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Category: Technology

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Evropa Soberana (webzine) Technology

Eduardo Velasco

I only learned last month that the real name of the (late?) Evropa Soberana might be Eduardo Velasco, although we are not sure because ‘Eduardo Velasco’ could simply be a pen name for the Spanish writer.

Whether Velasco is alive or not, now that I’ve been reading at least some of the content of the sixty-one long articles he wrote (which means I’ve already uploaded more than half of them here), I see an analogy between Velasco’s POV and Robert Morgan’s: both blame technology for the current mess. I, on the other hand, blame mankind itself insofar as technology is merely Prometheus’ fire that humans, Neanderthals as I see them in their present form, misuse.

Savitri Devi, in the book I am still proofreading, is also very critical of technology and industry. But she reluctantly accepts that Hitler had to use it to fight the evil world. Velasco and Morgan are more purists: they believe that technological civilisation is something like the apple of discord that led us out of the garden of Eden. I am closer to Hitler than to them because I don’t believe there was an Eden in the past. Think of the human sacrifices of the Ancient World to which I refer in my book Day of Wrath (see the sticky post). Or the TV programmes about animals showing carnivores killing herbivores in horrific ways (visualise, for example, pythons or anacondas swallowing beautiful mammals).

Pace Velasco and Savitri, pre-technological Eden never existed. While I believe that today’s man, whom I still see as a sort of exterminable Neanderthal, wasn’t and isn’t ready for the Industrial Revolution, a hypothetical overman could make good use of technology, after conquering the world for the Aryans of course. But for that he would first have to fulfil Delphi’s precept: to know himself. (Only after my fiftieth birthday did I devote myself to racism; before that, only to a long autobiography.) Thus, for the bulk of the population to know itself, and finally be worthy of Prometheus’ fire, we would have to arrive at Utopia. Meanwhile—:

‘The stars are not for man’—Karellen (in Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End).

The only way to present these ideas well developed would be to translate another of Velasco’s long essays, that here I called backup #24, and comment on it in detail. But I will do that only after I have finished proofreading Savitri’s book and finished my excerpts from Holland’s book.

There’s still a lot of work to do…

Categories
India Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Technology Welfare of animals

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 95

One might also recall the resurgence of vivisection, which coincided with the revival of interest in experimental science in the 16th, and especially the 17th and 18th centuries and since. It is unfortunate that this infamy, which has assumed frightening proportions in the last century and in our own time among peoples rotten with Christian and rationalist anthropocentrism, has spread, precisely at the same time as this anthropocentric attitude, to all the countries colonised politically or morally (or in both ways) by the European or American West; that is to say, has practically spread to the whole world.

To cite only one example, but one of the most significant, the Indian Government—democratic and humanitarian, as it should be in the world dominated by the victors of 1945—has, in recent years, encouraged the export of thousands of monkeys, knowing full well that they would be subjected to criminal experiments (which the government no doubt considered ‘praiseworthy’, since they were carried out ‘in the interests of science’, and therefore of ‘man’).

And on the soil of India itself, since the so-called ‘independence’ of the country as in the time of the British, various research centres exist and are multiplying, in particular cancer research, in whose laboratories the same horrors take place as in those of Paris, London, Chicago or Moscow. And in the big cities, stray dogs, considered ‘useless’ by the neophytes of anthropocentrism, die in atrocious suffering, systematically poisoned with strychnine, as I saw some die in Greece in 1970.[1]

And what to say of the treatment of the dogs of Constantinople, the most brutally collected in the world—with lasso and pincers—and thrown on a deserted island in the Sea of Marmara to die of hunger and thirst, by order of the ‘Young Turk’ government a few months after its accession to power, in 1908?[2] However, despite all these horrors and many others, a few decades ago there was still a very strong bond between many human beings and their domestic dogs or cats (in Western Europe, at the beginning of this century); war or draft horses; oxen and buffaloes for ploughing. The attachment of the Arab to his horse or camel was proverbial. The progressive mechanisation of the world is now breaking this bond, in all countries.

When I returned to India in 1971, it was a great joy for me to see, in the countryside flooded with monsoon rain, so many good big buffaloes, well-fed, plunged with delight up to their snouts in the innumerable ponds, and ruminating peacefully. There were, and still are, thousands of them. But until when? Until, as elsewhere with horses and oxen, tractors replace them. And tractors are bound to replace them, if ever larger tracts of fertile land are to be stripped of their forests—in India as everywhere—to feed a population whose numbers are doubling every thirty years.

The proliferation of man is, as I have said, at the root of the mechanisation of life: an unthinkable process, because it is perfectly superfluous, in a population as sparse as it was a few millennia ago. On the other hand, medical technology, placed at the service of invasive anthropocentrism, is contributing more and more to the proliferation of man by acting against natural selection. This is a vicious circle that must be broken at all costs. We, the Aryan racists, the followers of Adolf Hitler, were and are the only human beings who are serious about breaking it by giving free rein to saving natural selection. But since the ‘twenty-fifth hour’ had already sounded many years, if not centuries, before 1933, we could not keep the power and win the war.

