and the Sun, 11
It is written in Mein Kampf:
Poison can only be overcome through counter-poison, and only a shallow bourgeois mind can consider the middle line as the way to Paradise.[1]
A philosophy filled with infernal intolerance will only be broken through a clear and absolutely true new idea animated with the same spirit and defended with the same tremendous will-power.
One may, today, well regret that, in the Ancient World, which was much freer than ours, the first moral terror appeared with the coming of Christianity; one cannot, however, put in doubt the fact that the world has been, since then, dominated and oppressed through tyranny, and that tyranny can only be broken through tyranny, and terror through terror. Then only can new conditions — constructive ones — be created.[Emphasis by Ed.]
Political parties are inclined to compromise; creeds, never. Political parties take contradictors into account; creeds proclaim their own infallibility.[2]
That which gave Marxism its success was the perfect collaboration of political will and militant brutality. That which prevented national Germany from moulding German evolution was the absence of a decisive collaboration of brutal force and of the political will of a man of genius.[3]
The conviction that one has the right to use even the most brutal weapons always goes hand in hand with fanatical faith in the necessity of the victory of a revolutionary new order upon this earth.
A movement that is not fighting for such high aims and ideals, will therefore never resort to the most extreme means (or weapons).[4]
These and other such sentences (there are many more in what one could call the Book of the new Aryan faith) define with amazing exactitude the National Socialist Movement as an upheaval ‘against Time,’ and point out the fundamental difference between Adolf Hitler and all such great historical figures as I have, in these pages, described as men ‘above Time’ and men ‘in Time’ — ‘Sun’ men, and ‘Lightning’ men. They glaringly show how foolish it is to compare the Founder of National Socialism with Napoleon — as so many have done — or to accept the well-meant but no less erroneous — though by far less popular — description which a few of his English followers have boldly given of him as a ‘political Christ.’ [5]
Napoleon is but the pocket edition of Genghis Khan. Yet — considered from the cosmic standpoint — he is a man of the same sort as he: a war-lord and an organiser who put his genius to the service of his family and of nothing more, not, by any means, because he saw, or thought he could see, in it, the vehicle of some great impersonal Idea, but simply because it was his. In other words: a man altogether ‘in Time.’ Men ‘in Time’ either have no ideology at all and do not pretend to have any, or they pretend to serve a faith ‘above Time’ or ‘against Time’ and exploit the latter for their own ends (like all the false Christians who fought for themselves in God’s name, and all the false National Socialists for whom the struggle under the Swastika Flag was only a means to work themselves into power) or else — like the sincere Marxists — they have an Ideology which is, itself, an Ideology ‘in Time’; an Ideology which is in contradiction with the divine final y of Creation, and therefore expresses the will of the Death-forces. […]
Adolf Hitler is a typical Man ‘against Time’ — like Rama, like Lord Krishna, the most widely remembered Aryan heroes who fought and ruled in India already before, or at the dawn of, this Dark Age, and, nearer to us, like the very noblest Figure of the Arab world, the Prophet Mohamed. As I said in the beginning of this book, all real great men ‘against Time’ are, ultimately, also ‘above Time,’ inasmuch as any ideal of integral Perfection is necessarily timeless. In other words, that towards which the great men ‘against Time’ strive — Adolf Hitler like the others — is ‘God’; Perfection beyond Time as the Archetype and Principle of that perfect, tangible life-order which they seek to bring — to bring back; or rather to hasten back; — into the world. But they thoroughly know that no changes upon this earth, and especially no changes in the direction of primaeval Perfection in and, which is more, at the end of this Dark Age, can be brought about without violence. They know — infallibly — that, the more the Forces of disintegration and death are successful, i.e., the more the Dark Age is advanced, the more violence is indispensable in order to break the current of decay [emphasis by Ed.]; at least in order to stand in the way of the rush of Time, as a witness (and an active precursor) of the coming glorious Dawn of the next Time-cycle. And they accept that physical necessity. Contrarily even to those men ‘above Time’ who, such as Akhenaton of Egypt, dream of an earthly ‘Kingdom of God,’ they are prepared to make use of violence — of ‘utmost brutality,’ to quote Adolf Hitler’s own words — to the extent it is to forward the sacred purpose: ‘the destruction of evil-doers and the establishment on earth of the reign of Righteousness,’ of which it is spoken in the Bhagavad-Gita; the foundation of the socio-political order which is ‘in harmony with the original meaning of things’ — true to the eternal cosmic Order — as again Adolf Hitler has, with, crystal-clear insight, understood and proclaimed.
The very fact of historical existence — existence within Time — sets a dilemma before all those who already strive towards Perfection; they must either turn their backs to this world of strife altogether, and seek the timeless inner Kingdom of Peace, which is not of this earth; or, if that which they want be an earthly paradise, seek it, by all means, against the current of Time; against the formidable and ever-increasing pressure of the Death-forces throughout any Time-cycle and, specially near the end of one, but then, far from renouncing violence, fight the Forces of disintegration with the self-same ruthless weapons as they use; with violence; with the impact of quantity; and, if necessary — if expedient — even with lies; with the weapons of the Dark Age, the only ones which can and will match theirs.
For centuries, perhaps for millenniums — perhaps ever since the day Lord Krishna proclaimed upon the Kurukshetra battle-field the Gospel of detached Violence, creed of every hero ‘against Time’ — no man has understood that dilemma so clearly, and faced it with such boldness and such consistency as Adolf Hitler [emphasis by Ed.]. And unless one also understands it; unless one at least realises that it is a dilemma — i.e., that one cannot go both ways and that, after one has chosen, one is to tread the path to its end — one will behold neither the evolution of National Socialism (before 1933; between 1933 and 1945; and after 1945) not the history of the Second World War, which is narrowly connected with it, nor the subsequent history of our times, in the proper light. And any judgement one might, then, pass, will be false from the cosmic — and a fortiori from the historical — point of view.
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[1] Mein Kampf, p. 371.
[2] Mein Kampf, p. 507.
[3] Mein Kampf, p. 596.
[4] Mein Kampf, p. 597.
[5] The expression was used by Molly Stamford, an English woman detained during the war under the 18 B act.
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The Lightning & the Sun by Savitri Devi (Counter-Currents Publishing, 2014, unabridged edition) can be ordered here.
From 18 November 2023 until 12 January this year I had been publishing some extracts from Brendan Simms’ book on Hitler. I will no longer quote it at length. But I have just edited a PDF that can serve not only as an introduction to Simms’s intellectual biography—in the sense of trying to understand Hitler’s ideas— but for something more important. 
