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

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

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 43

In short, it is the ‘species’ (in other passages it is the ‘race’), that is to say, the most permanent, impersonal and essential aspect of the ‘people’ itself, that counts for the leader of the Third German Reich.

The people—his beloved German people—were to expand to the East, to colonise with the plough the immense spaces conquered by the war, build there a culture he wanted to be unprecedented; and this, not because they were ‘his’ people, but because they represented, in his mind, the nursery par excellence of a collective superhumanity; because, considered objectively, they were distinguished by qualities of health, of physical beauty, of a character of conscience, of hard work, of honesty, courage and loyalty; of intelligence both practical and speculative and of aesthetic sense: qualities which made them the ideal type of ‘the species’: the historical human closest to the ‘Idea of Man’ in the Platonic sense of the word.
 

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Editor’s Note: But apparently, according to this recent comment, those Germans are already gone. See my forthcoming entry on this subject right after I post the present one. Savitri continues:
 

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Because the Führer felt that he could, and indeed in our time was the only one who could have done it, he laid the foundations of a ‘Great Reich’ which would have been much more than a political entity. In the centuries that would have followed a National Socialist German victory, it was to gradually found a new, healthy and beautiful civilisation faithful to the fundamental laws of life (in contrast to modern society which denies them, or at least tries to thwart them): a peculiar civilisation within the Dark Ages into which we are plunged but centred, unlike that of Europe today, on the ceaseless struggle against the Forces of disintegration; against all softening and all uglification, against ‘the direction of history’ which is only decadence.

And it was to be up to this grandiose task that he had to practise the politics of the overflowing life; encourage the birth rate, certainly, but also not oppose natural selection; eliminate without hesitation the crazy, the weak, the mongrels and to ensure the survival of the best.

The elite of the best, the natural aristocracy, necessarily constituting a minority (and this, more and more as the Dark Ages progressed), was necessary to exalt the large family, to honour spectacularly the most fertile mothers, to do everything for the healthy, good-bred child, so that this minority would still be large enough to provide the framework for an indefinitely conquering organisation, as well as the creative core: the giants of art and thought of a superior culture.

The Führer repeatedly emphasised his plan to incorporate the Nordic elites—Scandinavian, Dutch, Danish, etc. into the Great Reich which he wanted to build, and sought the collaboration of Aryans (not necessarily ‘Nordics’) throughout the world. This alone would show how his racist philosophy and war aims transcended Germany, while retaining their roots there. And he would, if he had had the power to do so—that is, if he had won the war—have extended to all the Aryan elite of the earth his policy of encouraging fertility.

Two facts prove abundantly that for him these were quite different from projects ‘in the direction of Time’. The number of births was planned only because, without it, quality—already scarce, today, even among the superior races—risked becoming even scarcer: children destined to become men of exceptional value are not necessarily among the two or three first-born of their family.[1] We know what the race loses when an adult, or even a promising youth, dies. We don’t ‘know what we may be depriving the race of every time we prevent a child from being conceived, or remove it before it is born’.

On the other hand, the natural equilibrium between man and his environment was to be ensured not by any limitation of births (or pregnancies), but by the abolition of any intervention tending to encourage the survival of the weak or the ill-constituted by the quasi-permanent state of war on the ever-expanding frontiers of the Great Aryan Reich, and by the attraction which any activity that was both useful or simply beautiful and dangerous would have exercised on the young.

The Aryan world, dominated to some extent by regenerated Germany, was to be a world of the Strong; a world where, at least, their scale of values was to express the collective ethics. There, one had to cultivate a love of life and hard and beautiful action, contempt for human suffering and death; banish from it the preoccupation with ‘happiness’, the search for consoling illusions, the fear of the unknown and all kinds of weaknesses, pettinesses, futilities inseparable from decadent civilizations. It was to be a milieu capable of engendering and promoting a more-than-human aristocracy: the complete antithesis of the stultifying reign of anthropocentric materialism, either of the Communists or the ‘consumer societies’.

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[1] Libres propos sur la guerre et la paix, translation by R. d’Harcourt, p. 74.

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Miscegenation Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 42

Most people who think they know Hitlerism, and many who witnessed or even participated in its struggle for power, will find this interpretation of the movement which, by transfiguring Germany, came so close to renovating the Earth and by so little! It was, they will say, the very opposite of a movement intended to put an end to the present ‘reign of quantity’, with all the mechanisation of work and of life itself that it implies. It was a doctrine visibly addressed to the working masses—‘pure-blooded’ masses—or supposed to be so, with healthy instincts, no doubt biologically superior to the Jewish elements of the ‘intelligentsia’, but ‘masses’ anyway.

Didn’t the organisation which represented the instrument of dissemination bear the eloquent name of ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’?[1] And didn’t the Führer, himself a product of the people, repeat over and over again in his speeches that only what comes from the people, or at least has its roots in them, is healthy, strong and great? Incidentally, the word völkisch has such a resonance in National Socialist terminology that it became highly suspect after the disaster of 1945. It is avoided in re-educated post-war Germany, almost as much as the words Rasse (race) and Erbgut (heredity).

But there is more: the Führer seems to have aimed, as few men responsible for the destinies of a great people have done in the modern world, at three goals most in keeping with the spirit of our age: ever-greater technical perfection, ever-greater material well-being and indefinite demographic growth—more and more births in all healthy German families, even outside the family framework, provided the parents were healthy and of good breeding.

It is certain that most of the statements which illustrate the first and last of these aims are justified by the state of war that threatened Germany at the time they were made. Here is one, for example, from 9 February 1942: ‘If I now had a bomber capable of flying at more than seven hundred and fifty kilometres an hour, I would have supremacy everywhere… This aircraft would be faster than the fastest fighters. Therefore, in our manufacturing plans we should first tackle the bombers problem’… ‘Ten thousand bombs dropped randomly on a city are not as effective as a single bomb dropped with certainty on a power station, or on the pumping stations on which the water supply depends’.[2]

And further: ‘In the war of technology, it is the one who arrives at the right time with the right weapon who wins the decision. If we succeed in bringing our new panzer on line this year, at the rate of twelve per division, we will overwhelmingly outclass all the armoured vehicles of our adversaries… What is important is to have technical superiority at least on a decisive point. I admit it: I am a technical fanatic. You have to come up with something new that surprises your opponent so that you always keep the initiative’.

One could multiply such quotations ad infinitum taken from the Führer’s talks with his ministers or generals. They would only prove that he had a sense of reality, the absence of which would be surprising, to say the least, in a warlord.

The same applies to Adolf Hitler’s ideas about the need for a large number of healthy children. His point of view is that of a legislator, and therefore of a realist; and not only of someone who knows how to draw the right conclusions from the observations he himself has made—someone who, among other things, knows the consequences that a pernicious policy of anti-natalism has had for France but of one who understands the lessons of history and wants to make his people benefit from them.

The Ancient World, he stressed, owed its downfall to the restriction of births among the patricians and to the passage of power into the hands of the most diverse races of plebs ‘on the day when Christianity erased the border which, until then, separated the two classes’.[3] And he concluded, a little further on: ‘It is the baby bottle that will save us’. His viewpoint is also that of a conqueror conscious of the perenniality of natural law, that wants ‘the worthiest’ to be ultimately, in the eyes of Destiny, the strongest, conscious and therefore of the necessity for a missioned people—a people of the future to be the strongest.

Adolf Hitler dreamed of Germanic expansion in the East. He said so, and repeated it. It appears, however, that there was a difference between this dream and that of those conquerors of the East or West who had only the lucrative adventure in mind.
 

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Editor’s Note: This is precisely why I don’t identify at all with the Castilians who conquered Mexico. These idiots were only chasing gold, and the first thing they did when they stepped on the shores of the new continent was to fornicate with Indian women. It also explains why I have zero male friends in this country. Spanish-speaking liberals are bananas, and no one among the Criollo conservatives wants to see the damage that blood mixing caused in the Americas.