And the process of the gradual debasement of man, together with the extermination of the noblest beasts and the destruction of the forests—the process of the desecration and uglification of the earth—continues. It can only continue, given the mental attitude of the men now in power.

___________

[1] Now, in 1976, dogs in Delhi without collars or tags are electrocuted—or sent to the All India Institute of medical sciences for experimentation. This year the municipality has eliminated more than 30,000 of them.

[2] It is interesting to recall that the three main members of the ‘Young Turk’ government—Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha and Essad Pasha—were three Jews whose families had been ‘converted’ to Islam.

Categories
Poetry Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Technology Tree Welfare of animals

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 90

It is again verses of Leconte de Lisle—that nostalgic singer of all the beauties destroyed by the inexorable march of Time—that come back to my memory when I think of ‘this worm weaker than the grasses’ of the ancient Forest, but strong in the omnipotence of its intelligence dedicated to the work of disintegration, the diabolical work (‘in reverse’ of the ideal order). The poet addresses the Forest, which seemed to last forever, and says:

Like a swarm of ants on a journey,
That one crushes and burns, yet still they march,
The floods will bring the king of the last days to you;
The destroyer of woods, the man with the pale face. [1]

Words that are only too true but if the White Man was indeed, until the middle of the 20th century, the ruthless destroyer of the forest as well as of the fauna—the massacrer of forty million bison in North America—, and who emptied North Africa and the former Asia of their lions, and India of most of its tigers and leopards, the Negro’ and the swarthy man of every hue, have, with grim enthusiasm, hastened to follow suit and pursue, with a neophyte’s relentlessness, the war of man against tree and animal.

They put themselves in the service of the White Man not necessarily and not always Aryan, and believed his lies, accepted his money, and assisted him in the work of destruction. They killed for him the elephants whose ivory he traded; hunted or trapped the big cats, whose magnificent skins he wanted. And, imbued with the anthropocentrism newly learned in his schools, and proud to possess at least some of his techniques, they continued the butchery after he had grown weary of it—even after belated remorse or awakening of his sense of self-interest had prompted him to ‘protect’ endangered species from now on.

It is all mankind that is guilty of the usurpation of the soil at the expense of the forest and its ancient inhabitants—all except the few individuals or groups, always in the minority, who have protested against it all their lives, and proved, by everything they have said, written or done that they had taken a stand for the animal and for the tree against man, of whatever race he might be.

At the root of this indefinite usurpation is, without doubt, technology, which is, it must be admitted, the most inferior but an expression nonetheless of Aryan genius. Even in Roman times, when unfortunate wild animals were captured by the hundreds and thousands, to be sent to their deaths in circuses, the massacre of African, Asian (and European) fauna[2] never reached the proportions it was destined to reach in our time thanks to modern methods of hunting, and in particular to firearms.

But technology in all its forms, including this one, has developed only as an advantageous—sometimes the only possible—solution to the problems of survival of increasingly compact masses of men. It is only beyond a certain numerical limit that man, of whatever race, becomes a scourge to all that lives on the land he inhabits—and if he is of one of the inferior races (generally, alas, the most fertile), a dangerous rival to the nobler races: a veritable plague, in every respect.

_____________

[1] Leconte de Lisle, ‘La Forêt Vierge’, (Poèmes Barbares).

[2] And American. It is impossible here not to refer to the slaughter of seals, especially seal pups, so atrocious that many of our contemporaries themselves have been outraged.

Categories
2nd World War Léon Degrelle Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book) Technology

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 54

I mentioned above Adolf Hitler’s interest in modern technology—especially, and for good reason, war tec! This is not to say that the dangers of the mechanisation of life, and especially of excessive specialisation, escaped him. Even in this particular field of strategy where he, the former corporal, moved with an ease that even geniuses can hardly explain, he was sceptical of specialists and their inventions, and, in the final analysis, relied only on the supra-rational vision of the true leader without, of course, rejecting the use of any invention as it represented an effective means to victory.

