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Category: Souvenirs et réflexions d’une aryenne (book)

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Indo-European heritage Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 53

What he reproached most of all, it seems, was the fact that Christianity alienated his followers from Nature; that it inculcated in them a contempt for the body and, above all, presented itself to them as the ‘consoling’ religion par excellence: the religion of the afflicted; of those who are ‘toiled over and burdened’ and don’t have the strength to bear their burden courageously; of those who cannot come to terms with the idea of not seeing their beloved ones again in a naïvely human Hereafter. Like Nietzsche, he found it to have a whining, servile rotundity about it, and considered Christianity inferior to even the most primitive mythologies, which at least integrate man into the cosmos—all the more inferior to a religion of Nature, ancestors, heroes and of the national State such as this Shintoism, whose origin is lost in the night of prehistory, and which his allies, the Japanese, had had the intelligence to preserve, by adapting it to their modern life.[1]

And in contrast, he liked to evoke the beauty of the attitude of his followers who, free of hope as well as fear, carried out the most dangerous tasks with detachment. ‘I have’, he said on December 13, 1941 in the presence of Dr Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Terboven and others, ‘six SS divisions composed of men who are absolutely indifferent in matters of religion. This doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with a serene soul’.[2]

Here, ‘indifference in matters of religion’ just means indifference to Christianity and, perhaps, to all religious exotericism; certainly not indifference to the sacred. Quite the contrary! Because what the Führer reproached Christianity, and no doubt any religion or philosophy centred on the ‘too human’, was precisely the absence in it of that true piety which consists in feeling and adoring ‘God’—the Principle of all being or non-being, the Essence of light and also of Shadow—through the splendour of the visible and tangible world; through Order and Rhythm and the unchanging Law which is its expression: the Law which melts opposites into the same unity, a reflection of unity in itself. What he reproached them for was their inability to make the sacred penetrate life, all life, as in traditional societies.

And what he wanted—and, as I shall soon try to show, the SS must have had a great role to play here—was a gradual return of the consciousness of the sacred, at various levels, in all strata of the population. Not a more or less artificial resurgence of the cult of Wotan and Thor (the Divine never assumes again, in the eyes of men, the forms it once abandoned) but a return of Germany and the Germanic world in general, to Tradition, grasped in the Nordic manner, in the spirit of the old sagas including those which, like the legend of Parsifal preserved, under Christian outward appearances, the unchanged values of the race; the imprint of eternal values in the collective soul of the race.
 

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Editor’s note: Last year I wrote: ‘Musically, I think Parsifal is Wagner’s most accomplished work. The overtures of each of the three acts, as well as the magnificent music when Gurnemanz takes Parsifal into the castle in the first act; the background music and the voices by the end of the discussion between Parsifal and Kundry in the second act, and let’s not talk about the Good Friday music in the third act, are the most glorious and spiritual I have ever listened. No wonder why Max Reger (1873-1916) confessed: “When I first heard Parsifal at Bayreuth I was fifteen. I cried for two weeks and then became a musician”.’
 

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He wanted to restore to the German peasant ‘the direct and mysterious apprehension of Nature, the instinctive contact, the communion with the Spirit of the Earth’. He wanted to scrape off ‘the Christian varnish’ and restore to him ‘the religion of the race’ [3] and, little by little, especially in the immense new ‘living space’ which he dreamed of conquering in the East, to remake from the mass of his people a free peasant-warrior people, as in the old days when the immemorial Odalrecht, the oldest Germanic customary law, regulated the relations of men with each other and with their chiefs.

It was from the countryside, which, he knew, still lived on, behind a vain set of Christian names and gestures, pagan beliefs from which he intended one day to evangelise those masses in the big cities: the first victims of modern life in whom, in his own words, ‘everything was dead’. (This ‘everything’ meant for him ‘the essential’: the capacity of man, and especially of the pure-blooded Aryan, to feel both his nothingness as an isolated individual and his immortality as the repository of the virtues of his race, his awareness of the sacred in everyday life.)

He wanted to restore this sense of the sacred to every German—to every Aryan—in whom it had faded or been lost over the generations through the superstitions spread by the churches as well as by an increasingly popularised false ‘science’. He knew that this was an arduous and long-term task from which one could not expect spectacular success, but whose preservation of pure blood was the sine qua non of accomplishment—because, beyond a certain degree of miscegenation (which is very quickly reached) a people is no longer the same people.

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[1] Ibid., p. 141

[2] Libres propos sur la Guerre et la Paix, translation, p. 140.

[3] H. Rauschning, Hitler m’a dit, treizième édition française, p. 71.

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Neanderthalism Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 52

It is certain that the decision of the young corporal Hitler, of the 16th Bavarian infantry regiment, to ‘become a politician’ [1] —a decision taken at the announcement of the capitulation of November 1918 in the tragic circumstances of which everyone knows[2]—isn’t enough to explain the extraordinary career of the man who was one day to become the master of Germany, if not of Europe.

Moreover ‘politics’, paradoxical as it may seem, had never been for the Führer the main issue. In a talk on the night of 25 to 26 January 1942, he confessed that he had devoted himself to it ‘against his will’ and saw it as ‘only a means to an end’.[3] This ‘end’ was the mission to which I referred above. Adolf Hitler spoke of it in Mein Kampf and in many speeches, such as the one he gave on 12 March 1938 in Linz where he said, among other things: ‘If Providence once called me out of this city to lead the Reich, it was because it had a mission for me in which I believed, and for which I lived and fought’.

His confidence to act, driven by an impersonal Will, both transcendent and immanent, of which his individual will was only the expression, was pointed out by all those who approached him from near or from afar. Robert Brasillach mentioned the ‘divine mission’ with which the Führer felt invested. And Hermann Rauschning said that he ‘saw himself as a prophet whose role exceeded that of a statesman by a hundred cubits’. ‘No doubt’, he adds, ‘he takes himself quite seriously as the herald of a new humanity’.[4] This is in line with the statement of Adolf Hitler himself, also reported by Rauschning: ‘He who understands National Socialism only as a political movement knows little about it. National Socialism is more than a religion: it is the will to create the overman’.

Moreover, despite his political alliance with Mussolini’s Italy, the Führer was perfectly aware of the abyss separating his biologically based Weltanschauung from Fascism, which remained alien to the ‘stakes of the colossal struggle’ that was about to begin, that is, the meaning of his mission. ‘It is only we National Socialists and we alone’, he said, ‘who have penetrated the secret of the gigantic revolutions that are coming’.
 

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Editor’s note: This is so true that it reminds me of yesterday’s post on this site, in which we saw how a scholar well versed in NS fails to cross the axiological river. The greatness of the NS men is noticeable in that in the last century Himmler’s select group had already crossed it. And the main shortcoming of white nationalism on the other side of the Atlantic, eighty years later, is that they continue to resist crossing it because of Christian ethics.
 

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‘And that is why we are the only people, chosen by Providence, to make our mark on the coming century’.[5] In fact, few German National Socialists had penetrated this secret. But it was enough that he, Adolf Hitler, the leader and soul of Germany, had penetrated it to justify the ‘choice’ of the forces of life, for a people is in solidarity with its leader, at least when he is racially one of its sons. In other words, Germany’s priority was, in this case, a consequence of the lucidity of its Leader, of the ‘magic vision’—of the consciousness of the initiate living in the eternal Present—which, alone of all the politicians and generals of his time, he possessed.