Savitri goes on to quote the Fuhrer:
 

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I would consider it a crime’, he said in the same talk on the night of 28-29 January 1942, ‘to have sacrificed the lives of German soldiers simply for the conquest of material wealth to be exploited in the capitalist style. According to the laws of Nature, the land belongs to whoever conquers it. Having children who want to live; the fact that our people are bursting at the seams within their narrow borders, justifies all our claims on the Eastern spaces. The overflow of our birth rate will be our chance. Overpopulation forces a people to get out of the woods. We are not in danger of remaining frozen at our present level. Necessity will force us to always be at the forefront of progress. All life is paid for in blood’.[4]

Elsewhere, in a talk on the night of 1 to 2 December 1941, he said: ‘If I can admit a divine commandment it is this: ‘The species must be preserved. [Editor’s note: Gens alba conservanda est!] Individual life must not be valued at too high a price’.[5]

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[1] Nationalsozialistische Deutscher Arbeiter Partei (hence NSDAP).

[2] Libres propos sur la guerre et la paix, translation by Robert d’Harcourt, p. 297-98.

[3] Ibid, p. 254.

[4] Ibid, pp. 254-255.

[5] Ibid, p. 139.

Categories
Egalitarianism French Revolution Philosophy of history Red terror Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Technology

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 41

It is the bloodshed that accompanied the seizure of power by these ideological movements that gives the illusion. We readily imagine that killing is synonymous with revolution and that the more a change is historically linked to massacres, the more profound it is in itself. We also imagine that it is all the more radical the more visibly it affects the political order. But this is not the case. One of the most real and lasting changes in known history, the transition of multitudes of Hindus of all castes from Brahmanism to Buddhism between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, took place not only without bloodshed, without revolution in the popular sense of the word, but without the least political upheaval. Nevertheless, Buddhism, even though it was later practically eliminated from India, has left its mark on the country forever.[1]

Marxism-Leninism is, despite the persecutions, the battles, the mass executions, the tortures, the slow deaths in the concentration camps and the political overthrows which have everywhere accompanied its victory, far too much ‘in line’ with the evolution of the West—and of the world, increasingly dominated by Western technology, to deserve the name of ‘revolutionary doctrine’.

Fundamentally, it represents the logical continuation, the inevitable continuation, of the system of ideas and values which underlies and sustains the world which arose both from the French Revolution and the increasing industrialisation of the 19th century; the seeds of this system were already found in the quasi-religious respect of the Jacobins for ‘science’ and its application to the ‘happiness’ of the greatest number of men, all ‘equal in rights’ and before that, the notion of ‘universal conscience’ linked to ‘reason’: the same for all, as it appears in Kant, Rousseau and Descartes.

It represents the logical continuation of that attitude which holds as legitimate any revolt against a traditional authority in the name of ‘reason’, ‘conscience’ and above all of the so-called ‘facts’ brought to light by ‘scientific’ research. It completes the series of all these stages of human thought, each of which constitutes a negation of the hierarchical diversity of beings, including men: an abandonment of the primitive humility of the sage, before the eternal wisdom; a break with the spirit of all traditions of more than human origin. It represents, at the stage we have reached, the natural culmination of a whole evolution which merges with the very unfolding of our cycle: unfolding which accelerates, as it approaches its end, according to the immutable law of all cycles.

It has certainly not ‘revolutionised’ anything. It has only fulfilled the possibilities of expressing the permanent tendency of the cycle, as the increasingly rapid expansion of technology coincides with the pervasive increase in the population of the globe. In short, it is ‘in line’ with the cycle, especially the latter part of it.

Christianity was, of course, at least as dramatic a change for the Ancient World as victorious Communism is for today’s world. But it had an esoteric side that linked it, despite everything, to Tradition from which it derived its justification as a religion. It was its exoteric aspect that made it, in the hands of the powerful who encouraged or imposed it, first of all in the hands of Constantine, the instrument of domination assured by a more or less rapid lowering of the racial elites; by a political unification from below.[2]

It is this same exoteric aspect, in particular the enormous importance it gave to all ‘human souls’, that compels Adolf Hitler to see in Christianity the ‘prefiguration of Bolshevism’: the ‘mobilisation, by the Jew, of the mass of slaves to undermine society’, the egalitarian and anthropocentric doctrine, anti-racist to the highest degree, capable of winning over the countless uprooted of Rome and the Romanised Near East. It is this doctrine that Hitler attacks in all his criticisms of the Christian religion, in particular in the comparison he constantly makes between the Jew Saul of Tarsus, the St. Paul of the Churches, and the Jew Mardoccai, alias Karl Marx.

But it could be said that Christian anthropocentrism, separated of course from its theological basis, already existed in the thought of the Hellenistic and then the Roman world; that it even represented, more and more, the common denominator of the ‘intellectuals’ as well as the plebs of these worlds. I even wonder if we do not see it taking shape from further back, because in the 6th century BC Thales of Miletus thanked, it is said, the Gods for having created him ‘to be human, and not animal; male, not female; Hellene, not Barbarian’ meaning a foreigner.

It is more than likely that, already in Alexandrian times, a sage would have rejected the last two, especially the last one!, of these three reasons to give thanks to Heaven. But he would have retained the first. And it is doubtful that he would have justified it with as much simple common sense as Thales.
 

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Editor’s Note: Here I agree with Thales. But keep in mind that if Thales had not been an Aryan, I’d agree with Savitri. The point is that only the most beautiful specimens of the Aryan race are the image and likeness of divinity. The rest are, using the language of the priest of the 14 words, exterminable Neanderthals.
 

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Now any exaltation of ‘man’ considered in himself, and not as a level to be surpassed, automatically leads to the over-estimation of both the masses and individuals with interesting hands; to a morbid concern for their ‘happiness’ at any cost; therefore, to an utilitarian attitude above all in the face of knowledge as well as of creative action.

In other words, if, on the one hand, in the Hellenistic world—then in the Roman world—esoteric doctrines more or less related to Tradition—that is, doctrines ‘above Time’—have flourished within certain schools of ancient wisdom—among the Neo-Platonists, the Neo-Pythagoreans and certain Christians—it is, on the other hand, quite certain that all that conquering Christianity (exoteric, and to what degree!) was, as was the widespread interest in the applications of experimental science, in the direction of the Cycle.

The fact that the Churches have, later on in the centuries opposed the statement of several scientific truths, ‘contrary to dogma’ or supposedly so, doesn’t change anything. This is, in fact, a pure rivalry between powers aiming at the ‘happiness of man’—in the other world or this one—and embarrassing each other as two suppliers of similar commodities.

If the Churches today are giving more and more ground, if they are all (including the Roman Church) more tolerant of those of their members who like Teilhard de Chardin give ‘science’ the largest share, it is because they know that people are more and more interested in the visible world and the benefits that flow from its knowledge, and less and less to what cannot be seen or ‘proved’—and they do what they can to keep their flock. They ‘go with the flow’ while pointing out as often as possible that the anthropocentric ‘values’ of the atheists are, in fact, their own; that they even owe them, without realising it.

No doctrine, no faith linked to these values is ‘revolutionary’ whatever the arguments on which it is based, whether drawn from a ‘revealed’ morality or from an economic ‘science’.

The real revolutionaries are those who militate not against the institutions of one day, in the name of the ‘sense of history’, but against the sense of history in the name of timeless Truth; against this race to decadence characteristic of every cycle approaching its end, in the name of their nostalgia for the beauty of all great beginnings, of all the beginnings of cycles.

These are precisely those who take the opposite view of the so-called ‘values’ in which the inevitable decadence inherent in every manifestation in Time has gradually asserted itself and continues to assert itself. They are, in our time, the followers of the one I have called ‘the Man against Time’, Adolf Hitler. They are, in the past, all those who, like him, have fought against the tide, the growing thrust of the Forces of the Abyss, and prepared his work from far and near—his work and that of the divine Destroyer, immensely harder, more implacable, further from man than he, whom the faithful of all forms of Tradition await under various names ‘at the end of the centuries’.
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[1] The same could be said of Jainism, which still has one or two million followers there.

