The question arises, however, as to the boundary between the two intolerances, or rather, between acts and gestures hostile to the order dreamed of by the legislator and ‘thoughts’, deep-seated convictions, attachment to values that contradict the basic propositions on which this order is based. It is certain that gestures, unless they are purely mechanical, presuppose thoughts, convictions and the acceptance of well-defined values. And it is also certain that any ardent attachment to given values will sooner or later be expressed in gestures—by creating ‘facts’. It will do so as soon as it can, that is, as soon as the pressure of the hostile forces which have hitherto prevented it, relaxes.
And in the meantime, if any public demonstration is prohibited for him—if he is, even as a feeling, considered ‘subversive’, even ‘criminal’, by those in power—he will express himself clandestinely: by word and deed, behind closed doors, among ‘brothers’. This is exactly how our attachment to the values of Aryan racism in its contemporary form, Hitlerism, has been expressed for a quarter of a century now. We are tolerated only insofar as we are invisible. And the immense hostile world in whose midst we are scattered, accustomed as it is to trust only its senses, believes us to be non-existent. Any clandestine thought is necessarily tolerated, or rather ignored, and for good reason!
Tolerance of the expression of another’s thought or faith, in a society based on norms which it seems to despise, is logically justified in only two cases.
Either one considers this thought or faith as not being likely to have any influence on the social life of the individual (and even less on that of his racial brothers), or one admits its harmfulness; its subversive character, its potential danger on the practical level—but, either we don’t esteem the representatives enough to judge them capable of sustained persistence, or we don’t believe in the efficacy of thought and faith, even when expressed, if the action they call for is impossible. We don’t admit the real danger.
The Hindu who has no objection to one of his sons worshipping Jesus, rather than the divine Incarnations known and worshipped by his fathers, has in view only one function of religion: leading the worshipper to the lived experience of ‘God’ to the realisation of the universal Self within himself. He presupposes that his son, while tending towards this supreme experience through his devotion to the Christ, will not break any of the ties that bind him to Brahmanical society. If he thought differently, if he suspected, for example, that the young man no longer had the same respect for the traditional laws concerning food and marriage; if he believed that he was now capable of eating flesh (and especially bovine flesh) or of procreating children outside his caste, and this because his new faith had given rise to a new mentality in him, he would be less tolerant.
The European who is refused entry to a Hindu temple is excluded not because of his metaphysics, which is held to be false, still less because of his race, if he is indeed an Aryan, but because of the culinary habits attributed to him, sometimes wrongly; but no regulation takes account, alas, of the exception! (Although Hindu society in general had long since accepted me, I was refused entry to one of the temples of Sringeri, the homeland of Sankaracharya, in South-West India, on the pretext that I had been, before embracing Hinduism, a beef-eater. And when I vehemently objected to this accusation, pointing out that I had always been a vegetarian, both before I came to India and afterwards, the priest told me that ‘my fathers, no doubt’ had not been vegetarians. I must confess, to be fair, that I was admitted to almost every other temple in India, including the one at Pandharpur in the Mahrat country.)
Hindu ‘intolerance’ being, like ours, essentially defensive, is understood that it manifest itself against any idea or belief, or metaphysical or moral attitude, seen as tending to undermine the traditional social order. But it will never be exercised in respect of a different traditional order, to change it by force or even by persuasion. This is, I repeat—and it cannot be repeated too often—the ‘intolerance’ of all the peoples of antiquity, minus the Jews. The judges who condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock because he ‘didn’t believe in the gods of the city’ would never have dreamt of imposing these same gods of Athens on an Egyptian or a Persian.
If they could have known in which direction ideas would evolve and history would unfold—Christian (or Muslim) proselytism, the Crusades, the Holy Inquisition, the suppression of indigenous religions in America—, they would have seemed as monstrous to them as they do to us, the much-hated ‘intolerants’ of today. And we, who would be ready to crack down with the utmost violence on all those who, by nature or choice, would oppose the resurgence of a social and political order based on Aryan racial values among Aryan peoples, would regard as absurd any attempt to preach our values to Negroes or, in general, to peoples of other blood than ours.
Even in Europe we distinguish between the ‘North’ and the ‘South’, the Germanic and the Mediterranean element even though the latter was already mixed with the blood of the Nordic conquerors in ancient times. After every conquest there is a gradual return to the race of the conquered, if no ‘caste system’ or at least no marriage laws guarantee the survival of the conquerors.
If Aryans with our mentality would have conquered the Americas instead of the Spaniards and Portuguese, they would have left the temples and the worship of the native gods intact. At most, seeing that they themselves were taken for gods from the start, they would have allowed themselves to be worshipped while trying, with all their might, to become and remain worthy of being so. And they would have punished, with exemplary severity, any intimacy between their own soldiers and the women of the country, or at least prevented the birth of children from mixed unions, thus preserving the purity of both races.
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Note of the Editor: The following passage from Breve Historia de México (A Brief History of Mexico) by José Vasconcelos portrays the Catholic ethos criticised by Savitri:
In sum, it is time to proclaim, without reservation, that both the Aztec and the [Mesoamerican] civilisations that preceded it formed a set of aborted cases of humanity. Neither the technical means at their disposal, nor the morality in use, nor the ideas, could have ever raised them, by themselves.
The only means of saving peoples thus decayed is the one used by the Spaniards: the miscegenation legalised by the Papal Bull that authorised the marriages of Spaniards and natives. And with miscegenation, the total replacement of the old soul by a new soul, through the miracle of Christianity. The fact that we have so many millions of Indians in Mexico should not demoralise us, as long as the traditional tendency subsists: that is, the effort to make the Indian a European by soul, a Christian, and not a pagan with the paganism of savages. On the contrary, the Indianism that they try to take back from the past, to return us to the Indian, is a betrayal of the homeland that, since the Colony, stopped being Indian.
That is why we have always talked about incorporating the Indian into civilisation, that is, into Christianity and Hispanism, so that all our children, united, enjoy a Mexico totally regenerated from its Aztec-ism, even the Indians and the children of the Indians!
Vasconcelos was pathetically wrong. It’s impossible to turn the Other into oneself. Vasconcelos died when I was one year old. He could never have imagined that the statue of Christopher Columbus would be vandalised by the slightly mesticized Indians that he idealised; removed from its pedestal by the government itself, and replaced by that of an Amerindian woman as I said in my post yesterday.
Incidentally, those who want to read a translation of mine from ten years ago of another passage from Vasconcelos’ book can do it at Counter-Currents.