It is in this vision that we must seek the source of the Führer’s hostility towards the modern world—both capitalist and Marxist—and its institutions. There is no need to return to the process of the superstition of equality, parliamentarianism, democracy, etc., which is nothing more than the superstition of ‘man’ applied to politics: a trial which the founder of the Third Reich made again and again, in Mein Kampf as in all his speeches, before the multitudes, as well as before the few. Adolf Hitler also attacks features of our time which, while not at the root of this superstition (which is infinitely older) nevertheless reinforces its tragic character. These are, in particular, the rapid disappearance of the sense of the sacred, the resurgence of the ‘technical spirit’, and above all perhaps the disordered proliferation of man in inverse proportion to his quality.

While knowing that they could only be, in the name of Christian anthropocentrism, his worst adversaries, Adolf Hitler was careful not to attack the churches openly, let alone ‘persecute’ them. He did so out of political skill, and also out of fear of depriving the people of an existing faith before another had penetrated deeply enough into their souls to replace it advantageously.

This didn’t prevent him from observing that the time of living Christianity was over; that the Churches represented nothing more than a ‘hollow, fragile and deceptive religious apparatus’[6] which was not even worth demolishing from the outside, since from the inside it was already crumbling of its own accord, and cracking on all sides. He didn’t believe in a resurrection of the Christian faith. In the German countryside it had always been a ‘veneer’, a ‘shell’ which had kept intact the old piety under it. And it was now a question of reviving and directing it. In the urban masses he saw nothing that revealed any awareness of the sacred. He realised that ‘where everything is dead, nothing can be relighted’.[7]

In any case, Christianity was, in his eyes as in ours, nothing but a foreign religion imposed on the Germanic peoples, and fundamentally opposed to their genius. Adolf Hitler despised those responsible men who had been able for so long to content themselves with such childishness as those that the Churches taught the masses. And he was never short of sarcasm when, before those few to whom he knew he could confess the least popular aspect of his thinking, he spoke of Christianity as ‘an invention of sick brains’.[8]

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[1] ‘Ich aber beschloss, Politiker zu werden’, Mein Kampf, ed. 1935, p. 225.

[2] Adolf Hitler, gas-gnawed, threatened with blindness, learned the news at Pasewalk Military Hospital where he had been evacuated.

[3] In the presence of Himmler, Lammers, Zeitzler—Libres Propos, (op. cit.) p. 244.

[4] Hermann Rauschning, Hitler m’a dit, 13th French edition, 1939.

[5] Ibid., p. 147.

[6] Ibid., p. 69.

[7] Ibid. p. 71.

[8] Free Remarks on War and Peace (op. cit.), p. 141.

Categories
August Kubizek Kali Yuga Philosophy of history Salvador Borrego Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 51

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.

Categories
Democracy Monarchy Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Sturmabteilung (SA) Third Reich

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 50

There is no shortage of opponents of Marxism. They range from those who condemn all violence and are frightened by the known episodes of ‘class struggle’ in Russia and China, to those who reproach the Communists for their atheism and materialism, to those who own some property and are afraid of losing it if they have to live under the sign of the Sickle and Hammer.

Many oppose it in the name of some political doctrine, usually embodied in a ‘party’, which, if it attacks the ‘subversive’ character of Marxism, is itself no less subversive, and for the same deep reasons. This is the case with the adherents of all democratic parties, whose common denominator is to be found in the belief in the ‘equality in law’ of all men, and hence the principle of universal suffrage, of power emanating from the majority. These people don’t realise that Communism is in its infancy in this very principle, as it was already in Christian anthropocentrism (even if it is a question of the value of human souls in the eyes of a personal God who infinitely loves all men). They don’t realise that it is and can only be so, for the reason that the majority will always be the mass—and increasingly so, in an overpopulated world.

Only those who are faithful to any adequate expression of immemorial Tradition, and in particular to any true religion or to any Weltanschauung capable of serving as a basis for a true religion—any worldview which is ultimately based on the knowledge of the eternal and on the will to make it the principle of the socio-political order—, are fundamentally opposed to Marxism.

Now, disregarding the apparent paradox of such an assertion, twenty-five years after the collapse of the Third German Reich I dare to repeat that the only properly Western doctrine which (after the very old Nordic religions which Christianity persecuted and gradually killed between the 6th and 12th centuries) fulfils this condition is Hitlerism.

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Note of the Editor: Once more, Savitri didn’t know about the apocalypse of whites that also represented, in the 4th and 5th centuries, the violent destruction of the classical world by fanatic Christians. We cannot blame her. Books like this one had not been published! More recently than Savitri’s time, even Mauricio didn’t know about the blackest page of ancient history, as he commented yesterday.

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This is the only Weltanschauung infinitely more than ‘political’ that is clearly ‘against Time’ in accordance with the eternal. It is the only worldview which, in the long run, will triumph both over Marxism and the general chaos to which it will have led the world—and this, no matter how great the material defeat of its followers may have been yesterday, and no matter how hostile millions of men may be about it today. Only a total recovery can succeed a total subversion: a glorious beginning of the cycle at a lamentable end of it.

But our opponents won’t fail to draw everyone’s attention to the eminently ‘anti-traditional’ character of more than one aspect of National Socialism, both during the Kampfzeit, before 1933, and after the seizure of power. If it is ‘subversive’ from the viewpoint of eternal values to preach the ‘class struggle’ with a view to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. But wasn’t it equally subversive to rise to power democratically thanks to universal suffrage, by relying on a succession of electoral campaigns (on the protection of young fighters, for the most part as ‘proletarian’ in their behaviour, as the Communists whose attacks they repelled during meetings and whom they overcame in street battles)? Wasn’t it to be so, to keep this power, which came from the people—the masses—and to omit the reestablishment of the old monarchy despite the last and fervent recommendation of Marshal von Hindenburg, President of the Reich?

On the other hand, didn’t several German banks[1] as well as industrial magnates[2] subsidised the NSDAP, thus making the success of the National Socialist Revolution depend, in part, on the power of money and running the risk of making it considered, despite its popular appearance, the supreme defence of the ‘capitalist’ order as it already existed—that is to say, a society extremely distant from the traditional ideal?

Finally, it may be said, how can it be denied that, even after the seizure of power the Third German Reich was far from presenting the appearance of an organism inspired from top to bottom by the vision of the cosmic hierarchy? The famous author Hans Günther himself, apparently disillusioned, wrote to me in 1970 that he had, unfortunately, seen in it ‘an ochlocracy’ rather than the aristocratic regime he had dreamed of. And one cannot categorically reject without discussion this judgement of one of the most prominent theorists of Hitler’s racism before the disaster of 1945. The judgement, while undoubtedly excessive, must, in more than one particular case, certainly express some regrettable reality.

Let’s never forget that we are approaching the end of a cycle, and that the best institutions can therefore only exceptionally have a semblance of the perfection of the past. For everywhere, and the post-war period has amply proved this, there are more and more two-legged mammals and fewer and fewer men in the strongest sense of the word. No doctrine should therefore be judged by what has been accomplished in the visible world in its name.

The doctrine is true or false depending on whether or not it is in unison with that direct knowledge of the universal and eternal which only a steadily diminishing minority of sages possesses. It is true—it cannot be repeated often enough—regardless of the victory or defeat of its followers, or so-called followers on the material plane, and regardless of their weaknesses, foolishness, or even crimes. Neither the atrocities of the Holy Inquisition, nor the scandals attached to the name of Pope Alexander VI Borgia, take anything away from the truth of the vision of the ‘intelligible world’ that a Master Eckhart, for example, or some initiated Templar, may have had through Christian symbolism. And the same is true of all doctrines.