[2] Racial purity no longer played any role under Constantine. And even in the Germanic but Christian empire of Charlemagne much later, a Christian Gallo-Roman had more consideration than a Saxon or other pagan German.

Categories
Neanderthalism Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 40

 

Chapter VII

Technical development
and ‘fight against time’

‘What a sun, warming the already old world
shall ripen the glorious labours again
who shone in the hands of virile nations?’

Leconte de Lisle (L’Anathème’, Poèmes Barbares)

It should be noted that the Churches, which theoretically should be the custodians of all that Christianity may contain in terms of eternal truth, [1] have only opposed scholars when the latter’s discoveries tended to cast doubt on, or openly contradicted, the letter of the Bible. (Everyone knows Galileo’s disputes with the Holy Office about the movement of the Earth.)

But there was never, to my knowledge, any question of their protesting against what seems to me to be the stumbling block to any unselfish research of the laws of matter or life; namely, against the invention of techniques designed to thwart natural purpose—what I shall call techniques of decadence. Nor did they denounce and condemn categorically, because of their inherently odious character, certain methods of scientific investigation such as all forms of vivisection.

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Editor’s Note: They don’t mind tormenting animals because they are Neanderthals; that is to say, they belong to an inferior psychoclass to ours: just as the pre-Columbian Amerinds belonged to an inferior psychoclass to that of the Spaniards. Is this passage from my Day of Wrath remembered (in the chapter ‘Sahagún’s exclamation’)?:

I don’t believe that there is a heart so hard that when listening to such inhuman cruelty, and more than bestial and devilish such as the one described above, doesn’t get touched and moved by the tears and horror and is appalled; and certainly it is lamentable and horrible to see that our human nature has come to such baseness and opprobrium that [Aztec] parents kill and eat their children, without thinking they were doing anything wrong.

Like Sahagún, the priestess and the priest of the four words (‘eliminate all unnecessary suffering’) throw our hands up in horror when the man of today torments defenceless creatures, to the point of precognizing the appearance of a Kalki who avenges them (and us). Savitri continues:
 

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They could not, given the anthropocentrism inherent in their very doctrine. I recalled above that the vision that the esoteric teaching of Christianity opened to its Western initiates in the Middle Ages did not go beyond ‘Being’. But no exoteric form of Christianity has ever gone beyond ‘man’. Each of them affirms and emphasises the ‘apartness’ of that being, privileged whatever his individual worth (or lack of it) whatever his race or state of health. Each one proclaims concern for his own best interest, and the help it offers him in the search for his ‘happiness’ in the hereafter, certainly, but already in this lower world. Each of them is concerned only for him, ‘man’, always man, contrary even to the ‘exoterisms’ of Indo-European origin (Hinduism; Buddhism) which insist on the duties of their followers ‘towards all beings’.

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Editor’s Note: Remember my post from exactly a month ago: This very Catholic painter asked me at a family dinner: “¿Por qué los animales todavía existen?” (‘Why do animals still exist?’).
 

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It is, I think, precisely to this intrinsic anthropocentrism that Christianity owes the short duration of its positive role in the West insofar as, despite all the horror attached to the history of its expansion, a certain positive role can be attributed to it. Once weakened and death, the influence of its true spiritual elite—that which, until perhaps the 14th or 15th century, was still attached to Tradition—nothing was easier for the European than to move from Christian anthropocentrism to that of the rationalists, theists or atheists; to replace the concern for the individual salvation of human ‘souls’, all considered infinitely precious, by that of the ‘happiness of all men’ at the expense of other beings and the beauty of the earth, due to the proliferation of the techniques of hygiene, comfort and enjoyment within the reach of the masses.

Nothing was easier for him than to continue to profess his anthropocentrism by merely giving it a different justification, namely, by moving from the notion of ‘man’, a privileged creature because he was ‘created in the image of God’—and, what is more, of an eminently personal ‘god’—to that of ‘man’: the measure of all things and the centre of the world because he’s ‘rational’, that is to say, capable of conceiving general ideas and using them in reasoning; capable of discursive intelligence hence of ‘science’ in the current sense of the word.

The concept of ‘man’ indeed underwent some deterioration in the process. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has shown, the human individual, deprived of the character of ‘creature in the image of God’ that Christianity conferred on him, finally becomes a number within a pure quantity and a number that has less and less importance in itself. Understandably, everyone is sacrificed ‘to the majority’. But we no longer understand why ‘the majority’, or even a collectivity of ‘a few’, would sacrifice themselves or even bother for another one.

Saint-Exupéry sees the survival of a Christian mentality in the fact that in Europe, even today, hundreds of miners will risk their lives to try to pull one of them out of the hole where he lies trapped under the debris of an explosion. He predicts that we are gradually moving towards a world where this attitude, which still seems so natural to all of us, will no longer be conceivable.

Perhaps it is no longer conceivable in communist China. And it should be noted that, even in the West where it is still conceivable, the majorities are less and less inclined to impose simple inconveniences on themselves to spare one or two individuals, not of course of death but discomfort and even real physical suffering. The man who is most irritated by certain music, and who isn’t sufficiently spiritually developed to isolate himself from it by his asceticism, is forced to endure, in the buses, and sometimes even in the trains or planes, the common radio or the transistor of another traveller if the majority of passengers tolerate it or even more so enjoy it. They are not asked for their opinion.

One can, if one wishes, with Saint-Exupéry, prefer Christian anthropocentrism to that of the atheistic rationalists, fervent of experimental sciences, technical progress and the civilisation of well-being.

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Editor’s Note: This is true, and the best way to show it is to compare the most famous television series introducing the West: Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969), Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973) and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980). Obviously, the series by Christian Clark has its problems, but at least he transmits the spirit of the Aryan through art. Bronowski and Sagan on the other hand present civilisation from the point of view of science and technology: something that betrays the essence of the Aryan and his notion of the numinous.
 

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It is a matter of taste. But I find it impossible not to be struck by the internal logic that leads, without a solution of continuity, from the first to the second and from the latter to Marxist anthropocentrism for which man—himself a pure ‘product of his economic environment’—taken en masse is everything; taken individually, worth only what his function in the increasingly complicated machinery of production, distribution and use of material goods for the benefit of the greatest number. It seems to me impossible not to be struck by the character quite other than revolutionary and of Jacobinism at the end of the 18th century; and Marxism (and Leninism), both in the 19th and in the 20th.

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[1] Offered to the faithful through the symbolism of sacred stories and liturgy.

Categories
Neanderthalism Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Technology

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 39

But this slowly decadent Hellenic world, which, after having been subjected to Christianity was only to be reborn to detach itself more and more from ‘Europe’ without being able or willing, even today, to integrate with it, is characterised by the boom in experimental sciences and their applications.

The thirst to study the phenomena of Nature and to discover its laws (that satisfy reason and is becoming more widespread as the traditional science of the priests of Greece and Egypt, fruit from a direct intellectual intuition of the very principle of these laws) becomes rarer there. And above all, there was a growing determination, as there was later during the Renaissance and even more so in the 19th and 20th centuries, to use these physical laws to construct devices of practical use—such as the endless screw, the inclined screw and forty other machines whose invention is attributed to Archimedes such as the ‘burning mirrors’, enormous magnifying glasses using which this same man of genius set fire to the Roman ships that blocked Syracuse, or the ‘compression fountains’, or robots, of Heron.

Anatomy, physiology and the medical art which is based on both are, and this too is to be noted, in the spotlight. If it is true that in the 17th century Aselli and Harvey were already foreshadowing Claude Bernard, it is no less true that at the end of the 4th century B.C., two thousand years earlier, Erasistratos and Herophilus were foreshadowing not only Aselli and Harvey but also the famous physiologists, physicians and surgeons of the 19th and 20th century.

Of course, there is a long way to go from Herophilus’ automata to modern computers, just as there is a long way to go from Herophilus’ dissections and, four hundred years later, Galen’s dissections, however horrific they may have been, to the atrocities of organ or head transplanters, or even to those of cancer specialists, carried out today in the name of scientific curiosity and ‘in the interest of mankind’.