‘What is’, he said to Rauschning, ‘the invention that has so far been able to revolutionise the laws of warfare in a lasting way? Each invention is itself followed, almost immediately, by another which neutralises the effects of the previous one’. And he concluded that all this conferred ‘only a momentary superiority, and the decision to go to war always depends on men’ rather than on material, however important the latter may be.[1]

It was not, therefore, the technique itself that put him off. A universal spirit, he was at ease in this field as in so many others, and he recognised its place in modern combat. What irritated him to the point of revolt was the effect that technical training and the handling of precision equipment and statistical data can have, and almost always do have, on man, even the ‘well-trained’ one who specialises in them. It is the observation that they kill, in him, the flexibility of mind, the creative imagination, the initiative, the clear vision amid a labyrinth of unforeseen difficulties; the faculty of grasping, and of grasping in time—immediately, if possible—the relationship between a new situation and the effective action which must be taken to deal with it; in a word, the exact intuition: according to him, the superior form of the intelligence. ‘It is always outside of technical circles that one meets creative genius’, he said. [2]

And he advised his collaborators—and this all the more strongly as they occupied positions of greater responsibility—to take their decisions ‘by pure intuition’ relying ‘on their instinct’, never on bookish knowledge or on a routine which, in difficult cases, often lags behind the requirements of action. He advised them to ‘simplify the problems’ as he himself simplified them; to ‘make light of everything that is complicated and doctrinaire’.[3] And he kept saying that ‘technicians never have an instinct’, entangled as they are in their theories ‘like spiders in their webs’ and ‘incapable of weaving anything else’.[4] And Hermann Rauschning himself, whose malice towards him is obvious, is forced to agree that ‘this gift of simplification was the characteristic power that ensured Adolf Hitler’s superiority over those around him’.[5]

To prove it, it would be enough to reread, in Léon Degrelle’s Hitler for a Thousand Years, the luminous pages which relate to the French and Russian campaigns, in particular to the latter, about which so many people, and not even those whose job it is to fight wars, reproach the Führer for having stubbornly refused to listen to the technicians of strategy.

The great soldier who was the leader of the Waffen S.S. Wallon Legion brilliantly shows that Adolf Hitler’s refusal to be convinced by these famous specialists who, in the winter of 1941-1942, called for a withdrawal of one or two hundred kilometres, ‘saved the army’ because ‘a general retreat through these endless white and devouring deserts would have been a suicide’.[6] ‘Against his generals, Hitler was right’, he insists, and not only during the seven months of the dreadful Russian winter of 1941-42, but also in January 1943, when he insisted that von Paulus, surrounded at Stalingrad, should try, as best he could, to throw himself towards the armoured troops of General Hoth, under Field Marshal von Manstein, whom he had sent to his rescue and who were only a few kilometres away.

According to Degrelle, von Paulus ‘could have saved his men in forty-eight hours’[7] but ‘a theoretician incapable of working in the field confused by his meticulous mania for paper-based groupings’[8] didn’t do so preferring to capitulate, even though ‘salvation was under his nose, forty-eight kilometres away’.[9] He didn’t do it because, in him, a meticulous study had taken the place of instinct; because he lacked the gift of simplifying problems and of going intuitively to the essential. It was undoubtedly his nature. But these deficiencies must have been singularly reinforced by the fact that ‘almost all his life von Paulus had spent it among the bureaucracy of the general staff’[10] in front of his maps, within the narrow confines of his speciality.

Of course, specialists are needed—in their place. Unfortunately, in certain exceptional circumstances, one is sometimes forced to call on them outside the realm of their routine, and ask them for more than they can give.

And the more life, in all its aspects, becomes mechanised thanks to the applications of science, the more there are and the more there will be from the top to the bottom of the social scale specialised technicians. And fewer and fewer of them will be those who, while having in their particular capacity the maximum of knowledge, will be able to dominate it retaining the vision and inspiration and the invaluable qualities of character, which make the superior man.

The Third Reich had such men: ‘modern’ men in material terms (military or civilian); on the other hand, equal to the greatest figures of the past, like a Guderian, a Skorzeny; a Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a Hanna Reitsch or a Doctor Todt: people strong enough to think and act big while using the machines of our time and subjecting themselves to the precise manipulations they require; the Western counterpart of those Japanese warriors of the same Second World War who combined the intelligent handling of the most modern weapons with fidelity to the code of bushido and, more often than one thinks, the practice of some immemorial spiritual discipline.

The Führer would have liked the best of his Germans to become, more or less, these new ‘masters of fire’ capable of dominating our end of the cycle where technology is, with all its drawbacks, essential to whoever wants to survive in an overpopulated world. He knew that this role could and will only ever be played by a minority. And it is this minority, tested in combat, which was to constitute the warrior aristocracy of the new world: a world against the tide of universal decadence which he dreamed of building and in which, moreover, ‘after victory’ (once the urgency of total war had disappeared) the mechanisation of life would gradually cease and in which the traditional spirit, in the esoteric sense of the word, would take root more and more.

____________

[1] Rauschning, Hitler m’a dit (op. cit.), page 21.

[2] Ibid, page 22.

[3] Ibid, page 209.

[4] Ibid, page 210.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Léon Degrelle, Hitler pour 1000 ans, published by Editions de la Table Ronde in 1969, page 129.

[7] Ibid., page 130.

[8] Ibid., page 174-175.

[10] Ibid., page 170.

Categories
Savitri Devi 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.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
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:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
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 Savitri Devi 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.

Categories
Egalitarianism French Revolution Marxism 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) 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
Hinduism India 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.

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Japan 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.