We must therefore be careful not to impute to Hitlerism the faults, weaknesses or excesses of people with power, to any degree whatsoever, under the Third Reich or during the period of struggle (Kampfzeit) from 1920 to 1933, and especially the faults or excesses committed against the spirit of the Weltanschauung and the Führer’s dream, as there seemed to be so many. In German society, as it was under the growing influence and effective rule of the Führer during the Kampfzeit and afterwards, we must see only the Führer’s efforts to mould it according to his dream, or to prevent it from evolving against that same dream. We must try to understand what he wanted to do.

Already in the official National Socialist texts addressed to the general public—in the Twenty-five Points, which form the basis of the Party programme; and above all in Mein Kampf where the great philosophical directives of the latter are traced out even more clearly—it is visible that the Movement was directed against the most cherished ideals and the most characteristic customs of the eminently decadent society, which had grown out of the Liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Lending at interest, financial speculation, and any form of gain alien to a creative endeavour, as well as the exploitation of vice or silliness in a press, literature, cinema or theatre envisaged above all as a means of making a profit, are condemned with the utmost rigour. Moreover, the very principles of modern Western civilisation—the equality of all men and all races in law, the idea that ‘law’ is the expression of the will of the majority, and ‘nation’ the community of those who, whatever their origin, ‘want to live together’; the idea that perpetual peace in abundance, the fruit of man’s ‘victory over nature’ represents the supreme good—are attacked, ridiculed and demolished in a masterly manner.

Natural law, the law of the struggle for life, is recognised and exalted on the human level as on all other levels. And the primordial importance of race and personality—the two pillars of the new faith—is proclaimed on every page. Finally, this new faith, or rather this new conception of life (neue Audassung) for the Führer and the few, is not a question of ‘faith’ but true knowledge. It is characterised as ‘corresponding to the original meaning of things’[3] which says a lot, this ‘original meaning of things’ being none other than that which they take on in the light of Tradition.

We can therefore, without going any further, affirm that everything in the history of the National Socialist Party that doesn’t seem to coincide with the spirit of a struggle ‘against Time’ is a matter of the tactics of the struggle, not its nature or purpose. It was under the pressure of hard necessity, and only after he had failed on 9 November 1923 in his attempt to seize power by force that Adolf Hitler, released from his Landsberg prison but now deprived of all means of action, had recourse—reluctantly to be sure—to the slow and long ‘legal way’, that is to say, to the repeated appeal to the voters and the gradual conquest of a majority in the Reichstag. It is well known that his first move after taking power ‘by democratic means’ was to replace the authority of the many with that of one, namely his own at all levels; in other words, to abolish democracy: to bring the political order into line with the natural order as far as possible.

It was under the pressure of a no less compelling material necessity—that of meeting the enormous expenses involved in the struggle for power in a parliamentary system with its inevitable election campaigns—that he had to accept the help of the Hugenbergs, the Kirkdorfs, the Thyssens, Dr Schacht and later Krupp, as well as of a host of industrialists and bankers.

Without it, he couldn’t have risen to power fast enough to block the road to the most dangerous forces of subversion: the Communists. For money is, more than ever, in a world which it increasingly dominates, the ‘sinews of war’ and politics. Does this mean that the Führer was subservient to money or to those who had given him money during the Kampfzeit? Does it mean that he made any concessions to them after taking power?

Far from it! He allowed them to get rich insofar as, in so doing, they served the national economy effectively and gave the working masses what he had promised them: abundance through work insofar as, subject to his authority, they continued to help the Party, i.e. the state, in peace and war. He kept them in their place and their role—like a king and the merchant ‘caste’ in a traditional society—thus showing both his realism and wisdom.

On the other hand, the (at least partial) ‘ochlocracy’ that has so often been attributed to National Socialism was, in fact, only the inevitable corollary of Adolf Hitler’s obligation to come to power by relying, quite democratically, on the majority of the electorate. It wouldn’t have existed if the putsch of 9 November 1923 had succeeded and had given him free rein to remake Germany according to his immense dream. It wouldn’t have existed because he wouldn’t have needed the collaboration of hundreds of thousands of young people ready to do anything: to strike blows as well as to receive them, to maintain in the vicinity of his massive propaganda meetings, and in the halls themselves, an order constantly threatened by the physical attacks of the most violent and implacable elements of the Communist opposition.

To conquer Germany ‘democratically’ he had to show himself, to be heard, hundreds and hundreds of times to convey to the public his message: part of his message, at least that which would induce the masses to vote for his party. The message was irresistible but it had to be communicated. And that would have been impossible without the wolf pack, the SA[4], who ruled the streets and who, at the risk of their own lives, ensured the Führer’s silence and safety amid his audience.

Adolf Hitler loved his young beasts, madly attached to his person, eager for both violence and adoration, many of whom were former Communists who had been won over to the holy cause by the fascination of his words, his looks, his behaviour and his doctrine in which the son of a proletarian saw something more outrageous, more brutal, and therefore more exalting than Marxism.

He loved them. And he loved the latest of their supreme leaders of the Kampfzeit, under whose orders he himself had once fought in the war: Ernst Röhm, who had returned from Bolivia, from the end of the world, at his call in 1930. He willingly turned a blind eye to his deplorable morals and saw in him only the perfect soldier and genius organiser.

And yet… he resigned himself, despite everything, to having this old comrade killed, or to let him be killed—almost the only man in his entourage who was on a first-name basis with him[5]—as soon as he was convinced that the turbulence of this troop, so faithful though it was, its spirit of independence and especially the growing opposition which was emerging between it and the regular German army could only lead precisely to ochlocracy, if not to civil war; in any case, only to the weakening of Germany.

One could compare this tragic but apparently necessary purge of June 30, 1934 with the most Machiavellian settlements of accounts in history; for example, the execution without trial of Don Ramiro di Lorqua on the orders of Caesar Borgia—with this crucial difference, however: that, while the Duke of Valentino had in mind only power for himself, the Führer aimed infinitely higher. He wanted power to try, in a desperate effort, to reverse the march of Time against itself, in the name of eternal values. There was nothing personal in his struggle at any stage.

And if, despite the fervent desire of Field Marshal and Reich President von Hindenburg, he rejected any idea of restoring the monarchy, it was not out of ambition either. It was because he was aware of the vanity of such a step in terms of values and true hierarchies. The monarchy ‘by divine right’, the only normal one from the traditional point of view[6] had, for centuries already, lost all meaning and justification in Europe.

The Führer knew this. It was not a question of trying to restore a shaky order by reinstalling a parliamentary monarchy presided over (there is no other word) by William II or one of his sons. He wanted to build a new order, or rather to resurrect the oldest order: the ‘original’ order in the strongest and most durable form it could take in this century.

And he knew that, by the choice of those forces of life which, throughout any cycle of time, untiringly oppose the ineluctable current of dissolution, he—the eternal Siegfried, both human and more than human—held both the legitimate power in this visible world and the legitimate authority emanating from beyond: the ‘power of the two Keys’. With him at the top, the pyramid of earthly hierarchies was to gradually resume its natural position, once again depicting in miniature, first in Germany, then throughout Europe and the Aryan world: the invisible Order which the Cosmos depicts in large.

It was in the name of this grandiose vision of ideal correspondences that he rejected, with equal vigour, Marxism: a doctrine of total subversion; Parliamentarism in all its forms, always based on the same superstition of quantity; and ochlocracy, a source of disorder, and therefore of constant instability.

But the traditional character of his wisdom is to be sought even more in the few texts that give us his secret, or at least intimate, talks, his open-hearted confidences in front of a few selected people, than in his writings or speeches addressed to the general public.

__________

[1] The Deutsche Bank, the Commerz und Privat Bank, the Dresdener Bank, the Deutsche Credit-Gesellschaft, etc.