There is a long way to go in terms of results, from the embryonic technique of the Hellenistic world, and later the Roman world, to that which we see developing in all areas around us, and even to that of the 16th century. But it is no less true that in these two periods when a form of traditional religion relaxed before being definitively cut off from its esoteric base, there was a resurgence of interest in the experimental sciences and their applications, a reawakening of man’s desire to dominate the forces of Nature and living beings of other species than his own, with a view to the profit or convenience of as many people as possible.

This is not yet the excessive mechanisation and mass production that the 19th century would inaugurate in Europe and that the 20th intensified with all the consequences that we know. But it was already the spirit of the scientists whose work had, in one way or another, prepared this evolution: the spirit of experimental research to apply the information gained to the material comfort of man, to the simplification of his work and the prolongation of his physical life, that is to say, to the fight against natural selection.

The machine enables the individual or the group to succeed without innate strength or special ability, and the drug or the surgical operation prevents even the most useless and uninteresting patient from leaving the planet and giving up his place to the healthy man, more valuable than he.

It is difficult not to be impressed by the ever-increasing importance, both in the last centuries of the ancient world, in the early modern period, and in our own time, of experimentation on living beings to gain more complete information about the structure and functions of bodies and apply it to the art of healing—or trying to heal at any cost. These are times when, as today, the physician, the surgeon and the biologist are honoured as great men and when vivisection—older, of course, since as early as the sixth century B.C. Alcmaeon is said to have dissected animals, but increasingly encouraged thanks to unrestricted anthropocentrism—is regarded as a legitimate method of scientific research.

There are, therefore, precedents. And we would no doubt find others, corresponding to other collective declines, if the history of the world were better and more uniformly known. But it seems that the further back in time we go, the less certain traits that bring the most sophisticated ancient civilisations closer to today’s mechanised world are evident. I am thinking, for example, of those very old metropolises of the so-called Indus Valley civilisation, Harappa and Mohenjodaro, where archaeologists have attested to the existence of seven- or eight-storey buildings, and pointed to the enormous mass production of earthenware vessels and other objects, all of them perfectly made but all hopelessly similar. How can we not be struck by this uniformity in quantity and imagine, in the workshops from which these mass-produced objects emerged, on the assembly line, a robotization of the worker that already, five or six thousand years later, prefigured that of the ‘human material’ of our factories?

And how can we fail to see in the successive Aryan invasions which, from the 4th millennium before the Christian era if not earlier, that came up against this ultra-organised world—mechanised, as far as it was possible at the time—and destroyed it (while assimilating, certainly, the best that its elite could offer). How can we fail to see in them the blessed instruments of a recovery?

How can we fail to see in their work the installation of the Vedic civilisation in India: a halt, at least momentarily, in the downward march of the Vedic civilisation?: a halt in the downward march that the course of our Cycle represents, especially in the Dark Age, then close to its beginning: an attempt to fight ‘against Time’ undertaken by the Aryas under the impulse of the Forces of Life as were to be undertaken, centuries later, still driven by these same Forces by invaders of the same race, the Hellenes and Latins at the decline of the Aegean and Italic cultures, technically too advanced; the Romans, at the decline of the Hellenistic world, the Germans, at the decline of the Roman world?

But the hold of mechanisation on the civilisation of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro—modest mechanisation, moreover, since it was still only a matter of mass production of crafts—was to be less fatal than that which the Mediterranean and then the Western world underwent, respectively in the time of Archimedes, then Heron and the ergastulas of Carthage, Alexandria, then Rome, and in the 18th century and especially the 19th and nowadays. The world of the Indus Valley still had, even in its decline, something else to give to its successors than recipes for production. It is said that they learned at least some forms of Yoga. In the same way, the Hellenistic and later the Greco-Roman world even in its most advanced decadence retained, if only in the Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo-Platonists, something of the essence of ancient esotericism. This was, along with what was eternal in the teaching of Aristotle, assimilated into esoteric Christianity, survived in Byzantium and gave rise there, as well as in the West throughout the Middle Ages, to the flowering of beauty that we know: beauty is the visible radiation of Truth.

But of the treasures of the Middle Ages—of all that it had preserved of the eternal Indo-European Tradition, despite its rejection of the forms that this had taken in Germania and in the whole of the north of the continent, as in Gaul before the appearance of Christianity—the narrowly ‘scientific’ spirit of the Renaissance, and above all of the centuries that followed, wanted, or was able, to retain nothing. If we are to believe René Guénon and a few other well-informed authors, these treasures would have been put beyond the reach of the West as early as the 14th century, or at the very least the 15th, as soon as the last direct heirs of the secret teachings of the Order of the Temple disappeared.
 
The interest of so many 19th-century writers in the Middle Ages remains, like the 16th-century infatuation with classical antiquity and Greco-Roman mythology, attached to the most picturesque and superficial aspects of that past. The proof is that, for them, it goes hand in hand with the most naive belief in ‘progress’ and the excellence of generalised literacy as the surest way to hasten it (we may recall the pages of Victor Hugo on this subject). The link with immemorial Indo-European wisdom, and even with the little that Christianity has managed to assimilate from it after having destroyed—by snatch or by violence, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea and the Baltic—all the exoteric expressions, is indeed cut.

And it is in the place of this ancient wisdom that the West is seeing a true religion of the laboratory and the factory take shape and spread and flourish: a stubborn faith in the indefinite progress of man’s power, and I repeat, of any ‘man’, ensured by the ‘enslavement’ of the forces of Nature, that is to say, their use in parallel with the indefinitely increased knowledge of its secrets. It is in its place that he sees it imposing itself, and no longer alongside it, as in India or Japan and wherever peoples of ‘traditional’ civilisation have, reluctantly, and while clinging to their souls, accepted modern techniques.

This leads to the ‘conquest of the atom’ and the ‘conquest of space’ (so far, of the tiny space between our Earth and the Moon; less than half a million of our poor kilometres). But we are not discouraged. Soon, say our scientists, it will be the entire solar system that will fall within the ‘domain of man’. The solar system and then, for why stop?, ever-larger portions of the physical Beyond ‘without bottom or edge’. This also leads—at the cost of what horrors of experimentation on a world scale!—to the Luciferian dream of the indefinite prolongation of corporeal life with, already, the terrible practical consequence of the efforts made so far to reach it: the unrestrained pullulation of man, and more particularly of the lower man at the expense of the noblest flora and fauna of the earth and of the human racial elite itself.

Categories
Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 38

Unlike the Indies and Japan, Europe has unfortunately not been able to preserve a visible form of Tradition that is uninterrupted and whose origin is lost in the mists of time. In other words, even from the dawn of its history, not to mention its pre-history, it has nowhere continued to worship the same gods.

On the other hand, it is her sons, and even only those of a very limited West, who, after having cultivated the experimental sciences, invented one after the other all the modern industrial techniques, as well as the medical art and the ‘preventive’ hygienic measures of today and yesterday, which have so lamentably contributed to the overpopulation of the continent, and soon of the planet, and to the sacrifice of the quality of men to their number. And increasingly, in this West in the narrow sense of the word, people’s attachment to the pomp, customs and teachings of exoteric Christianity has relaxed in favour of an ever greater infatuation with ‘Science’ and especially for the applications of science as a source of wealth, easy enjoyment and power, both individual and collective.

This is especially true of the 19th century, if we look at the material achievements, the staggering progress of the sciences of the measurable world and the industries that depend on them, and the naive confidence, increasingly widespread in all domains (including the ‘moral’ domain) parallel to the progress of the sciences and the generalisation of their applications. But don’t be fooled!

The cult of positive science based on the experimental study of phenomena, and the dream of enslaving Nature to man through the application of scientific discoveries in the search of human well-being, have much more distant origins. To understand them, we must go back to the 17th century, Cartesian rationalism and the anthropocentrism that is inseparable from it. We must go back even further, to that fever of universal curiosity combined with the Promethean will of ‘man’ to dominate, the characteristic features of the Renaissance.

