kekism, a parody religion based on Devi’s work, centered on semi-ironic memes of Hitler and Vishnu. These images play for laughs (the word “kek” means “lol”), but, like other popular memes showing Donald Trump as a God-Emperor, are far more than silly humor. They use Devi’s ideas to steadily break down taboos about Hitler, making Nazism seem more acceptable to conservatives raised to think of the Third Reich as a symbol of evil. Perhaps, just as Devi was right that the United States would one day accept her ideas, she might also have been right that the end of the Third Reich was just the beginning for fascism.

This article was first published on Scroll.in

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‘Think Taliban, think Nazis’

Sun, 30 Sep 2001 18:30:00 +0000

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio to day, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we’re at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I’ve lived here for 35 years I’ve never lost track of what’s going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I’m standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan — a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with landmines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today’s Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They’d slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don’t move too fast, they don’t even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn’t really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban — by raping once again the people they’ve been raping all this time.

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they’re thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people.

Let’s pull our heads out of the sand. What’s actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden’s hideout. It’s much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that’s Bin Laden’s program. That’s exactly what he wants. That’s why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It’s all right there. At the moment, of course, "Islam" as such does not exist. There are Muslims and there are Muslim countries, but no such political entity as Islam. Osama Bin Laden believes that if he can get a war started, he can constitute this entity and he’d be running it. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he’s got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that’s a billion people with nothing left to lose, that’s even better from Bin Laden’s point of view. He’s probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

(Courtesy: znet.org)

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8 No. 72, Cover Story 6

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