[2] E. Kirkdorf, Fritz Thyssen, Voegler, Otto-Wolf von Schröder, then Krupp.

[3] ‘…unsere neue Auffassung, die ganz dem Ursinn der Dinge entspricht…’ (Mein Kampf, 1935 edition, page 440).

[4] Sturmabteilungen or Storm Troops.

[5] With some of his other early collaborators, such as Gregor Strasser.

[6] The elective kingship of the ancient Germans, that of the Frankish warrior raised to the flagstaff by his peers, was also ‘of divine right’ if we admit that the ‘divine’ is none other than the pure blood of a noble race.

Categories
Degenerate art Egalitarianism Kali Yuga Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 49

As the present Cycle is much nearer its end than its bright beginning, it is probably not the first time that such an undertaking has taken place. I mentioned above the Revolution of 1789, which, in the name of the idea of equality ‘in law’ of all men of all races, led in France, de facto, to the usurpation of power by the bourgeoisie, and, in the geographically much more distant West, to the creation of the grotesque negro republic of Santo Domingo.

I could have mentioned Christianity itself, despite the undeniable, but visibly limited, part of true universal symbolism it may contain. Didn’t its dissemination—in the name of this same idea, as subversive as it is erroneous of equality—consummated the disintegration of the Greco-Roman world (already begun, it is true, in the Hellenistic period)? And its outrageous anthropocentrism makes it, in any case, an incomplete religion.

The European aristocracy, that is to say Germanic, and the Byzantine or Byzantinized Slavic aristocracy, came to terms with it out of policy, using it as a ready-made pretext for proselytising conquests and as a unifying force for the conquered peoples; while some of their members, and the most eminent ones at that, sometimes welcomed in it the opportunity for pure spiritual masochism, if not physical masochism as well.[1] All in all, and despite the inspiration that so many artists have drawn from it, this work has been, practically as well as in the absolute sense of the word, more subversive than constructive.
 

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Editor’s Note: This letter to me has been the most radical approach to this subject I have ever read.
 

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I could have mentioned any of these wisdoms, always more or less truncated, that Nietzsche calls ‘slave religions’. For all of these, even and perhaps especially those that most ostensibly place themselves ‘above Time’, by the mere fact that they deny hierarchy even if only in society and not in itself, and take no account of race on the pretext that the visible is of little importance, result in practice in the encouragement of a levelling down[2] and thus constitute (in practice, always) disintegrating factors acting in the direction of Time. They all contribute to the vast work of subversion, in the true sense of the word: of turning the ideal order upside down which continues, and intensifies, throughout the cycle.

I will say more. Undoubtedly there is a ‘subversion’ of this principial order whenever a man, or a natural group of men—a caste, a race—moved by a false estimate of his ‘rights’ or even of his ‘duties’, usurps or tries to usurp the normal place of another; whenever, for example, a prince rejects the spiritual authority to which his kingdom, and perhaps his civilisation, owes its link—however remote and tenuous—with the highest and most hidden sources of Tradition. It is a crime of this nature of which Philip the Fair, otherwise a great king, seems to have been guilty in destroying, with the connivance of a pope who was more of a politician than a priest, the Order of the Knights Templar. But all this only prepares and prefigures, by far or by near, the ultimate subversion: that which consists in calling the mass—and the mass of all races: the ‘world proletariat’—to power and what is worse is the claims to derive from it, and from it alone, the principle and justification of power.

This subversion, which Guénon calls ‘the reign of Soudra’, is the worst of all those who have succeeded one another in the course of the ages. It is the worst not because a non-Marxist would find himself subjected to more inconveniences under a communist regime than under another, but because it is no longer a question of arbitrary changes, contrary to the spirit of the true hierarchy within visible society, but of a complete reversal of ideal situations and essential values.

The result is that this society, instead of tending, as it should, to reflect what it can of the eternal order, reflects, symbolises, concretises in the world of manifestation exactly the opposite. The pyramid which, in the supra-rational vision of the wise man, represents the organic arrangement of the ideal society, the image of the hierarchical states of cosmic existence, visible and invisible, is, in the sacrilegious dream of the Marxist, completely turned upside down. It is planted in balance—oh, how unstable!—on what should be, on what, from the viewpoint of formal correspondences, is its summit. And it is its natural base that serves as its artificial summit: a ‘summit’ that is not a summit because it is, precisely, mass, a formless and heavy mass: a crushing mass overflowing everything and not a point.

It is from the metaphysical point of view that Marxism is nonsense, no matter how deceptively subtle the arguments on which its founder, Mardoccai, a.k.a. Marx, tried to support from economic and political considerations concerning production, the employer’s profit, the worker’s wage, ‘surplus value’, etc.

No dialectic can bring a doctrine into line with cosmic truth, if it is not already so. And, in the practical domain this time, no force of coercion or persuasion or conditioning can in the long run stabilise a particular state of deterioration in a cycle. The social pyramid cannot remain precariously balanced on its top with its base in the air indefinitely. Either a ‘partial recovery’ will tend to put it back on its feet—with an increasingly illusory success, and less and less durable as the cycle approaches its end—or the pyramid, dragged down by the very inertia of the mass which it was intended to be the ‘summit’, will collapse, disintegrate, fall apart. And it will be chaos, complete anarchy succeeding the reverse order. It will be—to imitate the colourful, Hindu-tinged language of the author of The Crisis of the Modern World—the reign of the Chandala succeeding the reign of the Soudra: the end of the cycle.

Perhaps we still have sporadic glimpses of this in some manifestations of gregarious eccentricity and boisterous nihilism, such as those of the ‘Existentialists of Saint-Germain-des-Prés’, the young people of the ‘New Left’, or ‘hippies’ of all stripes: anarchists out of laziness, pacifists out of laziness, drug addicts, unwashed, uncombed, noisy, ragged individualists and tolerant as long as the individuality of their neighbours doesn’t bother them, preaching: ‘Make love; don’t go to war!’ and ready to jump on the first one who prefers to make war, or both.

________

[1] As could well be the case of Elisabeth of Thuringia, princess of Hungary, who was flogged by Conrad of Marburg, her director of conscience.

[2] I have tried to show this in a long passage in my book Gold in the Furnace, 1951 edition, Calcutta, pages 212ff.

Categories
Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 48

I have already insisted on the untruth at the root of Marxism, namely the assertion that man is reduced to what his economic environment makes of him. I won’t come back to this. I need only emphasise the unnatural character—against the fundamental law of all manifestation—of the approach which consists in presenting a being as the product of something external to him and which, in any case, is only interested in what is in him less essential, less specifically ‘his’ metaphysically speaking, less permanent: his physical needs and comfort.

From the point of view of the universal order, such an approach would be just as absurd about the animal, or the plant, as it is concerning man. No being can be reduced to its appearance and material functions, and even less to the result of the action of the economic environment, that is to say, in the final analysis, of the possibilities of nutrition, appearance and functions. The last of the herbs derives its existence from what is permanent in the seed from which it emerged. The environment can, of course, help it to develop, or on the contrary prevent it from developing; it cannot make it become what it is not: turn a buttercup into a dandelion or vice versa any more than it can destroy what is, in the visible world and beyond, permanent in a man: his physical and psychic heredity, his race.

No one is so foolish as to deny the influence of environment on a man’s life: his occupations, the opportunities he has or doesn’t have. But to reduce the being of the latter to the ‘result of the influence of the environment’ and especially of the ‘economic’ environment and to build on this real reversal of the process of passage from essence to existence a whole political philosophy, is a reversal of the original and impersonal cosmic wisdom. It is, therefore, an anti-traditional enterprise.