The physiologist Aselli, who studied the process of digestion in the open entrails of living dogs, is the counterpart of Claude Bernard, two centuries later. And Descartes himself, with his frenzied anthropocentrism—his famous theory of ‘machine animals’—as well as his eagerness to examine everything, to dissect everything, to want to know everything by the sole means of ‘reason’, and Francis Bacon, for whom science is above all the means that ensures the ‘triumph of man’ over Nature and so many others who, between the 1500s and 1750s, thought and felt the same, are also the fathers, or elder brothers, of all the more recent enthusiasts for science, technology, and the salvation of man by both—the Victor Hugos and the Auguste Comtes, no less than the Louis Pasteurs, the Jenners, the Kochs, and, closer to home, the Pavlovs, the Demikhovs[1], and the Barnards.

Certainly, the European Middle Ages had, alongside its undeniable greatness, weaknesses and barbarities which classify it without question among the epochs of the advanced Dark Ages. It had, among other things, all the shortcomings linked to his narrowly Christian faith, and therefore rigorously anthropocentric, faith: a faith whose esoteric aspect didn’t even embrace anything beyond ‘Being’ (in contrast to Hindu esotericism, for which Non-Being is also a manifestation of the fundamental ‘Non-Duality’). It deserves the sometimes virulent attacks of thinkers and artists who were most hostile to it but… provided that it is made clear that the centuries that followed it, far from being better than it from viewpoint of the essentials, were worse; worse, because they got rid (and how slowly!) of some of its superstitions and atrocities, only to replace them by superstitions of another order but just as crude, and by atrocities just as revolting, and this, without retaining anything of what had made its greatness.

It deserves the attacks of its detractors provided that they are fair, and recognise that within the Dark Ages, which covers almost everything we know about world history it represents, despite everything, a cultural and above all a spiritual ‘recovery’: a period when, with all the narrow-mindedness, all the religious intolerance inherited from the authors of the Old Testament, and all the anthropocentrism inherent in Christianity as it has come down to us, Western Europe (and Eastern Europe, for all this is also true of Byzantium) was then closer to the traditional ideal order than it was at the time of the decadence of Greco-Roman Paganism, and above all than it has been since the 16th century.

There is no doubt that Christian esotericism—which the initiates of a spiritual elite still lived, whose existence until the 14th century at least, and perhaps even afterwards, for some decades more—ensured this connection of the whole social edifice—the feudal pyramid where, in principle, everyone was in his place—with its secret archetype.

The light of a more-than-human knowledge penetrated from above, through symbols, into the life of the people, and in particular into that of the craftsmen-masons, woodcarvers, glassmakers, blacksmiths, weavers, goldsmiths. It was expressed in the world of forms and colours through the wealth of anonymous and disinterested creation that we know, from the Romanesque or Gothic or Byzantine cathedrals to the delicate illuminations of gold, azure and vermilion; creation, I repeat, anonymous and disinterested: of a beauty whose secret was to be sought in truths independent of time. The practical utility of the works of art it inspired was nevertheless less important than their ‘meaning’, revealing a world held to be more real than the visible.

It is curious, to say the least, to note that it is precisely when initiatory knowledge, and thus knowledge of the Eternal, becomes obscured in the elite that had previously held it, and when, as a result, the spiritual ‘meaning’ of every work of beauty increasingly escapes the artist and the craftsman, that the thirst for investigation of the future using systematic experimentation begins to spread. It is from this moment onwards that the demand for visible and tangible proof of all knowledge, the refusal to believe in the existence of the overman (or at least to be interested in it) and the growing preoccupation with the development of the world’s material wealth for the benefit of the greatest possible number of people converge—in other words, experimental science and the technology, both industrial and medical that derive from it, are increasingly being imposed.

And it is interesting to note that this is not a unique state of affairs, appearing only with the decline of Christianity at the dawn of the Modern Age. The same moral and cultural phenomenon, the same transfer of values manifested itself, along with the weakening of the traditional faith, during the long and slow agony of the Ancient Greek World, from the end of the fourth century BC, until the end of the next century. It was then, already in the field of letters and even more so than at the time of the Renaissance, that began the reign of quantity at the expense of quality.

There was a proliferation of polygraphs, rather like in our own time, and an almost complete absence of major works, apart from Aristotle’s (admittedly gigantic) work, which was still in its infancy when the period was just beginning. It was a time of grammarians, not poets; of scholars of the word, not creators through the word; of people who knew well and were able to analyse in detail, the work of their predecessors, not of literati whose own work, like that of the tragic authors of the classical Greek period, was to dominate the centuries to come. The geniuses of the verb and pure thought—the Virgils, the Lucretia—appear, in the famous century of Augustus, no longer in Greece or Hellenised Sicily, or Alexandria, but in Italy proper, already in the sphere of that West from which will eventually emerge, still under the influence of the peoples of the North, a young Europe, the only true one.
 

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Once we finish translating Savitri’s book from French to English we’ll resume the translation of Karlheinz Deschner’s book about the Middle Ages. We discover a very different medieval history once, instead of reading Christian authors, we read those who have actually left Christianity behind, as Savitri did.

I will devote tomorrow to producing a PDF of a German translation by our friend Albus. I refer to Ferdinand Bardamu’s essay on why Europeans must abandon Christianity, a long essay that appears in The Fair Race (see sidebar). This essay mentions the Middle Ages but Kevin MacDonald refused to publish it in his webzine when Bardamu submitted it to The Occidental Observer.
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[1] The Russian physiologist who, in the 1950s and 60s, was involved in grafting dog heads onto other living dogs.

Categories
Hinduism Liberalism Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Technology Who We Are (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 37

India is rapidly industrialising—too rapidly, in the eyes of more than one Hindu who is aware of the dangers of mechanisation—despite the influence of Gandhi and all those who, with him or in parallel with his movement, have militated and still militate for the same reasons as him or others in favour of a systematic encouragement of handicraft. They are industrialising not because the masses aspire, as in Europe, to ever greater comfort but because their leaders have decided to do so. (The masses, for their part, ask for nothing, and would do well without all the ‘progress’ imposed on them!) And the rulers have decided so because they are convinced that only ever more advanced industrialisation could help to absorb the numerous available energies offered by galloping demography from one end of the country to the other, and then make India a modern, prosperous and powerful state, and thus prevent it from falling into the hands of some invader impatient to appropriate the riches of its soil and subsoil. This may be partly true. People who hold this view cite the example of Japan—with little justification, moreover, for they forget that, if we except the Ainos, aborigines driven to the very north of their islands, the Japanese are a people, whereas the Hindus are not, and hopefully never will be. They could only become so as a result of a gigantic intermingling of races, which would result in the irreparable loss of their Aryan and Dravidian elements; their disappearance into a nameless pot, biologically inferior to both, all the more so as the hundred million or so aborigines, and the lower castes containing a high proportion of aboriginal blood would have melted into it.
 

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Editor’s Note: Savitri and I are different here. I have never visited India and am not interested in doing so. All the Aryans who originally conquered it mixed. There are no longer pure Aryans there. While the ancient Aryan religion of India is worth studying, the current population is almost worthless. It is like Latin America, where the Europeans who conquered it in the 16th century have all mixed up. When I recently spoke about Colegio Madrid and a Nazi classmate with canary-yellow hair, I was referring to the Spanish refugees from the Franco regime who came to this continent a few decades ago. But even many of these leftists have already married mudbloods in my native country.

Savitri didn’t read William Pierce’s book on the history of the white race in which Pierce advised ‘extermination or expulsion’ as the only legit way of Aryan conquest. On this point, the priest of the 14 words (like the Pierce who wrote Who We Are) was wiser than the priestess.

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But industrialisation always involves the movement and coming together of people, men and women. It is therefore much more dangerous when those whom it brings into contact with each other are, as in India, of different races than when they are of more or less homogeneous origin. So far, less than a quarter of a century after the proclamation of their independence India has—despite partial industrialisation and all the efforts made to level the playing field, despite the official abolition of the caste system by decree of an anti-traditional Government modelled on the democracies of the West—resisted this danger.

