So what are these values that make Hitlerism a ‘negation of man’ in the eyes of almost all our contemporaries? For it is, indeed, a negation of man as Christianity and Descartes and the French Revolution have taught us to conceive him. But isn’t this, on the other hand, the affirmation of another conception of man?
Philosophically, one could define or describe Hitlerism as the search for the eternal, in and through the love and service of tangible, living perfection. The perfection of a living species is the ‘idea’ of that species, in the Platonic sense of the word; or, if one prefers to use Aristotle’s language, it is its ‘entelechy’: what she ideally tends towards. The more complex a living species is—the more hidden possibilities it has—the more difficult it is to discover individuals, or groups of individuals, that are absolutely faithful to the ‘idea’ of this species, that is, perfect.
Of all the visible beings on our Earth, man is the one with the widest range of possibilities, and it is in him that perfection is the most difficult to find. And the criterion which allows it possible—statistically, of course; in this field all truth is statistical truth—is to speak about a natural hierarchy of human races, the extent to which each race can make the ‘idea of man’ a living reality; to present, in the face and body of its nationals, the harmony which is the very essence of beauty, and in their psyche, the virtues that distinguish the superior man, the one I have sometimes called ‘the candidate for Superhumanity’.
I insist that the idea of a ‘superior race’ is statistical. None of us has ever been so foolish as to believe that all specimens of one human race could be, merely by belonging to that race, necessarily ‘superior’ to all specimens of all other races. Some non-Aryans are clearly superior to some Aryans, even the ‘average’ Aryan. Hindu saints of low caste—such as Tukaram—or even below any caste—like Nandanar—were certainly closer to the eternal than many ‘twice-born’ Aryans, especially those Aryans of today, corrupted by the lust for material goods. Japanese heroes, such as Yamato Dake, or Yoshitsune, and so many others; Mongolian chiefs, such as Genghis Khan, the invincible genius, or his lieutenant, Subodai, the very incarnation of the highest military virtue at the same time as the most modest, the most unselfish of men; Mexican chiefs, such as Nezahualcoyotl, king of Tezcuco, at once warrior, engineer and poet, were also.
And what can we say about Tlahuicol, the Tlascaltec warrior from the middle of the fifteenth century, who, as a prisoner of the Aztecs and destined to be sacrificed during the Festival of Fire, refused the pardon and honours offered to him by Montezuma, who was amazed at the sight of his prowess, and preferred ‘to let the festival go on’, with all the excruciating consequences that it would entail for him, rather than accept to serve alongside the enemy chiefs against Tlascala? Confronted, according to custom, at the beginning of the ritual, alone, and without any other weapon than a wooden sword, with five of the best Aztec warriors, armed with stone swords, he had defeated and killed them—instead of being struck down by them—which had earned him the admiration of the prince and all the nobility of Tenochtitlan, whose welcome he rejected out of loyalty to his people. Was he not clearly superior to certain Christians of Aryan origin, his contemporaries in Europe, to a Commines, for example, a traitor to Charles the Bold, his benefactor?
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Editor’s Note: I can’t be so sure how to see under this light all of the characters Savitri mentions above. But I’ll just disagree with her regarding one of the ones she mentions, and what better way to do that than to quote a passage from my Day of Wrath:
As implied above, my father feels an excessive admiration for the Indian world. On several occasions he has argued that the fact that the poetry of Nezahualcóyotl, the most refined representative of the Nahua culture, is so humane that it refutes the vision of the culture as barbaric. But poetry is no reliable standard. The basic, fundamental principle in psychohistory has childrearing as the relevant factor, and from this point of view even the refined monarch of Texcoco was a barbarian.
In a courtier intrigue Nezahualcóyotl consented using garrote to execute his favorite son, the prince Tetzauhpilzintli. The Nahua characters were seized with fratricide fits. Moctezuma I (not the one who received Cortés) ordered the killing of his brother and something similar did Nezahualcóyotl’s heir, Nezahualpilli: who also used capital punishment with his first born son and heir. Soustelle says that this family tragedy was one of the causes of the fall of the Mexican empire since the blood brothers that rose to the throne flipped to the Spanish side. But Soustelle’s blindness about what he has in front of his nose is amazing. Like León Portilla, for Soustelle ‘there is no doubt that the Mexicans loved their children very much’. But that is not love. Nezahualcóyotl’s mourning after letting his son be killed reminds me the ‘Pietà’ of my first book […].