If proof were needed the few words which sum up, with blinding clarity, the method and aim of the Marxists are ‘class struggle’, and ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Certainly, in the advanced epoch of the Dark Age, in which we have been living for a long time now, ‘classes’ have lost their meaning. They have lost their meaning insofar as they no longer correspond to castes. They represent less and less the real differences in character and aptitudes between the people who compose them, differences linked to heredity. It is therefore not at all bad, but highly desirable, that they should disappear in a total overhaul of societies—an overhaul that would tend to restore the ideal order, as far as possible. It is, for anyone who wants to oppose the general decadence which only the fanatics of ‘progress’ refuse to see all around us, especially urgent to put an end to the scandal of purchasable privileges.

This state of affairs is not new. It seems to have been established in Western Europe—in France at least—in the 16th century, with the very first acquisitions of titles of nobility for money. It was sanctioned, and reinforced, by the Revolution of 1789, made in part by the people, but for the benefit of the bourgeoisie and under its direction: a Revolution whose result was to substitute, for the power emanating from birth alone, the power granted by money alone.

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Editor’s Note: This is extremely important! See this post that is already eight years old on this site.
 

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Nothing could be more urgent than to change this. It is not that the rich are condemnable in themselves because they have become rich, or because their rich fathers have passed on a fortune to them. It is by no means so, provided, of course, that their money hasn’t been acquired through the exploitation of misery or vice, at the expense of the community. But he becomes one as soon as he imagines that this money gives him rights other than those which derive from the qualities and capacities inherited with his blood, and therefore inherent in his very being. He becomes one if he imagines that he can legitimately buy everything with this money, including the responsibility of command and the obedience of his compatriots.

In a word, there is no need to ‘fight’, let alone suppress, the bourgeoisie, or the aristocracy, or the working or peasant class. All have their raison d’être and their role. It is only necessary to ensure that every man is truly in his place, and remains there.

From the point of view of this ideal order, which reflects and symbolises the intangible hierarchy of the states of Being from the point of view of the eternal, the idea of ‘class struggle’ having political power is nonsense. Power should be in the hands of the best, the aristoi, those worthy and capable of exercising it. And if the fact of losing it always reveals some lack or failure, or even, sometimes, some deep indignity in the one who has it snatched from him, it doesn’t follow that it is enough to usurp it to become worthy of it.

The ‘class struggle’ is only conceivable at a time when these ‘classes’ are no longer distinguishable from each other, except by what they possess, and not by what they are. It is, in other words, only conceivable when it is property alone, or property above all, which determines the factitious ‘being’ of each class instead of the true being of the class, that is, the physical and psychic heredity of its members which determines what they are entitled to possess; when, I repeat, the ‘classes’ no longer correspond to the respective castes.

‘Struggle’, ‘combat’—I shall come back to this later in connection with anything other than Marxism—then becomes the only means of establishing a certain order in a society that no longer has any connection with eternal principles. There is necessarily violence or struggle when these principles are disregarded in the visible world. This has been the case since the end of the age of truth.[1] This is the meaning given to this struggle, for or against the ideal order, that ultimately justifies or condemns it.

Now, for Marxists, it must lead to what they call the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, in other words, to the passage of power into the hands of the masses: that is to say, of the people who are the least qualified to exercise it. It therefore tends towards a complete overthrow of the social hierarchy as it was in all the periods when it reflected, even from a distance, the eternal order. This alone should suffice to characterise Marxism as a backwards philosophy. Its effort to eradicate the existing elites and to reduce the masses themselves to the state of a human ragbag which is increasingly easy to ‘condition’ and guide in the direction of exclusively economic production, is a seemingly a diabolical undertaking.

________

[1] The Satya Yuga of the Sanskrit scriptures.

Categories
Democracy Julian (novel) Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 47

 

Chapter VIII

The two great modern movements and tradition

 
Whenever justice is in danger, O Bharata, and
injustice is exalted, so I myself come back. For the
protection of the good, for the destruction of the wicked, and for
the establishment of a reign of justice, I am reborn from age to age.

Bhagawad-Gîta, IV, verses 7 and 8.

The difference in ‘style’, as well as in spirit, which separates the great collective demonstrations of Hitler’s faith under the Third Reich from the parallel expressions of Marxism in Russia (or China) and, even more so, from the orderless processions of the scruffy youths of the ‘New Left’, on the one hand, and the official parades of the liberal plutocracies, conceals a fundamental opposition in nature: the opposition between Tradition and Anti-tradition, to use the language of René Guénon or Evola.

I have tried to show that a visibly ‘political’ doctrine can sometimes serve as the basis of a religion, provided that it is associated with rituals, that is, with symbolism, and that it becomes an object of faith for all its adherents. But I recall that it can only serve as a foundation for a true religion if the propositions on which it is based are the expression of eternal truths, or are justified only in the light of such truths; in other words, are legitimately linked to Tradition.

A true religion is the set of beliefs and symbolic gestures—rites and customs, linked to these beliefs—which in a traditional civilisation give expression to the consciousness of the sacred. On the other hand, a traditional civilisation is, according to René Guénon, ‘that which rests on principles in the true sense of the word, that is to say, where the intellectual order dominates all the others, where everything proceeds from it directly or indirectly and, whether it is a question of sciences or social institutions, is, in the final analysis, nothing but contingent, secondary and subordinate applications of intellectual truths’.[1] And it is worth adding that what the sage means here by ‘purely intellectual truths’ and ‘intellectual order’ are the very laws of universal existence, manifest or unmanifest, and the permanent order behind all that passes: the eternal.

It is hardly necessary to point out that the ‘values’ and ‘truths’ nominally exalted in the civil solemnities of the western democracies—even in the secular education given to the youth—fit into a particular form of Tradition but don’t even possess, even as mere words, enough resonance to give rise to the outline of any powerful anti-traditional system—let alone a ‘false religion’, a religion based on a deliberate negation of Tradition: a counter-initiation. If an ever more relentless encroachment of technology brings the world of plutocracies and the world of communism so close together that one can, theoretically at least, say that there is nothing to choose between the two, there is, nevertheless, a difference between them. The world of the plutocracies—and their satellites—has no faith, and is not attached, and has not been for a long time, to any vision beyond the sensible and the transient.

If a few individuals or groups of individuals still possess a knowledge of the Eternal, they no longer have any influence over society as a whole; they remain silent, and wait, striving at most to remain faithful to themselves and recognise each other.
 

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Editor’s note:

The novel I have recommended most on this site is Julian by Gore Vidal. Those who have read it will recognise what Savitri says here on the last page of Julian.
 

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The masses are left to scatter in the grey of small daily worries and pleasures. They are not involved at all. On the other hand, all they have retained from the old faith of their churches is a veneer of conformity that is increasingly crumbling, and that anthropocentrism common to all teaching devised by Jews for Aryan consumption. The elites, or so-called elites, have, apart from a few individuals, hardly retained more.

The West lives on its gains but for how long?

Emptied of all will to power, refusing all risk, cursing all aggressiveness (except that which it deployed from 1939 to 1945 and beyond—in its efforts to ‘denazify’ Germany—against the only people and the only faith that could have led it into a prodigious recovery), it slips into comfortable decay, it gets stuck in a precarious welfare, becomes mechanised, Americanised, proletarianized until what it falls one day on its own, as a result of increasing infiltration of ideas and agents who are all the more effective for being more silent, under the dependence of the communist world, or that it becomes, by right of conquest, an integral part of it.