I saw this in particular in 1958 in Joda, near Barajamda, and in the whole region around Jamshedpur, which is, or at least was at that time, the largest metallurgical centre in Asia. At that time, the aerial funicular was being built in Joda to transport the iron ore from the top of a hill, where it would be extracted, to the wagons that would receive it at the foot of the hill. I was a ‘site interpreter’ for the duration of the work. I saw the workers, in the corrugated iron room which served as their kitchen, preparing their meals on as many separate stoves as there were castes or rather sub-castes among them, and eating, grouped according to the same principle—each one among his own—to the great bewilderment of the German engineers, directors of the works, to whom this desire for separation seemed all the stranger as they had been told of the ‘abolition of castes’ in democratic India. They were poor Sudras, or less so, but as attached to their ancestral customs as any other orthodox Hindus. And presumably, they were no less insistent on remaining faithful to them, when it was no longer a question of food but of the marriage of their children. One could not help thinking, as one watched them live, that despite the increased importation of Western techniques, the immemorial atmosphere of Hinduism was not about to deteriorate.

And this impression was confirmed, if not reinforced, by the active part that these workers, and all those in the workshops and factories of the region, taking in the celebrations of all time. The same men who during the day had fixed rivets to the pylons intended to support the aerial cables of the funicular, danced until late at night to the rhythm of the sacred drums, repeating the mystic names ‘Hari Krishna!’ in front of the painted earthen statue, where the spirit of the most popular of all gods was supposed to reside for the duration of the festival. And the workers who supervised and maintained the huge ultra-modern machines, most of them imported from Germany, decorated these steel monsters with garlands of red Jaba flowers on the day when all labour ceased in honour of Viswakarma, the ‘Architect of the Universe’, the divine patron of workers. They decorated them with the same love with which their fathers, a generation earlier, had adorned their implements, hammers or pickaxes, with garlands very similar to their own. And the workshops, for once silent, were filled with the smoke of incense. And, unless, of course, he was a proven enemy of Tradition, the stranger who contemplated the scene—men, collected in the thought of the Divine, penetrated by the ritual character of their daily labour, in front of these black metallic masses, from which hung scarlet flowers—envied India, where technology has not yet desecrated work.

He came to wonder why, after all, it had desecrated it. These monstrous machines, half beings half things—‘beings’ insofar as their automatism proclaims the power of European genius, and more particularly of Nordic genius—are, like the sacrosanct Tradition itself, which the Indies inherited from the Sages of Vedic times, products of Aryan intelligence. They illustrate, to be sure, an aspect of that intelligence other than that to which the liberating teaching of the Sages bears witness. But they are, in a different age of the same Time Cycle, products of the conquering intelligence of the same race. By associating them once a year with the ancient cult of Viswakarma, do these brown-skinned men know this in the depth of their collective unconscious? And do they pay homage to the Aryan genius—divine, even in its crudest manifestations of the Dark Ages—as well as to the Creator whose power it reflects? One would like to think so. In any case, such an attitude could only reinforce the spirit of the caste system: the only force that is, in the long run, capable of opposing the biological levelling that mechanisation tends to impose, sooner or later, on a multiracial society, even one as traditionally hierarchical as that of India.

Personally, however, I believe that the possibility of India (as indeed of Japan, or any other country of true culture) retaining its soul while increasingly undergoing the inevitable grip of industrialisation, is linked to the persistence in it of an elite of race and character. This elite is at the same time a spiritual aristocracy, a living guardian of Tradition, in other words, of the esotericism which underlies, from more or less a distance, the usual manifestations of religion, confused with social life. Even the purity of blood in a more or less homogeneous people as a whole—or, in a multi-racial hierarchical civilisation, the continuation of the effective separation of the races—cannot dispense with the need to preserve such an elite at all costs. Without it, the best of the races will eventually become stultified under the ever more powerful influence of technocracy. It will gradually lose its natural scale of values and attach more and more value to purchasable goods. And if it retains some visible manifestations of an ancient faith, these will eventually become so meaningless that people will gradually abandon them, without even being pushed. (For a custom to survive, a minimum of sincere belief must remain attached to it. Who would think, for example, in today’s Europe, of settling a dispute by appealing to the judgement of God through the use of fire or water? And yet, one must believe that these methods were once effective enough to justify them, otherwise, they wouldn’t have been used for so long.)

It is certainly to be deplored that this spiritual elite to which I have referred—in this case, the minority of initiated Brahmins, worthy of their caste—has no more influence on the direction of public affairs in India in our time. And it is perhaps even more unfortunate that so many of those in power in India are staunch opponents of Tradition, anti-racists, poisoned with bad anthropocentrism drawn from the British Liberals, the Christian missionaries, or the Communists—everywhere but the sacred authors who have transmitted the Aryan wisdom of old to India. These people are merely continuing the policy of promoting the most inferior racial elements, begun by the British: the policy of universal suffrage and ‘free, secular and compulsory’ education, instituted by all or almost all the European powers, first at home and then in their colonies; the policy which goes hand in hand with the excessive industrialisation and human pullulation which belated Malthusian propaganda fails to check. However well-intentioned, they are the agents of those Forces of Disintegration which, as the Dark Ages rush to a close, have more and more free rein. There is, of course, no reason why India should not be included in the general decay of the Earth.

It is undeniable, however, that one of the few civilisations that has lasted for millennia and that still lives on its soil, retains, today as in the past, the Tradition that has provided its basic principles from the beginning. Without venturing to make predictions, it seems plausible that, as long as this civilisation remains alive, thanks to the link, however tenuous, that binds it to its true elite, India will not succumb to technocracy, whatever concessions it may be forced to make to subsist in an overpopulated and mechanised world.

Categories
Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Technology

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 36

The example of Japan in the second half of the 19th century, suddenly opening itself without restraint to the trade and technology of the mechanised world, under the threat of Commodore Perry’s guns; moreover, taking up the challenge of all those peoples for whom economic success is everything, and accepting to compete with them on their ground, while striving to lose nothing of its tradition, seems to be the most resounding affirmative answer to the two questions posed above. Gandhi seems to proclaim that, if a certain (sometimes very advanced) degree of mechanisation is inevitable today for a people that refuses to become, or to remain, the prey of a conqueror, or the weakened, humiliated, ruined loser of a war, it doesn’t follow that it must automatically forsake what makes it itself; consider its past as a ‘state of infancy’ to be left behind and change its gods and its scale of values.

No doubt a factory is a factory, and an office, and a supermarket a place of all too material utility to be attractive in any climate, whatsoever the immense industrial agglomerations of Osaka, Kobe or Tokyo should disappoint the tourist in search of local colour and even more so the artist in search of beauty. Pre-1868 Japan, which had been closed to all foreign contact for almost two and a half centuries and was living in a prolonged Middle Ages, was undoubtedly more fascinating to see. But this is not an observation limited to one country.

The whole earth, including Europe, was more beautiful to contemplate in the Middle Ages and Antiquity than after the advent of big industry. What is remarkable and admirable is that, despite the ugliness inherent in all large-scale mechanisation, so much beauty has remained in the Empire of the Rising Sun, and above all that this beauty is so obviously linked to the preservation of Tradition in the particular expression that the people and their history and geographical environment have given it: a living and active Tradition, capable, as in the past, of impregnating the entire life of an elite, and even of creating an atmosphere in which the entire country, including factories, is bathed.
 

