The Tischgespräche, the Führer’s table talks with a few senior party officials, senior SS officers or foreign guests[1], are instructive in this respect. Even more instructive, perhaps, are certain reports that are hostile to Hitlerism, all the more virulent because their authors are angrier at having initially followed Adolf Hitler in the wrong direction, and at having felt themselves to be fools in retrospect—wrongly, no doubt, for it must have been very difficult to grasp the true thinking of the Master before being part of the narrow circle of people who enjoyed his confidence.
Such is, for example, the book by the former President of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig, Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Told Me which had, in its time, some notoriety since in 1939 the thirteenth French edition of it was already published: an excellent book, despite of the aggressiveness that pierces every line. The fact that Rauschning himself seems to be completely unaware of the cyclical conception of history and, in general, of the supra-human truths which are the basis of all ancient wisdom, makes the judgements he believes he is making against the Führer all the more eloquent by accusing him (without knowing it) of waging his struggle precisely in the name of these truths. Finally, nothing can shed light on certain aspects of Hitlerism like Hans Grimm’s book Warum? Woher? aber Wohin?, a work by an impartial non-Hitlerite, or the account given by Auguste Kubizek, a man with no political allegiance whatsoever, of his years of friendship with the future Führer, then aged between fifteen and nineteen, in his book Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund.[2]
The first thing that strikes one on reading these various texts is Adolf Hitler’s awareness of the speed with which everything is falling apart in our time, and of the total reversal of values that the slightest recovery would mean. It is also the very clear feeling he seems to have had that his action represented the last chance of the Aryan race as well as the last (at least theoretical) possibility of recovery, before the end of the present cycle.
This sentiment was coupled with the conviction that he himself was not ‘the last’ fighter against the forces of disintegration; not the One who would usher in the glorious ‘Golden Age’ of the next cycle. Five years before the seizure of power, the Führer said in all simplicity to Hans Grimm: ‘I know that someone must appear, and face our situation. I have been looking for this man. I have not been able to find him anywhere, and that is why I have arisen, to carry out the preparatory task, only the urgent preparatory task, for I know that I am not the One who is to come. And I also know what I lack. But the Other remains absent, and no one is there, and there is no more time to waste’.[3]
There is even reason to believe that he sensed—if not knew; I will come back to this point—the inevitability of disaster and the need for him to sacrifice himself. But just as his vision was centred on the German people but went far beyond Germany, so his defeat was to be a catastrophe on a planetary scale (which it was, indeed) and his sacrifice was to take on an unsuspected significance.
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Note of the Editor: In 1955 the notable Mexican José Vasconcelos (see my 2011 article: here) wrote a preface for Salvador Borrego’s main work, Derrota Mundial [World Defeat], in which Borrego argues that the world lost with the defeat of Germany. In 2015, on Borrego’s 100th birthday, David Duke, Ernst Zündel and Mark Weber visited him in Mexico. The four of them can be seen in this photograph; Weber appears to the far left; Zündel in the middle.
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He told Hermann Rauschning: ‘If we fail to win, we will drag half the world down with us, and no one will be able to rejoice in a victory over Germany’ and: ‘He could not otherwise accomplish his mission’, notes this author, without apparently realising the significance of such an assertion.[4]
So what was this ‘mission’, so imperious although He who knew he was in charge of it could, at times, foresee its failure? It was that of all those beings, both human and more than human—in India they are called avatars or descents of the divine Spirit in the visible and tangible world—who, from age to age, have fought against the tide of Time, for the restoration of a material order in the image of the eternal Order: that of the God Krishna, that of the Prophet Mohammed, and, in Germanic legend, truer than history: that of the hero Siegfried, like them both initiate and warrior.
Such a mission always implies the destruction of the decadent world, without which the restoration of a hierarchical society according to eternal values would be unthinkable. It therefore implies the recognition of the reign of evil, of the ‘triumph of injustice’[5] that is, what is contrary to the divine Order, at the time of the combatant—and the exaltation of combat. Undoubtedly, people who militate by violence against an already bad established order, in favour of a ‘new world’ even worse from the viewpoint of natural hierarchies, are also dissatisfied people who aren’t afraid of armed struggle. But, as I have tried to show above, it is the nature of their dream, not the methods employed for its realisation, which places them exactly opposite the fighters against time.
There are reckless, irresponsible fighters—both in the direction of temporal evolution and against it. There are millions of people of ‘goodwill’—liberals, individualists, pacifists, ‘friends of man’ of all stripes—who, mostly through sheer ignorance or laziness of mind, follow the deceptive suggestions of the agents of the Dark Forces, and contribute, with the most generous intentions in the world, to accelerating the pace of universal degeneration.
There are also people perfectly unconscious of the eternal laws of the visible as well as the subtle Universe, who militate enthusiastically for selection in battle, for the segregation of races, and, in general, for an aristocratic conception of the world, by instinct—simply out of horror of the physical and moral ugliness of men, and out of hatred of the prejudices and institutions which encourage its generalisation. Many of us are among them. Nobler than the former, since they are centred on beauty which, in its essence, merges with Truth, they are, despite everything, just as unresponsible in the strong sense of the word, because they are just as attached to the realm of impression, that is to say, to the subjective.
But it is different with leaders… all the more so with the founders of new times.
The real initiator of a subversive movement in the sense I have given above, can only be a man in possession of some degree of undeniable knowledge. But he uses it in reverse: for purposes contrary to the spirit of true hierarchies, therefore contrary to those which a wise man’s action should take. On the other hand, the founder and leader of a faith ‘against Time’—as Adolf Hitler was—can only be one of those men whom I have, in another book,[6] called ‘above Time’: a sage, an initiate in union with the Divine and simultaneously a warrior—and perhaps also a ‘politician’—ready to employ, at the level of the contingencies of the visible world, all the means he knows to be effective, and judging a means only by its effectiveness.
He can only be a man both above Time, as regards his being, and against Time, as regards his action in the world; in other words, a warrior (or a politician, or both) fighting against the order, institutions and powers of his time, with whatever weapons he can muster, with a view to an (at least temporary) ‘recovery’ of society, inspired by a Golden Age ideal: a will to bring the ‘new’ order into accord with the Eternal Order.
Now, I repeat: the texts, the facts, the whole history and atmosphere of National Socialism become fully comprehensible only if, once and for all, one admits that Adolf Hitler was such a man: the most recent manifestation, among us, of the One who returns from age to age ‘for the protection of the righteous, for the destruction of those who do evil, for the firm establishment of the order according to the nature of things’.[7]
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[1] Translated into French under the title Libres propos sur la Guerre et la Paix, by R. d’Harcourt.
[2] A (shortened) French translation was published by Gallimard.
[3] Hans Grimm, Warum? Woher? aber Wohin? published by Klosterhaus Verlag, Lippoldsberg, in 1954; page 14.
[4] Hermann Rauschning, Hitler m’a dit, 13th French edition, 1939, pages 142 & 279.
[5] Bhagawad-Gîta, IV, verse 7.
[6] The Lightning and the Sun, written from 1948 to 1956, published in Calcutta in 1958.
[7] Bhagawad-Gîta, IV, verse 8.