But, if it is true that while liberal democracy—with its superstitions of universal suffrage, of compulsory primary (and soon, secondary!) education, and of generalised vaccination, in other words, with its cult of equality and quantity—leads straight to Marxism, it is not Marxism. The decadence over which it presides is, to be sure, all pervaded by a distinctly anti-traditional spirit—all decadence is: this is its very essence. But it is a natural process, a sign of senility encouraged at most by certain conscious agents of the Dark Forces, working in a muted way in high places in the direction of anti-tradition. It is not linked to a systematic, long and coldly coordinated, and masterly directed effort of deliberate subversion of the traditional order, as is that which the zealots of Marxism have, if not provoked, at least accelerated in all the countries where they have taken power.

In other words there are between the so-called ‘free’ world—the elites and multitudes aspiring only to easy happiness and immediate success—and the communist world with its fiercely disciplined masses dominated by leaders (some of whom such as Lenin, Stalin or Mao-Tsé-Tong will leave an indelible mark on history), about the same analogy as between a man who lets himself live, without faith, without any impulse whatsoever beyond the realm of the senses, without participation in any rite, and a man who attends black masses.

This is the difference between the absence of any velocity of initiatory development, and real counter-initiation. And it is precisely for this reason that ‘the small margin of material freedom that the world of democracy still grants in some activities… to those who don’t allow themselves to be internally conditioned… would certainly disappear under a communist regime’.[2] A society without order is, of course, less intolerant in practice than a society built on a reverse order or one whose structure reflects true Order.

____________

[1] R. Guénon, Orient et Occident, p. 150.

[2] Julius Evola, Chevaucher le tigre.

Categories
Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Swastika Technology Third Reich

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 46

Maybe you could admit it, if it was about a politician. But the Leader of National Socialist Germany was something else entirely. He represented, as I have said, the most recent of the visible and tangible manifestations of Him who periodically returns to lead the struggle ‘against Time’ which has been going on, intensifying, since the end of the unthinkable Golden Age, far, far behind us, and which, at the same time, announces the next Golden Age: the blessed beginning of the next cycle.
 

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Editor’s note: It seems to me that here I’ll differ with Savitri (I don’t think the Golden Age existed), but for the moment I won’t enter into the discussion because I haven’t yet read The Lightning and the Sun. I’ve ordered a hard-cover copy from Counter-Currents Publishing since last month, but for some reason I haven’t received it yet. Only when I read The Lightning and the Sun, considered Savitri’s magnum opus, will I know whether I will disagree with her on this point. In the meantime, let’s stick with the book she wrote in French:
 

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Any action he may have taken in the direction of Time can only be fully explained in the light of his mission against Time, of his desperate effort at recovery accomplished in the present conditions of the world, that is, very close relatively speaking to the end of the present cycle. It is the action of an initiate, and therefore of a visionary (not in the sense of a victim of hallucinations but in the sense of a man capable of considering time, including the time in which he lived and the people who lived with him from the point of view of the eternal present); the action of a prophet, a realist as all true prophets are.

He saw very clearly, and it was not necessary to be an initiate or a prophet, the growing interest of the masses in the material pleasures of life, and the absurdity of any effort to distract them from it. He understood that in an age increasingly dominated by technology it cannot be otherwise. More than that, he understood that, deep down, it had never been otherwise; that only the nature of the ‘material amenities’ could change, not the tendency of the majority of people to give them enormous importance—and this for the simple reason that the masses are the masses, everywhere and always. He knew that while human races are unequally gifted, so are men within the same race, or even the same people; that, in particular, alongside the German elite which all his efforts tended to promote, there was—and always would be, even after the installation of the National Socialist ‘new order’—the masses.

In an interview reported by Hermann Rauschning (a man who has become the enemy of the Hitler faith to the very extent that he has begun to grasp at least some aspects of it and whom, therefore, we must believe whenever the words he quotes are really in the mind of the person who is supposed to have uttered them) the Führer sets forth, as early as the summer of 1932, his conception of the German social order as it must, in his eyes, emerge from the revolution he is leading. ‘There will be’, he said, ‘a class of lords from the most diverse elements, which will be recruited in the struggle and will thus find its historical justification. There will be a crowd of the various members of the Party, ranked hierarchically. It is they who will form the new middle classes. There will also be the great mass of the anonymous, the collectivity of servants, the miners ad aeternum. It doesn’t matter whether they were farm owners, workers or labourers in the former bourgeois society. The economic position and social role of the past will no longer have the slightest significance.[1]

There was, therefore, and there must have been for him, even within the good and brave German people he loved, a mass that was irreducibly ‘minor’: a sympathetic mass, to be sure, because of the good Aryan race despite its naivety from which exceptional individuals could sometimes emerge and stand out; but, on the whole, a mass nonetheless with all the mediocrity that this word suggests. It was to them that the Führer offered an increasingly standardised life, full of amenities within their reach, material amenities above all, it goes without saying: the cheap house (which could be dismantled and reassembled) whose parts, the same everywhere, would be easy to find; the radio, the typewriter, and other cheap conveniences.

One only has to remember how much of an artist he was to the core, and in particular how much he had an innate sense of everything that ‘looked good’, to imagine the secret contempt he must have felt for any uniformity from below: a pitiful caricature of unity, the principle of creative synthesis.

One only has to think of his lifestyle—his legendary frugality, in the most beautiful surroundings possible; the fact that in Vienna, for example, during the years of misery that were to mark him so deeply, he went without food to afford a place in the ‘henhouse’ and to hear and see some of Wagner’s opera—to measure the gulf that separated him from all vulgar humanity, and especially from a certain fat type of Teutonic plebeian, whose conception of happiness is schematically, but forcefully and aptly, evoked in the title of a record emanating from the satiated Germany of 1969, Sauerkraut und Bier. This type didn’t wait for 1969 to appear but was widely represented among the crowds who, between 1920 and 1945, cheered Adolf Hitler, voted for him and, especially after the seizure of power, flocked to the Party and helped to increase its membership to fourteen million.

This abyss between the Führer and the densest folk, physically and intellectually, or the most mediocre of his people didn’t prevent him from loving them. He saw, beyond their narrow-minded individuality, the beautiful children who could spring from them, blood having many mysteries. And he saw the Reich, which he was reshaping from top to bottom to make it the centre of a pan-Aryan Empire, and he knew that ‘in their place’ they were part of it.

And if, understanding their limitations and the impossibility of making them overcome them, he offered them each a comfortable material life, ‘pleasant’ in its growing uniformity—a life which he didn’t offer at all to the elite—he also offered them, in the increasingly grandiose public ceremonies, the interminable parades, the music of battle songs through the paved streets, the nightly processions by the light of real torches; the Harvest festivals; the Labour festivals; the Youth festivals; the magnificent annual Party meetings in Nuremberg for days on end with countless red flags with black swastikas on a white circle at the foot of giant pylons at the top of which the flame from the massive bronze cups, the morning to evening in the bright sunshine, and from evening to midnight under the unreal phosphorescence of the columns of light faltering from the floodlights all around.

He offered them, I say, in all this, as well as in his radio speeches, and above all in the magnetism of his presence: an atmosphere such as no people had yet had the privilege of experiencing. The less intuitive, the less artistic, the densest people were subjected to this magical atmosphere which lifted them despite of themselves, above themselves; which transformed them little by little, without their knowledge, by the mere fact of the almost daily intoxication which it poured upon them: the intoxication of beauty; vertigo of strength; repeated contact with the very egregore of Germany which possessed them, pulling them out of their insignificance and returning them for a moment to what was eternal in them, the bewitching rhythm of the ‘Sieg! Heil!’ from five hundred thousand chests.