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Editor’s Note: Here and in the following passages Savitri idealises modern Japan. Just look at the island today, or China! Regarding what she wrote above, remember what Kenneth Clark said in the last program of Civilisation: ‘One sees why heroic materialism is still linked with an uneasy conscience. The first large iron foundries like the Carron Works or Coalbrookdale, date from about 1780. The only people who saw through industrialism in those early days were the poets. Blake, as everybody knows, thought that mills were the work of Satan. ‘Oh Satan, my youngest born… thy work is Eternal death with Mills and Ovens and Cauldrons’ (the above image appeared in the Civilisation TV series). Savitri continues:

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What is admirable is that in Japan there are still masters like Kenzo Awa, who taught the German Herrigel the sacred art of archery according to the rules and spirit of Zen Buddhism, and a whole legion of disciples thirsting for true knowledge: that knowledge which leads the one who acquires it to ‘be’ more. What is admirable is the survival, even in politics, of this Shintoism whose origin is lost in prehistory and to which the great Japanese thinkers of the eighteenth century, Moturi and Hirata, have definitively given that character of sacred nationalism: a Far Eastern version of our cult of Blood and Soil which Japan has kept to this day.

A few days before December 7, 1941, our Japanese allies most naturally sent an official delegation to the Temple of Isé, an embassy of the Imperial Government to the Gods of the Empire and the ancestors of the Emperor-Gods: ‘Is it agreeable to you that we declare war on the United States of America?’ And it was only after the Gods (or their priests) responded favourably that war was declared. Four years later, after the bombing of Hiroshima, it was again with the permission of the Gods that the surrender was decided, as was the opening of Japan to foreign trade and modern technology in 1868, as the supreme measure of salvation for the Empire. What is admirable about all this is the persistence in Japan of the spirit of bushido in the middle of the 20th century; it is the cult of national honour in its highest expression, and the total contempt for death, both among the famous Kamikaze (‘living-bomb’ pilots of the Second World War) and among the twenty-five thousand Japanese on the island of Saipan, in the middle of the Pacific, all of whom killed each other when the Americans arrived; it is the resistance, unshakeable in its smiling politeness, to the occupation of the Yankees and to their political-philosophical proselytism: the reinstatement, in the school curriculum, immediately after the signing of the peace treaty, of the Kojiki or history of the National Gods, banned under the Democracy Crusaders’ regime; it is the construction, at Gamagori, of a temple to Tojo and the other Japanese hanged by the Americans as ‘war criminals’: a temple where school children will bow and burn a stick of incense before the image of the martyrs and defy any ‘moral conquest’ of the People of the Sun, after visiting the (only partly reconstructed) site of Hiroshima.

It all fits together: this teaching, as alive as ever, of traditional esotericism in its national forms, and this refusal of a whole people, penetrated by the radiance of its elite without even realising it, to renounce its soul under the sway of technology and in response to the lies of the men who have imposed it on them. It may be that the Japanese worker, who works at a discount in large companies and helps to flood the world with manufactured goods—tangible products of his country’s industrial expansion, whose prices defy all competition—has a material life almost as hard as that of a Russian proletarian in a kholkose. But he knows that he is working for the glory of the Empire, to which he belongs. And this Empire is, contrary to the Marxist state, the guardian of a Tradition that goes far beyond it. It is the link between the common man and the eternal. (For the belief in the divinity of the Emperor and the Nipponese land, which itself sprang from the body of a Goddess,[1] is not dead in Japan, despite its noisy official denial, repeated over and over again to give the foreigner the conviction of a lasting ‘progress’ in the democratic sense.)

On the other hand, the dream of a world dictatorship of the proletariat—or even that of the Slavic (or ‘yellow’) world, unified under such a dictatorship with a view to ever-increasing production and the comfort of an ever-growing number of individuals—is, if it constitutes an ideal, in the final analysis only a limited ideal. It doesn’t go beyond the material plane or man. Even the simplest of people can only ever be satisfied with it by becoming robots.

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[1] lzana-mi, wife of Izana-gi. The Emperor is descended from the Sun Goddess: Amaterasu-ohomi-kami.

Categories
Against the Fall of Night (novel) Exterminationism Maxfield Parrish Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Welfare of animals

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 35

But then two questions arise: Is technical progress inevitable and indispensable? And can a people retain its soul despite the growing influence of mechanisation?

Mahatma Gandhi would have answered ‘no’ to both. As is well known, he dreamed of an India without factories, where handicraft production would have sufficed for people who, of their own free will, would have reduced their needs to a minimum, and avoided their population growth by practising rigorous continence after the birth of one or two children. Gandhi would also have welcomed the discharge of most doctors. He uncompromisingly rejected any medication resulting from experimental research at the expense of animals of any kind (he considered, as I do, all such research, from vivisection to the odious inoculation of healthy animals with disease, to be criminal). And he regarded Western medicine as a whole as a diabolical enterprise on a vast scale.

But, unlike us, the Mahatma had naive confidence in man—in the Indian no less than in the foreigner, despite all the evidence that this ‘privileged’ being has never ceased to show his weakness and malignancy. He believed him capable of living, as a group, according to a norm which presupposes either an iron will coupled with constant asceticism, or a reassuring absence of reproductive energy, that is to say, an exceptional nature. He also believed that a country could refuse to industrialise without falling prey to technically better-equipped enemies although it seems, alas, that this is also utopian. The recent example of Tibet, invaded and subjugated by Communist China and kept under the rule despite its silent resistance, proves it fairly well.
 

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Editor’s Note: How I wish visitors were by now familiar with Arthur Clarke’s first novella, written in the 1940s, Against the Fall of Night, which I have been mentioning to illustrate the contrast between two cities: bucolic Lys and the technologically advanced Diaspar.

Since I, as Savitri, see most humans as Neanderthals who must be exterminated (as our Cro-Magnon ancestors exterminated Neanderthals in prehistory), * the surviving Aryans must be controlled by a totalitarian State.

Today’s experience shows that Aryans can be even worse than Neanderthals in that they have come to suffer from self-loathing like no other race on earth. Clarke himself wrote a futuristic novel in which whites had already all mixed up, as if that were not wicked. After writing his first novella, this Englishman would betray his race by going to live in India instead of marrying an English rose and procreating.

Not because sidebar nymphs are cute should we think that their existence is guaranteed. A bucolic utopia like Lys’s, a world without Neanderthals, means constant vigilance against falling into the mistakes Aryans fell into in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The only way to do it is through what we call psychogenic emergency: to produce an Aryan not only beautiful in physique but also in soul, in constant communion with the divine Nature of which he or she is a part.

One of the ways to understand what happens is to see glimpses of the future, or rather, of a possible future if Aryans begin to comply with the laws of Nature. What I see from my cave are nymphs in bucolic landscapes like the ones Parrish painted, but apparently few have such precognitive visions.

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(*) Unlike the Nazis who first passed laws to protect animals, the mere fact that humans experiment on animals means that they must be exterminated as morally obsolete creatures.

Categories
Free speech / association Kali Yuga Neanderthalism Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Technology

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 34

Note that I say nothing about the political regime in this world of living automatons. I’m not trying to ask what it might be, because that question is irrelevant.

The deeper one sinks into uniformity from below, created and maintained by dirigisme with no other ideal than that of ever-increasing production, with a view to the well-being of the greatest number—in other words, the more it moves away from the type of hierarchical social organism that ceases to be a living pyramid as it once was in all civilisations and becomes a nameless, grey porridge brewed not by artists, still less by sages, but by clever people devoid of any awareness of extra-human values working for the immediate, in the narrowest sense of the word—the more it is like this the less the form of government matters.

There is still, theoretically at least, a difference between the condition of an assembly line worker in the Cadillac factories and that of an assembly line worker in some industrial complex in the Marxist world; between a saleswoman in a supermarket in Western Europe or the USA and that of a food distributor in a canteen anywhere behind the iron curtain. And the list of parallels could go on and on.

In principle, the worker in the ‘free world’ is not obliged to accept conditioning. When the siren sounds, or when the monster shop closes, he can do what he wants, go where he wants, use his leisure time as he pleases. Nothing forces him physically to buy drinks for his mates at the local café, or in monthly instalments the indispensable TV set or the no less ‘indispensable’ car. There are no political, or semi-political, semi-cultural meetings which he is forced to attend, on pain of finding himself, the next day, without a job or, worse still, suspected of deviationism and incarcerated—whereas in the USSR or China there are some and how! (according to the echoes we have of it; I repeat, I don’t know, first hand, the Marxist world).

