But that is still nothing. What is most extraordinary is that this cult of the Führer survived, in this country, the collapse of the Third Reich. I found it alive during my stay in India from 1957 to 1960, and I found it again, to my joy, and despite intensified Communist propaganda, in 1971, and this, I repeat, especially in the circles most faithful to Tradition.
In the book she devoted to India, in the collection Petite Planète, the orientalist Madeleine Biardeau, herself clearly hostile to our Weltanschauung, is obliged to note this with regret, not to say with bitterness. ‘In no country’, she writes, ‘have I heard more praise for Hitler. Germans are praised for no other reason than that they are his countrymen’. [1] And she is also forced to admit that Hindu resentment of British rule—now finished anyway—isn’t enough to account for this worship. The scholar has, underhandedly as one would expect it, an explanation that is suitable for her. The Hindu, she says, feels and honours the presence of the Divine in all that is ‘great in evil’. In other words, he is free from the moral dualism that still underlies, almost invariably, the value judgements of Western man.
This is certainly true. But it does not suffice as an explanation. The only justification for the praise of an Aryan leader who is a stranger to India lies not in the fact that the Hindu easily transcends moral dualism, but in the reason for this fact.
This reason is to be found in the Hindu’s attachment to Tradition, not elsewhere; in his acceptance of sacred knowledge with full confidence, even if he has not acquired it himself.
It is in the name of this more-than-human science that he finds it natural that, under certain conditions, what on the average human scale would seem ‘evil’ is not.
It is in the light of the doctrine of necessary violence, exercised without passion ‘in the interest of the Universe’—i.e., of Life, not of ‘man’—it is in the light of the venerable Bhagawad-Gita that proclaims the innocence of violence of this nature, that the orthodox Hindu can see in the Master of the Third Reich—despite all the propaganda of concentration camps that have saturated all the rest of the men on this Earth for several decades—something other than ‘the incarnation of evil’.
Moreover, it is impossible not to be struck by the similarity of spirit between Hitlerism and, not, certainly, the philosophies of non-violence, which have broken away from the Brahmanical trunk, or the dissident Hindu sects, but the most rigorous and ancient Brahmanism. Both are centred on the idea of purity of blood, and the indefinite transmission of wholesome life—especially the life of the racial elite; the life from which can emerge the man whose self-mastery raises him to the rank of a God. Both exalt war in an attitude of detachment—‘war without hatred’ [2] —because ‘nothing better can happen to the Kshatriya’—or the perfect SS warrior—‘than a righteous combat’[3]. Both establish on the Earth, as do all traditional doctrines, a visible order modelled on cosmic realities and the very laws of life.
This worship of the Führer, surviving in India despite so much enemy propaganda well beyond the disaster of 1945 is, moreover, a proof—if one needed one—that Hitlerism, stripped of its contingent German expression, is also indeed attached to the primordial—Hyperborean—tradition of which Brahminism seems to be the most ancient living form.
It is undoubtedly related to it by what has, despite the imposition of Christianity, survived in Germany of a very old and properly Germanic traditional form, deriving from a common source of the holy ‘Arctic fatherland’ of the Vedas and the Edda.
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[1] Madeleine Biardeau, L’Inde, collection Petite Planète.
[2] This is the subtitle of a post-war book on the career of Feldmarschall Rommel.
[3] The Bhagawad-Gita, Chant II, verse 31.