They were under this spell, and as long as they remained ‘under the spell’ they were great—greater than all peoples; greater than the men, Germans or foreign visitors, who, individually more refined, more intelligent, better than each of them, remained, for some reason or other insensitive to this spell in the strongest sense of the word. For they participated in the divine power which emanated from Him who called them to battle against the sinister Forces of decadence. They were encompassed in the beauty of His dream. And it is enough to remember the imposing solemnities of the Third Reich, if one has seen any, or to read a description of them in person (for example, Robert Brasillach’s description of the Party Congress in Nuremberg in September 1935 in his novel The Seven Colours), or just to look at good photographs of them in the few surviving albums of the period, to realise how beautiful they were—beautiful and popular—and how different they were from the official celebrations, even with military parades, of other countries under other regimes.

Unlike the organised displays of collective patriotic fervour that the governments of the ‘free world’ periodically (though increasingly rarely) regale their citizens with, there were no weary faces, no dull faces, no signs of reluctant participation or boredom. And, unlike the parallel collective demonstrations of the communist world there was nothing vulgar about them. There were no monstrous, oversized daguerrotypes of the dictator, or some ‘people’s father’ ideologue, living or dead, posted on the surrounding buildings or marching with the political, military and paramilitary formations, brandished high above their ranks; none of these heterogeneous bands daubed with demagogic slogans; nothing, I repeat, absolutely nothing of the pasteboard paraphernalia of the delirious proletarian.

There is more. These extraordinary solemnities of National Socialist Germany were beautiful in the sense that works of art of cosmic significance are beautiful. Not only was there a profusion of the immemorial swastika on the folds of the red, white and black banners (themselves symbolic colours), on the immense banners, on the men’s armbands, on the granite of the stands from the top of which the Führer was communing with his people.

It was a metaphysical symbol and not a mere image recalling such and such human activities, or ideas to the measure of man; but the gestures that were performed there, the words that were repeated there, unchanging on every occasion: symbolic, liturgical. Let us think, among other things, of the consecration of the new flags that Adolf Hitler put, one by one, in contact with the old ‘Blood Standard’: all charged with the magnetism of the dead of November 9, or of the ritual dialogue of the Führer with the leaders and young recruits of the peasant formations of the Arbeitsdienst, standing in perfect order before him, armed with their shovels like soldiers with their rifles: ‘Are you ready to fertilize the holy German land?’ – ‘Yes; we are ready’.

These solemnities were themselves symbolic: gigantic sacred dramas, mysteries where the attitude, the word, the creative rhythm and the silence in which the hundreds of thousands communed with the Centre of their collective being evoked: the hidden meaning, the eternal meaning of the New Order.

Only He who returns from age to age could, amid the reign of excessive technology—and mind-numbing standardisation—delight the working masses, and make them participate in such mysteries; transfigure them, infuse them if only for a few brief years—even the densest human specimens among them!—the enthusiasm of the regenerate.

___________

[1] H. Rauschning, Hitler Told Me translated from the German by A. Lehmanu 13th edition, Paris 1939, page 61.

Categories
Berlin Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Technology Third Reich

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 45

(Editor’s Note: A model of Hitler’s plan for Berlin formulated under the direction of Albert Speer, looking north toward the Volkshalle at the top of the frame.)

The enormous industrial, technical and material development of the Reich, which was the inspiration long before the war in 1939, was due to the willingness to fulfil everything Hitler had promised as soon as he took over the government. More than seven million unemployed people had their eyes on him. They had voted for him, for his workers’ party. They had—and their sons had often helped him—to hold the streets where for thirteen years his followers and the Communists had clashed. He could not disappoint them. Besides, he loved them. Ten years later, at the height of his fame, he would still speak with the emotion of ‘the humble’ who had joined his Movement ‘when it was small’ and could be thought doomed to failure.

It was impossible to keep seven million unemployed people busy and to restore strength and prosperity to a country of eighty million people—prosperity being the primary source of strength—without intensively promoting industry and undertaking all kinds of public works. The factories that had been closed due to the unstable political and economic situation of the Weimar Republic soon began to operate at full capacity, and an unprecedented fever of construction, transformation and gigantic remodelling took place throughout the Reich.

It was then that hundreds of kilometres of four-lane autobahns were laid out, lined with forests, and admired by all travellers who had the good fortune to visit Germany at that time (or even later, as most of these grandiose roads still exist). It was then that some of the great architectural ensembles that were the glory of Hitler’s Germany were built such as, in Munich, the monument to the Sixteen who fell on 9 November 1923, or the Brown House; or in Berlin, the New Reich Chancellery or in Nuremberg, at the Zeppelin Wiese Stadium, the monumental staircase dominated by a double peristyle linking three enormous pylons with massive bronze doors, one central; two lateral, from the top of which on the great solemnities of the Party the Führer saw the S A and SS formations parade; those of the Hitler Jugend of the ‘Labour Front’ and the German Army from which he would harangue the multitudes that overflowed the stands and the immense grounds.

These works of art and masonry, which Robert Brasillach called ‘Mycenaean’ to show their overwhelming power—which others have likened to the most imposing works of Roman architecture—were, in Adolf Hitler’s mind, intended to last. And they would have lasted, defied the centuries, if Germany had won the Second World War. They had occupied thousands of workers, at the same time capturing them in their greatness as Germans. Adolf Hitler also wanted the most modern industry—that which allows a country, increasingly populated in a world of galloping demography, to indefinitely increase its production and raise its ‘standard of living’ and remaining independent of foreigners if not beating them on his own ground—helped his people to grasp their greatness.

He understood very well that technology was not everything but that it was of little importance compared to other areas, such as the quality of man. But he also realised that without it there was, in the present world, the world corresponding to the advanced stage of the Dark Age, neither power nor independence possible; nor survival worthy of the name. He was as aware of this fact as the realist leaders of traditional Japan may have been at the time of their forced choice in 1868, or as some of the men who took it upon themselves in India after 1947 to reject Gandhi’s archaic conception of autarky and to proceed with the industrialisation of the country against his will.

But he was, as a European and especially as a German, conscious of the fact that, imperfect as it may be compared with the splendid Aryan creations of the past, recent or remote, modern technology, the daughter of experimental science, is nevertheless, in itself, an achievement of the master race and a further argument in favour of its superiority.

He certainly didn’t put it on the same level as the work of the classical German musicians, in particular, nor that of Richard Wagner, his favourite composer, nor that of the builders of Gothic cathedrals or ancient temples; nor that of the Aryan sages, from Nietzsche to the Vedic bards, via Greek thought. However, he saw in it the proof that the last and grossest achievement of man in the Dark Ages, the only great achievement of which he was still capable, when neither true art, nor pure thought, but still a product of Aryan genius.

This, along with his desire to keep his people strong amid an increasingly mechanised world, led him to promote national industry and to do everything possible to raise the material standard of living of each of his compatriots. He was certainly interested in machines—every machine, from the most advanced machines of war, to the vulgar typewriters which avoid wasting time ‘deciphering doodles’. He spoke, they say, of each one with such precision of technical knowledge; the autodidact in this field as in all the others, left the specialists speechless.

He had a clear concern for the motor car. Not only could he discuss the various engine models with any experienced technician but loved this mode of transport. Speaking in a talk on February 3 to 4, 1942, about his memories of the Kampfzeit (the time of his power struggle) he said, among other things: ‘The first thing I did when I got out of Landsberg prison on December 20, 1924 was to buy my Kompressor Mercedes. Although I had never driven myself, I had always been a car enthusiast. I particularly liked this Mercedes. From the window of my cell in the fortress I followed the cars passing by on the Kaufbeuern road with my eyes and wondered if the time would ever come when I would drive again’.[1] Everyone knows the part he played in the creation and launch of the Volkswagen, the popular car with a solid mechanism that he would have liked to see in the possession of every German working-class or peasant family.

