Savitri Devi
| A lunatic Chaplin imitator and his greatest fans Nazism |
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| First as tragedy |
| Then as farce |
Savitri Devi Mukherji (Sanskrit: सावित्री देवी मुखर्जी, where Sāvitrī means "Sun-rays Goddess"; Bengali: সাবিত্রী দেবী মুখর্জী), née Maximiani Julia Portas (Greek
: Μαξιμιάνη Τζούλια Πόρτας) (1905–1982), was a Greek-French Nazi spy and propagandist who kept her allegiance to Neo-Nazism after the fall of the Third Reich, and is considered one of the foundational figures of Esoteric Neo-Nazism. She sought to synthesize Hinduism (to which she was a convert) and Nazism.
In addition, she was an animal rights and vegan activist.[1] Being in too deep to reject her Nazi activism after the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, she became a proponent of Western esotericism, going so far as to propose that Adolf Hitler was a god. She was a major forerunner of mystical or occult Neo-Nazism of the sorts espoused by Robert Charroux and Miguel Serrano. She died in 1982, and her ashes were interred in Wisconsin next to those of George Lincoln Rockwell.
Nazism[edit]
Savitri Devi was born in 1905 to a French father of Greek extraction and a British mother. Her earliest political affiliation was with Greek nationalism. She seemed at first to be destined for an academic career and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Lyon in the philosophy of mathematics. However, she travelled to Greece, where Heinrich Schliemann had discovered swastika motifs in ancient Anatolia. On the strength of these patterns, she concluded that the ancient Greeks were Aryans. In 1928, she renounced her French citizenship; during a pilgrimage to Palestine in the following year, she decided she was a National Socialist.
In 1932, she travelled to India, where she converted to Hinduism, which she believed to be the most authentic surviving form of Aryan Paganism. Using the Vedas' model of Aryan conquest and invasion from the north, she accepted Ariosophical mythology as true and imagined that the Brahmin caste, as well as nordic Teutons, originated in the lost frozen paradise of Hyperborea. It was at this time that she adopted the alias Savitri Devi. Under that name, she wrote A Warning to the Hindus in 1936, in which she affirmed her support of Hindu nationalism against British colonialism and Christian and Islamic proselytism. After working at the Hindu Mission in Calcutta for eighteen months, and having been influenced by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's concept of Hindutva, Devi concluded that:
“”...nothing is more necessary, to-day, than to revive, to exalt, to cultivate intelligent Hinduism through the length and breadth of India.
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| —Savitri Devi, A Warning to the Hindus[2]:39 |
This book, thus is Devi’s attempt to alert Hindus to the threat of submergence and cultural alienation, which she saw as resulting from the disproportional growth of the Muslim population in India. She thought the hitherto complacent response of upper-caste Hindus would result in Hinduism suffering the same fate as pagan Classical Greece.
The book also expresses admiration of Hinduism for its view of visible beauty, its broad artistic outlook on life and the universe, and its conception of God as both creative and destructive: living expressions of Aryan Paganism, which Devi saw as being lost in the West. As an outspoken Nazi, she criticizes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as creedal religions, and for being narrowly anthropocentric, in contrast with Hinduism, which is presented as biocentric.
Devi, here proposes that the numerical decline of Hinduism could be successfully remedied by a relaxation of the strict rules implicit in the caste system, which would have the additional benefits of developing Hindu solidarity and nationalist sentiment. Additionally, she argues that women should play a more active role in fostering devotional nationalism in the home with shrines to Shivaji and other national heroes.
In 1940, she married a Bengali Brahmin. The couple sought to ingratiate themselves with Allied military personnel in Calcutta, to pass on any military intelligence they might receive through these contacts to the Japanese.[3]
Neo-Nazism[edit]
She had committed too far to Aryanism to change her mind after the fall of the Third Reich. After the war was over, she travelled to Germany on her Indian British passport where she ultimately was arrested for distributing leaflets urging Germans to hold fast to the Nazi faith during the Allied occupation. She ultimately served eight months in an Allied prison with other Nazi criminals.
In 1958, she published The Lightning and the Sun, which attempted to meld the Hindu idea of cyclical history with National Socialism. In its pages, she announced to the world that Adolf Hitler was the ninth avatar of the deity Vishnu. Hitler's death was a sacrifice for humanity that ultimately would signal the end of the Kali Yuga and bring about a renewal of the Aryan world. To Savitri Devi, Hitler was the forerunner of Kalki, the final avatar of Vishnu, who would appear to purify the world with violence:
“”That last, great individual — an absolutely harmonious blending of the sharpest of all opposites; equally sun and lightning — is the one whom the faithful of all religions and the bearers of practically all cultures await; the one of whom Adolf Hitler (knowingly or unknowingly) said, in 1928: "I am not he; but while nobody comes forward to prepare the way for him, I do so"; the one whom I have called by his Hindu name, Kalki, on account of the cosmic truth that this name evokes.
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| —Savitri Devi, The Lightning and the Sun |
In the early 1960s, she lent her support to an earlier incarnation of the British National Party[4] and attended a global conference of neo-Nazis in Gloucestershire. This put her on the map of the neo-Nazi movement outside of India. George Lincoln Rockwell published an abridged version of The Lightning and the Sun in his magazine National Socialist World. She was one of the first Holocaust deniers and put the notion into Ernst Zündel's ear that the Nazi mass murder of Jews was untrue.[5]
Animal-rightsery[edit]
She was a lifelong advocate of animal rights and vegetarianism, a belief that gained further strength from her commitment to Hinduism. In her 1959 book The Impeachment of Man, she was an early adopter of the now-familiar vegan argument that equates human eating and use of animals with slavery and war crimes:
“”A 'civilization' that makes such a ridiculous fuss about alleged 'war crimes' — acts of violence against the actual or potential enemies of one's cause — and tolerates slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories, and circuses and the fur industry (infliction of pain upon creatures that can never be for or against any cause), does not deserve to live. Out with it! Blessed the day it will destroy itself, so that a healthy, hard, frank and brave, nature-loving and truth-loving élite of supermen with a life-centred faith, — a natural human aristocracy, as beautiful, on its own higher level, as the four-legged kings of the jungle — might again rise, and rule upon its ruins, forever!
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| —Savitri Devi, The Impeachment of Man, 1958 |
She claimed also to have pioneered the burglary of animal testing laboratories to set the animals free.[1]
See also[edit]
- Greg Johnson, who runs The Savitri Devi Archive
- Pentti Linkola, another Eco-Fascist
External links[edit]
- The Savitri Devi Archive
- Savitri Devi, a collection of writings by and about her.
- R. G. Fowler: Savitri Devi: The Woman Against Time
- Kerry Bolton: Priestess of Hitlerism: Savitri Devi
- Blake Smith: Writings of French Hindu who worshipped Hitler as an avatar of Vishnu are inspiring the US alt-right. Dec. 17, 2017.
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (1998). Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism. NY: New York University Press.M
- ↑ Savitri Devi, A Warning to the Hindus. Promilla/Bibliophile South Asia, 1993. ISBN 8185002401
- ↑ Shrabani Basu, The spy who loved Hitler, March 1999.
- ↑ See John Tyndall
- ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, NYU Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8147-3155-4.