Nothing would prevent a worker or an office employee or a saleswoman in the free world from using her leisure time as I would use it in his place if, for whatever reason, I had to work in a factory, an office or a supermarket to pay my bills. Nothing would prevent him provided that he finds a home secluded enough or soundproofed not to be bothered by the neighbours’ radio or television, and a manager or building owner complaisant enough to allow him to keep some domestic animal around, should that be his pleasure. Then perhaps his leisure hours would be truly blessed, and his modest flat a haven of peace.

Then perhaps he (or she) could, after spending an hour or two in silence, completely free himself entirely from the persistent noise of machines (or the light music imposed in certain workshops or shops); or the blinding glare of lights, of the atmosphere of people, have a quiet supper, alone or amid his family, walking his dog under the trees of some not too busy boulevard, and absorb himself, before the hour of sleep, in some nice read.

Then perhaps, but only then, the progress of machinery would guarantee him leisure, which he would use to cultivate himself, the more he would become ‘man’ again, in the most honest sense of the word; and the more one could, to some extent, speak of a ‘liberating technology’—although I could never be persuaded that even two hours a day spent in the depressing atmosphere of the factory or the office, or the modern department stores, are not, on balance, more exhausting than ten or twelve hours employed in some interesting work—in some art, such as that of the potter or the weaver of bygone ages.

But for this to happen, the worker, the proletarian, in the countries of the ‘free world’, who, in principle, can do what he wants after his working hours, would have to want something other than what he is conditioned to want. His ‘freedom’ resembles that of a young man, brought up since childhood in the atmosphere of a Jesuit boarding school, to whom one would say: ‘You are now of age. You are free to practice whatever religion you like’.

One student in ten million will practice something other than the strictest Catholicism; and the very one who breaks away from it will, most of the time, retain its imprint for the rest of his life.

In the same way, even in the ‘free world’ where, in theory, all ideas, all faiths, all tastes are accepted, the man of the masses and, increasingly, that of the ‘free’ intelligentsia, is, from childhood, caught up in the atmosphere of technical civilisation, and stultified by it and by all its ‘progressive’, humanitarian or pseudo-humanitarian, and pseudo-scientific publicity—the propaganda of ‘universal happiness’ by material comfort and purchasable pleasures. And he no longer wishes to break free of it.

One individual in ten million violently disengages from it, and turns his back on it, with or without ostentation, as the painter Delvaux did; as a few anonymous people do every day without even bothering to leave the banal building where they have made their room the sanctuary of a life that is anachronistic without necessarily appearing to be.

The only thing that might be said in favour of the ‘free world’, as opposed to its enemy brother, the Marxist world, is that it doesn’t take police sanctions against this exceptional individual—unless, of course, we express our hostility to today’s mores in the form of Hitlerism. And even in this respect there is a little less constraint than among the Communists in power: one can, everywhere in the ‘free world’, except, no doubt, in the unfortunate Germany, whose soul the victors of 1945 killed, have a portrait of the Führer on one’s bedside table, without fear of indiscreet inspections followed by legal sanctions.

What could be said in favour of the Marxist world, however, is that the latter has, despite everything, a faith—based on false notions and real counter-values, that is undeniable if we take a stand from the viewpoint of the eternal, which is that of Tradition, but finally, a faith—whereas the so-called ‘free’ world has none at all. The militant of values other than those exalted by official communist propaganda is likely to find himself one day in some ‘correction camp’ only if he pushes his temerity to the point of forgetting that he is in the underground, and must remain there.
 

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Editor’s Note: This interview with a Serbian intellectual who lived in the Spanish island Gran Canaria (where I lived for ten months) woke me up ten years ago to the fact that today’s West is more totalitarian than Eastern Europe in the time of Breshnev. Savitri continues:

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But the mass of the indoctrinated, who form the majority of the population there, will have the impression that they are working—and working hard—for the advent of something that seems great to them and that they love, whether it be the world revolution of the proletarians, the union of all Slavs under the aegis of holy Russia (this ideal is, it seems, that of more than one Russian Communist), or the domination of the yellow race through universal Communism. Industrial or agricultural production—that in the name of which so much eminently dull work has to be done—leads, in the final analysis, to such grandiose goals. It’s more exciting than the safe and neat little life culminating in the Saturday or Friday night drive to Monday morning.

Both worlds are, in fact, abominable caricatures of the hierarchical societies that once claimed to be, or at least wanted to be, as faithful images as possible of the eternal order of which the cosmos is the visible manifestation. The technical civilisation of the ‘free world’ opposes the unity in diversity which these societies possessed with the despairing uniformity of the man who is mass-produced, without direction, without impetus—not that of the water in a river, but that of a heap of sand whose grains, all insignificant and all similar, would each believe themselves to be very interesting.

The dictatorship of an increasingly invasive proletariat, on the other hand, opposes it with a uniformity of marching robots, all driven by the same energy: robots whose absence of individuality is a wicked parody of the deliberate renunciation of the individual, conscious of his place and role, in favour of that which is beyond him. The zeal for work and the irresistible push forward of these same automatons who believe they are devoted to the ‘happiness of man’ counterfeits the ancient efficiency of the masses who built, under the direction of true masters, monuments of beauty and truth: the pyramids, with or without floors, of Egypt, Mesopotamia or Central America; the Great Wall of China; the temples of India and those of Angkor; the Colosseum; the Byzantine, Romanesque, or Gothic cathedrals…

Of the two caricatures, the second, the Marxist, is arguably more clever in its crudeness than the other. To see this, one need only look at the number of people of real human worth who have fallen for it and who, in all sincerity, convinced that they were guided by an ideal of liberation and disinterested service, have swelled the ranks of the militants of the most fanatical form of Anti-Tradition that has yet appeared. This can be seen in Europe as well as in other regions—in India, in particular, where the Communist leaders are recruited mainly from the Aryan castes, strange as that may be. There is something in the very rigour of Communism that attracts certain characters eager for both discipline and sacrifice; something which makes them see the worst kind of slavery under the disguise of self-sacrifice, and the most laughable narrow-mindedness under the guise of a sacred intolerance.

The caricature of the ‘free world’ is less dangerous in the sense that it is outwardly ‘less resembling’, and therefore less capable to appeal to elite characters. But it is more dangerous in that, being less outrageous, it is at first sight less shocking to those whom Marxism repels, precisely because they have discovered in it the features of a false religion.

Having none of the attributes of a ‘faith’ it reassures them, encouraging them to believe that thanks to democratic ‘tolerance’—a tolerance which, as I have said, extends to all but us Hitlerites—they will be able to continue to profess in peace all the cults (all the exoterisms) which are dear to them: Christianity or Judaism in the West; Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, elsewhere; even one of these in the historical domain of another—why not, when the individual believes himself to be everything, and arrogates to himself, therefore, the right to choose everything?

They don’t realise that the very mentality of the technocratic world, with all its emphasis on the immediately and materially useful, the ‘functional’, and therefore the increasingly extensive applications of the sciences and pseudo-sciences at the expense of any detachment, is the antithesis of any disinterested thirst for knowledge as well as of any love of works of art and also of beings because of their beauty alone. They don’t realise that it can only accelerate the severing of any exoteric religion or philosophy from esotericism, without which it has no eternal value, and thus precipitate the ruin of all culture.

They don’t realise this because they forget that disinterested knowledge, the blossoming of art worthy of the name and the protection of beings (including man insofar as he responds to what his noun, Anthropos, ‘he who looks or reaches upwards’ would lead one to expect) go hand in hand, beauty being inseparable from truth, and culture being nothing if it doesn’t express both.

They forget—or have never known—that, deprived of their connection with the great cosmic and ontological truths they should illustrate, exoteric religions very quickly become fables to which no one attaches credence anymore; degenerate philosophies become idle chatter and political doctrines, recipes for electoral success; and that the technocratic world, with its eminently utilitarian approach to all problems, with its anthropocentrism coupled with its obsession with quantity, diverts even the best minds from the search and contemplation of eternal truths.