And he seems to have been, in yet other areas of everyday life, anything but an opponent of standardisation. Here, for example, is what he said in a talk of 19 October 1941, reported in his Tischgespräche translated into French under the title Libres Propos sur la Guerre et la Paix:

‘Building a house should consist of nothing more than an assembly which would not necessarily lead to a standardisation of housing. One can vary the number and arrangement of the elements, but they must be standardised. Anyone who wants to do more than is necessary will know what it costs. A Crésus is not looking for a ‘three-room apartment’ at the lowest price. What is the point of having a hundred different models of washbasins? Why are there differences in the size of windows and doors? You move to a new flat and your curtains can’t be used anymore. For my car I can find spare parts everywhere, not for my flat… These practices only exist because they are an opportunity for those who sell to make more money. In a year or two this scandal will have to stop’.

‘In the field of construction, the tools will also have to be modernised. The excavator still in use is a prehistoric monster compared to the new spiral excavator. What savings could be made here through standardisation! Our desire to provide millions of Germans with better living conditions forces us to standardise and thus to use standardised elements wherever necessity doesn’t dictate individual forms’.

‘The mass will only be able to enjoy the material pleasures of life if it is standardised. With a market of fifteen million buyers, it is quite conceivable that a cheap radio set and a popular typewriter could be built’.

A little further on, in the same talk, he says: ‘Why not give typing lessons in primary school instead of religious education, for example? I wouldn’t mind that’.

It seems difficult to go more resolutely in what I have called ‘the direction of time’: to willingly accept the side that perhaps is most repulsive: this tendency, precisely, to uniformity from below, to the serial hatching of objects all similar, of identical tastes, of interchangeable ideas, of interchangeable men and women; of living robots, for how can’t we feel that the uniformity of the intimate environment facilitates the uniformity of people? Is this the Fighter against this general decadence which characterises our ‘end of cycle’, the One who returns from age to age to take over the increasingly heroic, desperate struggle against the tide of Time, or is it a flatterer of the appetite for cheap comfort, a demagogue, who speaks in this talk?

If one can still pay tribute to the Aryan genius in the most stunning inventions of modern technology, it can no longer be a question about that here. Should we then admit the existence of a profound contradiction in the very personality of the Führer, of an opposition between the Architect of superhumanity and the politician eager to please the plebs by providing them with ‘better living conditions’?

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[1] Libres Propos, p. 75.

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Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Third Reich

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 44

But this new world, inspired by eternal principles, this environment generating demigods of flesh and blood, had to be forged from the already existing human material and the conditions, both economic and psychological, in which it found itself. These conditions evolved in the years before and after the seizure of power, especially during the war years. This must be taken into account if we want to understand both the history of the National Socialist regime and the feature that the Third German Reich had in common with all the highly industrialised societies of the modern era, namely the emphasis it placed on the application of science and material prosperity within everyone’s reach, presented as an immediate goal to millions of people.

We must never forget that ‘it was out of the despair of the German nation that National Socialism emerged’.[1] We must never lose sight of the picture Germany presented in the aftermath of the First World War: the economic collapse following the military disaster; the wanton humiliation of Europe’s most vigorous people, their sense of betrayal, the insistence of the Allied commissions on reparations under the terms of the infamous Treaty of Versailles; the growing threat, and then tragic reality, of inflation, unemployment, hunger and the Jewish usurer replying to the German mother who had come to sell her wedding ring for an already paltry sum: ‘Keep it! You’ll come back next week and give it to me for half that price!’ But…

‘The cloud is already less dark where the dawn shines
And the sea is less high and the windless rough’.[2]

He who, ‘from age to age’ takes human form and returns ‘when Justice is trampled, when evil triumphs’ and restores order for a time, was watching, incognito, lost in the crowd of the desperate. He rose; he spoke as Siegfried once spoke to the Valkyrie; as Frederick Barbarossa, emerging from his mysterious cave, must one day speak to his people. And prostrate Germany felt the divine breath pass over her. And she heard the irresistible Voice: the same; the eternal.

And the Voice said: ‘It is not the lost wars that ruin peoples. Nothing can ruin them, except the loss of that power of resistance which lies in the purity of blood’.[3]

She said: ‘Deutschland erwache!’, ‘Germany wake up!’ And the haggard faces, and the weary faces—the faces of men who had done their duty and yet lost everything; of those who were hungry for bread and hungry for justice—arose; the dull eyes met the glowing gaze of the living Unknown Soldier, a simple corporal in the German army who had like them ‘made war’.

And they saw in him the immortal gaze of the red-bearded Frederick, whose return Germany awaits; of the One who has returned a hundred times over the centuries, in various places under various names, and whose return the whole world awaits. From the depths of the dust Germany has cried out its allegiance to him. Galvanised, transfigured, she rose and followed him. She gave herself to him in the fervour of her reconquered youth—to him in whom her atavistic intuition had recognised the Depositary of the Total Truth. She gave herself to him like the Valkyrie to Siegfried, conqueror of the Dragon, master of Fire.

‘Nowhere in the world is there such a fanatical love of millions of men for one’ [4] wrote Dr Otto Dietrich in a book about the Führer at the time. It was this love, the unconditional love of the little people—of the unemployed factory workers and craftsmen, the ruined shopkeepers, the dispossessed peasants, the unemployed clerks, all the good people of Germany and of a minority of inspired idealists—who brought to supreme power the God of all time back in the form of the eloquent veteran of the previous war. They recognised him by the magic of his words, by the radiance of his face, by the power of his every gesture. But it was his fidelity to the promises he made during the struggle for power that bound them to him unwaveringly, even in the hellstorm of the Second World War and—more often than the superficial observer thinks—beyond the absolute disaster of 1945.

What had he promised them? Above all Arbeit und Brot, work and bread, Freiheit und Brot, freedom and bread; the abolition of the Versailles Diktat, that treaty imposed on Germany with a knife at her throat and claiming to seal forever her position as a defeated and dismembered nation: a place in the sun for the German people; the right, for them, to live in honour, order and prosperity thanks to the virtues with which Nature has endowed them; the right, finally, to recover in their bosom their blood brothers, torn from the common fatherland against their will. (In 1918 the Austrian Parliament had, as is too often forgotten, voted unanimously to join Germany.)

Politicians, especially those who come to power ‘by the legal and democratic means’ as Adolf Hitler did, rarely keep the promises they have made from the electoral podium, or on their propaganda posters and pamphlets. Sincere patriots do not necessarily keep their promises. They are sometimes overtaken by events. They make mistakes, even when they have not lied. Only the Gods do not lie or make mistakes. They alone are faithful, always. Adolf Hitler kept in full all the promises he had made to the German people before taking power. More than that: he went beyond what he had promised.

And if the very fate of the Age in which we live had not stood in the way of his momentum; if it had not been too late for a final turnaround against the tide of Time to be possible, and too early to hope, so quickly (and so cheaply) for the end of this temporal cycle and the dawn of the next one, he would have given much more, both to his people and to the whole world.

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[1] Free Remarks on War and Peace, p. 252.

[2] Leconte de Lisle, Les Erinnyes Part 2, iii.

[3] Mein Kampf, 1935 edition, p. 324.

[4] ‘Nirgends auf der Welt gibt es eine derart fanatische Liebe, von millionen Menschen zu einem….’